The Culture of Violence on the American Frontier: A Study of Market Failure Mythology

0:00The business about the GDP statistics reminds me of a debate in the 1960s in America over the Soviet Union's statistics, and on one side you had Warren Nutter at the University of Virginia, a former CIA employee, using CIA statistics on Soviet growth, arguing with left-wing economists like Paul Samuelson, who used the Soviet Union's own statistics on their growth, And that was the domain of the debates over economic growth. That's why Samuelson had these ridiculous graphs in his textbooks, claiming that the Soviet Union's growth would overtake the U.S. by 1980. It says something like that. The same statistics they use in India, I guess.

0:45Well, my paper, it could be entitled The Culture of Violence in the American West, the Missing Chapter. I start out by looking at some research that was done by Terry Anderson and PJ Hill 30 years ago in the Journal of Libertarian Studies, where they took a close look at the American frontier, the American West, before there was any state in the American frontier, and of course the popular culture has informed the whole world that everyone was shooting each other. You know, you could go If you go out there, if you were to be dropped by a helicopter anywhere west of Ohio in the 19th century, you would see every single person had a handgun and was shooting it in all directions, at all the other people with a handgun.

1:36That's your typical western movie, whether they're made by Clint Eastwood or anybody else. And of course, the history profession has just assumed that. The history profession has read many books about the American West, but it turns out to be a complete myth. And there's one historian named Eugene Holland, one of the few historians who wrote a book on violence on the American frontier, and he says this, The Western frontier was a far more civilized, more peaceful and safer place than American society today. And that's true. And Anderson and Hill themselves said that while the West is perceived as a great place of great chaos, with little respect for property or life, our research indicates that this was not the case. Property rights were protected and civil order prevailed.

2:25Revealed. Private agencies provided the necessary basis for an orderly society in which property was protected and conflicts were resolved. And I'm going to explain that briefly. So in other words, the American frontier was stateless, but it was not lawless, is what this research says. But the main part of my article, which by the way is going to be published in the independent review in the fall issue, fall 2010, the main thrust of it is that there There was a culture of violence in the American West, but it wasn't the civil society. It was the U.S. government's war on the Plains Indians, and that's the bulk of my article. How was it that the civil society was relatively peaceful? If you're interested in this, read the Anderson and Hill article. I have about a dozen copies of my paper here if anybody wants to grab a hard copy. But there were land clubs when people headed west from the The Wagon Trains adopted their own constitutions also, and they had very detailed judicial systems, mining camps, some of my favorite western movies are about the drunken andyx of the guys in the mining camps, as far as that goes, but these were movies, keep in mind, this is Hollywood, Hollywood portrayal, but the mining camps, if you look into this, there's a whole bunch of them.

3:50There's an economist named John Umbach. He discovered this, that the miners began forming contracts with one another to restrain their own behavior. He said, as long as a miner abided by the rules, the other miners would defend his rights under community contract. If he did not abide by the agreed upon rules, his claim would be considered to be open to any claim jumpers. So they policed themselves, and they did a pretty good job of it. That's That's why Anderson and Hill concluded that it was a relatively peaceful place. When government bureaucrats failed to police cattle rustling, cattlemen's associations did it themselves. They hired guys who were very good riflemen, for example, and just the mere fact that you had private snipers standing around guarding your herd was enough.

4:39They were brandishing their Winchesters was enough to keep the cattle rustling under control. And these people, these sort of vigilantes, if you will, they did not become one big giant monopoly crime syndicate as some people have claimed would happen under private enforcement of crime. And so the Wild West was not very wild at all, there was violence, all human societies have conflicts and violence, but relatively speaking, it was certainly much more peaceful than your typical American city. Where I live in Baltimore, the number one statistic is that there are over 300 murders a year and there are also over 300 pit bull attacks on humans every year in the city of Baltimore.

5:25So compared to that, the Wild Wild West was near Vanna. But the real cause of the violence, and there was a culture of violence, if there's anything to the idea that there was this culture of violence in America that sort of has pervaded American society and affects society today, it was the military culture that created it. I quote Jennifer Roback in an article on this topic about the relationship between whites and Indians in the 19th century. in the 19th Century. And she said, Europeans generally acknowledge that the Indians retained possessory rights to their lands. More importantly, the English recognized the advantage of being on friendly terms with the Indians. Trade with the Indians, especially the fur trade, was profitable, but war was costly. And, you know, if you think about it, you know, trade versus war, which way will we both prosper? We being the white European settlers and the Well, the impression you get from the popular culture is that war is the way to do it, but

6:28that's not true. Even Thomas Jefferson himself found that during his time, negotiation had been the predominant means of acquiring land from the Indians. By the 20th century, about $800 million had been paid for Indian lands. Terry Anderson and Fred McChesney had an article The Journal of Law and Economics on this issue about Indian-White relations, and they point out that the existence of a standing army changes the calculus here of whether trade versus raid is the way to acquire property, because essentially it socializes the cost of stealing property from the Indians rather than doing business with them and negotiating with them.

7:13For example, when the transcontinental railroads were built, you had James J. Hill, the private entrepreneur who didn't accept government subsidies. He paid for rights of way across Indian lands with livestock, money, whatever they could trade for, whereas the government subsidized railroads would just call in the U.S. Army and have them kill everybody and take their land. Then they would build the railroad tracks. So it certainly does make a difference. Anderson and McChesney quote Adam Smith on this point about a standing army. And Adam Smith said, quote, in a militia the character of the laborer, artificer, or tradesman predominates over that of the soldier. But in a standing army, that of the soldier predominates over every other character. And then Anderson and McChesney go on to say, a standing army creates a class of professional soldiers whose personal welfare increases with warfare, even if fighting is a negative some act for the population as a whole.

8:12But they do not address the question, Anderson and McChesney, of why there was a standing army in the American West all of a sudden, and I address this in my paper, and the reason there was a standing army all of a sudden in the years right after the so-called civil war was that the U.S. government was big into subsidizing the building of the transcontinental The Federal Railroads and they wanted the standing army out there to essentially, once and for all, take all the land from the Indians and essentially exterminate the Plains Indians. It was all about the railroads. Three months after the Civil War ended, I'm in polite company here so I won't call it the war to prevent southern independence like I always do.

8:59Most people call it the Civil War. Three months after it was over, Sherman was put in charge of the military district of Missouri. Think about that. What did the Lincoln regime do? They turned the sovereign states into military districts. The whole country was, Virginia was military district number one, I think, the land of Thomas Jefferson. But anyway, he was in charge of all the land west of the Mississippi and given the job of exterminating the Indians and making way for the railroads. Here's what Sherman himself said in his memoirs. He said, as soon as the war ended, he said, quote, My thoughts and feelings at once reverted to the construction of the Great Pacific Railway. I put myself in communication with the parties engaged in the work, visiting them in person, and assured them that I would afford them all possible assistance and encouragement.

9:49We are not going to let a few thieving ragged Indians check and stop the progress of the railroads. That's pretty explicit. Murray Rothbard wrote about this even during the war. War, he wrote how the chief engineer of the Transcontinental Railroad was a man named Grenville Dodge, who Murray wrote, he quote, helped swing the Iowa delegation to Lincoln at the 1860 Republican National Convention. And in return for that, early in the Civil War, I'm still quoting Murray Rothbard, Lincoln appointed Dodge to Army General. Dodge's task was to clear the Indians from the designated path of the country's first heavily subsidized, federally chartered, transcontinental railroad, the Union Pacific. In this way, conscripted Union troops and hapless taxpayers were coerced into socializing the cost of constructing and operating the Union Pacific." End quote. And that just continued after the war for 25 years, this policy. After the war was over, Grenville Dodge proposed making slaves of the Plains Indians and forcing them to, in his words, do the grading on the railroad beds

10:55with the Army furnishing a guard to make the Indians work and to keep them from running away." So in other words, Union Army veterans were to be the new overseers of this new class of slaves, but the U.S. government decided they would not make slaves of the Indians. They would kill them instead. So that would be the more efficient way of doing it. Grant made Sherman the commanding in general, and then Sherman, in turn, handed over the reins to Sheridan, General Sheridan. And one of Sherman's biographers, Michael Fellman, calls Grant Sherman and Sheridan the great triumvirate of the Union's Civil War effort, who he says, quote, formulated and enacted military Indian policy until reaching by the 1880s what Sherman sometimes referred to as, in Sherman's words, the final solution to the Indian problem.

11:47It's kind of creepy, isn't it, Sherman Ruth? Feldman, the Sherman biographer, he said, These men applied their shared ruthlessness, born of their Civil War experiences, against a people all three despised. Sherman's overall policy was never accommodation and compromise, but vigorous war against the Indians. They were less than human and savage race. And then there's a list of all, if you look into this literature, All the old Civil War officers from the Union side were involved in this. Pope Howard, Miles, Canby, Ord, Terry, Custer, Benjamin Garrison, Winfield, Scott, Hancock, they were all involved. And another biographer of Sherman named Marzelek said this about Sherman.

12:36He said that Sherman, quote, view the Indians as they reviewed recalcitrant Southerners during the war and newly freed people after, resistors to the legitimate forces of an ordered society, end quote. And I argue in the paper that these people were not resistors to order in society, they were resistors to being ordered around by politicians in Washington, D.C., eventually. That's what they were resisting. And if you look into the literature on the Indian Wars, and I quote a lot of it, Some of the most widely cited or famous books about it in my paper, it's really sickening. When Bob Higgs accepted this paper for publication, he says, it turns my stomach, but I'll publish it anyway. I was just reading about what happened with the Indian Wars.

13:24And to give you an idea of what happened, maybe a few more lovely comments by General The Indians give a fair illustration of the fate of the Negroes if they are released from the control of the Whites. That was Sherman. So the Indians, like the ex-slaves, had to be controlled by the Whites or they'll run wild somehow. Somehow, and Sherman also believed that the inner marriage of whites and Indians would be a disaster. He said this about Mexico, he said, and I'm quoting Sherman, the blending of races had produced general equality, which led inevitably to Mexican anarchy, and we can't have that, we can't have anarchy.

14:17So this really was a racial cleansing in the words of Sherman, if you look at all the rhetoric here. In fact, I quote Michael Fellman, the biographer of Sherman, using that word. He called this a racial cleansing of the land. Sherman himself used the word extermination over and over again. He and Sheridan are famous for, according to the phrase, the only good Indian is a dead Indian. And the way they prosecuted the war was orders were given to kill everybody. According to Feldman again, Sherman gave Sheridan prior authorization to slaughter as many women and children as well as men that Sheridan or his subordinates felt was necessary when they attacked Indian villages.

15:03There were overall over a thousand attacks on Indian villages and these were attacks with artillery and infantry troops on Indian villages which for many years were armed mostly with bows and arrows and old Civil War era rifles when they had rifles. and they also waged a war of extermination on the buffalo. The buffalo hides at one point could be sold back east for $3.50 and so hunters had the incentive to go out there and just shoot as many as they could in a day and just do it day after day after day and that led to the extermination of the buffaloes but this was also government policy. They consciously wanted to kill off all the buffaloes Because the buffaloes were a main source of food, shelter, clothing.

15:49The Indians even made fish hooks out of the bones and bowstrings out of the sinews of buffalo. They used every part of the buffalo. It was their life blood. And one of the first incidents in this campaign of extermination, as General Sherman called it over and over again, was called the Sand Creek Massacre in Eastern Colorado on a creek named Sand Creek and there was a large group of Cheyenne and Arapaho Indians on a village there and the U.S. government, the U.S. military had told them if you fly the U.S. flag over your teepees, we will know you are friendly and we will leave you alone. So they knew who they were, they were friendly Indians and they had sort of made a treaty, you leave us alone, we'll leave you alone.

16:38And so these were among the, you know, the top Indians in it, the Plains Indians, who wanted to maintain peaceful relations. They wanted to live their life, shoot their buffalo, and, you know, be Indians. But there was another Civil War luminary, as he's called, Colonel John Chivington, who had other plans. He wanted fame and glory for himself, apparently. So he gave orders to his men, to 700 soldiers. He said this, quote, I want you to kill and scalp all of them, big and little, knits make lights. And so if you, and one of the books that I cite here is by an author named Marshall, who was the chief historian of the European theater of the World War II, who wrote 30 books on American military history. So this guy is quite the expert on American military history. And about Chivington's His troops, quote, began a full day given over to bloodlust, orgiastic mutilation, rapine and destruction, with Chivington looking on and approving.

17:45Upon returning to his fort, Chivington and his raiders demonstrated around Denver, waving their trophies more than 100 drying scalps. They were acclaimed as conquering heroes, which is what they sought mainly, end quote. And I also quote a newspaper that was associated with the Republican Party that wrote about this and they said this, Colorado soldiers have once again covered themselves with glory after this. There's a famous book called Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, the historian of the American West, and he writes about the Chivington raid on this village and he says this, quote, when the troops came up to the squads, the squads ran out and showed The orders that Sheridan gave to Custer to kill everybody indiscriminately, Marshall, The Military Historian, the man who wrote 30 books on American military history, says these were, quote, the most brutal orders ever published to American troops.

19:04And that's a very powerful statement from a man who wrote 30 books on American military history. Custer was kind of, he was just as creepy as Sherman on this. When they were mass murdering women and children, he brought a band along with them to play an Irish jig called Gary Owens, and why did he do this? Marshall says, quote again, This was Custer's way of gentling war. It made killing more rhythmic. So he'd strike up the band, play this Irish jig, and start firing on these people. Overall, the historians think that about 45,000 Indians were killed during the Plains Wars, roughly from 1865 to 1890. In Sherman's memoirs, the year before he died in 1890, he wrote to his son. His biggest regret was that his armies did not kill off every last Indian in North America.

19:55And it's telling that the Canadians built a transcontinental railroad, but they did not decide they needed to exterminate the Indians of Canada. And every time the Indians were cornered by the U.S. Army, they would go to Canada. That's where they would hide out. And so the culture of violence in the American West, this is the source of it, it's the Indian Wars. And what is this culture like? Well, Paul Fussell, the old military veteran and writer, said, the culture of war is not like the culture and Ordinary Peacetime Life. It is a culture dominated by fear, blood and sadism, by irrational actions and preposterous results. It has more relation to science fiction or to absurdist theater than to actual life. And I compare that to what von Mises says in Human Action about civil society versus the division of labor versus war.

20:43He said, what distinguishes man from animals is the insight into the advantages that can be derived from cooperation under the division of labor. Man curbs his innate instinct of aggression in order to cooperate with other human beings. Well, that was the civil society of the West that I talked about at the beginning of this talk that Anderson and Hill documented. The more he wants to improve his material well-being, the more he must expand the system of the division of labor. Concomitantly, he must more and more restrict this fear in which he resorts to military action. That's just the opposite. And so the final thing I'll say is that it's untrue that whites wage war against the Indians. It was really essentially the Republican Party that did all this. It wasn't even a lot of Democrats in Congress.

21:29The Republican Party monopolized American politics from the Civil War years until Woodrow Wilson became president in 1912, with a few exceptions and so that's that's who was responsible for this and one bad influence you know one bad precedent the many bad precedents you can see is that this whole idea of the government declaring people to be subhuman as a way of justifying quote justifying extermination like this listen to what Teddy Roosevelt said about the Filipinos he called them quote savages This half breeds a wild and ignorant people and this was in 1898 when the U.S. government was commencing its policy of killing off 200,000 Filipinos because they resisted.

22:21The American government helped them get rid of the Spanish Empire but then they put in place the American Empire and the Filipinos didn't like that so we killed 200,000 of them The President of the United States had to make it a point to call them wild beasts and ignorant people, which is exactly what Sherman and the rest called the Indians, the Plains Indians at the time. But you know, when I lived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, I lived near a place called Ross's Landing. John Ross was a white man who was the head of the Cherokee Nation at a time down there, and the Cherokees were very civilized people. We had this campaign by the government to portray them as wild beasts somehow, but who's the wild beast?

23:07People like Custer who would mass murder and scalp hundreds of women and children, or the Plains Indians who wanted to hunt buffalo and fish and live their lives on the plains. And so that's why I said this paper turned Bob Higgs's stomach, but he's going to publish it anyway. Thank you, Tom, for turning our stomachs back and forth. It's almost lunchtime. We do have a few minutes for questions, Tom, we'll see if we can get some new questions. You mentioned that the Indian government didn't have the same military campaign against the Indians and natives for that area of the continent. You mentioned that the Canadian government didn't have the same military campaign against the indigenous and native to that area of the continent.

23:54I'm just curious, I can't think of a specific one, but I've heard other similar stories where the Canadian government just wasn't as cruel or militaristic throughout its history. They were essentially settled by similar people, British immigrants, so you know what the difference is in the culture that created such differences between them?

24:38This behavior is the behavior of the New England Yankees. Go online and look up an article called The Yankee Problem in America by Clyde Wilson. This was a group of people, the sons and daughters of the Puritans, who believed that they were God's chosen people and that as such they had the right to do anything in their power to force their ways on anybody else, including southerners, Indians, whoever. And that group of people, the Yankees, spread. There was a Yankee belt that went from New England across northern Pennsylvania and Ohio and to the upper Midwest.

25:23Not all northerners were Yankees, but the Yankees was an ideology. Clyde Wilson says that Hillary Clinton is the museum specimen quality of a Yankee, for example. for example, in today's world. And so these are the people who always wanted empire. That's why Thomas Jefferson loathed and hated them, because he knew empire just meant endless blood and treasure being thrown away for the greater glory of the people running the empire. And they had just fought a revolution against an empire, the British Empire, at the time of the founding. But the Yankees of that day were Alexander Hamilton and his crowd, and so I think that's where these people come from, and Canada doesn't seem to have been inflicted by that disease of that particular clique, but essentially captured the American government in 1865 and has monopolized it ever, really, ever since.

26:25Exactly. Did you ever consider doing a follow-on when they were talking about the economics and the situation of the house and you know, the morals are totally drunk with it? So you don't understand as much as you can actually trade for some property when you know that rather than just I have all these run-up costs at work there. Why should I do this? There's probably no economy in Jordan. Oh yeah, there's much more I can do about this. on a book entitled A Treasury of Virtue, with a big question mark. Robert Penn Warren said the U.S. government had a Treasury of Virtue after the Civil War and what they did with all that virtue to the Indians is one chapter. And then Reconstruction and the railroad scandals and other chapters of that. So yeah, you can say a lot about that. But yeah, we've been bombarded with the stories Americans have about the heroic U.S. Army and even the Buffalo Buffalo Soldiers are made out to be great heroes, the ex-slaves who were recruited to mass murder the Indian women and children along with Custer and his troops, which is an abomination as far as I'm concerned. Shame on them.

27:33But they have statues of the Buffalo Soldiers all over the place now and it's supposed to be a great thing, but they were corralled into becoming murderers by the U.S. government. You know, the real heroes among the ex-slaves are the ones who became farmers and eventually moved into industry and business. Bob Higgs himself has written about this. The real heroes are not the Buffalo Soldiers. I agree with that. There is a literature. The article by Jenny Roback that I quoted is all about that. The article by McChesney and Anderson in the Journal of Law and Economics is a very good article about trade or raid, and the Economics of Peaceful Relations versus War, and they also address various things that will tip the calculus from trade to raid, but much more can be done, and I agree about that.

28:24Bill? Bill, it seems to me somewhere I read a book not too long ago, phrasing this heritage you talk about the Ames, through the rest of the era and the social gospel, to America's entry into World War I and trying to impose those values all over the world. Yeah, one of Murray Rothbard's articles talks about that on the progressives of how they were, a lot of them were and they believed that they wanted to create some sort of Kingdom of God on Earth, starting with America, but then when you get to the World War I era, they thought, well, wouldn't it be good if we could also create a Kingdom of God on Earth everywhere? And Woodrow Wilson, that's what Woodrow Wilson thought he was up to, apparently. But yeah, I see it as the same crowd. There's a book called The Metaphysical Club, that talks about many of the progressives of that era, era and their link to Lincoln and the Yankees and the philosophy behind the

29:26centralizers like Abraham Lincoln. Many of them were literally in Lincoln's army by the time you get to the late 19th century. They were they We have time for just one more, I'm trying to find someone who hasn't asked the question yet. Is it not from this path of significance that Canada ended up with the defending of Britain in 1864?

30:05We built his railroad until the 1870s, and I'm not sure of the exact date of the Canadian transcontinental, but it was around the same era as far as that goes, and of course Queen Victoria would not have tolerated this sort of behavior, I don't think, and maybe that's one reason for why they had Queen Victoria, we had these sons of Abraham Lincoln ruling our empire, and so that certainly made a difference. Thanks to all three of our members.