This is an I-Heart podcast.

And we're back with our American stories.

And up next, another story from our rule of law series.

We examine what happens when there is rule of law

and also when there's not. And remember that half the people of this world don't have rule of law.

There are no property rights. There isn't an independent judiciary. And contract law and the

enforcement of contracts, well, good luck with that. P.J. Hill is Senior Fellow at the Property and Environment Research Center in Bozeman, Montana.

And it was a long-serving professor at Wheaton College.

Today, he's going to share a bit about his background in the American West and some of its misconceptions.

Here's Madison.

Bar fights, shootouts, bank robberies, and outlaws.

These are things we might envision when we think of the Wild West.

Not to mention the many films that portray exactly that.

But what if the West wasn't as wild as we thought?

Co-author of the Not So Wild Wild West, P.J. Hill is here to share that maybe the West had a rule of law.

Not one we're used to, but rule of law nonetheless.

My grandfather came up from Denver in 1892, horseback, worked on a ranch for a couple of years.

This is in southeastern Montana, part of the big open, hardly anybody around.

And then started his own ranch, the ranch that actually became the PJ Ranch, and that was named after him, Peter Jensen.

And then of course, when I was born, it seemed natural to call me P.J. Hill.

I had gone on to graduate work at the University of Chicago with the thought that I would probably

go back to our cattle ranch and run it. And that's what I did. I got married in 1970, took my wife back to our cattle ranch, and operated it for another 40 years.

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