ABSTRACT
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. The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. 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. The frontier region of the time lay along the Great Lakes, where Astor's American Fur Company operated in the Indian trade, and beyond the Mississippi, where Indian traders extended their activity even to the Rocky Mountains; Florida also furnished frontier conditions. At the Atlantic frontier one can study the germs of processes repeated at each successive frontier. The legislation which most developed the powers of the national government, and played the largest part in its activity, was conditioned on the frontier.
