ABSTRACT
The building of civil community can re-establish the possibility for properly negotiating with the federal government in matters affecting the city. Even in the so-called laissez-faire periods of American history, government—local, state, and federal—has played a major role in providing the infrastructure for the unfolding of each frontier stage. The Cities of the Prairie entered the metropolitan-technological frontier only after World War II as the chain reaction passed through the Upper Mississippi Valley and then jumped to the Rockies. By the time that the metropolitan-technological frontier had spent itself in the late 1960s and the rurban-cybernetic frontier opened up as a fourth frontier stage, generated by the technological and social transformations of the third stage, the continuing American frontier had all the characteristics of a chain reaction. Westering and the myth to which it gave birth has been part of the American experience since the first settlers landed in Jamestown in 1607.
