Kentucke's Frontiers

Epilogue

Epilogue Regardless of what one might think of Frederick Jackson Turner’s “frontier thesis,” there is an inherent truth in Turner’s placement of the frontier at the center of Ameri­ can identity development. The frontier narrative is a foundational drama on which Ameri­ can society is constructed. Kentucke’s frontiers were among the first national frontiers. Its settlers continued patterns not only of touching America as it is but of assaulting it in frenzies of mean fear that had characterized the earliest Atlantic colonial frontiers and would continue as Ameri­ cans crossed the Plains, claimed the Great West, filled in the continent, and confronted the rest of the world. Contemporary historians’ efforts to redefine the frontier as a cultural zone have brought significant insight into the complicated dynamics of Indian-­ white-­ black relations. As one anthology introduction claimed of its contributors: “They see them [frontiers] as contested spaces, not as a stage in the progress of the world according to Europeans.” But white Europeans and Ameri­ cans who actually settled the West saw the frontier both as contested space and as a stage for “civilized” progress. Reconceptualizing the frontier as contested spaces without continued recognition of the frontier as a line that separated “civilization” • Kentucke’s Frontiers 290 • from “savagery”—­ as Ameri­ cans of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries imagined it—minimizes the sense of God-­ ordained entitlement that most whites felt about conquering the frontier and the Ameri­ can future: settlement of western lands was considered a moral right, and impediments to that right were by definition wrong. The children and grandchildren of Kentucke’s earliest generation of settlers heard the stories of frontier life, and as they recorded it in the nineteenth century, Kentucke’s frontier narrative became one of conflict with malevolent, racialized Others who hid in the wilderness, living not as “civilized” nations but in poorly defined tribal and village entities, refusing to abide by “civilized” rules of military engagement, and indiscriminately waging war against Ameri­ can families—men, women, and children . It is true that in their desires to keep their lands, Indians employed brutal and savage tactics to instill terror among enemy civilians. It is equally true that settlers became equally savage as they ripped those lands from the Indians. Historically, however , savagery as an ethnic characteristic was ascribed to native peoples, even as the same tactics employed by white settlers were justified as vengeance or strategic. Categorizing the native enemy in this manner was not specifically an Ameri­ can trait: it was and remains characteristic of all West­ ern imperialism. As psychopathologist of colonization Franz Fanon once argued, “the settler paints the native as a sort of quintessence of evil. . . . It is not enough for the colonist to affirm that those values have disappeared from, or still better never existed in, the colonial world. The native is declared insensible to ethics; he represents not only the absence of values, but also the negation of values.” One need only consider the mound-­ builder theorists’ condemnation of contemporary Indians as the destroyers of greater civilized cultures to see the validity of this argument . Because their imperialism—military, cultural, gendered, and racial—was part of a larger effort to define national identity in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, white Ameri­ cans did not easily or quickly abandon demonizing the Others, even as natives were pushed farther and farther westward. Frontier Epilogue • 291 memories, from the most educated, like Humphrey Marshall, to the least literate, like some of John Dabney Shane’s interviewees, sanctified a narrative in which “the settler was making history; his life is an epoch, an Odyssey,” as Fanon continued; “He is the absolute beginning: ‘This land was created by us’; he is the unceasing cause: ‘If we leave, all is lost, and the country will go back to the Middle Ages’. . . . The settler makes history, and is conscious of it.” Not only did settlers make history, but they acted upon those constructed histories. White Ameri­ cans who pioneered trans-­ Appalachia took with them the stories of colonial Indian wars and savagery, and their own children and grandchildren did not forget the lessons of Kentucke. As historian June Namias concluded , along the frontiers where loss of family was a constant peril, “The retelling of these stories of loss marked each Ameri­ can generation during the first three centuries of North Ameri­ can life. These tales constituted significant childhood memories, so...