This is a dry, dusty, obscure, scholarly book, and while I wouldn’t call
it a compelling read, I did manage to read the whole thing over the
period of about a month, and I’m not sorry about it. What that says
about me, I’m not sure, because This Is Not A Book For The Mass Market.

This is a book about the wave of emigration along the California and
Oregon trails in the middle part of the 19th century, and in particular
the understanding of law by the emigrants themselves, and in particular
of law as it relates to private property (as, after all, most civil and
criminal law does).

One gathers from a variety of snide (if exceedingly polite) comments that
Reid makes in the text that there has been the tendency among historians
to make one of two errors regarding the Overland Trail and the California
mining camps. The first is to see them as “lawless”, places where the
usual societal norms didn’t apply, and therefore places where every human
impulse, no matter how base, is given free rein. This is (I paraphrase)
utter hogwash. During the course of this long book, Reid builds a
compelling case that the emigrants brought the law they had known in the
east with them as they travelled west–despite knowing full well that
they were travelling far beyond the bounds of any kind of coercive authority.

The Overland Trail was a place of great hardship. What with short water, short
food, burning heat, bad water, disease, freezing cold, there was
something bad for everyone. In such a desparate situation, we’d
expect to see the have-nots stealing from the haves, and murdering if
necessary to get the food and water and other supplies they needed.
But Reid has surveyed the many diaries of the trip–and there
were hundreds, at least, written by men and women from all classes and
levels of education–and the picture is clear. Property rights were
respected on the Overland Trail. There was remarkably little thievery.
People bought what they needed, often at exorbitant prices, from other
emigrants, or from the trading posts that sprang up. Basic honesty is
taken to a surprising degree; emigrants finding a stray horse or ox or
mule and taking it into their train would freely return it should the
owner come and recognize it.

The Trail was a dangerous place, certainly, but the dangers did not
include, for the most part, one’s fellow man. And the emigrants
recognized this: when the evitable need to lighten the load became
extreme (everyone overpacked), one of the first things to go as being
of no use were the guns.

Well, you might ask, what about murders for other reasons? Certainly
there were some, though it seems to be have uncommon. Reid has written
another book on that topic, Policing the Elephant, which I’ve
not yet gotten to.

The other error historians have been prone to make is to see the Overland
Trail as a place where the dictum, “From each according to his ability, to
each according to his need,” would naturally hold sway. But there is no
Marxist paradise, and in fact even those in the deepest degree of need
expected to pay (in money or in kind or in labor) for what they needed.

The conclusion seems to me to be inescapable. The emigrants were decent,
God-fearing folk (and they were, too) when they left the east; they
remained decent God-fearing folk as they travelled west. They brought
their moral compasses with them.

I don’t know what it says of historians that they seem to think that,
once away from the coercive power of state and society, the emigrants
would turn into slavering beasts with all the morals of, well, modern
academics. But they didn’t.