In addressing environmental and natural resource problems, there is a move away from primary reliance
upon centralized regulation toward assignment of property rights to mitigate the losses of open-access.
I examine the assignment of private property rights during the 19th and early 20th centuries to five
natural resources, mineral land, timberland, grazing and farm land, and water on federal government
lands in the Far West. The region was richly endowed with natural resources, but assigning property
rights to them required adaptation from established, eastern practices as defined by the federal land
laws. The property rights that emerged and their long-term welfare effects provide a laboratory for
examining current questions of institutional design to address over-fishing, excessive air pollution,
and other natural resource and environmental problems. A major lesson is that property rights allocations
based on local conditions, prior use, and unconstrained by outside government mandates were most
effective in addressing not only the immediate threat of open-access, but in providing a longer-term
basis for production, investment, and trade. Another lesson is how hard it is to repair initial faulty
property allocations. Accordingly, path dependencies in property rules are real, and they have dominated
the economic history of resource use in the West.