The Frontier in American History | Page 4

opening of the
Erie Canal, and the westward extension of cotton[7:3] culture added
five frontier states to the Union in this period. Grund, writing in 1836,
declares: "It appears then that the universal disposition of Americans to
emigrate to the western wilderness, in order to enlarge their dominion
over inanimate nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which
is inherent in them, and which by continually agitating all classes of
society is constantly throwing a large portion of the whole population
on the extreme confines of the State, in order to gain space for its
development. Hardly is a new State or Territory formed before the
same principle manifests itself again and gives rise to a further
emigration; and so is it destined to go on until a physical barrier must
finally obstruct its progress."[7:4]
In the middle of this century the line indicated by the present eastern
boundary of Indian Territory, Nebraska, and Kansas marked the
frontier of the Indian country.[8:1] Minnesota and Wisconsin still
exhibited frontier conditions,[8:2] but the distinctive frontier of the

period is found in California, where the gold discoveries had sent a
sudden tide of adventurous miners, and in Oregon, and the settlements
in Utah.[8:3] As the frontier had leaped over the Alleghanies, so now it
skipped the Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains; and in the same
way that the advance of the frontiersmen beyond the Alleghanies had
caused the rise of important questions of transportation and internal
improvement, so now the settlers beyond the Rocky Mountains needed
means of communication with the East, and in the furnishing of these
arose the settlement of the Great Plains and the development of still
another kind of frontier life. Railroads, fostered by land grants, sent an
increasing tide of immigrants into the Far West. The United States
Army fought a series of Indian wars in Minnesota, Dakota, and the
Indian Territory.
By 1880 the settled area had been pushed into northern Michigan,
Wisconsin, and Minnesota, along Dakota rivers, and in the Black Hills
region, and was ascending the rivers of Kansas and Nebraska. The
development of mines in Colorado had drawn isolated frontier
settlements into that region, and Montana and Idaho were receiving
settlers. The frontier was found in these mining camps and the ranches
of the Great Plains. The superintendent of the census for 1890 reports,
as previously stated, that the settlements of the West lie so scattered
over the region that there can no longer be said to be a frontier line.
In these successive frontiers we find natural boundary lines which have
served to mark and to affect the characteristics of the frontiers, namely:
the "fall line;" the Alleghany Mountains; the Mississippi; the Missouri
where its direction approximates north and south; the line of the arid
lands, approximately the ninety-ninth meridian; and the Rocky
Mountains. The fall line marked the frontier of the seventeenth century;
the Alleghanies that of the eighteenth; the Mississippi that of the first
quarter of the nineteenth; the Missouri that of the middle of this century
(omitting the California movement); and the belt of the Rocky
Mountains and the arid tract, the present frontier. Each was won by a
series of Indian wars.
At the Atlantic frontier one can study the germs of processes repeated

at each successive frontier. We have the complex European life sharply
precipitated by the wilderness into the simplicity of primitive
conditions. The first frontier had to meet its Indian question, its
question of the disposition of the public domain, of the means of
intercourse with older settlements, of the extension of political
organization, of religious and educational activity. And the settlement
of these and similar questions for one frontier served as a guide for the
next. The American student needs not to go to the "prim little
townships of Sleswick" for illustrations of the law of continuity and
development. For example, he may study the origin of our land policies
in the colonial land policy; he may see how the system grew by
adapting the statutes to the customs of the successive frontiers.[10:1]
He may see how the mining experience in the lead regions of
Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa was applied to the mining laws of the
Sierras,[10:2] and how our Indian policy has been a series of
experimentations on successive frontiers. Each tier of new States has
found in the older ones material for its constitutions.[10:3] Each
frontier has made similar contributions to American character, as will
be discussed farther on.
But with all these similarities there are essential differences due to the
place element and the time element. It is evident that the farming
frontier of the Mississippi Valley presents different conditions from the
mining frontier of the Rocky Mountains. The frontier reached by the
Pacific Railroad, surveyed into rectangles, guarded by