The Significance of the Frontier in American History #246015

In the settlement of America we have. To observe how Euro pean life entered the continent, and how America. Modilled and developed that life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an Amcricau environment. Too exclusive attention has heen paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors. The frontier is the line. Of most rapid and ell'ective Americanization. 'l'hc wilderness masters the colonist. It tlnds him a. Liurolican in dress, indus tries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips 011' the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It. Puts him in the log cabin oi' the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to plantinpr 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 fron I tier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept tho conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he tits 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 devel opment of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenom enon 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 part-altos 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 imlepcndence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic.