from F.J. Turner, The Significance of the Frontier in American History:
"Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history
of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land,
its
continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain
American development....[The wilderness] takes him [the frontiersman] from
the
railroad
car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization
and
arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin
of the
Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long
he
has gone to planting 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
frontier
the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions
which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings
and follows the Indian trails....The fact is that here is a new product that
is American....The advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away
from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines....The
most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy
here and in Europe. As has been indicated the frontier is productive of individualism.
Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive
organization,
based on the family. The tendency is anti-social. It produces antipathy to
control, and particularly to any direct control."