And the Indians? On the North Pacific Coast, they were viewed as a people whose culture was going or gone, whose society would soon cease to exist. California and the Willamette Valley of Oregon were long viewed as lands of agricultural plenty but much of the coast was blanketed in huge and impenetrable forest. The Pacific Coast is well watered, sometimes quite damp. Oddly enough, this is not the frontier that could be found at the far western edge of our nation. It once had Indians and buffalo, but those have vanished, leaving hard-handed sons of toil, some cowboys, a few miners, a few deer and antelope. The frontier can be a mental realm of new ideas, ideas about space and time and the origins of the world.įor many Americans, what was "the frontier" is, geographically, that land west of the Missouri River that is characterized as dry, perhaps even arid, where crops grow with a struggle and where cattle range freely, searching for water and feed. It can be the idea of a place, something more ambiguous: a frontier is a place where you are on your own, where the rules are not yet made. Sometimes it is a particular territory, such as the North American continent west of the Missouri River. The idea of a "frontier," of a place that is an edge between the known and the unknown, the settled and the wild, has a prominent place in American history.
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