The Frontier
Major Themes
• Frontier Thesis and the myth of the West
• Who Turner left out—women, African and
Native Americans
• Comparative racism: the West v. the
South
• Frontier idea in history, literature, art, and
popular culture
• The frontier in the 20th century: Empire
and imagination
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Major dates in the history of the American
West
1775: Daniel Boone opened Wilderness Road through Cumberland Gap (aided
settlement of KY)
1803 LA Purchase
1804 Lewis & Clark expedition; gov’t funded
1830, 1831-8 Indian Removal
1845-8 Manifest Destiny coined; acquisition of TX; war with Mexico leads to
appropriation of California
1848 California gold rush
1862 Homestead Act promises free land to settlers
1864 Sand Creek Massacre
1867 Seward purchases Alaska; Medicine Lodge Treaty puts Comanches,
Arapahoes, Cheyennes and Kiowas on reservations
1869 completion of transcontinental railroad; women vote in western states
1876 Little Big Horn
1889 oil drilling begins in OK
1890 allegedly frontier finished; Wounded Knee Massacre
1897 Klondike Gold Rush
1893 Euro American businessmen overthrow Queen of Hawaii
1898 Spanish American War; annexation of Hawaii
1901 Spindletop gusher in Texas
1913 Hollywood settled by filmmakers
The Significance of 1893
• Frederick Jackson Turner delivers paper
on ‘Significance of the Frontier in
American History’ at American Historical
Association meeting in Chicago
• World’s Columbian Exposition also in
Chicago (400 years since Columbus
‘discovers’ America)
• William F. Cody (aka Buffalo Bill)’s Wild
West show performs in Chicago
The Significance of 1890
Burying the dead at Wounded Knee, 1890 Pine Ridge Reservation, 150-300
dead at hand of 7th Cavalry. 20 soldiers awarded medal of honor.
The Foundations of Western
History: FJT and TR
Frontier ‘Process’
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Native Americans
Trappers and Traders
Miners
Cattle Ranchers
Pioneer farmers
Merchants, professionals, etc.
New area of settlement, population growth and
competition for land and wealth lead others to
push westward for a new frontier
African Americans and
Nat Love, aka Deadwood Dick
Mexican Americans in the
and below, Mexican vaqueros at
West: Revising the Cowboy
Buffalo Bill’s Wild West
• Of the estimated 35,000 cowboys
who worked the ranches during the
19th century, 5-9,000 were black
• At the end of the 19th century, 1 in
3 cowboys was a vaquero
Annie Oakley (1860-1926) and Ellen Watson
(Cattle Kate, 1861-1889)
The Frontier: Major Historical
Questions
• Frontier or region (West)? Ever-expanding frontier line;
changing definitions of what constitutes ‘West’
• American cultural identity centered on authentic western
values: but frontier was also a site of disunion
(expansion, cultural annihilation and slavery)
• East/West dichotomy
• Expanding the binary racial conflict to a multiracial
understanding of westward expansion
• When the frontier disappears (Turner), does the
West/America also vanish?
• Thesis given in Chicago: How will idea of limitless space
and freedom survive industrialization and the rise of the
big cities?
• How does the frontier travel overseas (foreign policy)
The West and the South; or, How Expansion and
Slavery are Linked
• Treatment of Native
Americans
• Expulsion from lands
(Cherokee Nation v. Georgia,
1831; Trail of Tears, 1831-8)
• Resistance by religious
leaders like Tecumseh (sides
w/ British in 1812; Sitting Bull
and Red Cloud, 1876)
• Massacres by settlers and US
Army (Sand Creek, 1864;
Wounded Knee, 1890)
• Reservations
• Question of citizenship
• Loss of historical voice
• Savage, demonised image in
popular culture
• Development of Slavery in
South
• Sale and enforced separation
of families
• Resistance through slave
revolts (1831, Nat Turner, lay
preacher)
• Lynchings by the ‘invisible
army’: aka, the KKK
• Segregation and Jim Crow
laws
• Voting rights denied in South
• Slave narratives as correctives
to national history (Harriet
Jacobs, 1861)
• Image of unbridled male
sexuality and female passivity
in popular culture
Multiracial Exclusion in the West (different from
South’s black-white racial binary)
• In California, mestizos, Indians, and Chinese were not
allowed to vote or testify in court. Many Californios (of
Spanish-Mexican-Indian descent) were divested of their
lands due to their alleged Indian blood
• Texas as much of a slave/cotton culture as western
ranching envir.
• Chinese Exclusion Act, 1882, forbids future importation of
Chinese labourers (made permanent in 1902)
• Statements against Japanese men in California and other
western states use language of miscegenation and fears
of unions with white women to stir up racial hatred
(borrowed from South). Ban on Japanese immigration in
1921-4
• Were westerners really against slavery? CA, NV, OR all
pass anti-miscegenation laws in 1870s (not repealed in
CA until 1948 and 1959 in NV). Oregon’s law forbidding
settlement of free blacks not repealed until 1926
Western history was always living its own myth:
John Gast’s American Progress (1872) dramatises John
O’Sullivan’s term ‘Manifest Destiny’ (1845)
Cooper and the Leatherstocking
Myth
• Last of the Mohicans, 1826, looks at 18th-c
frontier as racial and cultural clash
• Native American expulsion and
extermination
• Life and death of archetypal American
hero who ‘understands Indians’ but is ‘a
man without a cross’ (not mixed-race)
• Violence and regeneration key to
American character (like TR)
Turnerian Images of Settlement:
George Caleb Bingham, Daniel Boone Escorting
through the Cumberland Gap, 1851-1852
Performing Western
History: Buffalo Bill,
Sitting Bull and Annie
Oakley
Theodore Roosevelt (1858-1919) as
Badlands Cowboy (1885) and Rough Rider
(1898)
Frederick Remington (1861-1909),
Thunder on the Prairie
Owen Wister (1860-19) begins writing
western stories after chatting with Roosevelt
• The Virginian, 1902, possibly the most famous
western of all time
Popular Imagery
Twentieth-Century‘Frontiers’?
• Turner claims frontier over in 1890
• Mexican American Immigration: to satisfy big business’ need for
cheap labour during 20s
• Jim Crow laws affect Mexicans in South too– separate schools,
churches, restaurants, restrooms, etc., and votes often controlled by
elite whites
• Sharecroppers in Texas were black, white and Mexican—tensions
develop between poor whites and Mexicans
• Indian Citizenship Act, 1924
• 1924: first Mexican and Canadian border patrol instituted in US
• League of United Latin American Citizens, est. 1928 in Corpus
Christi, Texas to develop coherent, upwardly mobile, white Mexican
population
• Mexicans listed as white in 1920 census; listed as ‘other’ in 1930
census
• African American migration to California during WWII
• Japanese internment, 1942
Frontier, Empire, and Cold War
• 1898, Spanish Civil War
• American participation
paves way for overseas
empire in Philippines,
Hawaii, Guam, Korea,
Vietnam…
• Elasticity of Frontier
ideals for political ends:
spreading of American
democracy via Manifest
destiny?
• Cold War use of frontier
masculinity
Monument Valley
Idea of the West
• Limitless space
• Wilderness becomes
‘garden’
• Environment for
individual
achievement
• Symbol of American
exceptionalism
• Escape from
government, greed,
and ‘the blessings of
civilization’
• Environmental
exploitation (Pike’s
Peak, California Gold
Rush, Comstock
Lode, Klondike Rush)
• Corporate rather than
individual gain
(railroads/mines)
• Ethnic cleansing
• Environmental
disasters (Dust Bowl,
atomic testing, ExxonValdez, 1989)