Social control of vice in post-frontier Montana

The question of how to control vice is ubiquitous within societies. This paper describes social issues expressed within seven small rural towns in Montana following the settlement by non-Indigenous migrants. The analysis focuses on the evolution of ecological mechanisms to control vice as external influences brought demographic and ideological change to frontier communities. Data are drawn from historical archives and census records. The solutions to the problems of that period involved discussion of the meaning of vice and of feasible strategies for controlling it according to how it was locally defined. The questions of which behaviours, drinking alcohol, gambling, and prostitution, would be publicly tolerated, even encouraged, were hotly debated political issues then, as now. The transition of development, from frontier through later stages of settlement, was neither an absolute nor a finite process. Nevertheless, there appears to have been a common process for how these communities responded to development and to vice, within a relatively limited time span. All engaged in dialogue. All sought to control vice through local statutes. All utilised spatial and temporal ecological strategies. This common process appears to have been in response to a combination of extra-local influences and local demographic transitions.