Migration and Settlement from the
Atlantic to the Pacific,
1750-1890: A Survey of the Literature
by Kim M. Gruenwald
Introduction:
From Frederick Jackson
Turner
to the New Western History
In the late nineteenth
century when Americans were feeling overwhelmed by waves of immigration from
south and central Europe, many scholars argued that all that was good about
America came from its Protestant English origins—they wrote of an Anglo-American
love of liberty and individualism supposedly unknown to newcomers who they
considered anarchists and socialists.
A generation later, Congress passed a law to apportion the number of
immigrants allowed to enter the country according to their percentage of the
population in 1890 before the presence of the newcomers was fully felt. But a young scholar from Wisconsin latched on to
the date of 1890 for a different reason, and he turned the way Americans thought
about their history upside down. In
1893, Frederick Jackson Turner presented his frontier thesis as a paper at the
annual meeting of the American Historical Association. Turner stated that the population of the
United
States had reached a saturation level of at
least 2 people per square mile in 1890, and therefore the frontier was
closed. This was significant, he
argued, because it had been the frontier that made the United
States unique. Americans, he said, were exceptional,
and it was their centuries-long struggle with the wilderness, not their European
traditions, that made them so. The
history of the West as a place continued after 1890, of course, but in
retrospect, the date makes an excellent cut-off point for frontier history
because Americans began looking outward starting with the Spanish-American War,
turning their attention from claiming a continent to overseas imperialism.
Frederick Jackson
Turner characterized the frontier as a moving line—the line between civilization
and savagery. The further Americans
of European descent penetrated into the continent from the East, the more
American they became. Turner
identified a number of different stages:
the furthest line of colonial expansion to the Appalachians, the
expansion to the Mississippi during the first
half of the nineteenth century, and expansion into the arid plains and the
Rocky Mountains all the way to the Pacific
after the Civil War. On each
frontier, settlers wrested the land from Native Americans by force and
established farms, as well as social and political institutions. Turner argued that settlers of all
European ethnicities became Americans through this process. Individualism, self-reliance, and
democracy flourished. He later
published a book that expanded upon his thesis: The Frontier in American History
(New York: H. Holt & Co.,
1920).
Others followed in
Turner’s footsteps, and frontier history took on new significance for American
scholars. With the publication of
The Spanish Borderlands: A
Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1921), Herbert
Eugene Bolton coined a new term and made an argument for Spain’s contribution to the settlement of
North America. In The Great Plains (New
York: Grossett & Dunlap, 1931),
Walter Prescott Webb theorized that Americans used revolvers, barbed wire,
windmills, and railroads to conquer the plains where the Spanish had
failed. Wilbur R. Jacobs, John W.
Caughey, and Joe B. Franz provide an excellent overview of the work of these
three founders of western history in Turner, Bolton, and Webb: Three Historians of the American
Frontier (Seattle: Washington University Press, 1965).
In the closing decades
of the twentieth century, many scholars began to challenge Turner’s
interpretation, and the New Western History was born. This generation argued that focusing on
the frontier as a process had long overshadowed the need for a real examination
of the West as a place—they favored a regional approach. They believed that with its mixture of
peoples of European, Mexican, Native American, and Asian descent, the West was
every bit as ethnically diverse as the East, and after World War II, every bit
as urban.
Four historians
led the charge. In Legacy of
Conquest: The Unbroken History of
the American West (New York:
Norton, 1987), Patricia Nelson Limerick synthesized much of the best new
work to tell the tale of a region filled with large-scale capitalists and
ordinary farmers dedicated to making a profit, along with settlers and
politicians who preached individualism and self reliance but demanded government
help at every turn. Limerick identified a region fraught with messy
interactions between people of all races and social classes that became more
complex rather than less over time.
In Land Use, Environment, and Social Change: The Shaping of Island County
Washington (Seattle: University
of Washington Press, 1980), Richard White examines the impact of Native
Americans, early settlers, loggers, and twentieth-century industrialists on the
landscape, concluding that both the land and the people emerged in poorer shape
for all their efforts. Donald Worster combined environmental history, political
history, and business history to examine power relations in Rivers of
Empire: Water, Aridity, and the
Growth of the American West (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1985).
William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (New
York: W.W. Norton, 1991) is a
masterful work that provides a thought-provoking new model of frontier economic
and regional development with an urban area at the core rather than developing
at the end of the process.
The New Western History
included interdisciplinary scholarship, including geographer D.W. Meinig’s
Southwest: Three Peoples in
Geographical Change, 1600-1700 [i.e. 1600-1970] (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971) and his
four-volume work, The Shaping of America: A Geographical Perspective on 500 years
of History (New Haven, Conn:
Yale University Press, 1986-1998).
Others studies to consult include John Stilgoe’s Common Landscape of
America, 1580-1845 (New Haven, Conn.:
Yale University Press, 1982) and John A. Jackle’s Images of the Ohio
Valley: A Historical Geography of
Travel, 1740 to 1860 (New York:
Oxford University Press, 1977).
Readers looking
for the latest general overviews of the history of migration and settlement in
North America should consult Richard White, ”It’s Your Misfortune and None of
My Own”: A New History of the
American West (Norman:
University of Oklahoma Press, 1991); Gregory H. Nobles, American
Frontiers: Cultural Encounters and
Continental Conquest (New York:
Hill and Wang, 1997); Robert V. Hine and John Mack Faragher, The
American West: A New Interpretive
History (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 2000); and Eric Hinderaker and Peter C. Mancall, At the
Edge of Empire: The Backcountry in
British North America (Baltimore:
Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003). Gerald McFarland provides the story of
one family’s generational moves across each frontier over the course of 200
years in A Scattered People: An
American Family Moves West (New York:
Pantheon Books, 1985).
The Frontier of Colonial
and Revolutionary America
During the 1980s, the
backcountry emerged as one of the hottest fields in both frontier history and
the history of early America. Scholars began to chronicle what
happened as the colonists expanded beyond the Atlantic seaboard into the western
Carolinas, western Virginia and Pennsylvania, and into northern New
England. As Gregory H. Nobles explains in “Breaking into the
Backcountry: New Approaches to the
Early American Frontier,” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd
ser., 46 (October 1989): 641-70, this new generation got busy examining a key
paradox of frontier history:
eastern leaders and western entrepreneurs wanted to integrate the economy
and society of new territories into the larger Atlantic world, but while
settlers themselves shared these goals in many ways, they also sought
independence. Rather than a simple
tale of economic and democratic progress, frontier history became a story of
competing visions and strategies as farmers, eastern merchants, and western
developers all did battle for control over the process of territorial
expansion.
In The Evolution of
the Southern Backcountry: A Case
Study of Lunenburg County, Virginia, 1746-1832 (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1984),
Richard R. Beeman chronicles the way in which society changed as residents
switched from tobacco to cotton production. Many scholars have made note of the
intersection of backcountry history with that of the American Revolution—see
Gentry and Common Folk:
Political Culture on a Virginia Frontier, 1740-1789 (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1991) by
Albert H. Tillson and An Uncivil War:
The Southern Backcountry during the American Revolution
(Charlottesville: University Press
of Virginia, 1985), edited by Ronald Hoffman, Thad W. Tate, and Peter J.
Albert. In The Planting of New
Virginia: Settlement and Landscape in the
Shenandoah Valley (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 2004),
Warren R. Hofstra follows the fortunes of one region as the residents first
settled the area, began to exchange goods and services among themselves, and
then began to build stronger ties to international markets back east.
Books that focus on the
economic transformation of western Pennsylvania
include Valley of Opportunity: Economic Culture Along the Upper
Susquehanna, 1700-1800 (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1991) by Peter C. Mancall. It is a short, readable account that
traces the evolution of land use and cultural interaction starting with the
Susquehanna Indians, moving on to the arrival of American colonists pushing
west, and finishing with the impact of the American Revolution and the growth of
markets afterwards. R. Eugene
Harper’s The Transformation of Western Pennsylvania, 1770-1800
(Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press) is not as deftly presented, but readers may be surprised at
the number of people who descended upon Pittsburgh and its hinterland over such
a short time, and the way in which entrepreneurs consolidated power and began to
construct commercial networks from the start.
New England’s frontier has not been neglected. Battles between absentee landowners and
settlers seeking land they claimed by working it are the subject of a pair of
books: Alan Taylor’s Liberty Men
and Great Proprietors: The
Revolutionary Settlement on the Maine Frontier, 1760-1820 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1990) and Michael A. Bellesiles’s Revolutionary Outlaws: Ethan Allen and the Struggle for
Independence on the Early American Frontier (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia,
1993). Laurel Thatcher Ulrich turns
from the struggle of men to the life of one woman on the Maine frontier in A
Midwife’s Tale: The Life of Martha Ballard, based on her Diary, 1785-1812
(New York, Knopf, 1990). Ballard’s
story makes fascinating reading, and through her eyes readers become involved in
family life as Martha moves from being a mother to a grandmother, and then
struggles alone when her husband is imprisoned for debt. Along the way readers can also ford
raging rivers to reach needy patients, attend a rape trial, and see male doctors
push midwives aside. William
Wyckoff’s The Developer’s Frontier:
The Making of the Western New York Landscape (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988) and Alan Taylor’s William Cooper’s
Town: Power and Persuasion on the
Frontier of the Early American Republic (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1995) provide readers with
accounts of the goals and roles of town developers and boosters who paved the
way for the farmers who came after.
At roughly the same
time that backcountry scholarship emerged, ethnohistory made itself felt. This is the practice of carefully
combining information gleaned from European sources with the theories and models
of anthropology to reconstruct the world of early Native Americans who left no
written records. Scholars who
refined this approach have written at length about what happened as the
eighteenth century progressed when colonists abandoned trade with Indian nations
in favor of taking their land. In
the The Dividing Paths:
Cherokees and South Carolinians through the Era of Revolution (New
York: Oxford University Press,
1993), Tom Hatley provides the most straight forward account of this
evolution. Claudio Saunt’s A New
Order of Things: Property, Power,
and the Transformation of the Creek Indians, 1733-1816 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1999)
explores how entry into European markets changed the way Creek Indians governed
themselves and their families. In
The Indians’ New World: Catawbas
and their Neighbors from European Contact through the Era of Removal (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 1989), James H. Merrell focuses on how refugees of tribes weakened or
destroyed by contact with Europeans came together to form a new nation. Theda Perdue concentrates on women’s
history in Cherokee Women:
Gender and Culture Change, 1700-1835 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1998).
Others have
focused their attention on the Pennsylvania frontier. Council Fires on the Upper Ohio: A
Narrative of Indian Affairs in the Upper Ohio
Valley until 1795
(Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1940) by Randolph C. Downes remains one of most
interesting and detailed accounts from the Indian point of view. Downes is not afraid to find humor in
some of the situations, and he casts an equally critical and discerning eye on
the strategies of Indians and whites.
It is the Indians who are the pioneers on the move in Michael N.
McConnell’s A Country Between:
The Upper
Ohio Valley and its Peoples, 1724-1774
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1992). Pushed west by
European encroachment, the Delaware Indians erected a new society on the
Ohio only to
have colonists follow and take the land from them once again. In At the Crossroads: Indians and Empires on a Mid-Atlantic
Frontier, 1700-1763 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2003), Jane T. Merritt focuses her energy on
an analysis of the religious images, dream landscapes, and language that marked
the rise of racism between Indian and white neighbors, culminating in atrocities
by both sides during the Seven Years’ War.
The Trans-Appalachian
Frontier
As colonists
from British North America pushed west into the Ohio Valley
in the 1750s, they helped spark the Seven Years’ War between Great Britain and France as the two empires did battle over who
would control the interior of North
America. After the
Revolution, settlement by the newly independent United
States began in earnest. The two best overviews of westward
expansion into all the states between the original thirteen colonies and the
Mississippi River are Reginald Horseman, The
Frontier in the Formative Years, 1783-1815 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1970) and
Malcolm J. Rohrbough, The Trans-Appalachian West: People, Societies, and Institutions,
1775-1850 (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1978).
Andrew R. L. Cayton theorizes that federal aid in expelling Native
Americans north of the river coupled with neglect to the south created the early
foundations for hostility between the sections in “’Separate Interests’ and the
Nation-State: The Washington
Administration and the Origins of Regionalism in the Trans-Appalachian West,”
Journal of American History, 79 (June 1992), 39-67. In The Urban Frontier: Pioneer Life in Early Pittsburgh,
Cincinnati, Lexington, Louisville, and St. Louis (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1964),
Richard C. Wade provides a necessary corrective to histories that emphasize
farmers to the exclusion of other topics.
Kim M. Gruenwald follows his lead with River of Enterprise:
The Commercial Origins of Regional Identity in the Ohio Valley,
1790-1850 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2002), a study
of merchants and their networks of trade.
Gruenwald traces the economic ties that bound residents north and south
of the river in cities and towns large and small into a cohesive region called
the Western Country before the rise of the abolition movement helped transform
the Ohio River from an avenue of trade to a
boundary between North and South.
To compare and contrast relationships between settlers and Native
Americans across time and space in the trans-Appalachian West, readers should
consult Contact Points: American
Frontiers from the Mohawk
Valley to the Mississippi,
1750-1830 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1998) edited by Andrew R. L. Cayton
and Fredrika J. Teute.
Those wishing to delve
into the history of the Old Northwest should begin with The Old Northwest:
Pioneer Period, 1815-1840 (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1950) by R.
Carlyle Buley. This is a massive
and detailed 2-volume work that is eminently readable and very well
indexed. Buley includes chapters on
land policy, the daily lives of pioneers, western society, politics, religion,
education, all things economic, and more.
Next they may wish to turn to Peter S. Onuf’s Statehood and
Union: A History of the Northwest
Ordinance (Bloomington: Indiana
University Press, 1987). Onuf
focuses on the ambiguous nature of the ordinance’s antislavery provision that
created little controversy when enacted, but evolved into a source of friction
as time went by. Northern and
southerner settlers with differing ideas of how a new territory and state should
be run do battle in Andrew R. L. Cayton’s The Frontier Republic: Ideology and Politics in the Ohio
Country, 1780-1825 (Kent, Ohio:
Kent State University Press, 1986) and Nicole Etcheson’s The Emerging
Midwest: Upland Southerners and the
Political Culture of the Old Northwest, 1787-1861 (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996). Richard Lyle Power takes the story
further, examining the interaction between a new influx of Yankees and Ohioans
of southern stock after the opening of the Erie
Canal in 1825 in Planting Corn Belt Culture: The Impress of the Upland Southerner and
Yankee in the Old Northwest (Indianapolis: Indiana Historical Society, 1953). Donald J. Ratcliffe claims that his
Party Spirit in a Frontier Republic:
Democratic Politics in Ohio, 1793-1821 (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1998) is
old-fashioned political history, but there’s nothing old-fashioned about the way
he examines the strong ties Ohioans retained with easterners—his frontier is not
an isolated one. An in-depth, local
study of northern society in the West can be found in Susan E. Gray’s The
Yankee West: Community Life on the
Michigan Frontier (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1996).
Though it may be argued
that the Ohio River was not really a boundary
between sections within mainstream society before the 1830s, there’s no denying
that it was always just that from the African American perspective. Readers should begin with Stephen
Vincent, Southern Seed, Northern Soil:
African American Farm Communities in the Midwest, 1765-1900
(Bloomington: Indiana University
Press, 1999) for an excellent study of the interaction between African Americans
and their white neighbors north of the Ohio
River. Juliet K.
Walker’s Free Frank: A Black
Pioneer on the Antebellum Frontier (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983)
chronicles the story of a man who moved from Kentucky to Illinois to engage in land ventures.
There are many
excellent studies of the pan-Indian movement that developed in response to white
encroachment west of the Appalachians,
including A Spirited Resistance:
The North American Indian Struggle for Unity, 1745-1815
(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins
University Press, 1993) by Gregory Evans Dowd. For a more in-depth biography of one of
the movement’s leaders, readers should turn to The Shawnee Prophet
(Lincoln: University of Nebraska
Press, 1983), an excellent examination of the role of Tecumseh’s brother,
Tenskwatawa, by R. David Edmunds.
Relationships between Native Americans and white settlers—both economic
and familial—are the focus of Lucy Eldersveld Murphy’s A Gathering of
Rivers: Indians, Metis, and Mining
in the Western Great Lakes, 1737-1832 (Lincoln:
University
of Nebraska Press,
2000). She highlights the changing
patterns of white encroachment and the strategies that Indians adopted to combat
it.
As for Kentucky, Elizabeth A.
Perkins delved into the memories recorded by a mid-nineteenth century chronicler
to explore the mental territory of the earliest settlers in Border Life: Experience and Memory in the
Revolutionary Ohio Valley (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
1998). In “The Consumer
Frontier: Household Consumption in
Early Kentucky,” Journal of American History, 78 (September 1991):
486-510, Perkins added more weight to notions of strong connections binding East
and West that modify earlier models that emphasize isolation. In The Buzzel
About Kentuck: Settling the
Promised Land (Lexington:
University Press of Kentucky, 1999) Craig Thompson Friend assembles a
variety of studies by scholars of early Kentucky, and in Along the Maysville
Road: The Early American Republic
in the Trans-Appalachian West (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2005), he
focuses his attention on the evolution of society along the most important route
from the Ohio River to the Kentucky Bluegrass. Stephen Aron’s How the West Was
Lost: The Transformation of
Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996)
provides the best account of the evolution of Kentucky settlement and society.
As for the cotton
frontier, in The Ruling Race: A
History of American Slaveholders (New York, Knopf, 1982), James Oakes
provides an interesting analysis of the way ordinary settlers expected slavery
to help them get ahead as they moved west.
In order to compare this view with that of the planters themselves, see
James David Miller, South by Southwest:
Planter Emigration and Identity in the Slave South
(Charlottsville: University of Virginia Press, 2002). History from the bottom of the economic
ladder is ably recounted in Charles C. Bolton’s Poor Whites of the Antebellum
South: Tenants and Laborers in
Central North Carolina and Northeast Mississppi (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1994). For in-depth local histories, see Edward
E. Baptist, Creating an Old South:
Middle Florida’s Plantation Frontier before the Civil War (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2002); Donald P. McNeilly, The Old South Frontier: Cotton Plantations and the Formation of
Arkansas Society, 1819-1861 (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2000);
Daniel S. Dupre, Transforming the Cotton Frontier: Madison County, Alabama, 1800-1840
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State
University Press, 1997); and Willam Oates Ragsdale, They Sought a Land: A Settlement in the Arkansas River
Valley, 1840-1870 (Fayetteville:
University of Arkansas Press, 1997). Kinship networks and sex roles take
center stage in Joan E. Cashin’s A Family Venture: Men & Women on the Southern Cotton
Frontier (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1991).
The intersection
between westward movement from the Appalachians to the Mississippi and the
religious revivals of the first half of the nineteenth century can be found in a
trio of books: Ellen Eslinger,
Citizens of Zion: The Social
Origins of Camp Meeting Revivalism (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1999);
Christine Leigh Heyrman, Southern Cross: The Beginnings of the Bible Belt
(New York: Knopf, 1977); and Nathan
O. Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven,
Conn: Yale University Press, 1989).
Expansion Beyond the Mississippi River
The first migration and
settlement of Europeans into North America came from the South and began west of
the Mississippi River—the Spanish came north from Mexico before the English settled Jamestown. For an overview of the topic from
Spanish exploration in the early sixteenth century through Mexico’s independence in 1819,
readers should consult David J. Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North
America (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1992). Elizabeth
Ann Harper John expands the story to include a third group in Storms Brewed
in Other Men’s Worlds: The
Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the South, 1540-1795
(College Station: Texas A&M
University Press, 1975).
Captives and Cousins:
Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel
Hill: University of North Carolina
Press, 2002) by James F. Brooks spans 400 years and focuses on the evolution of
how Indians, Spaniards, and Americans dealt with captives in turn and how they
interacted with each other. As for
the New Western History, William DeBuys focuses on environmental history and
differing cultural values pertaining to land use among Native Americans,
Hispanics, and Anglo Americans in Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico
Moutain Range (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1985).
As for the
Lone Star State,
David Montejano’s Anglos and Mexicans in the Making of Texas, 1836-1936
(Austin: University of Texas Press,
1987) presents an excellent overview.
Recent books include Mark M. Carroll, Homesteads Ungovernable: Families, Sex, Race, and the Law in
Frontier Texas, 1823-1860 (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 2001) and Walter Struve, Germans &
Texans: Commerce, Migration, and
Culture in the Days of the Lone Star
Republic (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1996).
For an overview of how
westward migration affected Native Americans, readers should start with Robert
Utley, The Indian Frontier of the American West, 1846-1890
(Albuquerque: University of New
Mexico Press, 1984). Of course
Indians were pioneers, too, and William G. McLoughlin takes on the topic of how
they adapted to the arid West in After the Trail of Tears: The Cherokeess Struggle for Sovereignty,
1839-1880 (Chapel Hill:
University of North Carolina Press, 1993). Colin G. Calloway has edited a
collection of Native American accounts of westward expansion so that readers can
read about their point of view in their own words in Our Hearts Fell to the
Ground: Plains Indian Views of How
the West Was Lost (Boston:
Bedford Books/St. Martin’s Press, 1996).
For books that focus on
the journey west itself, readers can turn to John Mack Faragher’s Women and
Men on the Overland Trail (New Haven:
Yale University Press, 1979) and John D. Unruh’s The Plains
Across: The Overland Emigrants and
the Trans-Mississippi West, 1840-60 (Urbana: University of Illinois Press,
1979). Readers can find many
scholars that focus on the trials and tribulations of farmers once they arrived,
including Allan G. Bogue, From Prairie to Corn Belt: Farming on the Illinois and Iowa
Prairies in the Nineteenth Century (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1963) and
Gilbert C. Fite, The Farmers’ Frontier, 1865-1900 (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1966).
For the nuts and bolts
of the development of mining in the West, Rodman W. Paul’s Mining Frontiers
of the Far West, 1848-1880 (New York : Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1963) is
considered a classic, and it was reissued in 2001 by the University of New Mexico Press with three new chapters
by historian Elliot West. Many,
many published first-person accounts of the Gold Rush can be had by interested
readers, but J. S. Holliday’s The World Rushed In: The California Gold Rush Experience
(New York: Simon & Schuster,
1981) is a special one. The diary
of William Swain who went west seeking gold in 1849 and returned home to western
New York two years later is complemented by carefully rendered maps and the
inclusion of seventeen illustrations drawn by another man on the trail—Joseph
Goldsborough Bruff. Bruff’s
pictures are grand, yet unsentimental, and really allow readers to see the trail
to California
through the eyes of participants.
The best current scholarly treatments of the Gold Rush include Malcolm J.
Rohrbough, Days of Gold: The
California Gold Rush and the American Nation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997)
and a collection of essays edited by Kevin Starr and Richard J. Orsi--Rooted
in Barbarous Soil: People, Culture,
and Community in Gold Rush California (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2000). As for the way that society
evolved once the rush ended, readers should turn to Ralph Mann’s After the
Gold Rush: Society in
Grass Valley and Nevada City, California, 1849-1870 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1982).
Americans were
on the trail to Oregon before the Civil War, too. The Pacific
Northwest’s history is different in some ways from the rest of the
trans-Mississippi West because it is not an arid land. The most important studies include John
Fahey, The Inland Empire:
Unfolding Years, 1879-1929 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1986);
Katherine G. Morrissey, Mental
Territories: Mapping the Inland
Empire (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1997); Dean L.
May, Three Frontiers: Family,
Land, and Society in the American West, 1850-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and
Peter G. Boag, Environment and Experience: Settlement and Culture in
Nineteenth-Century Oregon (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1992). As for the Native American point of view
on all this change, readers may turn to Alvin M. Josephy’s The Nez Perce
Indians and the Opening of the Northwest (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971.)
One of the main
objections to Turner’s frontier thesis voiced by many scholars was his emphasis
on the rugged individual. A wealth
of community studies emerged that told a different story. Susan Sessions Rugh writes about an
Illinois town in which New Englanders, southerners, and settlers from the
mid-Atlantic states competed for land and markets in Our Common Country: Family Farming, Culture, and Community
in the Nineteenth-Century Midwest (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). John Mack Faragher once again focuses on
issues of gender in Sugar Creek:
Life on the Illinois Prairie (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1986), and also
posits the interesting idea that there existed a persistent, small core of
settlers in frontier towns that controled things while the majority picked up
and moved on to greener pastures on a regular basis. For in-depth local histories of ethnic
communities readers can turn to a trio of books: Jon Gjerde, From Peasants to
Farmers: The Migration from
Balestrand, Norway to the Upper Middle West (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985);
Royden Loewen, Family, Church, and Market: A Mennonite Community in the Old and New
Worlds, 1850-1930 (Toronto:
University of Toronto Press, 1993); and Frederick C. Luebke, European
Immigrants in the American West:
Community Histories (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1998). Of
course one of the groups that set itself apart most clearly were the Mormons,
and their history can be explored in Newell G. Bringhurst,
Brigham Young and the Expanding American Frontier (Boston: Little, Brown, 1985) and Klaus J.
Hansen, Mormonism and the American Experience (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981). Readers will have no trouble finding
books about cowboys, but should balance such fare with Robert R. Dykstra’s
The
Cattle Towns
(New York: Knopf, 1968) for
business concerns and life at the end of the trail.
The experiences
of women in the West are ably examined in Anne M. Butler, Daughters of Joy,
Sisters of Misery: Prostitutes in
the American West, 1865-90 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 1985) and Sandra L. Myres, Westering
Women and the Frontier Experience, 1800-1915 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
1982). New Mexico
Women: Intercultural
Perspectives (Albuquerque:
University of New Mexico Press, 1986) edited by Joan M. Jensen and Darlis
A. Miller, is a wonderful collection of essays that span the period from the
first Spanish incursions through the twentieth century. For a collection of biographies, turn to
Glenda Riley and Richard W. Etulain, eds, By Grit & Grace: Eleven Women who Shaped the American
West (Golden, Co.: Fulcrum
Pub., 1997).
Overviews of African
Americans who ventured west include Quintard Taylor, In Search of the Racial
Frontier: African Americans in the
American West, 1528-1990 (New York:
Norton, 1998) and Monroe Lee Billington and Roger D. Hardaway, African
Americans on the Western Frontier (Niwot: University Press of Colorado,
1998). For more detailed community
studies, consult Nell Painter, Exodusters: Black Migration to Kansas after
Reconstruction (New York:
Knopf, 1977) and Quintard Taylor, The Forging of a Black
Community: Seattle’s Central
District from 1870 through the Civil Rights Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press,
1994).
The Asian
experience is examined in general in Jack Chen, The Chinese of America
(San Francisco: Harper & Row,
1980), and more particularly and locally in Liping Zhu, A Chinaman’s
Chance: The Chinese on the Rocky
Mountain Mining Frontier (Niwot:
University Press of Colorado, 1997) and Yong Chen, Chinese San
Francisco, 1850-1943: A
Trans-Pacific Community (Stanford:
Stanford University Press, 2000).
Some historians have begun exploring issues of race more generally. Their work includes Najia Aarim-Heriot,
Chinese Immigrants, African Americans, and Racial Anxiety in the United
States, 1848-82 (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2003) and Arnoldo De Leon, Racial
Frontiers: Africans, Chinese, and
Mexicans in Western America, 1848-1890 (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press,
2002).
Resources
There are many
resources available for those who would like to find out more about the numerous
topics that pertain to the history of migration and settlement in the United
States before they settle down to hone in on the topics that interest them
most. Reference works include
Howard R. Lamar, ed., The New Encyclopedia of the American West (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1998)
which includes entries that pertain to all 50 states; Clyde A. Milner II, Carol
A. O’Connor, Martha A. Sandweiss, eds, The Oxford History of the American
West (New York: Oxford
University Press, 1994); Sucheng Chan, ed., Peoples of Color in the American
West (Lexington, Mass.: D.C.
Heath and Co., 1994); and the four-volume Encyclopedia of Frontier
Biography (Glendale, Calif:
A.H. Clark Co., 198801994), edited by Dan L. Thrapp. Scholarly journals to consult include
the Western Historical Quarterly and the Journal of the Early
Republic.
Conclusion
As the New Western
History took hold, some began to disparage the concept of the frontier by
referring to it as the “’F’ word.”
Scholars dismissed Turner’s definition of a frontier as the line between
civilization and savagery and most began studying the West as a place. There’s no doubt that Turner had the
story wrong: the wilderness
wasn’t an empty place waiting to be conquered; Indians played a much more
critical role than that of obstacles to be overcome, and they certainly didn’t
disappear; individualism and self-sufficiency weren’t all they were cracked up
to be--the role of government and big business proved to be critical, and most
moved west (or north or east) in groups for support; ethnic differences did not
disappear; and power and domination arose along with democracy. But Turner was on the right track, and
he had the right idea. From the
mid-eighteenth century onward, Americans were obsessed with expansion as they
gazed west from the Atlantic. For many, independence and a rise in
status didn’t wait just over the horizon, but the fact that Americans believed
it did proved to be a powerful motivator even if the reality didn’t always
measure up to the vision. Turner
presented the history of the frontier as a tale of triumph, but in fact the real
story of complex human interaction among whites, Indians, Hispanics, blacks,
Asians, men, women, farmers, land speculators, businessmen, politicians, and all
the rest is much more interesting and has much more to tell us about how the
United States that we know today came to be.