ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the various clusters of images about America's frontier under three general headings. The first is the essential frontier, a popular ideology bearing on the presumed role of the frontier in national development. The second is about images that concern failure and demoralization on the frontier. The third is about various images associated with the frontier as a settled locale. The historians have detailed how each frontier drew varieties of men there for a variety of motives and enterprises. Men invaded frontiers to speculate in land and claim sites for settlement, as well as to strike it rich in gold, to practice their chosen trades or professions, and to build frontier cities for profit, excitement and honor. To these diverse locales came the untrammeled, the disgraced, the failures, but also the opportunists, the poor but hopeful and the well-off but ambitious. The chapter further focuses on recent transmutations of frontier symbolism.
