The Frontier in American History | Page 3

developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention
has been paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins, too
little to the American factors. The frontier is the line of most rapid and
effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds
him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought.
It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It
strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting
shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and
Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has
gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts
the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at
the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must
accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits
himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by
little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old
Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than
the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark.

The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the
frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very
real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more
American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive
glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it
becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier
characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady
movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of
independence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men
who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and
social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history.
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. In the first half of the eighteenth century
another advance occurred. Traders followed the Delaware and
Shawnese Indians to the Ohio as early as the end of the first quarter of
the century.[5:1] Gov. Spotswood, of Virginia, made an expedition in
1714 across the Blue Ridge. The end of the first quarter of the century
saw the advance of the Scotch-Irish and the Palatine Germans up the
Shenandoah Valley into the western part of Virginia, and along the
Piedmont region of the Carolinas.[5:2] The Germans in New York
pushed the frontier of settlement up the Mohawk to German Flats.[5:3]
In Pennsylvania the town of Bedford indicates the line of settlement.
Settlements soon began on the New River, or the Great Kanawha, and
on the sources of the Yadkin and French Broad.[5:4] The King
attempted to arrest the advance by his proclamation of 1763,[5:5]
forbidding settlements beyond the sources of the rivers flowing into the
Atlantic; but in vain. In the period of the Revolution the frontier
crossed the Alleghanies into Kentucky and Tennessee, and the upper
waters of the Ohio were settled.[5:6] When the first census was taken in
1790, the continuous settled area was bounded by a line which ran near
the coast of Maine, and included New England except a portion of
Vermont and New Hampshire, New York along the Hudson and up the
Mohawk about Schenectady, eastern and southern Pennsylvania,
Virginia well across the Shenandoah Valley, and the Carolinas and
eastern Georgia.[6:1] Beyond this region of continuous settlement were

the small settled areas of Kentucky and Tennessee, and the Ohio, with
the mountains intervening between them and the Atlantic area, thus
giving a new and important character to the frontier. The isolation of
the region increased its peculiarly American tendencies, and the need of
transportation facilities to connect it with the East called out important
schemes of internal improvement, which will be noted farther on. The
"West," as a self-conscious section, began to evolve.
From decade to decade distinct advances of the frontier occurred. By
the census of 1820[6:2] the settled area included Ohio, southern Indiana
and Illinois, southeastern Missouri, and about one-half of Louisiana.
This settled area had surrounded Indian areas, and the management of
these tribes became an object of political concern. The frontier region
of the time lay along the Great Lakes, where Astor's American Fur
Company operated in the Indian trade,[6:3] and beyond the Mississippi,
where Indian traders extended their activity even to the Rocky
Mountains; Florida also furnished frontier conditions. The Mississippi
River region was the scene of typical frontier settlements.[7:1]
The rising steam navigation[7:2] on western waters, the