The Significance Of The American Frontier

The American Frontier was the extreme limit of settled land beyond which lies wilderness, especially referring to the western US before Pacific settlement. The development and conquering of the American Frontier was extremely important to the country because of the many benefits it would have to the country with things such as more space and more states for the country. It is explained through works like Excerpts from Frederick Jackson Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History. 1893, John L. O’Sullivan “On Manifest Destiny”, and a Segment from Ken Burns Video Series, The West - Volume 2, Empire of the Trails. In The Significance of the Frontier in American History, it talks about the importance of why Americans wanted to
In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.î 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… . Said Calhoun1 in 1817, ìWe are great, and rapidly I was about to say fearfully growing!îÜ 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
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. . . . . . . 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.. . . 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