FRONTIER

The concept of a frontier—some kind of dividing line between nature and civilization—was present in some form or other in the minds of European discoverers and explorers of North America almost from the beginning, and early on it became a defining phenomenon in American history. As settlers confronted the interior of a vast continent full of exotic people, animals, and plants as well as geographic and geologic wonders, they came to realize that although they intended to transplant and perpetuate European institutions and to exploit the new continent for European purposes, indigenous circumstances were inevitably going to make life in America significantly different from that in the Old World.

Images of the frontier in early American literature vary greatly, from a place of darkness and dread, the domain of the devil, to a happy, peaceful realm of opportunity for the human spirit to recover a presumed primeval innocence cleansed of civilization's corruption and indeed even a place to achieve union with God. It was violent and perilous, but it was also a land of opportunity, where an enterprising person with a sharp ax could become the master of his own destiny. The frontier was thus fraught with ambiguous meaning, but it was a place few Americans could ignore. The novels of James Fenimore Cooper, the histories of Washington Irving and Francis Parkman, and the government reports of John C. Frémont all found enthusiastic audiences among Americans who felt themselves drawn to the frontier or who only dreamed of going there.

However the frontier might have been defined, it was a transitional phenomenon, a passing phase on the road to civilization. Civilization of course contains its own problems, and as Americans found themselves confronted increasingly by those new problems, their concept of the frontier acquired a nostalgic component. In that view America's best days lay in the past, in a time when life's essentials were laid bare and challenges brought out the best in human nature. This nostalgic view became more and more prominent in American literature and history during the years after the Civil War, when a country newly reunited and invigorated by the Industrial Revolution rushed to vanquish the remaining Indians, settle the open spaces, and exploit the continent's natural resources.

When the University of Wisconsin historian Frederick Jackson Turner (1861–1932) read his path-breaking paper "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" before the American Historical Association in Chicago on 12 July 1893, he both represented contemporary interest in the frontier and foreshadowed the fascination with the subject that lasted well into the twentieth century. Like the ancient Roman god Janus, Turner looked both ways, reacting to previous views as well as preparing the way for other viewpoints that dominated writing about the frontier in the next decades. The "frontier" or "Turner" thesis, although much challenged in the late twentieth century and early twenty-first century, nonetheless remains the beginning place for understanding the central concept of the frontier in American history and literature. In addition, because novelists, historians, and moviemakers are not immune from their own times, their interpretations of the frontier often reflect their present-day experiences as much as the events of the past. Over time the frontier has become as much a metaphor for presenting one's views as a series of historical events.

THE FRONTIER BEFORE FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER

Turner built on an enduring interest in borders and frontiers. In Europe well before Turner spoke of the idea, the frontier referred to set boundaries between nations. In the United States in the nineteenth century, frontiers were often points of contact between colonial empires or of division between white and Indian societies. Travelers and writers of the nineteenth century provided varied depictions of the frontier. The journals of the explorers Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, Zebulon Pike, and Stephen H. Long, for example, spoke of the vast spaces, the giant mountains and rivers, and numerous Indian tribes. They also warned of dangers from natural disasters and native opponents. If explorers in the early nineteenth century furnished close approximations of what they saw and experienced, more imaginative tourists, authors the likes of Washington Irving and James Fenimore Cooper, the historian Francis Parkman, and artists such as Albert Bierstadt and Thomas Moran provided more romantic depictions.

Toward the end of the century, other writers and publicists further wilded up the West. From 1860 into the early twentieth century, dime novelists utilized the frontier repeatedly for sensational and lurid tales of historical and quasi-historical figures like Billy the Kid, Buffalo Bill Cody, Wild Bill Hickok, and Calamity Jane as well as wholly fictional characters like Deadwood Dick, Rattlesnake Ned, and Sagebrush Sal. Dime novels depicted a West much more of fantasy than of reality. The most influential of all such promulgators of the romanticized West was William F. Cody, "Buffalo Bill" (1846–1917), who in 1883 organized his Wild West show and took it throughout the United Statesand western Europe. Cody's circus-like exhibition provided a mix of cowboys, Indians, shootists, and fancy riders, but most of all Buffalo Bill portrayed the frontier as a setting of nonstop vigorous competitions.

The local color movement in American literature, which lasted from the end of the Civil War until the 1890s and provided the southern animal fabliaux of Joel Chandler Harris and the Hoosier dialect stories of James Whitcomb Riley, also manifested itself in the stories of Mark Twain, Bret Harte, Joaquin Miller, and Alfred Henry Lewis, who utilized historical and imagined characters to depict mysterious, adventurous, and faraway frontiers peopled with exotic miners, courageous explorers, and exuberant cowboys. "Local color" denotes a literary tradition based on folklore and character types that are charming representations of life in a particular time and place but which do not transcend their roots to achieve a timeless universal significance.

The most influential interpreter of the frontier before Turner was the Boston Brahmin Francis Parkman (1788–1852). A horticulturist by training, Parkman was one of the first in a long line of talented researchers and writers who have made immense contributions to American history as hobbyists rather than as professionally trained scholars. Parkman's most celebrated work is The Oregon Trail (1872; first published as The California and Oregon Trail in 1849), a now-classic memoir of Parkman's direct experience of the frontier during a trip across the Great Plains on the overland trail in 1846. Parkman has been accused, most notably by the historian Bernard DeVoto, of missing the larger significance of the historic moment he witnessed because of his aristocratic disdain for the unwashed mountain men and the Indians, whom he typically referred to as savages, who shared the trail and were effecting the continental expansion that DeVoto considered the basic theme in American history. Be that as it may, the experience aroused Parkman's literary instincts and set a great career in motion.

Parkman's voluminous histories, which continued to flow from his inkwell until the early 1890s, were deeply grounded in the grand Romantic vision that inspired his fellow historians George Bancroft and William H. Prescott as well as writers like Irving and Cooper. His pages are filled with such epic themes as the clash of empires in the Seven Years' War (The History of the Conspiracy of Pontiac and the Indian War after the Conquest of Canada [1851] and Montcalm and Wolfe [1884]) and the heroic deeds of great explorers and missionaries like La Salle and the French Jesuits.

Modern western historians owe a great deal to Parkman, both for his tireless exploitation of archival resources and for his literary style, which, while no one would write in that mode in the early twenty-first century, reminds one that history is a literary art as well as a science. Interpretively his contribution is much thinner. Parkman was certainly aware of the existence of a frontier as a line separating the primitive from the civilized, but he saw little utility in it or any other sociological phenomenon in his literary purposes. He was much less interested in explaining than in simply narrating. Issues of causation and significance—the interpretive elements in which modern historians believe history achieves its explanatory force and intellectual height—were less important to Parkman than exploring the literary potential of his epic themes and characters.

Another pre-Turner historian of the West, who was much more read in his day than in later years, is Theodore Roosevelt (1858–1919). Only a little psychoanalysis is required to understand that Roosevelt's interest in what he imagined to be the robust masculinity of western life grew out of his personal determination to triumph over the limitations of the weak body with which he was born, a determination that made him a horseman, hunter, boxer, cowboy, and lifelong advocate of what he came to call "the strenuous life." Born into a wealthy New York aristocratic family, Roosevelt was a voracious reader who early became aware of the frontier and the outsize adventures of the colorful characters who populated it. No armchair adventurer himself, Roosevelt's passion for the West led him to ownership of two cattle ranches in the Dakota Territory in the 1880s. Although the rough-edged cowboys in his employ sometimes found themselves snickering at his Harvard accent, they had to applaud his toughness and energy, and Roosevelt vindicated his authentic western-ness by knocking out a bully in a Dakota saloon.

The long shelf of Roosevelt's writings includes several titles recounting his experiences and travels in the West, but his multivolume history of the frontier, The Winning of the West: An Account of the Exploration and Settlement of Our Country from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, which appeared during 1889–1896, was most influential in promoting a particular view of the frontier that remains vital in popular culture even to this day. Driven by an unabashed racism that underlay most of the European and American imperialism of that day, The Winning of the West was the story of the triumph of the Anglo-Saxon pioneers in supplanting indigenous "savagery" with civilization. Filled with dramatic battles, desperate struggles, and similar vindications of "the strenuous life," Roosevelt's history was an implicit rebuke to the effete easterners of his native society whose vision failed to embrace the great challenge of redeeming the earth through Anglo-Saxon conquest.

THE "WATERSHED" OF THE 1890s

The frontier began to take on increased importance in the American mind as a result of what various historians have called the "watershed," the "psychic crisis," and the "reorientation of American culture" during the 1890s. Although twentieth-century western historiography, with its focus on ethnic and cultural minorities and on women, has tended to minimize some of the traumatic aspects of that decade as a tempest only within the teapot of elite white Americans, the fact that those Americans were the dominant power in politics, society, and culture gives the thesis some force.

In broad terms, the thesis focuses on a widespread failure of confidence in the basic soundness of American culture in the face of the end of the frontier, the great economic depression of the decade, the resulting revolt of farmers, labor unrest and violence in the Homestead and Pullman strikes of 1892 and 1894, respectively, ostensibly unassimilable waves of immigrants and the resulting ghettos and slums, widespread civic corruption, and the death of free enterprise and competition by the domination of big business conglomerates. The West played a major role in the attempt of Americans to revert to and reassert virtues and attributes that they imagined had defined America's strength in the simpler years before the Industrial Revolution. A new focus on the outdoors as opposed to the city was manifested by the creation of national parks such as Yosemite and Sequoia, in the nature writings of Ernest Thompson Seton and John Muir, by the founding of organizations like the Boone and Crockett Club (1887) and the Sierra Club (1892), and a general emphasis on Roosevelt's "strenuous life." Those emphases came to the surface of public life perhaps most tellingly in the jingoistic patriotism that led to imperialistic ventures in the Caribbean and the Philippines during the Spanish-American War (1898), to the Open Door Policy (1899), and to the building of the Great White Fleet (1907–1909).

FREDERICK JACKSON TURNER AND THE FRONTIER

Before Turner could give the frontier its rightful place in the American past, he had to clear away what he considered three major impediments. For one, after the Civil War, American historians had placed too much stress, Turner was convinced, on the controversies that led to that fratricidal conflict. True, slavery and the attendant political and economic embroilments were important, but they must be viewed in larger contexts, alongside other powerful forces that shaped what became the United States. Second, Turner urged his fellow historians to avoid their nearly exclusive emphases on the molding influences of Europe on American history. In this urging, Turner was separating himself from his teacher Herbert Baxter Adams. As Turner's doctoral mentor at Johns Hopkins University, Adams preached the doctrine of the "germ theory," which asserted that the "germs" of European history and culture were the primary shaping forces of the American past. Third, Turner wanted to put distance between himself and historians and popularizers who wanted to turn the frontier into a Wild West replete with gigantic heroes and villains. Without naming names Turner implied that his analytical approaches to the study of the frontier were miles distant from the kinds of Wests that Buffalo Bill, Theodore Roosevelt, and others were portraying in their arena shows and romantic narrative histories. Turner was convinced that if the underbrush of slavery, the "germ theory," and a Wild West could be cleared away, his ideas about the significance of the frontier as the most important force in influencing American history could gain the attention they merited.

In the opening paragraph of Turner's notable presentation in 1893, he sounded the tocsin for the importance of the frontier in American history. Out on the frontier, he argued, "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development" (Frontier in History, p. 1). The frontier experience did not help explain, partially explain, or largely "explain American development"; it did the explaining by itself. This is the boldest statement in an iconoclastic essay. Once one accepts the proposition encapsulated in that sentence, it is not difficult to understand the central significance of the frontier to American history.

Turner pointed to several results of the American frontier experience. The outcome of demanding wilderness contact, Turner asserted, encouraged individualism and a democracy derived from individual effort and from the necessity of working together to survive and to form political and social institutions. On the frontier a social and economic leveling took place when all families, without servants or slaves, had to do their own work. Here were Thomas Jefferson's yeoman farmers laboring in a setting where class divisions could not be sustained. Besides individualism and democracy, the frontier spawned a new, corporate nationality, a real melting pot in which ethnic differences dissolved in the light of common experience. Turner was equally convinced that the frontier had encouraged another of kind of nationalism in which frontier residents forged links with the federal government through their need for banks, tariffs, and internal improvements such as canals and roads.

A new kind of culture had also emerged on the frontier and influenced the remainder of the nation. Turner notes elsewhere that historical figures such as Daniel Boone, Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Mark Twain prove that the frontier produced, in the words of the transcendentalists, men of reason (homespun, grassroots, intuitive democrats) rather than men of understanding (rational intellectuals and philosophers). The "intellectual traits" of the frontier, Turner opined, were a "coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness." These traits also included a "practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients." Finally, the frontier mind demonstrated a "masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends . . . restless, nervous energy . . . a dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom" (Frontier in American History, p. 37).

Reflecting the nationalistic, reforming, and positive spirit of his time and personal temperament, Turner produced a generally optimistic essay. True, the frontier had closed, but its powerful, shaping legacies would sustain Americans in the future. The individualism, democracy, nationalism, and social mobility that the frontier fostered were beacons for Americans facing an uncertain horizon. Turner's forward-looking vision, based on a valuable past, comes into focus in the rhetorical flourishes appearing at the end of his remarkable essay. Turner, the historian and poet, wrote: "What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely" (Frontier in American History, p. 38).

REACTIONS TO TURNER'S FRONTIER THESIS

Although a few years passed before Turner's frontier thesis became irrevocable doctrine, most American historians had converted to the Turner camp by 1910. In that year Turner was elected president of the American Historical Association and was named to a chair of history at Harvard, two signs that he was among the most influential historians in the United States. Turner's students and other disciples carried the frontier message throughout the country. Hardly a major college or university was without its Turner man. Indeed, when Turner's replacement at the University of Wisconsin, Frederic Logan Paxson (1877–1948), wrote a book-length frontier history that Turner often promised but never completed, Paxson seemed a Turner look-alike in arguing in his preface "that the frontier with its continuous influence is the most American thing in all America." For that book, History of the American Frontier, 1763–1893 (1924), with its clear Turnerian stamp, Paxson won a coveted Pulitzer Prize. Soon after Turner died in 1932, Paxson wrote an overview of frontier historiography, declaring that Turner's frontier thesis "stands today as easily to be accepted as it was when launched" ("A Generation of the Frontier Hypothesis," p. 51).

ZANE GREY

One of the most widely read fictional proponents of the significance of the frontier in American history is an Ohio dentist turned novelist, Zane Grey (1875–1939). Grey's fictional portrayal of life on the frontier owes a good deal more to the hairy-chested imperialism of Theodore Roosevelt than to the social analysis of Turner, but Grey, by becoming one of America's bestselling authors, demonstrates the depth and persistence of interest in the frontier within the reading public.

Frustrated with dentistry, Grey in 1903 began trying his hand at fiction in the form of a trilogy based on the historical exploits of his ancestors on the Ohio River frontier. Betty Zane (1903), The Spirit of the Border (1906), and The Last Trail (1909) were melodramas featuring lurid prose and violence similar to the dime novels. Although they sold poorly, they provided Grey with practice plotting frontier action stories and convinced him that a literary career was possible. A trip in 1907 to the ranch of the former buffalo hunter Colonel C. J. "Buffalo" Jones in northern Arizona gave Grey his first actual experience with frontier-like conditions and began to incubate the themes that became the framework of his most popular books. Jones's Mormon cowboys, the colorful Indians of the Grand Canyon region, the dramatic scenery, and the challenges of life in the desert all found prominent places in Grey's interpretation of the frontier.

Those elements coalesce in The Heritage of the Desert (1910), the first of Grey's "Mormon" novels and the first to develop his idea of the frontier as a theater of Darwinian natural selection, in which an ill and exhausted easterner, symbolizing the cultural bankruptcy of industrialized urban civilization, comes west and, responding to the moral and physical challenges of a harsh frontier life, finds rejuvenation and, of course, love. Grey further develops that theme in his other two "Mormon" novels, Riders of the Purple Sage (1912) and The Rainbow Trail (1915), perhaps the most famous westerns ever written. In those books Grey also introduced the character of Lassiter, the mysterious avenging gunman almost as lacking in antecedents as Owen Wister's Virginian, whose guns impose justice where vestigial frontier institutions cannot.

Grey's frontier Darwinism reached its apogee during the 1920s. Two character types appearing in his novels of that decade find physical and moral healing in the West: broken and unappreciated veterans of World War I and superficial flappers of the Jazz Age. The books featuring those themes—The Man of the Forest (1920), The Call of the Canyon (1924), and 30,000 on the Hoof (1940)—are arguably his most philosophical and culturally significant works. During the 1930s Grey's literary output continued unabated, but with his audience now assured, his stories were less imaginative. Other novelists and historians—Willa Cather, Walter Prescott Webb, and Herbert E. Bolton among them—by that time had also rushed out onto the literary frontier, and an abiding interest in the significance of the frontier in American history had become a fundamental element in American culture.

See alsoAnnexation and Expansion; Dime Novels; Farmers and Ranchers; History; Parks and Wilderness Areas; The Western; Wild West Shows

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Primary Works

Parkman, Francis. The Oregon Trail. Boston: Little, Brown, 1872. A revised version of The California and Oregon Trail. New York: Putnam, 1849.

Paxson, Frederic Logan. "A Generation of the Frontier Hypothesis: 1893–1932." Pacific Historical Review 2 (March 1933): 34–51.

Paxson, Frederic Logan. History of the American Frontier, 1763–1893. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1924.

Roosevelt, Theodore. The Winning of the West: An Account of the Exploration and Settlement of Our Country from the Alleghanies to the Pacific. 4 vols. New York: Putnam, 1889–1896.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Frontier in American History. 1920. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1986. Contains "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." The quotations in the present article are taken from the 1986 edition.

Turner, Frederick Jackson. The Significance of Sections in American History. New York: Henry Holt, 1932.

Secondary Works

Bogue, Allan G. Frederick Jackson Turner: Strange Roads Going Down. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998.

Commager, Henry Steele. The American Mind: An Interpretation of American Thought and Character since the 1880s. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1950.

Cronon, William. "Revisiting the Vanishing Frontier: The Legacy of Frederick Jackson Turner." Western Historical Quarterly 18 (April 1987): 157–176.

Etulain, Richard W. Re-Imagining the Modern American West: A Century of Fiction, History, and Art. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1996.

Etulain, Richard W. Telling Western Stories: From Buffalo Bill to Larry McMurtry. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999.

Gruber, Frank. Zane Grey: A Biography. New York: World, 1970.

Higham, John. "The Reorientation of American Culture in the 1890s." In his Writing American History: Essays on Modern Scholarship. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970.

Hofstadter, Richard. "Cuba, the Philippines, and Manifest Destiny." In his The Paranoid Style in American Politics, and Other Essays. New York: Knopf, 1965.

Klein, Kerwin Lee. Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of Native America, 1890–1990. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.

Limerick, Patricia Nelson. The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West. New York: Norton, 1987.

Morris, Edmund. The Rise of Theodore Roosevelt. New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1979.

Nash, Gerald D. Creating the West: Historical Interpretations, 1890–1990. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991.

Ridge, Martin. "The Life of an Idea: The Significance of Frederick Jackson Turner's Frontier Thesis." Montana: The Magazine of Western History 40 (winter 1991): 3–13.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1950.

Steiner, Michael C. "Frederick Jackson Turner and Western Regionalism." In Writing Western History: Essays on Major Western Historians, edited by Richard W. Etulain. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1991.

Topping, Gary. "Zane Grey: A Literary Reassessment." Western American Literature 13 (spring 1978): 51–64.

Richard W. EtulainGary Topping