Great Lakes, where Astor's American Fur Company operated in the Indian trade,1 and beyond the Mississippi, where Indian traders extended their activity even to the Rocky mountains; Florida also furnished frontier conditions. The Mississippi river region was the scene of typical frontier settlements.2 The era of internal improvements and protective tariffs under the home-market idea opened. Its explanation is to be sought in the distribution of settlement.

3

The rising steam navigation on western waters, the opening of the Erie canal, and the westward extension of cotton culture added five frontier states to the Union in this period. Grund, writing in 1836, declares: "It appears then that the universal disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness, in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the actual result of an expansive power which is inherent in them, and which by continually agitating all classes of society is constantly throwing a large portion of the whole. population on the extreme confines of the state, in order to gain space for its development. Hardly is a new state or territory formed before the same principle manifests itself again and gives rise to a further emigration; and so it is destined to go on until a physical barrier must finally obstruct its progress." 5

1 Turner, Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin (Johns Hopkins University Studies, Series ix), pp. 61 ff.

* Monette, History of the Mississippi Valley, Vol. II; Flint, Travels and Residence in Mississippi; Flint, Geography and History of the Western States; Abridgment of Debates of Congress, VII, 397, 398, 404; Holmes, Account of the United States; Kingdom, America and the British Colonies [London, 1820]; Grund, Americans, II, i, iii, vi (although writing in 1836, he treats of conditions that grew out of western advance from the era of 1820 to that time); Peck, Guide for Emigrants [Boston, 1831]; Darby, Emigrants' Guide to Western and Southwestern States and Territories; Dana, Geographical Sketches in the Western Country; Kinzie, Waubun; Keating, Narrative of Long's Expedition; Schoolcraft, Discovery of the Sources of the Mississippi River, Travels in the Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley, and Lead Mines of the Missouri; Hurlbut, Chicago Antiquities; McKenney, Tour to the Lakes; Thomas, Travels through the Western Country, etc. [Auburn, N. Y., 1819]. Cf. Turner, Rise of New West, Vols. V-VIII [New York, 1906].

Darby, Emigrants' Guide, pp. 272 ff; Benton, Abridgment of Debates, VII, 397.

4 Turner, Rise of New West, chap. iv.

5 Grund, Americans, II, 8.

It was in the period between 1820 and 1850 that the forces

7 were at work which differentiated the northwestern frontier

and the southwestern frontier. In the Southwest the spread of cotton culture transformed the pioneer farmer into the great planter and slaveholder. In the Northwest, the New England and Middle State stream, followed by German immigration, took possession of the Great Lake basin, and the pioneer farmer type was continued. This section was united to New York by the Erie canal and by the later railroads. New Orleans ceased to be the outlet of the Northwest. Thus the physiographic province included in the glaciated area embracing the Great Lake basin and New England plateau was brought, by the flow of frontier settlement, into economic, political, and social unity. In the same period the physiographic province of the Gulf plains was settled and unified by extensions of the coastal south, under the temptations of the cotton lands. The struggle for Texas and the Mexican War were later sequences of this movement.

L

Prior to this, the Mississippi valley had possessed a considerable degree of social and political homogeneity. By the processes just mentioned, however, the sectional division of North and South was carried beyond the Alleghenies, and the western spirit gave to the political and economic antagonisms between the old North and South sections a new rancor and aggressiveness. Both were regions of action, and they furnished the radical leaders for their respective sections in the struggle that followed.

In the middle of this century the line indicated by the present eastern boundary of Indian Territory, Nebraska, and Kansas marked the frontier of the Indian country. Minnesota and

1 Peck, New Guide to the West, chap. iv [Cincinnati, 1848]; Parkman, Oregon Trail; Hall, The West [Cincinnati, 1848]; Pierce, Incidents of Western Travel; Murray, Travels in North America; Lloyd, Steamboat Directory [Cincinnati, 1856]; "Forty Days in a Western Hotel" (Chicago), in Putnam's Magazine, December, 1894; Mackay, The Western World, II, ii, iii; Meeker, Life in the West; Bogen, Germans in America [Boston, 1851]; Olmstead, Texas Journey; Greeley, Recollections of a Busy Life; Schouler, History of the United States, V, 261-267; Peyton, Over the Alleghanies and across the Prairies

Wisconsin still exhibited frontier conditions, but the distinctive frontier of the period is found in California, where the gold discoveries had sent a sudden tide of adventurous miners, in Oregon, and in the settlements in Utah.2 As the frontier had. leaped over the Alleghenies, so now it skipped the Great plains and the Rocky mountains; and in the same way that the advance of the frontiersman beyond the Alleghenies had caused the rise of important questions of transportation and internal improvement, so now the settlers beyond the Rocky mountains needed means of communication with the East, and in the furnishing of these arose the settlement of the Great plains and the development of still another kind of frontier life. Railroads, fostered by land grants, sent an increasing tide of immigrants into the Far West. The United States army 3 fought a series of Indian wars in Minnesota, Dakota, and the Indian Territory; cessions made way for settlement.

By 1880 the settled area had been pushed into northern Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, along Dakota rivers, and in the Black hills region, and was ascending the rivers of Kansas and Nebraska. The development of mines in Colorado had drawn isolated frontier settlements into that region, and Montana and Idaho were receiving settlers. The frontier was found in these mining camps and the ranches of the Great plains. The superintendent of the census for 1890 reports, as previously stated, that the settlements of the West lie so [London, 1870]; Peyton, Suggestions on Railroad Communication with the Pacific and the Trade of China and the Indian Islands; Benton, Highway to the Pacific (a speech in the United States Senate, December 16, 1850). Cf. Chittenden, American Fur Trade.

1 A writer in the Home Missionary [1850], p. 239, reporting Wisconsin conditions, exclaims: "Think of this, people of the enlightened East! What an example, to come from the very frontiers of civilization!" But one of the missionaries writes: "In a few years Wisconsin will no longer be considered as the West, or as an outpost of civilization, any more than western New York, or the Western Reserve."

2 Bancroft (H. H.), History of the Pacific States; and Popular Tribunals; Hittell, California; Shinn, " Mining Camps"; Shinn, "Story of the Mine": Century Magazine, 1890, 1891.

* Rodenbough and Haskin, Army of the United States.

* See Atlantic Monthly, LXXIX, 440.

scattered over the region that there can no longer be said to be a frontier line.

It will be noted that the frontier boundaries are physiographically significant. The fall line marked the seventeenthcentury frontier; the Allegheny mountains, that of the middle of the eighteenth century; the Mississippi, that of the last decade of the eighteenth century, and, in part, that of the first quarter of the present century. Settlement which had crept up the Missouri, the Platte, etc., by the middle of the nineteenth century stayed while the rush of gold seekers made a new frontier on the Pacific coast and in the Rocky mountains. The boundary of the arid region (roughly the hundredth meridian) marks the most recent frontier. The conquest of the arid West will be by different processes than that of the other areas of western advance, and a different social type may be looked for in the region.

Each great western advance, thus outlined, has been accompanied by a diplomatic or military struggle against rival nations, and by a series of Indian wars and cessions.

THE FRONTIER FURNISHES A FIELD FOR COMPARATIVE STUDY OF SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT

At the Atlantic frontier one can study the germs of processes repeated at each successive frontier. We have the complex European life sharply precipitated by the wilderness into the simplicity of primitive conditions. The first frontier had to meet its Indian question, its question of the disposition of the public domain, of the means of intercourse with older settlements, of the extension of political organization, of religious and educational activity. And the settlement of these and similar questions for one frontier served as a guide for the next. The American student needs not to go to the "prim little townships of Sleswick" for illustrations of the law of continuity and development. For example, he may study the origin of our land policies in the colonial land policy; he may see how the system grew by adapting the statutes to the

customs of the successive frontiers.1 He may see how the mining experience in the lead regions of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa was applied to the mining laws of the Rockies,2 and how our Indian policy has been a series of experimentations on successive frontiers. Each tier of new states has found in the older ones material for its constitution.3 Each frontier has made similar contributions to American character, as will be discussed farther on.

But with all these similarities there are essential differences, due to the place element and the time element. It is evident that the farming frontier of the Mississippi valley presents different conditions from the mining frontier of the Rocky mountains. The frontier reached by the Pacific railroad, surveyed into rectangles, guarded by the United States army, and recruited by the daily immigrant ship, moves forward in a different way and at a swifter pace than the frontier reached by the birch. canoe or the pack horse. The geologist traces patiently the shores of ancient seas, maps their areas, and compares the older and the newer. It would be a work worth the historian's labors to mark these various frontiers, and in detail compare one with another. Not only would there result a more adequate conception of American development and characteristics, but invaluable additions would be made to the history of society.

Loria, the Italian economist, has urged the study of colonial life as an aid in understanding the stages of European development, affirming that colonial settlement is for economic science what the mountain is for geology, bringing to light primitive stratifications. "America," he says, "has the key to the historical enigma which Europe has sought for centuries in vain, and the land which has no history reveals luminously the course of universal history." There is much truth in this. The United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. Line by

See the suggestive paper by Professor Jesse Macy, "The Institutional Beginnings of a Western State."

2 Shinn," Mining Camps."

Cf. Thorpe, in Annals of American Academy of Political and Social Science, September, 1891; Bryce, American Commonwealth [1888], II, 689.

4 Loria, Analisi della Proprietà Capitalista, II, 15.