ABSTRACT
In this chapter, one of the processual variables, "the countryside", crosscut by other processual variables—frontier, urbanization, immigration and industrialization—as well as by the triad of persistent American themes. The chapter answers that what do these related variables tell people about perspectives on mobility? The answer is closely connected with two major clusters of imagery of rurality. The first cluster is the imagery of the safety valve: western farmland supposedly functioning to relieve eastern areas of their discontented laborers, allowing them opportunities to rise, giving the country a proper balance between western farming and eastern commerce and industry, and contributing to the nation's development. The second cluster pertains to western farmland as a miraculous and bountiful garden. The garden might be so fertile that it needed only to be lived in, or it might require a hardworking yeoman to cultivate it, or it might fail to flourish unless control over its destiny lay in the hands of genuinely civilized men.
