American Frontier
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| Patricia Limerick |
Frederick Turner’s nostalgic
perspective of the American frontier the scene of an epic victory over the
wilderness reflects the classical purpose of history. As Turner noted, “What
the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering
new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more,
the ever-retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the
nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of
America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the
frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American
history.”1 Some prominent historians
disagreed. For example, William Cronon claimed
that the European pioneers revealed far more troubling characteristics than the
virtues Turner had portrayed. To Cronon
life on the frontier was more about the gradual spread of the capitalist
economy instituted by the founders of the American nation than a heroic
adventure of subduing and civilizing savage natives. On the contrary Cronon pointed out that the
clash between European and Native American systems of land use and differing
views on trade and property rights that occurred in New England were equally
applicable as Europeans settled the West.2 Furthermore, Patricia Limerick
disputed Turner’s assumption that the pioneer spirit was the symbolic character
of the story of the West. “If the
‘frontier’ meant, in one of its many and changeable definitions, the discovery
of new resources and the rush of population to exploit those resources, then
1890 was no deadline.”3 There were alternate ways to describe the
European expansion westward. Limerick wrote,
“To characterize the process that shaped the region, new western historians
have available a number of terms - invasion, conquest, colonization,
exploitation, development, expansion of the world market. The ongoing presence of American native
peoples and earlier Spanish and Mexican settlers remain significant factors in
the character of the land.
