Law and Order at the End of the Oregon Trail

Law and Order at the End of the Oregon Trail

The earliest American settlers in Oregon got by with as little government as possible, including law enforcement. That worked for a time, because crime was rare and justice was a do-it-yourself affair.But that independence came at a price, because different cultures had sometimes very different notions of what constituted law and order, often shaped by religion and influenced by ideas about race, class, gender, sex, ethnicity, and the concept of public versus private property. Obviously, none of those issues is settled easily by enacting a law, because we’re still wrestling with all of them today.To complicate matters, there have been dramatic shifts in how people view mercy, mental illness, capital punishment, and the role of forensic science.To put it mildly, the path to what constitutes modern law and order has been as bumpy as the Oregon Trail that built the state in the first place.