Bonanza Revisited.

Ordinary people, making it by guess and by God, or not quite making it, are just as susceptible to dreams as the ambitious and greedy, and respond as excitedly to the adventure, the freedom, the apparently inexhaustible richness of the West. And the boosters have been there from the beginning to oversell the West as the Garden of the World, the flowing well of opportunity, the stamping ground of the self-reliant.

[...]

If you believe that the world owes you not merely a living but a bonanza, then restrictive laws are only an irritation and a challenge.

— Wallace Stegner, writing about his father, the boom-and-bust West, and its drill, baby, drill spirit