The Closing of the American Frontier: The Story of America Series [Ep. 36]

This is Lee Habib, and this is our American Stories. Up next, the Story of Us: The Story of America series with Hillsdale College professor and author of Land of Hope, Bill McLay. In the eighteen eighties, America was a changing nation. But what became of the Western frontier? Let’s get into this story. Take it away, Bill.

Then there was the story of the great, mythic land of opportunity and dreams. How had its legacy been impacted by these great new economic and social forces?

Surely, this land of open spaces and great canyons and wilderness was untouched and unscathed by all that was happening to our cities. And most certainly, that ethos of the West—the land of rugged individualism and personal freedom—was still alive and kicking, wasn’t it? Though we like to think of the American West in certain ways: the space populated with cowboys riding the open range and steering massive numbers of cows, thousands of numbers on cattle drives to cow towns like Abilene and Fort Worth. Truth is that those times were more myth and legend in fact, lasting only a brief time, a couple of decades at most, between the end of the Civil War in the eighteen eighties. As farmers and ranchers populated the West, they needed to increasingly settle out their property lines, which soon began crowding out the kind of open ranges needed for those epic cattle drives.

Ironically, the heavy hand of the federal government in the American West would play an enormous role. The federal government owns nearly half of the land there, making the West the region of America least free from federal interference. This was true nowhere more than in America’s Indian policy. The most tragic victims of America’s relentless push to consolidation were America’s Plain Indians—two hundred and fifty thousand of them—who were constantly bombarded with federal interference and intrusion on their lands. They did what anyone would do under the circumstances, resisting and fighting as best they could, but eventually they would lose everything.

When the Nez Perce Chief Joseph finally surrendered, he said these words—about as tragic as any words uttered in our nation’s history: “I will fight no more forever. I will fight no more forever.” Think about what Chief Joseph was saying in that short and powerful sentence: he wasn’t just surrendering all future combat. He was surrendering an entire way of life, and, worst, he was turning that way of life over to the people who were running America’s Indian affairs policy and all of its duplicitousness and incompetence. The policy of Americanizing Indians was deeply misguided. These Indians, too, were trapped by forces much larger than themselves. And despite all of this, the image of the American West is a land of opportunity and freedom, a land of hope, persisted, hardwired into the very idea of America itself, which may be why when the Eighteen Ninety Census Bureau report was issued, it created such a stir because the report noted, in its customary bureaucratic speak, that the western part of America had so many settled spaces that, quote, “there can hardly be said to be a frontier line anymore.”

As only bureaucrats could do. In such cold language, the Census Bureau had essentially told America and the world that the age of the American frontier was over, and that was an earth-shattering proclamation. Could America be America without that image, without that idea of the frontier? The answer to these profound cultural and identity questions could never be founded the Census Bureau or any other government agency. Much more talented to take on the desk was Frederick Jackson Turner, a young historian from Wisconsin, which was then considered the West, who penned an essay entitled The Significance of the Frontier in American History. This would become one of the most influential works of American cultural history ever produced.

Here are some excerpts from this remark. The whole essay: “Up to our own day, American history has to a large degree been the history of the colonization of the Great West, the existence of an area of free land. Its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement. Western explain American development. Behind the institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. American social development has continually been beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character.”

Turner then addressed the very notion, the very idea, of what constitutes the frontier.

“What is the frontier? It is not the European frontier, a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about it is that it lies at the hither edge of free land. The term is an elastic one. The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization, and it arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois. Before long he’s gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick. He shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier, the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes or perish. So he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness. But the outcome is not the old Europe. The fact is that here is a new product that is American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations.” Here, he’s using geology as his metaphor. “So each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area, the region still partakes of the frontier characteristic.” That’s the advance. “The frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And to study this advance—the men who grew up under these conditions—is to study the really American part of our history.” Here, Turner captures the very force of nature that the idea of the frontier inspires. Turner continues, “It appears, then, that the universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature. Since the days when the fleet of Columbus sailed into the waters of the New World, America has been another name for opportunity, and the people of the United States have taken their tone from the incessant expansion which has not only been open, but has even been forced upon them. He would be a rash prophet who should assert that the expansive character of American life has now entirely ceased. Movement has been its dominant fact, and unless this training has no effect upon a people, the American energy will continually demand a wider field for its exercise. But never again will such gifts of free land offer themselves. What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks—breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences—that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of one hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.”

Thus ends Turner. But what would become of America now that the frontier as we knew it was over? Were there new frontiers to be had: frontiers of the imagination, frontiers in creativity, frontiers in space? And there were more questions. Did America’s future now belong to the organized, centralized, and nationalized, and to the massive forces at play that marched to the tune of modern industrial life? Those were the big and unanswered questions as a new era emerged—an era of industrialization and urbanization—would alter American life as we knew it. But would it alter it totally? That remained to be seen.

The Story of America series. This one: the fate of the American Frontier. Here on Our American Stories.