America's Frontier Heritage: A Review Essay

AMERICA'S FRONTIER HERITAGE: A Review Essay Arrell M. Gibson Probably no American history subject has provoked such discussion and controversy as Frederick Jackson Turner's view of the frontier and its role in shaping American character and culture. Anyone daring to reopen the subject, especiaUy widi a pro-Turner viewpoint, does so at great peril and invites the wrath of iconoclasts. Ray Allen Billington, editor of the Histories of the American Frontier , resurrects the Turner hypothesis in his volume for this series, America's Frontier Heritage.1 He unequivocally places himself as an advocate of the pioneering experience as a determinant of American character and culture. But he constructs a revisionist view which relegates the Turner Thesis from an absolute to a relative force. And his methodology in producing America's Frontier Heritage will provoke as much comment among historians as his attempt to refine and reinterpret the pioneering experience and provide it a more rational structure and direction. Billington sets die stage for his revisionist view by dissecting the Turner Thesis to show its over-simplified nature, and repeats one of Turner's most-quoted statements: "Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch die procession of civüization, marching single file—the buffalo foUowing die trail to die salt springs, die Indian, die fur-trader and hunter, die cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see die same procession widi wider intervals between." Billington answers, "actuaUy man does not behave in such an orderly way." Frontiersmen did not move in neatly arranged columns, each caring for its own task in advancing civilization. Instead they scattered in all directions and mixed so completely that fur trappers and town planters sometimes operated side by side. Nor could the "frontier types" be so exactly designated , for the pioneering process required a complex variety of skills that defied any simple definition. The West was won not only by hunters and herdsmen and farmers, but by miners, explorers, soldiers, lumbermen, land speculators, missionaries . . . lawyers, and an uncountable host of others. ? America's Frontier Heritage. By Ray Allen Billington. ( New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1966. Pp. xiv, 302. $7.95.) 250 All played dieir parts, sometimes in several roles, and all . . . sought opportunity without paying heed to their proper roles in the emergence of civilization. Billington grants that American culture is the product of many interacting forces but die pioneering experience rates a place of major importance; diat "some—but by no means all—of the characteristics that Europeans brand uniquely American were die product of the three centuries of pioneering needed to settle the continent." He advises die reader that in America's Frontier Heritage he defends "what scholars caU the frontier hypothesis. . . ." Europeans who founded the New World settlements in the seventeenth century and the later pioneers who were lured ever westward by the thirst for furs or cheap land or gold or adventure found themselves in an unfamiliar environment. In Europe and the East men were many and land was scarce; on the frontier men were few and land was abundant. There the old laws governing compact societies no longer apply. Traditional techniques of production were unsuited to an environment where resources were more plentiful than manpower; innovation and experimentation became a way of life. Attachment to place diminished in a land where more attractive places lay ahead; mobility came to be a habit. . . . Cultural creativity lost its appeal to men burdened with the task of clearing a continent; materialism emerged as a desirable creed no less than an economic necessity. Leisure was nonexistent in frontier communities; hard work became a persistent habit. Inherited tides seemed archaic and traditional class distinctions less meaningful in a land where a man's worth to society was judged by his own skills; a democratic social system with greater possibilities for upward mobility followed naturally. And, most important of all, men found that die man-land ratio on the frontier provided so much opportunity for the individual to better himself that external controls were not necessary; individualism and political democracy were enshrined as their ideals. These were the traits which were...