What is the significance of the frontier in american society

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Please re-enter recipient e-mail address es. You may send this item to up to five recipients. Therefore, discarding the word frontier and defining the West as a region make it possible to study its twentieth-century history, which had been completely overlooked by the "Old Western History", a label that appeared following the birth of the New Western History, to emphasize the novelty of the latter.

While Turner depicted the westward movement as a march of civilization and progress, the new historians denounce the expansionism and colonialism of the nation.

As prominent New Western Historian and author of the landmark study The Legacy of Conquest Patricia Nelson Limerick states: "Conquest forms the historical bedrock of the whole nation, and the American West is a preeminent case study in conquest and its consequences" Limerick , Criticizing Turner for his focus on white male pioneers, the revisionists also aim at writing the history of all the actors of the western past: men, women, families, African-Americans, Chinese, Mexicans, Native Americans, etc.

The Western past is not a one-dimensional story of white men marching westward and replacing savagery by civilization, resulting in the ennoblement of the American character, but a multicultural tale highlighting ethnic and racial diversity, with people coming from the East, but also from the North, the South, and the West. Neither is it the story of the unique and exceptional subduing of an empty land, but a tale of environmental destruction and despoliation.

According to the New Western History, the West is not some moving line advancing westward, but a region, with geographical limits and intrinsic characteristics. Interestingly, members of the movement do not agree on the limits of the region: some include Alaska and Hawaii; others consider that the Pacific slope does not share the same characteristics as the rest of the region; while still others disagree over the northern and southern edges of the area.

While it is generally agreed that the region corresponds to the entire territory lying west of the 98 th meridian, the limits of the West have long been debated. Nevertheless, the New Historians all insist on considering the West as a fixed entity, and advocate a regionalist approach.

And it has characteristics all of its own, that distinguish it from the other regions of the United States. For instance, semi aridity, ethnic and racial diversity, and "a legacy of conquest", are considered as giving the western region its distinctiveness.

In the s, historian Walter Prescott Webb discussed the aridity of the West, and made it the main characteristic of the region. Yet, this insistence on what some critics call the "regionalizing of the West" is a distinguishing feature of the New Western History. According to Donald Worster, " regionalism is about telling differences or it has nothing to tell" Worster , Ironically, then, even though Turner has been the whipping-boy of the New Western Historians, Old and New Historians have more in common than the latter would admit.

So large is the area traditionally referred to as "the West" that the defining characteristics the New Historians are attached to are hardly applicable to all parts of the region. Aridity, for instance, does not characterize the Pacific Northwest as it does New Mexico or Arizona, just as ethnic diversity is probably not as central a feature of the Plains states or Oregon as it is of California or Texas.

The New Historians try so hard to define and study the West as a region with distinctive characteristics that they fall into the trap of generalization.

This homogenization masks subregional variations and basically suppresses one of the main characteristics of the broader region: its diversity, or lack of uniformity. Furthermore, the search for a clearly delineated region with tangible features has led the New Historians to ignore an important aspect of the West, that is, the fact that it may also have intangible characteristics, such as an undisputed place in the American imagination. Seen as "a state of mind", the West is no less significant, yet much more difficult to locate on a map.

That is why historians like David Wrobel and Michael Steiner have recently called for a study of the "many Wests within the larger West" Wrobel and Steiner 11 , one that would go beyond both the old frontier paradigm and the fixed and rigid entity of New Western History.

While Turner, in spite of his sweeping assertions and fuzzy definitions, wrote a national history, the New Historians limit the scope of their analyses to the westernmost part of the United States. As a result, the new framework lacks the force and appeal of the old one. According to a critic, "by abandoning the idea of the frontier and making the West as place the center of [their] focus, [the New Western Historians have] drained away some of the drama of life on the edges where people and places meet" Weber, in Worster, Armitage, Malone, Weber, and Limerick , italics in the text.

The regionalism of the New Historians results in parochialism, and runs the risk of being regarded as irrelevant to American history at large. For instance, Western historians have paid more attention to colonialism over the last decade.

Particularism was strongest in colonies with no Indian frontier. This frontier stretched along the western border like a cord of union. The Indian was a common danger, demanding united action. Most celebrated of these conferences was the Albany congress of , called to treat with the Six Nations, and to consider plans of union. Even a cursory reading of the plan proposed by the congress reveals the importance of the frontier.

The powers of the general council and the officers were, chiefly, the determination of peace and war with the Indians, the regulation of Indian trade, the purchase of Indian lands, and the creation and government of new settlements as a security against the Indians. It is evident that the unifying tendencies of the Revolutionary period were facilitated by the previous cooperation in the regulation of the frontier.

In this connection may be mentioned the importance of the frontier, from that day to this, as a military training school, keeping alive the power of resistance to aggression, and developing the stalwart and rugged qualities of the frontiersman. It would not be possible in the limits of this paper to trace the other frontiers across the continent. The experience of the Carolina cowpens guided the ranchers of Texas. The effect of these great ranches on the subsequent agrarian history of the localities in which they existed should be studied.

In part this is due to Indian resistance, in part to the location of river valleys and passes, in part to the unequal force of the centers of frontier attraction. Among the important centers of attraction may be mentioned the following: fertile and favorably situated soils, salt springs, mines, and army posts. The frontier army post, serving to protect the settlers from the Indians, has also acted as a wedge to open the Indian country, and has been a nucleus for settlement.

But all the more important expeditions were greatly indebted to the earliest pathmakers, the Indian guides, the traders and trappers, and the French voyageurs, who were inevitable parts of governmental expeditions from the days of Lewis and Clarke. In an interesting monograph, Victor Hehn [31] has traced the effect of salt upon early European development, and has pointed out how it affected the lines of settlement and the form of administration.

A similar study might be made for the salt springs of the United States. The early settlers were tied to the coast by the need of salt, without which they could not preserve their meats or live in comfort. An annual pilgrimage to the coast for salt thus became essential. Taking flocks or furs and ginseng root, the early settlers sent their pack trains after seeding time each year to the coast. But when discovery was made of the salt springs of the Kanawha, and the Holston, and Kentucky, and central New York, the West began to be freed from dependence on the coast.

It was in part the effect of finding these salt springs that enabled settlement to cross the mountains. From the time the mountains rose between the pioneer and the seaboard, a new order of Americanism arose.

The West and the East began to get out of touch of each other. The settlements from the sea to the mountains kept connection with the rear and had a certain solidarity. But the overmountain men grew more and more independent. The East took a narrow view of American advance, and nearly lost these men. Kentucky and Tennessee history bears abundant witness to the truth of this statement. The East began to try to hedge and limit westward expansion. Though Webster could declare that there were no Alleghanies in his politics, yet in politics in general they were a very solid factor.

The exploitation of the beasts took hunter and trader to the west, the exploitation of the grasses took the rancher west, and the exploitation of the virgin soil of the river valleys and prairies attracted the farmer. The land hunger of the Virginians drew them down the rivers into Carolina, in early colonial days; the search for soils took the Massachusetts men to Pennsylvania and to New York.

As the eastern lands were taken up migration flowed across them to the west. Daniel Boone, the great backwoodsman, who combined the occupations of hunter, trader, cattle-raiser, farmer, and surveyor—learning, probably from the traders, of the fertility of the lands on the upper Yadkin, where the traders were wont to rest as they took their way to the Indians, left his Pennsylvania home with his father, and passed down the Great Valley road to that stream.

Learning from a trader whose posts were on the Red River in Kentucky of its game and rich pastures, he pioneered the way for the farmers to that region. Thence he passed to the frontier of Missouri, where his settlement was long a landmark on the frontier. Here again he helped to open the way for civilization, finding salt licks, and trails, and land.

His son was among the earliest trappers in the passes of the Rocky Mountains, and his party are said to have been the first to camp on the present site of Denver.

His grandson, Col. Boone, of Colorado, was a power among the Indians of the Rocky Mountains, and was appointed an agent by the Government. Generally, in all the western settlements, three classes, like the waves of the ocean, have rolled one after the other.

It is quite immaterial whether he ever becomes the owner of the soil. He builds his cabin, gathers around him a few other families of similar tastes and habits, and occupies till the range is somewhat subdued, and hunting a little precarious, or, which is more frequently the case, till the neighbors crowd around, roads, bridges, and fields annoy him, and he lacks elbow room.

The next class of emigrants purchase the lands, add field to field, clear out the roads, throw rough bridges over the streams, put up hewn log houses with glass windows and brick or stone chimneys, occasionally plant orchards, build mills, schoolhouses, court-houses, etc. Another wave rolls on. The men of capital and enterprise come. The settler is ready to sell out and take the advantage of the rise in property, push farther into the interior and become, himself, a man of capital and enterprise in turn.

The small village rises to a spacious town or city; substantial edifices of brick, extensive fields, orchards, gardens, colleges, and churches are seen. Broadcloths, silks, leghorns, crapes, and all the refinements, luxuries, elegancies, frivolities, and fashions are in vogue.

Thus wave after wave is rolling westward; the real Eldorado is still farther on. A portion of the two first classes remain stationary amidst the general movement, improve their habits and condition, and rise in the scale of society.

The writer has traveled much amongst the first class, the real pioneers. He has lived many years in connection with the second grade; and now the third wave is sweeping over large districts of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Migration has become almost a habit in the west.

Hundreds of men can be found, not over 50 years of age, who have settled for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time on a new spot. To sell out and remove only a few hundred miles makes up a portion of the variety of backwoods life and manners. Omitting those of the pioneer farmers who move from the love of adventure, the advance of the more steady farmer is easy to understand. Obviously the immigrant was attracted by the cheap lands of the frontier, and even the native farmer felt their influence strongly.

Year by year the farmers who lived on soil whose returns were diminished by unrotated crops were offered the virgin soil of the frontier at nominal prices. Their growing families demanded more lands, and these were dear. The competition of the unexhausted, cheap, and easily tilled prairie lands compelled the farmer either to go west and continue the exhaustion of the soil on a new frontier, or to adopt intensive culture.

Thus the census of shows, in the Northwest, many counties in which there is an absolute or a relative decrease of population. These States have been sending farmers to advance the frontier on the plains, and have themselves begun to turn to intensive farming and to manufacture. A decade before this, Ohio had shown the same transition stage. Thus the demand for land and the love of wilderness freedom drew the frontier ever onward.

Having now roughly outlined the various kinds of frontiers, and their modes of advance, chiefly from the point of view of the frontier itself, we may next inquire what were the influences on the East and on the Old World. A rapid enumeration of some of the more noteworthy effects is all that I have time for. First, we note that the frontier promoted the formation of a composite nationality for the American people.

The coast was preponderantly English, but the later tides of continental immigration flowed across to the free lands. This was the case from the early colonial days. With these peoples were also the freed indented servants, or redemptioners, who at the expiration of their time of service passed to the frontier.

In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated, and fused into a mixed race, English in neither nationality or characteristics. The process has gone on from the early days to our own. In the middle of the present century the German element in Wisconsin was already so considerable that leading publicists looked to the creation of a German state out of the commonwealth by concentrating their colonization. In another way the advance of the frontier decreased our dependence on England.

The coast, particularly of the South, lacked diversified industries, and was dependent on England for the bulk of its supplies. In the South there was even a dependence on the Northern colonies for articles of food.

This no doubt diminishes the number of shipping and the appearance of our trade, but it is far from being a detriment to us. The legislation which most developed the powers of the National Government, and played the largest part in its activity, was conditioned on the frontier. Writers have discussed the subjects of tariff, land, and internal improvement, as subsidiary to the slavery question. But when American history comes to be rightly viewed it will be seen that the slavery question is an incident.

In the period from the end of the first half of the present century to the close of the civil war slavery rose to primary, but far from exclusive, importance. But this does not justify Dr. Even so recent a writer as Rhodes, in his History of the United States since the compromise of , has treated the legislation called out by the western advance as incidental to the slavery struggle. This is a wrong perspective. The pioneer needed the goods of the coast, and so the grand series of internal improvement and railroad legislation began, with potent nationalizing effects.

Over internal improvements occurred great debates, in which grave constitutional questions were discussed. Sectional groupings appear in the votes, profoundly significant for the historian. Loose construction increased as the nation marched westward. The disposition of the public lands was a third important subject of national legislation influenced by the frontier.

The public domain has been a force of profound importance in the nationalization and development of the Government.

The effects of the struggle of the landed and the landless States, and of the ordinance of , need no discussion. The purchase of Louisiana was perhaps the constitutional turning point in the history of the Republic, inasmuch as it afforded both a new area for national legislation and the occasion of the downfall of the policy of strict construction.

But the purchase of Louisiana was called out by frontier needs and demands. As frontier States accrued to the Union the national power grew. In a speech on the dedication of the Calhoun monument Mr. When we consider the public domain from the point of view of the sale and disposal of the public lands we are again brought face to face with the frontier.

The policy of the United States in dealing with its lands is in sharp contrast with the European system of scientific administration. Efforts to make this domain a source of revenue, and to withhold it from emigrants in order that settlement might be compact, were in vain. The jealousy and the fears of the East were powerless in the face of the demands of the frontiersmen.

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In this essay, Turner argued that the frontier shaped key elements of the American experience. Upcoming Events Explore our upcoming webinars, events and programs. View All Events. Invest In Our Future The most effective way to secure a freer America with more opportunity for all is through engaging, educating, and empowering our youth. Support now Make your investment into the leaders of tomorrow through the Bill of Rights Institute today! Make a Donation. Learn More. About BRI The Bill of Rights Institute engages, educates, and empowers individuals with a passion for the freedom and opportunity that exist in a free society.

Page: Resources Library Arrow icon. Unit: Chapter 9: Use this primary source text to explore key historical events. Point-Counterpoint to give students more background on individualism and expansion west.