The Frontier in American HistoryTurner, Frederick Jackson
History
The Frontier in American History
Turner, Frederick Jackson
Frontier and pioneer life -- United States; Frontier thesis; United States -- History; United States -- Territorial expansion
It would be impossible within the limits of this paper to detail the
history of the occupation of the Middle West; but the larger aspects of
the flow of population into the region may be sketched. Massachusetts
men had formed the Ohio Company, and had been influential in shaping the
liberal provisions of the Ordinance. Their land purchase, paid for in
soldiers' certificates, embraced an area larger than the State of Rhode
Island. At Marietta in 1788, under the shelter of Fort Harmar, their
bullet-proof barge landed the first New England colony. A New Jersey
colony was planted soon after at Cincinnati in the Symmes Purchase. Thus
American civilization crossed the Ohio. The French settlements at
Detroit and in Indiana and Illinois belonged to other times and had
their own ideals; but with the entrance of the American pioneer into the
forest of the Middle West, a new era began. The Indians, with the moral
support of England, resisted the invasion, and an Indian war followed.
The conquest of Wayne, in 1795, pushed back the Indians to the
Greenville line, extending irregularly across the State of Ohio from the
site of Cleveland to Fort Recovery in the middle point of her present
western boundary, and secured certain areas in Indiana. In the same
period Jay's treaty provided for the withdrawal of the British posts.
After this extension of the area open to the pioneer, new settlements
were rapidly formed. Connecticut disposed of her reserved land about
Lake Erie to companies, and in 1796 General Moses Cleaveland led the way
to the site of the city that bears his name. This was the beginning of
the occupation of the Western Reserve, a district about as large as the
parent State of Connecticut, a New England colony in the Middle West,
which has maintained, even to the present time, the impress of New
England traits. Virginia and Kentucky settlers sought the Virginia
Military Bounty Lands, and the foundation of Chillicothe here, in 1796,
afforded a center for Southern settlement. The region is a modified
extension of the limestone area of Kentucky, and naturally attracted the
emigrants from the Blue Grass State. Ohio's history is deeply marked by
the interaction of the New England, Middle, and Southern colonies within
her borders.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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