When was closing of the frontier?

The third and last frontier advance carried migrants across the remaining reaches of the continent to the Pacific Ocean and then turned back to fill in the areas passed over in the first forward drive. It began around 1840 and lasted to 1890 and beyond, when the federal census announced the end of the frontier era. This is usually referred to as the trans-Mississippi frontier.

The region faced by the American pioneers in this last advance was different in character from anything that they had met before, and the frontiers that emerged were more varied and more colourful than any earlier environments had produced. Beyond the first stretches of prairie lands lay the dry, treeless plains where rainfall was too scant for the accustomed agricultural crops and methods. Its nutritious grasses, however, had supported immense herds of bison, and the settlers, after pushing old crops well beyond their limits, gave way to the cattlemen with their picturesque ranch houses, their cow towns, and their cowboys. It was a new kind of frontier, where capital and colour went together to stir the imagination of those whose lives were cast in more prosaic times and places.

Beyond the plains were the Rocky Mountains, with inland basins sometimes as large as an eastern state and with fur and mineral riches that brought the trapping frontier and the mining frontier to their fullest development. California and Oregon, on the Pacific Coast, with their mines, their trading posts, their missions, and their international complications, brought an end to the westward journey and turned the frontier dweller back to the half-finished continent.

These last frontiers were unique in many ways. Vast distances and greater physical difficulties to be overcome created problems that the individual alone could not solve. Group action, government aid, and outside capital were required to carry forward the necessary irrigation projects, to build the transcontinental railroads, and to develop the mines and the timber resources. Everything was on a larger scale; everything was exaggerated. Movement and settlement often came by rushes, not by a slow, steady advance. One of the largest of these mass migrations was the 1,300-mile (2,100-km) exodus carried out by thousands of followers of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints along a route that came to be called the Mormon Trail. Hardships were greater—the tragic outcome of the Donner party served as a reminder of this—and rewards were in proportion. All that any frontier had meant in the past to American life in terms of optimism, waste, lawlessness, abundance, and progress were there magnified at the very time that the physical frontier was coming to an end.

Significance of the frontier

In his essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893), Frederick Jackson Turner insisted that “the peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people—to 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.” It was this unique American experience that reshaped inherited patterns into native ones. It created “a new product that is American.” It explains “American development.”

The fact that the frontier settler had to look to the national government—for land, often for protection, and generally for aid in securing markets and ways to market—served as a nationalizing tendency. “On the tide of the father of Waters,” declared Turner, “North and South met and mingled into a nation.”

The part that the frontier played in promoting democracy has been subject to considerable debate. Turner believed that the necessity of doing things for oneself and standing alone much of the time against difficulties developed a peculiar kind of individualism in the American and at the same time strengthened cooperative attitudes toward neighbours who faced the same problems. This kind of individualism was “antisocial,” but it led the new frontier states to grant democratic suffrage and to demand equal representation. As long as opportunity remained in free lands, competency had its chance and democracy would result. Thus, argued Turner, the peculiar type of American democracy “came out of the American forest”; it was not a European importation.

Critics, however, have insisted that much of democracy came out of the Old World and much of it resulted from conditions in American society that had nothing to do with either free lands or the frontier. Opportunity and abundance, wherever found, created a fluid social-economic condition which produced democracy. There was as much of these in the rising urban-industrial east as on the frontier. And besides, neither the Spanish nor the French frontiers showed democratic tendencies. For these reasons, say the critics, too much has been claimed for the frontier.

Turner and the multitude of later historians who were influenced by him saw the frontier as having had a defining influence in creating certain American intellectual traits. For them a practical, inventive quality in dealing with material things, an idealism that merges into an incurable belief in progress, and a conservative approach that is mixed with a willingness to try new things when the accepted fails were frontier traits that have become American traits. With them has gone a rather unusual emphasis on the simple virtues of courage, loyalty, energy, and physical strength; a larger respect for women; and a rather marked indifference to things abstract. European travelers, commenting on Americans and their ways, have stressed these things and found them more common to the West and the newer regions than to the East.

Turner’s “frontier thesis” has remained central to the discussion of American history into the 21st century, but it has also been the subject of considerable criticism, most notably in the 1980s and ’90s by a group of American academics known as the New Western Historians. These historians—including Patricia Nelson Limerick, Richard White, William Cronon, and Donald Worster—viewed Turner’s concept of the frontier as ethnocentric in its failure to acknowledge that the landscape into which the settlers came had already been altered by centuries of habitation by Native Americans. The New Western Historians questioned Turner’s positivist interpretation of developments in the West as a triumph of progressive values and instead saw the conquest and exploitation of both the indigenous people and the environment. Some of them viewed the experience as contributing to the establishment of an imperialist mentality that would foster the willingness for later U.S. expansion in the Pacific. Cronon saw the availability of “free land” as facilitating the development of a national psyche based on exploiting natural resources without regard for consequences. The New Western Historians argued for the study of the West as a region and grounded their approach in environmental history and a recognition of the impact of boom and bust economic cycles. In the process, they enjoyed a period of prominence, but they also became the target of criticism from neo-Turnerian historians who reacted against the New Western Historians’ negativist interpretation and who continued to see Turner’s work as the essential touchstone for further understanding the American character.