Babies in Frontier States have more unusual names

http://news.yahoo.com/s/livescience/babiesinfrontierstateshavemoreunusualnames
Begin quote from above yahoo article:

Babies born in newer U.S. states have more distinctive names compared with their counterparts in older regions such as New England, a new study finds.
It turns out, the same values that pushed adventurous individuals into new territories as our country was being populated may still show up in the names their descendants give to babies, a new study finds.
In more recently established states, such as Washington and Oregon, parents tend to choose less common baby names, while parents in "older" areas, such as the original 13 states, go for more popular names.
Frontiers typically have fewer established institutions or infrastructure, and often occupy harsh environments. Early pioneers couldn't rely on others for help in such sparsely populated areas. end quote.

Yes. This is my experience as well. My grandfather's relatives came over from Switzerland and then Germany in the 1720s. When I studied the family's history back to 1580 in Switzerland, I noticed that family's of 8 to 10 or even 12 kids in each generation was the norm all the way down to the late 19th Century, when families started to reduce more to about 5 kids. I think as health care got better, instead of losing 4 or 5 kids by adulthood, people tended to lose only one or two by adulthood to accidents and disease. The consciousness of uniqueness and adaptability made the difference between surviving and not surviving outside of large major cities. So, people had to have more autonomy and independence in all their decision making to survive at all. Also, law and enforcement was less in Frontier states, so one had to know how to defend oneself in all situations without the law backing one up most times.

I ran into this even in the 1980s in India out in the country where there didn't appear to be any law for miles and often the Tibetan children all carried knives and weren't afraid to use them when necessary to defend their group near Dharamsala, India. They rescued my two sons, then aged 10 and 14  from kidnappers in a Mercedes who pulled a gun on them while trying to kidnap my sons. The Tibetan boys (about 20 of them) all pulled out their knives and the two men jumped in their Mercedes and drove quickly away so my sons weren't kidnapped for ransom.

Another incident typifies this western pioneer state kind of thinking. This was my grandfather who was born in the early 1880s so he was at least 20 when he saw his first automobile. Guns were a natural part of his life and so my father was taught to use a gun by 6 and his younger brother 4.  Guns and knives were a normal part of hunting and survival in the western states. Even I was given my father's Remington .22 pump rifle by age 8 years old in 1956 and immediately learned to be an excellent shot up to a block away or more by aged 9 years old. This is at least a 500 year tradition in my family of being an excellent marksman and hunter. But times change and I haven't shot a gun now for about 30 years since I was about 30 years old because I haven't had the need to shoot anything during those 30 years. The last thing I remember shooting was a Green Mojave Sidewinder Rattlesnake that was going into my family's desert house. Since it is 9 times more poisonous than a Diamond back rattler I didn't see another alternative.

But the uniqueness of people like my grandfather is sort of like out of a cowboy movie like "True Grit".
During World War II people grew Victory Gardens because so many farm boys were soldiers there wasn't enough food grown for people to eat in the U.S. So, literally everyone grew something in their yards to help out. So my grandad grew Tomatoes on a plot of land in Washinton state. When he went to get his gas coupon rations they told him, "Tomato season ended last week. Being and old Kansas type of western person he went to get his shotgun and came back and laid it on the counter and once again said, "I want my gas coupons." They gave them to him. That was how it was done in the old west. Though the shotgun wasn't loaded it was enough to put the fear of God into people. This was the way he grew up in the 1800s and people in general put up with folks like this until about 1960 when most of them had either died or were so old they stopped doing stuff like this. So, one more story. In the 1960s Grandpa had a mining claim of about 2000 acres in  Idaho near Elk City. The Forest Rangers came one day to tell Grandpa that the laws had changed and that he wasn't getting enough gold per year to keep his claim anymore. Grandpa took out his old bear hunting rifle and shot the ranger's hat off. They left him alone another 5 years on his mining claim until he died in 1970. This is part of the uniqueness of people of the old west. But they are all gone now.