ABSTRACT
This chapter shows how what has here been called the frontier myth, and components of it as they were developed and redeveloped in the US, were thus present long before Frederick Jackson Turner published his work on the frontier. However, Turner’s characterisations not only brought together numerous assumptions Americans wanted to make about how the country had been formed but also influenced many of those who came to continue forming it, with extreme historical and nation-building significance. In this, the myth-based development of the American state thus legitimised a conception of nature use that perhaps manifested itself the most strongly here, but that has in fact come to – in similar ways across the world – delegitimise the direct, local and naturalised linkage to nature and inform understandings of wilderness into the present day.
