Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), UW-Madison historian Copyright 1997 State Historical Society of Wisconsin

In "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," Turner made three major points:

1) There has not been one West in American history; there has been a series of Wests. [That is, Turner conceived of the West not as a place, but as a process--a series of Wests in a receding frontier line]. Indeed, Turner wrote, the entire history of America up to the late nineteenth century, has been a history of people setting their eyes westward, marching with their feet westward from the Atlantic seaboard into the western portions of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, eventually into the Ohio Valley, from the Ohio Valley beyond the Mississippi into the Great Plains and to the Far West. And so American history, Turner observed in this first important generalization, has been the history of a people escaping or leaving behind the settled institutions of society, a plunging into the forests, or later into the grasslands of the Great Plains. Turner found this very important, and I want to quote his observation: "The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development. American social development," Turner wrote, "has been continually beginning over again on the frontier."

2) Definition of "frontier": Turner wrote the frontier is "the outer wave of expansion, the meeting point between savagery and civilization." When people left settled territory, when people went into often unexplored areas, the weight of society bore less heavily upon them. They went into areas where they had no settled established governments, no institutions like churches, courts of law, and the like. People, in a sense, left civilization behind. They had to find new ways of adjusting, new ways of peaceful coexistence at this "meeting point between savage and civilization."

3) The most important effect of the frontier in American history has been the promotion of democracy. The frontier, Turner wrote, has been "productive of individualism." In entering into areas without established social structures, each person was pretty much on a basis of equality with each other person. People had to learn democratic means of social cooperation. Democracy, Turner wrote, therefore, was born of free land, and of free, self-reliant individuals moving out on to that land learning how to get along with one another.

But note again, as I mentioned earlier, Turner believed that the frontier had come to an end in 1890. There were pockets of unsettled territory moving west, but there was no longer a "frontier" of settlement moving westward. Thus, according to Turner, this "latest" West in a long line of American Wests was the "last West." So what we're talking about today is that the Old West was, in point of fact, the "last West" in American history. A period of American development had come to an end. Turner inferred that with the end of the frontier, we could no longer count upon democracy to continue to flourish. We could no longer count upon a West to produce self reliant individuals--men and women, ready, willing, eager to breath a new life into tired, old social institutions. Thus, much of our imagery of the self-reliant rugged individual being at the core of American democracy, the core of American society and government, stems both from the historical reality and from the academic interpretation of that reality.

What, then, did Turner really mean by the word "frontier"? At first glance, he seemed to be adopting a kind of geographical determinism, a notion that "free land bred free individuals"; that the geography itself and the way in which people reacted to that geography produced democratic equality and a democratic form of government. Settlers in a new geographical terrain learned to innovate. Where there were not adequate lakes or rivers, they dug wells. Where the grass land plains did not allow for settled farming, they invented barbed wire to hedge in cattle, to hedge in sheep. These and other various learning experiences seem to be the result of human beings acting as innovators in response to geography. The land itself, Turner seemed to say, made human beings more self-reliant. And self-reliance is at the core of the American democratic experience, or so we have long told ourselves.

I would like to suggest to you that at first glance, Turner was preaching a kind of geographical determinism. But at second glance, we can see much more in the issue, because at heart it seems to me a question of whether Turner and others who followed his line of thinking of the frontier as "the cradle of democracy" were really talking about geography or whether, as I think was the case, they were making a generalized assumption about the varying nature of society and social development itself. What Turner really had in mind, it seems to me, is unrelated to open or closed space. Turner implied that civilization is a process that inevitably becomes more complex. As more and different varieties of human beings have to interact with one another, civilization inevitably subordinates the individual to organization, to bureaucracy. Whether there is open or closed space has little to do with this. Open and free lands were only a symbol of an alternative to an increasingly complex society. They were not an escape from that society, if my reading of Turner is correct.

I want to illustrate this reading of Turner and this question of civilization inevitably subordinating the individual, of government inevitably growing larger and more complex, by looking at one of our most famous historical examples in our popular culture: the rise of the cattle kingdom and the heyday of the cowboy. There is probably not a single character in the annals of the American folklore who is more representative of the totally free, totally self-reliant, totally unchained human being than the cowboy. When we want to talk about the free individual, when we want to present an image in a movie, in a television commercial, in a magazine advertisement of the totally free, self-reliant person, the first image that leaps to the minds of most people is the image of the American cowboy--freed from societal standards, freed from governmental restraints, free from organization, a man, solely on his own, interacting with nature. Is this really true? Who were the cowboys? When did they have their heyday? What kind of people were they?