The Fabric of America

by Andro Linklater

  Yet the myth of the frontier captured the popular imagination because it seemed to offer a historical explanation for the extraordinary phenomenon of westward expansion. Not only had the United States spread across the continent in little more than two generations, but it had created a society so homogeneous, despite its diversity, that to say American was to describe a set of characteristics that referred only to the citizens and society of the USA and specifically excluded all the other Americans in South, Central, and North America.

  Turner’s theory seemed the more credible because the myth of the frontier was already lodged in every American’s imagination. History was in fact the last discipline to appreciate its power. Visually, the land of the frontier had provided the raw material for artists since Thomas Cole had depicted the upper Hudson Valley in the 1820s, when old-timers could still remember the Mohawks living there. In 1859 Albert Bierstadt traveled to the Rockies with a U.S. Public Land Survey party, then displayed its spectacular scenery to eastern eyes for the first time through a series of immense canvases. Most spectacularly of all, Thomas Moran’s gigantic landscape Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone, painted after a visit to Yellowstone in 1871, had helped persuade Congress to set the area aside as the first national park in the country.

  While painters dealt with the scenery of the frontier, writers concentrated on the people. Eighteenth-century Andrew Ellicott, recoiling from the fleas and squalor of Beeson Town, had allowed himself to be amused by the skewed language of the innkeeper there who solemnly predicted “there would be a great conjunction of Rain or Snow for there was a large Circumstance round the Moon.” But the nineteenth century took frontier struggles and sayings more seriously.

  The style was set by James Fenimore Cooper’s iconic character Natty Bumppo or Leatherstocking, who first appeared in The Pioneers in 1823. Raised by Delaware Indians, and conditioned by a life spent in the wilderness, Natty stood for simple virtues and the vast freedom of the unclaimed land. When he leveled his rifle at an intruder, saying, “If you come a foot nigher you shall have frontier punishment,” the reader knew he was not bluffing.

  Cooper placed his stories in the past when the frontier lay no farther off than upstate New York, but the conflict between the liberty of the wilderness and the privileges of property was timeless. “There’s two rights to all the land on ‘arth,” another frontier character, the squatter Thousandacres, said to a surveyor who was the symbol of the law in The Chainbearer. “One of these rights is what I call a king’s right, or that which depends on writin’s, and laws, and sich like contrivances; and the other depends on possession. It stands to reason, that fact is better than writin’ about it can be.”

  But as the settlers moved out of the forest and into the prairie, the fictional frontiersman became less of a junction between Anglo- and Native-American cultures. A work of nonfiction, Timothy Flint’s hugely influential 1826 memoir of missionary work among the newly arrived settlers in Missouri, Recollections of the Last Ten Years, created the template for the enduring image of the white frontiersman at war with the bloodthirsty Indian. “The antipathy between the two races seems fixed and unalterable,” Flint declared. “Peace there often is between them when they are cast in the same vicinity, but any affectionate intercourse, never.”

  Unfortunately, Flint arrived in Missouri at the end of a long period of cultural harmony between natives and newcomers. What he saw were the last Shawnee being driven from their lands by the torrent of settlers who poured across the Mississippi—almost one hundred thousand had come by 1824—and laid the foundations for an exclusive property-owning democracy. Nevertheless, this was the frontier that provided the staple of the western adventure novels published in the 1840s. Unlike Cooper’s forest-bound fiction, these placed their heroes in the wide-open spaces of the prairie, and while Natty Bumppo was half-Indian in his ways and outlook, the frontiersman of the westerns was the implacable enemy of the Indians.

  Their defining hero was the real-life Kit Carson, guide and adviser on all matters Indian to John C. Frémont on his trail-finding expeditions to California. As a trapper, hunter, and soldier, Carson’s adventures among Apache, Cheyenne, and Ute became so legendary that in later life he could not visit San Francisco without attracting crowds of celebrity hunters, who were usually disappointed to discover that their hero stood a scrawny, pockmarked five feet and a few inches. On one surreal occasion in 1849 while pursuing a company of Apache who had kidnapped and subsequently killed a white woman, Carson found among her scattered possessions one of the books about him, “the first of the kind I had ever seen,” he reported, “in which I was represented as a great hero, slaying Indians by the hundreds.” He imagined her reading it and praying, fruitlessly as it happened, that the real Kit Carson would ride up in time to rescue her.

  So much of his early life was actually spent hunting and trapping in the company of Indians that Carson might have been portrayed as part of the original inclusive frontier, but that was not what the market wanted. In the 1860s, the New York publisher Erastus Beadle began to churn out his orange-covered dime novels on new steam-powered rotary presses. Sixty thousand copies was the average run, but Seth Jones; or the Captives of the Frontier sold four hundred thousand copies, and Beadle retailed no fewer than five million books in his first five years in business. The appeal of Seth Jones and his buckskin-clad successor, Deadwood Dick, was that single-handedly they kept savagery at bay, by slaughtering huge numbers of Indians, so that they could rescue delicate, civilized, and very white damsels in distress.

  The dime novels were escapist, but their theme belonged to a larger yearning. To an audience trapped in the complexities of urban and industrial life, the idea of the frontier in its largeness and simplicity and absence of boundaries stood for all that their own everyday existence was not. “Eastward I go only by force; but westward I go free,” Thoreau wrote in his posthumously published “Walking.” “I must walk toward Oregon, and not toward Europe. And that way the nation is moving, and I may say that mankind progresses from east to west.”

  The first suggestion that the frontier might hold the key to the American character was made a generation before Turner. It came in 1865 from a sophisticated New Yorker, Edwin Godkin, founder of the literary weekly The Nation, whose interest was sociological rather than historical. In the dying days of the Civil War he wrote an article for the North American Review proposing, “If we enquire what are those phenomena which distinguish [the American spirit] from that of older countries, we shall find that by far the larger number of them may be attributed to what we shall call ‘the frontier life’ led by a large proportion of the inhabitants, and to the influence of this portion on manners and legislation rather than to political institutions or even to the equality of conditions.”

  What interested Godkin was the classless, egalitarian nature of American society, so different from the strict hierarchy of his native England. His choice of the frontier as the source of those values might have surprised his urban, eastern readership, for whom the quintessentially American characteristics were those derived from the Puritan ethos of the Mayflower’s passengers— freedom of belief, an egalitarian society, and reliance on individual conscience. Even de Tocqueville, whose phrase “the equality of conditions” Godkin quoted, had found the most vibrant examples of democracy in the township meetings of New England. But four years of civil war had revealed those to be sectional values, while the aristocratic freedom of the white south was equally unacceptable. The west, by contrast, offered a glimpse of the United States untainted by slavery.

  Turner’s frontier theory fitted neatly into this background. History, it seemed, could confirm what sociology, literature, and art had long suspected. That Turner himself never satisfactorily developed his original hypothesis should raise doubts, however. In later accounts, he tended to recapitulate the argument rather than provide detail to confirm or refine it, and he entirely failed to follow up his own suggestion of comparing the American frontier exp
erience with that of other frontiers. Significantly, his most interesting work in later life focused instead on the sectional interests of the south and west that he had dismissed in his Chicago speech.

  Modern historians of the west such as John Mack Faragher and Patricia Nelson Limerick largely treat Turner’s frontier theory as irrelevant or “fraught with error.” The frontier experience that Turner took to be unique to the United States is now increasingly seen as a struggle between the migrants’ economic muscle and strategies of resistance by aboriginal owners, comparable to other colonizing movements around the world, and his male-dominated battle with the wilderness has been replaced by a mosaic of struggles involving ecological forces, women’s activities, and cultural expectations.

  Many of these criticisms are what might be expected of a different age with different priorities, and the popular appeal of Turner’s misreading of history has not been appreciably diminished. The idea of the frontier as a uniquely American experience offering fresh and unlimited opportunities particularly suited to exploitation by American enterprise and adaptability continues to be attached to such boundless areas as space, the Internet, or intellectual property.

  “We stand today on the edge of a New Frontier,” John F. Kennedy told the Democratic National Convention in 1960, “the frontier of the 1960s—a frontier of unknown opportunities and perils, a frontier of unfulfilled hopes and threats.” Thirty years later, Mitch Kapor and John Perry Barlow, founders of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, boldly outlined the future of the Internet as “a frontier region, populated by the few hardy technologists who can tolerate the austerity of its savage computer interfaces.” Indeed, if an instant explanation is needed to describe how the American outlook, the American character, the American way, came into being, the default version remains Turner’s romantic vision of the lone individual fighting against nature, Indians, and government.

  “The frontier is productive of individualism,” wrote Turner. “The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to control, and particularly to any direct control. The tax-gatherer is viewed as a representative of oppression.”

  Appealing though it is, this image of libertarian self-expression bears no relation to reality. What made the settlement of the West such an iconic American experience was precisely that it took place under the umbrella of the U.S. government. At every level, from the toughest gold miners panning gold in 1849 California to financially sophisticated land speculators, the first impulse of anyone working a square yard of land was to register its use and a claim to ownership—first unofficially with others in the claim group, then officially with government. The tax-gatherer might not have been liked, but payment of taxes then as now has the compensating benefit of guaranteeing legal possession.

  The basic flaw in Turner’s argument was there at its starting point. What made the American frontier experience unique was not the freedom of the wilderness but the lines drawn in previously uncharted ground—around claims, properties, states, and the republic itself. So far from from being hostile to the individual, government made it possible for the individual to gain due reward for his or her enterprise.

  By the same token, what made the new frontiers of space, the Internet, and intellectual property potentially rewarding for pioneers was that there too claims could be registered under the umbrella of the U.S. government. Through the World Bank, the World Trade Organization, and the International Monetary Fund, through the Web-controlling Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN), and through the patent enforcement Agreement on Trade-Related Aspects of Intellectual Property Rights (TRIPS), the influence of the United States reaches worldwide, enforcing concepts of property backed by American law. As the economics commentator John Gray noted, the fabric of globalization itself “is largely an artifact of American power, which was constructed in the belief that it would serve American interests.”

  . . .

  No one suffered more from the artificial boundaries drawn in the ground than the Native Americans. With the buffalo gone, their hunting grounds signed away, and their reserves under threat, Massachusetts senator Henry L. Dawes made a last attempt in 1887 to bring them the benefits of the system that had overpowered them. As he frankly confessed to the Senate, a conversation with the paramount chief of the Cherokee had revealed that there was no poverty in the nation, and yet “the defect of [their] system was apparent. They have got as far as they can go, because they own their land in common…There is no enterprise to make your home any better than that of your neighbor’s. There is no selfishness, which is at the bottom of civilization. Until this people consent to give up their lands and divide them among their citizens so that each can own the land he cultivates, they will not make much progress.”

  As a piece of social engineering, Dawes’s General Allotment Act, assigning community land to each individual Native American, turned out to be a mockery. The fail-safe provisions designed to protect the new owners from unscrupulous buyers were immediately swept aside. By 1900, more than half the remaining reservations had been bought up by white settlers, while the nominal owners saw little of the money since payments were held in trust by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. There they were so mismanaged that a lawsuit conducted by the Blackfeet lawyer Elouise Cobell on behalf of Native Americans today claims a total of $176 billion in unpaid royalties from the U.S. government.

  Yet there was a fundamental truth in Dawes’s analysis. Individual land ownership was the key to the uniquely American system that evolved from the nation’s expansion westward. It made capitalists out of squatters, settlers, and speculators, it rewarded individual enterprise, and in the years following the Civil War it subsidized the profits and corporate structure of railroads, banks, manufacturing, and a dozen other peripheral businesses.

  The central importance of property made the maintenance of law and order vital in the west. It also made the violence so beloved by pulp fiction deeply unpopular in reality.

  The legend of Wild Bill Hickok, city marshal of Abilene, Kansas, in 1871, which declared him to have “contributed more than any other man to making the West a place for decent men and women to live in,” demonstrated how far myth could escape from history. Not only was the real James Butler Hickok assisted by three deputies—unkind gossip said it was they who patrolled the streets when the range cowboys came to town leaving Hickok to concentrate on gambling—but his dismissal after just eight months in the job was for excessive violence in shooting a man rather than arresting him. “He acted only too ready to shoot down, to kill out-right, instead of avoiding assassination when possible as the higher duty of a marshal,” Abilene’s Mayor Theodore C. Henry commented reprovingly. “Such a policy of taking justice into his own hands exemplified, of course, but a form of lawlessness.”

  In the actual world, even the trail cowboys—whose lives as pictured by Hollywood epitomized the free life, riding the wide, open range under big skies and creating hell in any town they arrived in—were caught in the network of city, state, and federal government and could hardly have existed without it. When the cattle drives began out of Texas in the 1860s, many did not follow the Chisholm Trail to the railhead in Abilene but went straight to the Indian reservations in Oklahoma, where federal officials from the Bureau of Indian Affairs needed to buy regular supplies of meat to feed the inhabitants after the buffalo herds had been wiped out. It was a shorter, less romantic drive than a three months’ trail to the railhead, but the compensations appealed powerfully to a Texas rancher. Not only did the government pay a higher price than the meat companies’ agents, the herds did not have to be quarantined against “Texas fever,” as was required by law after crossing state lines into Kansas, Colorado, or Missouri. Nor did a trail boss run the same risk of being fined and having his cattle impounded by a county sheriff when the animals strayed into a wheat field.

  When the herd did travel all the way to Dodge, Abilene, or some other railhead, the rancher and trail hands benefited from another piece of
government intervention. The railroad network that served the markets in Chicago and the east coast had been financed by grants of federal and state land measured out by Public Land surveyors. Without the government and its laws, there would have been no Chisholm Trail, and no legends big enough to fit John Wayne.

  The harshest indictment against Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier myth, however, is not just that its roots were planted in a romantic escape from reality, but that the thesis itself represented a deliberate turning away from the chief anxiety of the day. What most disturbed Americans about the 1890 census was not the end of the frontier of settlement, but the information that more than eight million of the country’s sixty-three million citizens had been born abroad in no fewer than thirty-seven different countries, from Africa and Austria through Turkey and Wales. Already made anxious by the rising level of immigration—in a decade it had increased by 50 percent to an average of five hundred thousand a year, equivalent to five million today in relation to the existing population—Turner’s contemporaries were especially alarmed by the racial mix.

  The British, Irish, Germans, and others from northern Europe who had in the past provided the bulk of the settlers became a minority. In some years, up to 70 percent of immigrants came from southern and eastern Europe, including the first great surge of Jewish immigration. The newcomers tended to cluster in urban centers, speaking their own languages—Italian, Yiddish, Polish, Russian—and creating their own cultural ghettos. For the first time since the Know-Nothings, anti-immigrant feeling reached the point of becoming a serious political force. Calls were made for restrictions on the number of entrants through the use of literacy tests, and for the total “exclusion of elements undesirable for citizenship or injurious to our national character.”