The Significance of the Frontier in American History
By Frederick J. Turner, 1894
Editor's Note: Please note, this is a short version of the essay subsequently published in Turner's essay collection, The Frontier in American History (1920). This text is closer to the original version delivered at the 1894 meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, published in The Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1894, pp. 119--227.
In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree 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 westward, explain American development.
Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications,
lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape
them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions
is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to
the changes of an expanding people—to the changes involved
in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing
at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and
political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city
life. Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly-I was
about to say fearfully-growing!”1 So saying, he touched the
distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development;
the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In
the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred
in a limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other
growing peoples whom it has conquered. But in the case of the United
States we have a different phenomenon. Limiting our attention to
the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution
of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative
government; the differentiation of simple colonial governments into
complex organs; the progress from primitive industrial society,
without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But
we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution
in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Thus American
development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line,
but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing
frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social
development has been continually 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. The true point of view in the history of this nation
is not the Atlantic coast, it is the great West. Even the slavery
struggle, which is made so exclusive an object of attention by writers
like Prof. von Holst, occupies its important place in American history
because of its relation to westward expansion.
In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the
meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written
about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and
the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist
and the historian it has been neglected.
The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European
frontier—a fortified boundary line running through dense populations.
The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that
it lies at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it
is treated as the margin of that settlement which has a density
of two or more to the square mile. The term is an elastic one, and
for our purposes does not need sharp definition. We shall consider
the whole frontier belt, including the Indian country and the outer
margin of the “settled area” of the census reports.
This paper will make no attempt to treat the subject exhaustively;
its aim is simply to call attention to the frontier as a fertile
field for investigation, and to suggest some of the problems which
arise in connection with it.
In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life
entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that
life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of European
germs developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention
has been paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins,
too little to the American factors. 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 arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him
in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian
palisade around him. Before long he has 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, and 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, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more
than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic
mark. 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, so each frontier leaves its traces behind
it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes
of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of 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, and the political,
economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American
part of our history.
Stages of Frontier Advance.
In the course of the seventeenth century the frontier was advanced
up the Atlantic river courses, just beyond the “fall line,”
and the tidewater region became the settled area. In the first half
of the eighteenth century another advance occurred. Traders followed
the Delaware and Shawnese Indians to the Ohio as early as the end
of the first quarter of the century.2 Gov. Spotswood, of Virginia,
made an expedition in 1714 across the Blue Ridge. The end of the
first quarter of the century saw the advance of the Scotch-Irish
and the Palatine Germans up the Shenandoah Valley into the western
part of Virginia, and along the Piedmont region of the Carolinas.3
The Germans in New York pushed the frontier of settlement up the
Mohawk to German Flats.4 In Pennsylvania the town of Bedford indicates
the line of settlement. Settlements had begun on New River, a branch
of the Kanawha, and on the sources of the Yadkin and French Broad.5
The King attempted to arrest the advance by his proclamation of
1763,6 forbidding settlements beyond the sources of the rivers flowing
into the Atlantic; but in vain. In the period of the Revolution
the frontier crossed the Alleghanies into Kentucky and Tennessee,
and the upper waters of the Ohio were settled.7 When the first census
was taken in 1790, the continuous settled area was bounded by a
line which ran near the coast of Maine, and included New England
except a portion of Vermont and New Hampshire, New York along the
Hudson and up the Mohawk about Schenectady, eastern and southern
Pennsylvania, Virginia well across the Shenandoah Valley, and the
Carolinas and eastern Georgia.8 Beyond this region of continuous
settlement were the small settled areas of Kentucky and Tennessee,
and the Ohio, with the mountains intervening between them and the
Atlantic area, thus giving a new and important character to the
frontier. The isolation of the region increased its peculiarly American
tendencies, and the need of transportation facilities to connect
it with the East called out important schemes of internal improvement,
which will be noted farther on. The “West,” as a self-conscious
section, began to evolve.
From decade to decade distinct advances of the frontier occurred.
By the census of 1820,9 the settled area included Ohio, southern
Indiana and Illinois, southeastern Missouri, and about one-half
of Louisiana. This settled area had surrounded Indian areas, and
the management of these tribes became an object of political concern.
The frontier region of the time lay along the Great Lakes, where
Astor’s American Fur Company operated in the Indian trade,10
and beyond the Mississippi, where Indian traders extended their
activity even to the Rocky Mountains; Florida also furnished frontier
conditions. The Mississippi River region was the scene of typical
frontier settlements.11
The rising steam navigation12 on western waters, the opening of
the Erie Canal, and the westward extension of cotton13 culture added
five frontier states to the Union in this period. Grund, writing
in 1836, declares: “It appears then that the universal disposition
of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in order to
enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the actual result
of an expansive power which is inherent in them, and which by continually
agitating all classes of society is constantly throwing a large
portion of the whole population on the extreme confines of the State,
in order to gain space for its development. Hardly is a new State
or Territory formed before the same principle manifests itself again
and gives rise to a further emigration; and so is it destined to
go on until a physical barrier must finally obstruct its progress.”14
In the middle of this century the line indicated by the present
eastern boundary of Indian Territory, Nebraska, and Kansas marked
the frontier of the Indian country.15 Minnesota and Wisconsin still
exhibited frontier conditions,16 but the distinctive frontier of
the period is found in California, where the gold discoveries had
sent a sudden tide of adventurous miners, and in Oregon, and the
settlements in Utah.17 As the frontier has leaped over the Alleghanies,
so now it skipped the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains; and
in the same way that the advance of the frontiersmen beyond the
Alleghanies had caused the rise of important questions of transportation
and internal improvement, so now the settlers beyond the Rocky Mountains
needed means of communication with the East, and in the furnishing
of these arose the settlement of the Great Plains and the development
of still another kind of frontier life. Railroads, fostered by land
grants, sent an increasing tide of immigrants into the far West.
The United States Army fought a series of Indian wars in Minnesota,
Dakota, and the Indian Territory.
By 1880 the settled area had been pushed into northern Michigan,
Wisconsin, and Minnesota, along Dakota rivers, and in the Black
Hills region, and was ascending the rivers of Kansas and Nebraska.
The development of mines in Colorado had drawn isolated frontier
settlements into that region, and Montana and Idaho were receiving
settlers. The frontier was found in these mining camps and the ranches
of the Great Plains. The superintendent of the census for 1890 reports,
as previously stated, that the settlements of the West lie so scattered
over the region that there can no longer be said to be a frontier
line.
In these successive frontiers we find natural boundary lines which
have served to mark and to affect the characteristics of the frontiers,
namely: The “fall line;” the Alleghany Mountains; the
Mississippi; the Missouri, where its direction approximates north
and south; the line of the arid lands, approximately the ninety-ninth
meridian; and the Rocky Mountains. The fall line marked the frontier
of the seventeenth century; the Alleghanies that of the eighteenth;
the Mississippi that of the first quarter of the nineteenth; the
Missouri that of the middle of this century (omitting the California
movement); and the belt of the Rocky Mountains and the arid tract,
the present frontier. Each was won by a series of Indian wars.
The Frontier Furnishes a Field for Comparative Study of Social Development.
At the Atlantic frontier one can study the germs of processes repeated
at each successive frontier. We have the complex European life sharply
precipitated by the wilderness into the simplicity of primitive
conditions. The first frontier had to meet its Indian question,
its question of the disposition of the public domain, of the means
of intercourse with older settlements, of the extension of political
organization, of religious and educational activity. And the settlement
of these and similar questions for one frontier served as a guide
for the next. The American student needs not to go to the “prim
little townships of Sleswick” for illustrations of the law
of continuity and development. For example, he may study the origin
of our land policies in the colonial land policy; he may see how
the system grew by adapting the statutes to the customs of the successive
frontiers.18 He may see how the mining experience in the lead regions
of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa was applied to the mining laws
of the Rockies,19 and how our Indian policy has been a series of
experimentations on successive frontiers. Each tier of new States
has found in the older ones material for its constitutions.20 Each
frontier has made similar contributions to American character, as
will be discussed farther on.
But with all these similarities there are essential differences,
due to the place element and the time element. It is evident that
the farming frontier of the Mississippi Valley presents different
conditions from the mining frontier of the Rocky Mountains. The
frontier reached by the Pacific Railroad, surveyed into rectangles,
guarded by the United States Army, and recruited by the daily immigrant
ship, moves forward at a swifter pace and in a different way than
the frontier reached by the birch canoe or the pack horse. The geologist
traces patiently the shores of ancient seas, maps their areas, and
compares the older and the newer. It would be a work worth the historian’s
labors to mark these various frontiers and in detail compare one
with another. Not only would there result a more adequate conception
of American development and characteristics, but invaluable additions
would be made to the history of society.
Loria,21 the Italian economist, has urged the study of colonial
life as an aid in understanding the stages of European development,
affirming that colonial settlement is for economic science what
the mountain is for geology, bringing to light primitive stratifications.
“America,” he says, “has the key to the historical
enigma which Europe has sought for centuries in vain, and the land
which has no history reveals luminously the course of universal
history.” There is much truth in this. The United States lies
like a huge page in the history of society. Line by line as we read
this continental page from west to east we find the record of social
evolution. It begins with the Indian and the hunter; it goes on
to tell of the disintegration of savagery by the entrance of the
trader, the pathfinder of civilization; we read the annals of the
pastoral stage in ranch life; the exploitation of the soil by the
raising of unrotated crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled
farming communities; the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement;
and finally the manufacturing organization with city and factory
system.22 This page is familiar to the student of census statistics,
but how little of it has been used by our historians. Particularly
in eastern States this page is a palimpsest. What is now a manufacturing
State was in an earlier decade an area of intensive farming. Earlier
yet it had been a wheat area, and still earlier the “range”
had attracted the cattle-herder. Thus Wisconsin, now developing
manufacture, is a State with varied agricultural interests. But
earlier it was given over to almost exclusive grain-raising, like
North Dakota at the present time.
Each of these areas has had an influence in our economic and political
history; the evolution of each into a higher stage has worked political
transformations. But what constitutional historian has made any
adequate attempt to interpret political facts by the light of these
social areas and changes?23
The Atlantic frontier was compounded of fisherman, far trader, miner,
cattle-raiser, and farmer. Excepting the fisherman, each type of
industry was on the march toward the West, impelled by an irresistible
attraction. Each passed in successive waves across the continent.
Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization,
marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the
salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser,
the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by. Stand at
South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession
with wider intervals between. The unequal rate of advance compels
us to distinguish the frontier into the trader’s frontier,
the rancher’s frontier, or the miner’s frontier, and
the farmer’s frontier. When the mines and the cow pens were
still near the fall line the traders’ pack trains were tinkling
across the Alleghanies, and the French on the Great Lakes were fortifying
their posts, alarmed by the British trader’s birch canoe.
When the trappers scaled the Rockies, the farmer was still near
the mouth of the Missouri.
The Indian Trader’s Frontier.
Why was it that the Indian trader passed so rapidly across the continent?
What effects followed from the trader’s frontier? The trade
was coeval with American discovery, The Norsemen, Vespuccius, Verrazani,
Hudson, John Smith, all trafficked for furs. The Plymouth pilgrims
settled in Indian cornfields, and their first return cargo was of
beaver and lumber. The records of the various New England colonies
show how steadily exploration was carried into the wilderness by
this trade. What is true for New England is, as would be expected,
even plainer for the rest of the colonies. All along the coast from
Maine to Georgia the Indian trade opened up the river courses. Steadily
the trader passed westward, utilizing the older lines of French
trade. The Ohio, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, the Missouri,
and the Platte, the lines of western advance, were ascended by traders.
They found the passes in the Rocky Mountains and guided Lewis and
Clarke,24 Fremont, and Bidwell. The explanation of the rapidity
of this advance is connected with the effects of the trader on the
Indian. The trading post left the unarmed tribes at the mercy of
those that had purchased fire-arms—a truth which the Iroquois
Indians wrote in blood, and so the remote and unvisited tribes gave
eager welcome to the trader. “The savages,” wrote La
Salle, “take better care of us French than of their own children;
from us only can they get guns and goods.” This accounts for
the trader’s power and the rapidity of his advance. Thus the
disintegrating forces of civilization entered the wilderness. Every
river valley and Indian trail became a fissure in Indian society,
and so that society became honeycombed. Long before the pioneer
farmer appeared on the scene, primitive Indian life had passed away.
The farmers met Indians armed with guns. The trading frontier, while
steadily undermining Indian power by making the tribes ultimately
dependent on the whites, yet, through its sale of guns, gave to
the Indians increased power of resistance to the farming frontier.
French colonization was dominated by its trading frontier; English
colonization by its farming frontier. There was an antagonism between
the two frontiers as between the two nations. Said Duquesne to the
Iroquois, “Are you ignorant of the difference between the
king of England and the king of France? Go see the forts that our
king has established and you will see that you can still hunt under
their very walls. They have been placed for your advantage in places
which you frequent. The English, on the contrary, are no sooner
in possession of a place than the game is driven away. The forest
falls before them as they advance, and the soil is laid bare so
that you can scarce find the wherewithal to erect a shelter for
the night.”
And yet, in spite of this opposition of the interests of the trader
and the farmer, the Indian trade pioneered the way for civilization.
The buffalo trail became the Indian trail, and this because the
trader’s “trace;” the trails widened into roads,
and the roads into turnpikes, and these in turn were transformed
into railroads. The same origin can be shown for the railroads of
the South, the far West, and the Dominion of Canada.25 The trading
posts reached by these trails were on the sites of Indian villages
which had been placed in positions suggested by nature; and these
trading posts, situated so as to command the water systems of the
country, have grown into such cities as Albany, Pittsburg, Detroit,
Chicago, St. Louis, Council Bluffs, and Kansas City. Thus civilization
in America has followed the arteries made by geology, pouring an
ever richer tide through them, until at last the slender paths of
aboriginal intercourse have been broadened and interwoven into the
complex mazes of modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been
interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing ever more numerous.
It is like the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the
originally simple, inert continent. If one would understand why
we are to-day one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states,
he must study this economic and social consolidation of the country.
In this progress from savage conditions lie topics for the evolutionist.26
The effect of the Indian frontier as a consolidating agent in our
history is important. From the close of the seventeenth century
various intercolonial congresses have been called to treat with
Indians and establish common measures of defense. 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 1754, 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.
The Rancher’s Frontier.
It would not be possible in the limits of this paper to trace the other frontiers across the continent. Travelers of the eighteenth century found the “cowpens” among the canebrakes and peavine pastures of the South, and the “cow drivers” took their droves to Charleston, Philadelphia, and New York.27 Travelers at the close of the War of 1812 met droves of more than a thousand cattle and swine from the interior of Ohio going to Pennsylvania to fatten for the Philadelphia market.28 The ranges of the Great Plains, with ranch and cowboy and nomadic life, are things of yesterday and of to-day. The experience of the Carolina cowpens guided the ranchers of Texas. One element favoring the rapid extension of the rancher’s frontier is the fact that in a remote country lacking transportation facilities the product must be in small bulk, or must be able to transport itself, and the cattle raiser could easily drive his product to market. The effect of these great ranches on the subsequent agrarian history of the localities in which they existed should be studied.
The Farmer’s Frontier.
The maps of the census reports show an uneven advance of the farmer’s frontier, with tongues of settlement pushed forward and with indentations of wilderness. 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.
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.29 In this connection mention should also be made of the Government military and exploring expeditions in determining the lines of 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.30 Each expedition was an epitome of the previous factors in western advance.
Salt Springs.
In an interesting monograph, Victor Hehn31 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. Writing in 1752, Bishop Spangenburg says of a colony
for which he was seeking lands in North Carolina, “They will
require salt & other necessaries which they can neither manufacture
nor raise. Either they must go to Charleston, which is 300 miles
distant * * * Or else they must go to Boling’s Point in Va
on a branch of the James & is also 300 miles from here * * *
Or else they must go down the Roanoke—I know not how many
miles—where salt is brought up from the Cape Fear.”32
This may serve as a typical illustration. 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.33 This proved to be an important
educational influence, since it was almost the only way in which
the pioneer learned what was going on in the East. 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.
Land.
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. Good soils have been the most continuous attraction to the
farmer’s frontier. 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. A. J. Boone, of Colorado, was a power among the Indians of
the Rocky Mountains, and was appointed an agent by the Government.
Kit Carson’s mother was a Boone.34 Thus this family epitomizes
the backwoodsman’s advance across the continent.
The farmer’s advance came in a distinct series of waves. In
Peck’s New Guide to the West, published in Boston in 1837,
occurs this suggestive passage:
Generally, in all the western settlements, three classes, like the waves of the ocean, have rolled one after the other. First comes the pioneer, who depends for the subsistence of his family chiefly upon the natural growth of vegetation, called the “range,” and the proceeds of hunting. His implements of agriculture are rude, chiefly of his own make, and his efforts directed mainly to a crop of corn and a “truck patch.” The last is a rude garden for growing cabbage, beans, corn for roasting ears, cucumbers, and potatoes. A log cabin, and, occasionally, a stable and corn-crib, and a field of a dozen acres, the timber girdled or “deadened,” and fenced, are enough for his occupancy. It is quite immaterial whether he ever becomes the owner of the soil. He is the occupant for the time being, pays no rent, and feels as independent as the “lord of the manor.” With a horse, cow, and one or two breeders of swine, he strikes into the woods with his family, and becomes the founder of a new county, or perhaps state. 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 preemption law enables him to dispose of his cabin and cornfield to the next class of emigrants; and, to employ his own figures, he “breaks for the high timber,” “clears out for the New Purchase,” or migrates to Arkansas or Texas, to work the same process over.
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., and exhibit the picture and forms of plain, frugal, civilized
life.
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.35
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 1890 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.
Composite Nationality.
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. The Scotch Irish and the Palatine Germans, or “Pennsylvania Dutch,” furnished the dominant element in the stock of the colonial frontier. With these peoples were also the freed indented servants, or redemptioners, who at the expiration of their time of service passed to the frontier. Governor Spottswood of Virginia writes in 1717, “The inhabitants of our frontiers are composed generally of such as have been transported hither as servants, and, being out of their time, settle themselves where laud is to be taken up and that will produce the necessarys of life with little labour.”36 Very generally these redemptioners were of non-English stock. 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. Burke and other writers in the middle of the eighteenth century believed that Pennsylvania37 was “threatened with the danger of being wholly foreign in language, manners, and perhaps even inclinations.” The German and Scotch-Irish elements in the frontier of the South were only less great. 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.38 Such examples teach us to beware of misinterpreting the fact that there is a common English speech in America into a belief that the stock is also English.
Industrial Independence.
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. Governor Glenn, of South Carolina, writes in the middle of the eighteenth century: “Our trade with New York and Philadelphia was of this sort, draining us of all the little money and bills we could gather from other places for their bread, flour, beer, hams, bacon, and other things of their produce, all which, except beer, our new townships begin to supply us with, which are settled with very industrious and thriving Germans. This no doubt diminishes the number of shipping and the appearance of our trade, but it is far from being a detriment to us.”39 Before long the frontier created a demand for merchants. As it retreated from the coast it became less and less possible for England to bring her supplies directly to the consumer’s wharfs, and carry away staple crops, and staple crops began to give way to diversified agriculture for a time. The effect of this phase of the frontier action upon the northern section is perceived when we realize how the advance of the frontier aroused seaboard cities like Boston, New York, and Baltimore, to engage in rivalry for what Washington called “the extensive and valuable trade of a rising empire.”
Effects on National Legislation.
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. von Holst (to take an example) in
treating our constitutional history in its formative period down
to 1828 in a single volume, giving six volumes chiefly to the history
of slavery from 1828 to 1861, under the title “Constitutional
History of the United States.” The growth of nationalism and
the evolution of American political institutions were dependent
on the advance of the frontier. Even so recent a writer as Rhodes,
in his History of the United States since the compromise of 1850,
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.40 But the West was not content with
bringing the farm to the factory. Under the lead of Clay—“Harry
of the West”—protective tariffs were passed, with the
cry of bringing the factory to the farm. The disposition of the
public lands was a third important subject of national legislation
influenced by the frontier.
The Public Domain.
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 1787, need no discussion.41 Administratively the frontier called
out some of the highest and most vitalizing activities of the General
Government. 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. Lamar explained: “In
1789 the States were the creators of the Federal Government; in
1861 the Federal Government was the creator of a large majority
of the States.”
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.
John Quincy Adams was obliged to confess: “My own system of
administration, which was to make the national domain the inexhaustible
fund for progressive and unceasing internal improvement, has failed.”
The reason is obvious; a system of administration was not what the
West demanded; it wanted land. Adams states the situation as follows:
“The slaveholders of the South have bought the cooperation
of the western country by the bribe of the western lands, abandoning
to the new Western States their own proportion of the public property
and aiding them in the design of grasping all the lands into their
own hands.” Thomas H. Benton was the author of this system,
which he brought forward as a substitute for the American system
of Mr. Clay, and to supplant him as the leading statesman of the
West. Mr. Clay, by his tariff compromise with Mr. Calhoun, abandoned
his own American system. At the same time he brought forward a plan
for distributing among all the States of the Union the proceeds
of the sales of the public lands. His bill for that purpose passed
both Houses of Congress, but was vetoed by President Jackson, who,
in his annual message of December, 1832, formally recommended that
all public lands should be gratuitously given away to individual
adventurers and to the States in which the lands are situated.42
“No subject,” said Henry Clay, “which has presented
itself to the present, or perhaps any preceding, Congress, is of
greater magnitude than that of the public lands.” When we
consider the far-reaching effects of the Government’s land
policy upon political, economic, and social aspects of American
life, we are disposed to agree with him. But this legislation was
framed under frontier influences, and under the lead of Western
statesmen like Benton and Jackson. Said Senator Scott of Indiana
in 1841: “I consider the preemption law merely declaratory
of the custom or common law of the settlers.”
National Tendencies of the Frontier.
It is safe to say that the legislation with regard to land, tariff,
and internal improvements—the American system of the nationalizing
Whig party—was conditioned on frontier ideas and needs. But
it was not merely in legislative action that the frontier worked
against the sectionalism of the coast. The economic and social characteristics
of the frontier worked against sectionalism. The men of the frontier
had closer resemblances to the Middle region than to either of the
other sections. Pennsylvania had been the seed-plot of frontier
emigration, and, although she passed on her settlers along the Great
Valley into the west of Virginia and the Carolinas, yet the industrial
society of these Southern frontiersmen was always more like that
of the Middle region than like that of the tide-water portion of
the South, which later came to spread its industrial type throughout
the South.
The Middle region, entered by New York harbor, was an open door
to all Europe. The tide-water part of the South represented typical
Englishmen, modified by a warm climate and servile labor, and living
in baronial fashion on great plantations; New England stood for
a special English movement—Puritanism. The Middle region was
less English than the other sections. It had a wide mixture of nationalities,
a varied society, the mixed town and county system of local government,
a varied economic life, many religious sects. In short, it was a
region mediating between New England and the South, and the East
and the West. It represented that composite nationality which the
contemporary United States exhibits, that juxtaposition of non-English
groups, occupying a valley or a little settlement, and presenting
reflections of the map of Europe in their variety. It was democratic
and nonsectional, if not national; “easy, tolerant, and contented;”
rooted strongly in material prosperity. It was typical of the modern
United States. It was least sectional, not only because it lay between
North and South, but also because with no barriers to shut out its
frontiers from its settled region, and with a system of connecting
waterways, the Middle region mediated between East and West as well
as between North and South. Thus it became the typically American
region. Even the New Englander, who was shut out from the frontier
by the Middle region, tarrying in New York or Pennsylvania on his
westward march, lost the acuteness of his sectionalism on the way.43
The spread of cotton culture into the interior of the South finally
broke down the contrast between the “tide-water” region
and the rest of the State, and based Southern interests on slavery.
Before this process revealed its results the western portion of
the South, which was akin to Pennsylvania in stock, society, and
industry, showed tendencies to fall away from the faith of the fathers
into internal improvement legislation and nationalism. In the Virginia
convention of 1829–30, called to revise the constitution,
Mr. Leigh, of Chesterfield, one of the tide-water counties, declared:
One of the main causes of discontent which led to this convention,
that which had the strongest influence in overcoming our veneration
for the work of our fathers, which taught us to contemn the sentiments
of Henry and Mason and Pendleton, which weaned us from our reverence
for the constituted authorities of the State, was an overweening
passion for internal improvement. I say this with perfect knowledge,
for it has been avowed to me by gentlemen from the West over and
over again. And let me tell the gentleman from Albemarle (Mr. Gordon)
that it has been another principal object of those who set this
ball of revolution in motion, to overturn the doctrine of State
rights, of which Virginia has been the very pillar, and to remove
the barrier she has interposed to the interference of the Federal
Government in that same work of internal improvement, by so reorganizing
the legislature that Virginia, too, may be hitched to the Federal
car.
It was this nationalizing tendency of the West that transformed
the democracy of Jefferson into the national republicanism of Monroe
and the democracy of Andrew Jackson. The West of the war of 1812,
the West of Clay, and Benton, and Harrison, and Andrew Jackson,
shut off by the Middle States and the mountains from the coast sections,
had a solidarity of its own with national tendencies.44 On the tide
of the Father of Waters, North and South met and mingled into a
nation. Interstate migration went steadily on—a process of
cross-fertilization of ideas and institutions. The fierce struggle
of the sections over slavery on the western frontier does not diminish
the truth of this statement; it proves the truth of it. Slavery
was a sectional trait that would not down, but in the West it could
not remain sectional. It was the greatest of frontiersmen who declared:
“I believe this Government can not endure permanently half
slave and half free. It will become all of one thing or all of the
other.” Nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within
the nation. Mobility of population is death to localism, and the
western frontier worked irresistibly in unsettling population. The
effects reached back from the frontier and affected profoundly the
Atlantic coast and even the Old World.
Growth of Democracy.
But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion
of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier
is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated
by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on
the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to
control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer
is viewed as a representative of oppression. Prof. Osgood, in an
able article,45 has pointed out that the frontier conditions prevalent
in the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the
American Revolution, where individual liberty was sometimes confused
with absence of all effective government. The same conditions aid
in explaining the difficulty of instituting a strong government
in the period of the confederacy. The frontier individualism has
from the beginning promoted democracy.
The frontier States that came into the Union in the first quarter
of a century of its existence came in with democratic suffrage provisions,
and had reactive effects of the highest importance upon the older
States whose peoples were being attracted there. An extension of
the franchise became essential. It was western New York that forced
an extension of suffrage in the constitutional convention of that
State in 1821; and it was western Virginia that compelled the tide-water
region to put a more liberal suffrage provision in the constitution
framed in 1830, and to give to the frontier region a more nearly
proportionate representation with the tide-water aristocracy. The
rise of democracy as an effective force in the nation came in with
western preponderance under Jackson and William Henry Harrison,
and it meant the triumph of the frontier—with all of its good
and with all of its evil elements.46 An interesting illustration
of the tone of frontier democracy in 1830 comes from the same debates
in the Virginia convention already referred to. A representative
from western Virginia declared:
But, sir, it is not the increase of population in the West which
this gentleman ought to fear. It is the energy which the mountain
breeze and western habits impart to those emigrants. They are regenerated,
politically I mean, sir. They soon become working politicians; and
the difference, sir, between a talking and a working politician
is immense. The Old Dominion has long been celebrated for producing
great orators; the ablest metaphysicians in policy; men that can
split hairs in all abstruse questions of political economy. But
at home, or when they return from Congress, they have negroes to
fan them asleep. But a Pennsylvania, a New York, an Ohio, or a western
Virginia statesman, though far inferior in logic, metaphysics, and
rhetoric to an old Virginia statesman, has this advantage, that
when he returns home he takes off his coat and takes hold of the
plow. This gives him bone and muscle, sir, and preserves his republican
principles pure and uncontaminated.
So long as free land exists, the opportunity for a competency exists,
and economic power secures political power. But the democracy born
of free land, strong in selfishness and individualism, intolerant
of administrative experience and education, and pressing individual
liberty beyond its proper bounds, has its dangers as well as it
benefits. Individualism in America has allowed a laxity in regard
to governmental affairs which has rendered possible the spoils system
and all the manifest evils that follow from the lack of a highly
developed civic spirit. In this connection may be noted also the
influence of frontier conditions in permitting lax business honor,
inflated paper currency and wild-cat banking. The colonial and revolutionary
frontier was the region whence emanated many of the worst forms
of an evil currency.47 The West in the war of 1812 repeated the
phenomenon on the frontier of that day, while the speculation and
wild-cat banking of the period of the crisis of 1837 occurred on
the new frontier belt of the next tier of States. Thus each one
of the periods of lax financial integrity coincides with periods
when a new set of frontier communities had arisen, and coincides
in area with these successive frontiers, for the most part. The
recent Populist agitation is a case in point. Many a State that
now declines any connection with the tenets of the Populists, itself
adhered to such ideas in an earlier stage of the development of
the State. A primitive society can hardly be expected to show the
intelligent appreciation of the complexity of business interests
in a developed society. The continual recurrence of these areas
of paper-money agitation is another evidence that the frontier can
be isolated and studied as a factor in American history of the highest
importance.48
Attempts to Check and Regulate the Frontier.
The East has always feared the result of an unregulated advance
of the frontier, and has tried to check and guide it. The English
authorities would have checked settlement at the headwaters of the
Atlantic tributaries and allowed the “savages to enjoy their
deserts in quiet lest the peltry trade should decrease.” This
called out Burke’s splendid protest:
If you stopped your grants, what would be the consequence? The people
would occupy without grants. They have already so occupied in many
places. You cannot station garrisons in every part of these deserts.
If you drive the people from one place, they will carry on their
annual tillage and remove with their flocks and herds to another.
Many of the people in the back settlements are already little attached
to particular situations. Already they have topped the Appalachian
mountains. From thence they behold before them an immense plain,
one vast, rich, level meadow; a square of five hundred miles. Over
this they would wander without a possibility of restraint; they
would change their manners with their habits of life; would soon
forget a government by which they were disowned; would become hordes
of English Tartars; and, pouring down upon your unfortified frontiers
a fierce and irresistible cavalry, become masters of your governors
and your counselers, your collectors and comptrollers, and of all
the slaves that adhered to them. Such would, and in no long time
must, be the effect of attempting to forbid as a crime and to suppress
as an evil the command and blessing of Providence, “Increase
and multiply.” Such would be the happy result of an endeavor
to keep as a lair of wild beasts that earth which God, by an express
charter, has given to the children of men.
But the English Government was not alone in its desire to limit
the advance of the frontier and guide its destinies. Tidewater Virginia49
and South Carolina50 gerrymandered those colonies to insure the
dominance of the coast in their legislatures. Washington desired
to settle a State at a time in the Northwest; Jefferson would reserve
from settlement the territory of his Louisiana purchase north of
the thirty-second parallel, in order to offer it to the Indians
in exchange for their settlements east of the Mississippi. “When
we shall be full on this side,” he writes, “we may lay
off a range of States on the western bank from the head to the mouth,
and so range after range, advancing compactly as we multiply.”
Madison went so far as to argue to the French minister that the
United States had no interest in seeing population extend itself
on the right bank of the Mississippi, but should rather fear it.
When the Oregon question was under debate, in 1824, Smyth, of Virginia,
would draw an unchangeable line for the limits of the United States
at the outer limit of two tiers of States beyond the Mississippi,
complaining that the seaboard States were being drained of the flower
of their population by the bringing of too much land into market.
Even Thomas Becton, the man of widest views of the destiny of the
West, at this stage of his career declared that along the ridge
of the Rocky mountains “the western limits of the Republic
should be drawn, and the statue of the fabled god Terminus should
be raised upon its highest peak, never to be thrown down.”51
But the attempts to limit the boundaries, to restrict land sales
and settlement, and to deprive the West of its share of political
power were all in vain. Steadily the frontier of settlement advanced
and carried with it individualism, democracy, and nationalism, and
powerfully affected the East and the Old World.
Missionary Activity.
The most effective efforts of the East to regulate the frontier
came through its educational and religious activity, exerted by
interstate migration and by organized societies. Speaking in 1835,
Dr. Lyman Beecher declared: “It is equally plain that the
religious and political destiny of our nation is to be decided in
the West,” and he pointed out that the population of the West
“is assembled from all the States of the Union and from all
the nations of Europe, and is rushing in like the waters of the
flood, demanding for its moral preservation the immediate and universal
action of those institutions which discipline the mind and arm the
conscience, and the heart. And so various are the opinions and habits,
and so recent and imperfect is the acquaintance, and so sparse are
the settlements of the West, that no homogeneous public sentiment
can be formed to legislate immediately into being the requisite
institutions. And yet they are all needed immediately in their utmost
perfection and power. A nation is being ‘born in a day.’
* * * But what will become of the West if her prosperity rushes
up to such a majesty of power, while those great institutions linger
which are necessary to form the mind and the conscience and the
heart of that vast world. It must not be permitted. * * * Let no
man at the East quiet himself and dream of liberty, whatever may
become of the West. * * * Her destiny is our destiny.”52
With the appeal to the conscience of New England, he adds appeals
to her fears lest other religious sects anticipate her own. The
New England preacher and school-teacher left their mark on the West.
The dread of Western emancipation from New England’s political
and economic control was paralleled by her fears lest the West cut
loose from her religion. Commenting in 1850 on reports that settlement
was rapidly extending northward in Wisconsin, the editor of the
Home Missionary writes: “We scarcely know whether to rejoice
or mourn over this extension of our settlements. While we sympathize
in whatever tends to increase the physical resources and prosperity
of our country, we can not forget that with all these dispersions
into remote and still remoter corners of the land the supply of
the means of grace is becoming relatively less and less.”
Acting in accordance with such ideas, home missions were established
and Western colleges were erected. As seaboard cities like Philadelphia,
New York, and Baltimore strove for the mastery of Western trade,
so the various denominations strove for the possession of the West.
Thus an intellectual stream from New England sources fertilized
the West. Other sections sent their missionaries; but the real struggle
was between sects. The contest for power and the expansive tendency
furnished to the various sects by the existence of a moving frontier
must have had important results on the character of religious organization
in the United States. The multiplication of rival churches in the
little frontier towns had deep and lasting social effects. The religious
aspects of the frontier make a chapter in our history which needs
study.
Intellectual Traits.
From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded. The result is that to the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics. That coarseness and strength combined with acuteness and inquisitiveness; that practical, inventive turn of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that restless, nervous energy;53 that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom—these are traits of the frontier, or traits called out elsewhere because of the existence of the frontier. 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. For a moment, at the frontier, the bonds of custom are broken and unrestraint is triumphant. There is not tabula rasa. The stubborn American environment is there with its imperious summons to accept its conditions; the inherited ways of doing things are also there; and yet, in spite of environment, and in spite of custom, each frontier did indeed furnish a new field of opportunity, a gate of escape from the bondage of the past; and freshness, and confidence, and scorn of older society, impatience of its restraints and its ideas, and indifference to its lessons, have accompanied the frontier. 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. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history.
Notes
Since the meeting of the American Historical Association, this paper
has also been given as an address to the State Historical Society
of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893. I have to thank the Secretary of
the Society, Mr. Reuben G. Thwaites, for securing valuable material
for my use in the preparation of the paper.
1. Abridgment of Debates of Congress, v., p. 706.
2. Bancroft (1860 ed.), III, pp. 344, 345, citing Logan MSS.; [Mitchell]
Contest in America, etc. (1752), p. 237.
3. Kercheval, History of the Valley; Bernheim, German Settlements
in the Carolinas; Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America,
V, p. 304; Colonial Records of North Carolina, IV, p. xx; Weston,
Documents Connected with the History of South Carolina, p. 82; Ellis
and Evans, History of Lancaster County, Pa., chs. iii, xxvi.
4. Parkman, Pontiac, II; Griffis, Sir William Johnson, p. 6; Simms’s
Frontiersmen of New York.
5. Monette, Mississippi Valley, I, p. 311.
6. Wis. Hist. Cols., XI, p. 50; Hinsdale, Old Northwest, p. 121;
Burke, “Oration on Conciliation,” Works (1872 ed.),
I, p. 473.
7. Roosevelt, Winning of the West, and citations there given; Cutler’s
Life of Cutler.
8. Scribner’s Statistical Atlas, xxxviii, pl. 13; MacMaster,
Hist. of People of U. S., I, pp. 4, 60, 61; Imlay and Filson, Western
Territory of America (London, 1793); Rochefoucault-Liancourt, Travels
Through the United States of North America (London, 1799); Michaux’s
“Journal,” in Proceedings American Philosophical Society,
XXVI, No. 129; Forman, Narrative of a Journey Down the Ohio and
Mississippi in 1780–‘90 (Cincinnati, 1888); Bartram,
Travels Through North Carolina, etc. (London, 1792); Pope, Tour
Through the Southern and Western Territories, etc. (Richmond, 1792);
Weld, Travels Through the States of North America (London, 1799);
Baily, Journal of a Tour in the Unsettled States of North America,
1796–‘97 (London, 1856); Pennsylvania Magazine of History,
July, 1886; Winsor, Narrative and Critical History of America, VII,
pp. 491, 492, citations.
9. Scribner’s Statistical Atlas, xxxix.
10. Turner, Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin
(Johns Hopkins University Studies, Series IX), pp. 61 ff.
11. Monette, History of the Mississippi Valley, II; Flint, Travels
and Residence in Mississippi; Flint, Geography and History of the
Western States; Abridgment of Debates of Congress, VII, pp. 397,
398, 404; Holmes, Account of the U. S.; Kingdom, America and the
British Colonies (London, 1820); Grund, Americans, II, chs. i, iii,
vi (although writing, in 1836, he treats of conditions that grew
out of western advance from the era of 1820 to that time); Peck,
Guide for Emigrants (Boston, 1831); Darby, Emigrants’ Guide
to Western and Southwestern States and Territories; Dana, Geographical
Sketches in the Western Country; Kinzie, Waubun; Keating, Narrative
of Long’s Expedition; Schoolcraft, Discovery of the Sources
of the Mississippi River, Travels in the Central Portions of the
Mississippi Valley, and Lead Mines of the Missouri; Andreas, History
of Illinois, I, 86-99; Hurlbut, Chicago Antiquities; McKenney, Tour
to the Lakes; Thomas, Travels through the Western Country, etc.
(Auburn, N. Y., 1819).
12. Darby, Emigrants’ Guide, pp. 272 ff.; Benton, Abridgment
of Debates, VII, p, 397.
13. De Bow’s Review, IV, p. 254; XVII, p. 428.
14. Grund, Americans, II, p. 8.
15. Peck, New Guide to the West (Cincinnati, 1848), ch. IV; Parkman,
Oregon Trail; Hall, The West (Cincinnati, 1848); Pierce, Incidents
of Western Travel; Murray, Travels in North America; Lloyd, Steamboat
Directory (Cincinnati, 1856); “Forty Days in a Western Hotel”
(Chicago), in Putnam’s Magazine, December, 1894; Mackay, The
Western World, II, ch. II, III; Meeker, Life in the West; Bogen,
German in America (Boston, 1851); Olmstead, Texas Journey; Greeley,
Recollections of a Busy Life; Schouler, History of the United States,
V, 261–267; Peyton, Over the Alleghanies and Across the Prairies
(London, 1870); Loughborough, The Pacific Telegraph and Railway
(St. Louis, 1849); Whitney, Project for a Railroad to the Pacific
(New York, 1849); Peyton, Suggestions on Railroad Communication
with the Pacific, and the Trade of China and the Indian Islands;
Benton, Highway to the Pacific (a speech delivered in the U. S,
Senate, December 16, 1850).
16. A writer in The Home Missionary (1850), p. 239, reporting Wisconsin
conditions, exclaims: “Think of this, people of the enlightened
East. What an example, to come from the very frontiers of civilization!”
But one of the missionaries writes: “In a few years Wisconsin
will no longer be considered as the West, or as an outpost of civilization,
any more than western New York, or the Western Reserve.”
17. Bancroft (H. H.), History of California, History of Oregon,
and Popular Tribunals; Shinn, Mining Camps.
18. See the suggestive paper by Prof. Jesse Macy, The Institutional
Beginnings of a Western State.
19. Shinn, Mining Camps.
20. Compare Thorpe, in Annals American Academy of Political and
Social Science, September, 1891; Bryce, American Commonwealth (1888),
II, p. 689.
21. Loria, Analisi della Proprieta Capitalista, II., p. 15.
22. Compare Observations on the North American Land Company, London,
1796, pp. xv,144; Logan, History of Upper South Carolina, I, pp,
149–151; Turner, Character and Influence of Indian Trade in
Wisconsin, p. 18; Peck, New Guide for Emigrants (Boston, 1837),
ch. iv; Compendium Eleventh Census, I, p. xl.
23. See pages 220, 221, 223, post, for illustrations of the political
accompaniments of changed industrial conditions.
24. But Lewis and Clarke were the first to explore the route from
the Missouri to the Columbia.
25. Narrative and Critical History of America, VIII, p.10; Sparks’
Washington Works, IX, pp. 303, 327; Logan, History of Upper South
Carolina, I; McDonald, Life of Kenton, p. 72; Cong. Record, XXIII,
p. 57.
26. On the effect of the fur trade in opening the routes of migration,
see the author’s Character and Influence of the Indian Trade
in Wisconsin.
27. Lodge, English Colonies, p. 152 and citations; Logan, Hist.
of Upper South Carolina, I, p. 151.
28. Flint, Recollections, p. 9.
29. See Monette, Mississippi, I, p. 344.
30. Cones’, Lewis and Clarke’s Expedition, I, pp. 2,
253–259; Benton, in Cong. Record, XXIII, p. 57.
31. Hehn, Das Salz (Berlin, 1873).
32. Col. Records of N. C., V, p. 3.
33. Findley, History of the Insurrection in the Four Western Counties
of Pennsylvania in the Year 1,794 (Philadelphia, 1796), p. 35.
34. Hale, Daniel Boone (pamphlet).
35. Compare Baily, Tour in the Unsettled Parts of North America
(London, 1856), pp. 217–219, where a similar analysis is made
for 1796. See also Collot, Journey in North America (Paris, 1826),
p. 109; Observations on the North American Land Company (London,
1796), pp. XV, 144; Logan, History of Upper South Carolina.
36. “Spottswood Papers,” in Collections of Virginia
Historical Society, I, II.
37. [Burke], European Settlements, etc. (1765 ed.), II, p. 200.
38. Everest, in Wisconsin Historical Collections, XII, pp. 7 ff.
39. Weston, Documents connected with History of South Carolina,
p. 61.
40. See, for example, the speech of Clay, in the House of Representatives,
January 30, 1824.
41. See the admirable monograph by Prof. H. B. Adams, Maryland’s
Influence on the Land Cessions; and also President Welling, in Papers
American Historical Association, III, p. 411.
42. Adams Memoirs, IX, pp. 247, 248.
43. Author’s article in The Ægis (Madison, Wis.), November
4, 1892.
44. Compare Roosevelt, Thomas Benton, ch. i.
45. Political Science Quarterly, II, p. 457. Compare Sumner, Alexander
Hamilton, Chs. ii–vii.
46. Compare Wilson, Division and Reunion, pp. 15, 24.
47. On the relation of frontier conditions to Revolutionary taxation,
see Sumner, Alexander Hamilton, Ch. iii.
48. I have refrained from dwelling on the lawless characteristics
of the frontier, because they are sufficiently well known. The gambler
and desperado, the regulators of the Carolinas and the vigilantes
of California, are types of that line of scum that the waves of
advancing civilization bore before them, and of the growth of spontaneous
organs of authority where legal authority was absent. Compare Barrows,
United States of Yesterday and To-morrow; Shinn, Mining Camps; and
Bancroft, Popular Tribunals. The humor, bravery, and rude strength,
as well as the vices of the frontier in its worst aspect, have left
traces on American character, language, and literature, not soon
to be effaced.
49. Debates in the Constitutional Convention, 1829–1830.
50. [McCrady] Eminent and Representative Men of the Carolinas, I,
p.43; Calhoun’s Works, I, pp. 401–406.
51. Speech in the Senate, March 1, 1825; Register of Debates, I,
721.
52. Plea for the West (Cincinnati, 1835), pp. 11 ff.
53. Colonial travelers agree in remarking on the phlegmatic characteristics
of the colonists. It has frequently been asked how such a people
could have developed that strained nervous energy now characteristic
of them. Compare Sumner, Alexander Hamilton, p. 98, and Adams’s
History of the United States, I, p. 60; IX, pp. 240, 241. The transition
appears to become marked at the close of the war of 1812, a period
when interest centered upon the development of the West, and the
West was noted for restless energy. Grund, Americans, II., ch. i.
Last Updated: May 21, 2007
