Atomistic order and frontier violence: miners and whalemen in the nineteenth century yukon

Abstract

The nineteenth century Euroamerican invasion of western North America brought with it the establishment of a remarkable diversity of new frontier communities. From placer camps to military garrison outposts, from Mormon towns to the forts of the fur traders, and from prairie farm settlements to the towns and ranches ofthe cattle kingdom, the diversity of community forms which appeared was reminiscent of the diversity of the indigenous societies of the region. The systems of public justice which appeared in these new communities were equally varied, and they provide a useful array of comparisons for assessing the effectiveness of various systems of social control in stemming the potential for community disorder on the frontier. Violence was undeniably a problem in some western frontier communities, but not in all. It has been a common assumption that the kind of informal, popular justice found in loosely structured communities of transient frontier adventurers is more likely to be associated with internal violence than the more authoritarian systems of justice characteristic of tightly structured forms of community. Comparisons stressing the relative tranquility of the Canadian west as contrasted with the supposedly greater violence south of the 49th parallel have expressed this theme (Sharp 1955:109-110; Trimble 1972:187-247; Gough 1975; Reid 1977-37); so, too, have historians* assessments of the relative potential for violence in the "cumulative" as opposed to the "colonized" communities of the American west (Smith 1973:30-32; Brown 1976:87-91). This view is also consistent with anthropological assertions concerning the relationship between community structure and the potential for intracommunity violence, assertions which have been familiar since the time of Ruth Benedict (Maslow and Honigmann 1970:325-326; Munch and Marske 1981:158-161). In this paper, I compare two populations of migrant adventurers who appeared on the northwestern frontier of North America in the late nineteenth century. The effects of community organization on the nature and functioning of systems of public justice in these two populations, and the effects of these systems of public justice, in turn, on conflict management, fail to confirm the forgoing conventional wisdom. In what follows, I explore the reasons for this, drawing on current theory which suggests that a community's system of public justice will influence levels of internal violence primarily through its effects on opportunities for resort to nonviolent forms of conflict management (Koch 1974; Nader and