many Sacs and Foxes who had married with the Winnebago tribes. Some of these Foxes, irritated by representatives of the American Fur Company who purchased Indian lead along the Fever River, made no small amount of trouble for Dubuque. The United States assumed possession of Louisiana in 1804, and from that time forward Americans appeared in the lead mines, although, as representatives of a land-grabbing race, they found little favor with the Indians; the latter preferred the volatile French, who were in greater sympathy with them, and who did not care to make the wilderness blossom as the rose.

In 1811 we find George E. Jackson, a Missouri miner, building a rude low furnace on an island in the Mississippi, near East Dubuque, and floating his lead to St. Louis by flatboats, although meeting with much opposition from the savages, who bitterly hated all Americans.

In 1810 Nicholas Boilvin, United States Indian agent at Prairie du Chien, went on foot from Rock Island to the mouth of the Wisconsin, and reported that the Indians of the region had "mostly abandoned the chase, except to furnish themselves with meat, and turned their attention to the manufacture of lead." He states that that year they had made 200 tons of the metal, which they had exchanged for goods, mainly with Canadian traders, who were continually inciting them to opposition against Americans.

Nine years later (1819) some American traders, who attempted to go among the Sac and Fox miners and run opposition to the Canadians, were killed. This same year there appears to have been a more general movement on the lead region on the part of the Americans. The hostile Indians were browbeaten at a treaty held at Prairie du Chien, and Jesse W. Shull, the founder of Shullsburg, Wis., erected a trading post in the vicinity of where is now Galena. The same or the following year Col. James Johnson, of Kentucky, came into the district and worked mines, carrying his product to St. Louis by flatboat. In 1822 he took out a lease from the national government, and under strong military protection encamped with a party of negro slaves where Galena now stands, and commenced operations on the most extensive scale yet known in the lead country. There were at the time several French miners on Fever River, and one or more American trading posts.

On the heels of Johnson there at once flocked to the Galena region a crowd of squatters and prospectors from Missouri, Kentucky, and Tennessee, while many came from southern Illinois. In 1825 there were in the Fever River diggings about 100 persons engaged in mining; in 1826 the number rose to 453, while across the river in Missouri there were fully 2,000 men thus employed-"miners, teamsters, and laborers of every kind (including slaves)"-but some of these were farmers, who, with their slaves, spent only their spare time in the mines. West of the great river the heirs of Spanish claimants held that the mines were private property, and American prospectors were warned off. This fact helped the development of the Fever River district to the east of the Mississippi. In 1827 the name Galena was applied to the largest settlement on the Fever. In 1829 the heaviest American immigration set in, and from that time the history of lead mining in the Fever River district is familiar. Four years later (1833) the Spanish and Indian titles in Missouri having been cleared, mining operations recommenced there upon an extended scale.

XVIII. THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN

HISTORY.

By PROFESSOR FREDERICK J. TURNER,

OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN.

THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE FRONTIER IN AMERICAN HISTORY.*

By FREDERICK J. TURNER.

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: "Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area 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." This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. 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.

Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people-to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. Said Calhoun in 1817, "We are great, and rapidly-I was about to say fearfully-growing!" So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. All peoples show development; the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized. In the case of most nations, however, the development

*Since the meeting of the American Historical Association, this paper has also been given as an address to the State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893. I have to thank the Secretary of the Society, Mr. Reuben G. Thwaites, for securing valuable material for my use in the preparation of the paper.

+Abridgment of Debates of Congress, v., p. 706.