ABSTRACT
In his seminal essay on “The significance of the frontier in American history,” written in 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner (1958 edn) wrote:
American development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line, and a new development for that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier .... In this advance the frontier is the outer edge of the wave – the meeting point between savagery and civilization . . . The wilderness has been interpenetrated by lines of civilization growing ever more numerous.
For Turner, the expansion of the frontier and the rolling back of wilderness and savagery were an attempt to make livable space out of an unruly and uncooperative nature. This involved not simply a process of spatial expansion and the progressive taming of the physical world. The development of the frontier certainly accomplished these things, but for Turner it was also the central experience which defined the uniqueness of the American national character. With each expansion of the outer edge by robust pioneers, not only were new lands added to the American estate but new blood was added to the veins of the American democratic ideal. Each new wave westward, in the conquest of nature, sent shock waves back east in the democratization of human nature.