-
2. The Plow and the Gun
- Michigan State University Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
19 CHAPTER TWO The Plow and the Gun THE PLOW In 1890, Robert P. Porter, the superintendent of the eleventh national census, made note, in the perfunctory style of a federal bureaucrat conducting the business of state, that “at present the unsettled area [of the United States] has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement , etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” Porter based his conclusion upon the federal definition of the frontier, which was predicated upon the statistical density of settlers per square mile, but in the eyes of one historian at the University of Wisconsin, Porter had just published the official obituary for the American frontier. Three years later, Frederick Jackson Turner stood in front of his colleagues at a meeting of the American Historical Society in Chicago and announced “the closing of a great historic movement” in American history. “The true point of view in the history of this nation,” Turner argued, “is not the Atlantic coast, it is the Great West.” It was a bold argument. Few historians had paid attention to the West in spite of its rapid expansion and development since the Civil War, and now a historian was pointing to the West and claiming that “the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement explain American development.”1 In other words, the hardships of life on the frontier had bred the first generation of men and women of truly American character. Turner implied that the birthplace of the nation wasn’t really the eastern establishment cities such as Philadelphia, Boston, New York, or Washington, but the vast uninhabited interior of the continent, where the most daring of the nation’s citizens had been battling the titanic forces of nature to carve out a life for themselves as yeoman farmers. The people who lived on the eastern seaboard and in the South, according to Turner, carried “the Germanic germ” of culture and still practiced the old, effete ways of Europe. And although the settlers carried those same old laws and ways with them as they trudged past the Alleghenies, the heady demands of life on the frontier dictated that they adapt to new rules or perish. So they jettisoned the heavy furniture of their past as it bogged down their progress. The West, Turner concluded, had created a hearty people who were capable of building empires. Traditionally, the reasoning went, nations expanded by conquering other nations, even though Turner didn’t equate Native Americans with equal nations or even as civilized enemies .2 They may have been human beings, but only marginally because they were savages and so did not earn moral respect. In the emerging nation’s mind, the struggle for possession wasn’t between men and nations as much as it was between man and nature. 20| Chapter Two From the settler’s point of view, savages were raw products of nature that lived like beasts, ignorant of science or commerce. They didn’t care about the value of a farm or a town, and so they were inconvenient squatters who should be swept away in favor of a nobler cause. Turner’s West was a vast, unoccupied, and unclaimed domain that beckoned to the hunter and the trader to exploit the beasts, the rancher to exploit the grass, and the farmer to exploit soils that had never known the biting edge of a plow. “The United States is unique,” he wrote, “in the extent to which the individual has been given an open field, unchecked by restraints of an old social order, or of scientific administration of government.” The riches of the earth belonged to anyone who was bold and clever enough to claim them. Nature, however, did not yield its treasury easily. Possession required the struggle of undaunted pioneers to overcome the prodigious forces of nature that opposed them. They fought this battle on the frontier, which became the skirmish line between nature and civilization . More of a conceptual space than a geographical place, it was here that “the hither edge of free land” created a unique breed of American man and woman. “The West, at bottom,” wrote Turner, “is a form of society, rather than an area.” Turner perceived nature to be such a powerful force that it overwhelmed the pioneer by...