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
The writer has traveled much amongst the first class, the real
pioneers. He has lived many years in connection with the
second grade; and now the third wave is sweeping over large
districts of Indiana, Illinois, and Missouri. Migration has
become almost a habit in the West. Hundreds of men can be
found, not over 50 years of age, who have settled for the
fourth, fifth, or sixth time on a new spot. To sell out and
remove only a few hundred miles makes up a portion of the
variety of backwoods life and manners.[21:1]
Omitting those of the pioneer farmers who move from the love of
adventure, the advance of the more steady farmer is easy to understand.
Obviously the immigrant was attracted by the cheap lands of the
frontier, and even the native farmer felt their influence strongly. Year
by year the farmers who lived on soil whose returns were diminished by
unrotated crops were offered the virgin soil of the frontier at nominal
prices. Their growing families demanded more lands, and these were dear.
The competition of the unexhausted, cheap, and easily tilled prairie
lands compelled the farmer either to go west and continue the exhaustion
of the soil on a new frontier, or to adopt intensive culture. Thus the
census of 1890 shows, in the Northwest, many counties in which there is
an absolute or a relative decrease of population. These States have been
sending farmers to advance the frontier on the plains, and have
themselves begun to turn to intensive farming and to manufacture. A
decade before this, Ohio had shown the same transition stage. Thus the
demand for land and the love of wilderness freedom drew the frontier
ever onward.
Having now roughly outlined the various kinds of frontiers, and their
modes of advance, chiefly from the point of view of the frontier itself,
we may next inquire what were the influences on the East and on the Old
World. A rapid enumeration of some of the more noteworthy effects is all
that I have time for.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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