Copyright 1999 Adam Barnhart. All Rights Reserved. Fair use of this document.

American identity, character, and socio-political development have long existed as areas of great debate among historians and non-historians alike. Causative functions and other explanatory mechanisms of the American experience can be found throughout the writings of luminaries such as Thomas Jefferson, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Alexis de Tocqueville. In contemporary historiography, perhaps the best-known theoretical model is Frederick Jackson Turner's "frontier thesis," offered first in his 1893 essay "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" and published later in his The Frontier in American History collection. His work, a repudiation of the Eurocentrism of late nineteenth-century historians, served as a rallying point for historians pro and con in the subsequent 100 years. For those amenable to Turner's thesis, the frontier became a mechanism for explaining American exceptionalism and/or establishing a progressive framework that gave non-elites a place in history. For those in opposition to Turner, the "frontier" lacked clear operational definition and failed to extend agency to American Indians, coming to be seen as a haphazard intellectual construct. As Turner's framework gradually fell into disuse, "New Western" historians have posited new schema which have elaborated the role of the Indian population in defining the frontier, the relevance of geographic and ecological complexity, and the interaction of European actors on the North American stage. While the term itself is subject to great debate, the frontier continues to have, as Andrew Cayton and Fredrika Teute argue, great "significance...as a critical organizing principle in the history of North America."¹

As a heavily theoretical concept, the notion of the frontier has received considerable specific critical attention Kerwin Klein drolly observes that "the ritual flagellation of Frederick Jackson Turner has become a popular scholarly pastime" ² and undergone concomitant change as an "organizing principle" since its introduction. While the theory enjoyed considerable success in its expansion during the first half of the twentieth century in the hands of scholars including Merle Curti and Walter Prescott Webb, by mid-century the deterioration of frontier theory had begun, a process realized in full by the "Gang of Four," Patricia Limerick, Donald Worster, Richard White, and William Cronon. With the legitimacy of traditional Western history beginning to fail, the frontier as a scholarly tool is restructured, reflecting changes in the broader practice of history, including an emphasis on ethnohistory and a more specific interdisciplinary orientation, reflective of the emergence of Cultural Studies. With the introduction of culture, historians become better able discuss specific rather than theoretical phenomena, shifting the content of frontier history towards ethnicity and specific cultural and economic practices. Specifically, frontier history shifts from a focus on the changes geography forced in the way Europeans behaved to the writing of narratives addressing the apocalyptic experience of the Indians and the way the world they occupied changed when forced to deal with the Europeans, a world of the making of both Indian and European groups.

Prior to 1893, the story of the settlement of North America focused itself on the east, to the importation of European values and practices to the North American continent, where they were molded to form the core of the American nation. The historiography of the period, in emphasizing this view, according to Joseph Schafer, "was descriptive, emotional, hortatory, and pragmatic or pedagogical."³ By emphasizing the European tradition, one in which America's organization was formed from the "germs" of European society, a "great man" theory of history was advanced, where the United States was seen as a logical extension of notions of liberty and sovereignty advanced in England and France.

Turner's work broke with this tradition, locating North American exceptionalism as a western phenomenon. Turner states this most clearly at the outset of "The Significance of the Frontier in American History":

In a recent bulletin of the superintendent of the census for 1890 appear these significant words: "Up to and including 1880 the country has a frontier of settlement, but at the 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 cannot, 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.⁴

Using this construct, Turner creates a framework different in type from previous historical treatments in its interdisciplinary nature, drawing from geography, anthropology, sociology, and economics. Turner's emphasis is theoretical, looking for a means of explaining American democracy and development, rather than the factual, descriptive orientation of historians of the previous generation such as George Bancroft and Herbert Baxter Adams. His focus on the largest scale was distinctive; as Avery Craven argues, "He (Turner) was not concerned with facts for their own sake; he was interested only in their meaning, in the light they shed on the larger social evolution."⁵

Despite his desire to form a forward-looking intellectual framework, Turner employs an ephemeral definition of "frontier." The definition of the frontier underpinning the census declaration Turner refers to at the beginning of "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," the division between the occupation of land by fewer than two people (of European ancestry) per square mile and more than two people per square mile, is one that Turner largely eschews in favor of vaguer notions of intersection between Euro-American and Indian populations. Throughout, however, Turner is interested in separating the American frontier from Europe, arguing, "It is not the European frontier -- a fortified boundary running through dense populations. The most significant thing about it is that it lies at the hither edge of free land."⁶ Issues such as proportions of indigenous to European populations, patterns of trade, and land ownership are not examined in great detail, Turner deferring to popular notions of the constitution of the frontier.

For Turner, definitions of the frontier rested largely on the activities carried out on the land. The frontier provided a largely untapped source of material riches in an area not yet occupied by European settlement, carrying a correspondingly inexpensive price to settle upon. In this schema, westward migration provided a mechanism for improving one's lot in life, by exploiting the wealth of the land. Social units on the frontier were much smaller and more diffuse, giving primacy to the individual and familial units. This individualism promoted a broader pragmatic nature that played a central role in the formation of community over time.

In Turner's thesis, the Native American population is a savage population, integral to the frontier experience as one of the contributing factors shaping the worldly, material, pragmatic orientation of the West. Described as a "consolidating agent,"⁷ the Indian population forced a solidification of European-American military might and purpose, countering the threat of Indian attack. Indians play other limited roles in the frontier narrative, as guides on military expeditions and as developers of tools indigenous to the local geography. Ultimately, Turner relegates Indians to a position of being a part of the land; one of the mitigating factors of the spread of Euro-American civilization.

The community and socio-political and economic interaction of the frontier, according to Turner, yielded American democracy. Rather than borrowing heavily from the European democratic tradition, he saw the American democratic tradition in a Jacksonian light, where opportunity in an unexploited environment leveled the stage for all the actors of the frontier. In a socio-political environment comprised almost wholly of common men, the frontier provided for a democracy of opportunity. The diffuse nature of economic success and leverage in the freedom of the frontier afforded a greater number of men access to the political world that coexisted with the frontier economy. The frontier not only an established an environment for a comparatively unrestrained existence, but gave economic and political options to those in more urban environments, spreading the impact of frontier liberty back through the east.

In the implementation of an egalitarian social structure based on the leveling impact of the frontier and the development of political cognates to frontier existence, an American national identity emerges. In arguing that "the advance of American settlement westward explain American development," Turner equates the American character with the frontiersman and explains its uniqueness in terms of pragmatism, labor, and a materially-based existence. Life on the frontier altered the European conventions brought over and shaped new patterns of behavior that allowed the people in wilderness lands to subsist, coexist, and, ultimately, profit. Those practices which benefitted these small social units and subunits most were written into the larger narrative of American practice and identity. As Turner states:

Our early history is the study of European germs developing in an American environment...It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization, and arrays him in the hunting shirt and moccasin...In shirt, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man...Little by little he transforms the wilderness but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs...The fact is that here is a new product that is American. Thus the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. And to study this advance, the men who grew up under these conditions, and the political, economic, and social results of it, is to study the really American part of our history.⁸

The democratizing impact of the frontier is implicit throughout the work of one of Turner's most prominent students, Merle Curti. While Turner's work had been relentlessly theoretical, almost wholly unconcerned with specific applications, Curti's work extended the frontier thesis toward history-as-social-science, where he "attempted to derive and test a series of predictable hypotheses from Turner's frontier thesis."⁹ The best known of these historiometric efforts, The Making of an American Community: A Case Study of Democracy in a Frontier County, published in 1959, studied the growth of Trempeleau county, located in the heart of Turner's Wisconsin frontier. Focusing on issues including income and land ownership during the mid- to late-1800s, Curti found a growth in wealth throughout the community, cutting across demographic lines, validating, for Curti, Turner's belief that the frontier was, in fact, a profoundly democratic social environment.

Curti framed many of these notions of egalitarianism in his Pulitzer Prize-winning 1943 work, The Growth of American Thought. While much of the book is dedicated to the adaptation of European ideas and the content of democracy, the frontier provides a subtext as the environment for the adopted tropes of European thought to realize themselves as uniquely American phenomena.¹⁰ His 1955 book, Probing Our Past, includes a specific discussion of Turner and his contribution to the field, including an extension of frontier theory as a possible explanation of capitalism, adroitly casting Turner's argument in the same light as that of Charles Beard, who had criticized Turner for his focus on agrarian issues. For Curti, Turner's work played a seminal role in forming subsequent Progressive thought, citing Carl Becker, another former student of Turner, who had adopted strains of Turnerian thought in his essay "Kansas"¹¹ as an example of its conceptual centrality and flexibility. In further advancing the notion of the frontier as intellectual construct in the early- to mid-1900s, no scholar played a more pivotal role than Walter Prescott Webb. Webb's work, focusing on the primacy of geography, gave the notion of frontier a more deterministic outlook, while relating the conceptual underpinnings of frontier to notions of social development. In The Great Frontier, which extends the frontier well beyond the bounds of Turner's work, Webb examines the whole of modernity through the lens of Turnerian theory. Employing clear notions of civilization (Western Europe and its political derivatives) and savagery (everyone else), Webb depicts a triumphant history that marks a steady growth of liberty, independence, and individualism beginning in Western Europe and spreading throughout the world.¹²

Breaking with the emphasis on the frontier as a shaper of ideology and establishing an orientation of frontier as a function of culture, Henry Nash Smith's Virgin Land: The American West as Myth and Symbol anticipates the advent of "New Western" and "New Indian" history. Virgin Land, by placing the geographic elements of the frontier in a subordinate role to the role of consciousness in history, created a history of the frontier reflecting the work of Perry Miller, who had argued against the geographic determinism of Turner by offering an ideological history of colonial America. Smith linked ideology to culture in the form of myth, arguing for history as an intellectual framework of symbols embedded in culture.¹³ Smith's work freed historians from notions of historical inevitability, refocusing the history of the frontier on the specifics of culture and the actions taken by various European and Indian groups when faced with the need to interact. A less celebratory history than that of that of the Turnerians, the extensions of cultural history allow the telling of a non-Eurocentric history that yields the beginnings of the New Indian history that followed, including Dee Brown's Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, published in 1970. While Virgin Land utilized myth and ideology as theoretical constructs, the impact of the book was one of reduction, limiting the scope of the historical survey, bringing in notions of microhistory and ethnography.

More a "New Indian" than a "New Western" history, ethnography plays a major role in Francis Jennings' The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest. Attacking the civilization/savage dichotomy of the frontier thesis and its attendant evolutionary structure and borrowing from Smith in its denotation as "myth," Jennings argues:

the grand myth is fallacious because there never were such absolutes as "savagery" and "civilization" (considered as savagery's antithesis) that play the myth's active roles; there was accordingly no triumph of civilization and no death of savagery; there was nothing in the product of the events to make their survivors inherently superior to mankind elsewhere; only the events unwilled by human agency were inevitable.¹⁴

Stripping colonial New England of the teleology of the frontier narrative, the arch of colonial history becomes one of competing cultures and conquest, where the European culture, over a period of time, implements a forced acculturation of the Indian groups it comes into contact with, as a result of uneven power relationships and aggressivity on the part of the Europeans. In place of the traditional frontier, Francis Jennings argues for the "reciprocal discovery" of Indian and European populations, emphasizing the "symbiotic interdependence that prevailed between the two societies in North America for well over two centuries."¹⁵

Rather than focusing solely on the specific actions of conquest, as a "traditional" elaboration of Indian-European interaction would prior to the advent of American and Cultural Studies, The Invasion of America emphasizes the role of language as a historical tool, framing the course of conquest and reflecting the ideology implicit in the colonial period. Reacting to extant literature addressing the Puritans and the broader European legacy in a manner similar to Dee Brown, perhaps even Howard Zinn, Jennings asserts, "I have found no substantiation for the filiopietist portrayal of them in a semidivine state superior even to the humanity of the garden variety of civilized people."¹⁶ In Jennings' treatment, various native populations are demonized, emasculated, and reduced to inhuman status to validate colonial claims of right to the land and resources of the Indians. Focusing on the Indian loss of life, property, and sovereignty, The Invasion of America is an early (1975) example of the history of the colonial frontier as one of holocaust, rather than the spread of civilization.

The extension of Indian agency and the complexity of native and European interaction led to an attack on the notion of "frontier" itself. Patricia Limerick's The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West argues that the "frontier is an unsubtle concept in a subtle world," used in a triumphant history told by enfranchised Anglo males in a process of self-aggrandizement.¹⁷ Limerick assails the notions of "opening" and "closing" frontiers, instead emphasizing the continual recreation of area histories. While her interest in section ties her to the Turnerian tradition, rather than using sectional history to mark the progress of American settlement, Limerick advocates a use of section that focuses on the activities of specific groups, particularly ethnic groups, within the context of a geographic area. Limerick rejects the use of colonization as process, finding it an technique of exclusivity, preventing the full exploration of diversity, the most crucial element of the history of the western regions. The historical legacy of the frontier is one of heavily politicization, a point she emphasizes in asserting "western history has been an ongoing competition for legitimacy."¹⁸

While "conquest" is used in the same sense as "invasion" is for Francis Jennings, The Legacy of Conquest differs from The Invasion of America in its more theoretical orientation. Through often grounded in specifics, the book concentrates more on the impact of those specifics on the practice of frontier history and less on the context of the issues raised. Limerick attempts, in large part, to dismantle the Turnerian thesis, offering in its place histories of regional "wests" that stress the importance of internecine conflict over time. Above all, regional history provides an instrument for taking the perspectival nature of the many ethnohistories written over the few decades and making them less inchoate without the tyranny of the ethnocentric frontier thesis.

It is to this multifaceted understanding of the frontier that contemporary treatments of the subject have focused. Turner's work most often comes into criticism for its ethnocentrism and failure to recognize the self-determination of Indian populations in interactions with Europeans, while frontier ethnohistory is cited for its ungrounded nature and tendency to assume positions of subaltern advocacy. Publishing three years after The Legacy of Conquest, Richard White, in The Middle Ground, employs the concept of the "middle ground" to depict an environment where native and European populations both worked to form new social and economic structures in a frontier world. Rather than simply focusing on region or a consistent expansion of European civilization to the west, the "middle ground" establishes a geo-political basis for describing European-Indian relationships that allows for economic and cultural dynamism. White uses the French and Algonquians of the early eighteenth-century pays d'en haut as exemplars of this:

Because the French and Algonquians were trading partners and allies, the boundaries of the Algonquian and French worlds melted at the edges and merged. Although identifiable Frenchmen and identifiable Indians obviously continued to exist, whether a particular practice or way of doing things was French or Indian was, after a time, not so clear....They had to arrive at some common conception of suitable ways of acting; they had to create...a middle ground.¹⁹

In establishing a schema allowing for a truly mutually created universe, The Middle Ground gives true agency to the native populations, who possessed the ability to fashion a world via a full range of social, economic, and political alternatives. Rather than standing either as elements of the land to which Europeans responded or as passive recipients of European aggression, the Indians played an active role in the trade, warfare, alliances, and even sexual and familial relations of the region. Fur traders were often forced to observe the rites and customs of specific tribes in order to establish trade with the group, while relationships between European men and Indian women often included living largely within the context of the Indian familial tradition. With a multitude of European settlements scattered throughout the section, "European-Indian alliances in the pays d'en haut...originated and thrived amid a contest of imperial powers." Indian groups enjoyed the ability to establish and renounce alliances between different groups, furthering their own political and economic causes by positioning the Europeans against one another. By maintaining a modicum of power, the Indians were able to sustained a level of military security, promote their trade interests, and partially define the paternal relationship that the Europeans, particularly the French, instituted to orient their responsibility to the native populations.²⁰

The theoretical grounding of White's work, both in The Middle Ground and in It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own: A History of the American West, published later in 1991, eliminates both Turner and the concept of the frontier from the narrative entirely. In utilizing the "middle ground" as the explanatory mechanism for European-Indian interaction, White stresses the importance of the range of possibilities afforded to actors on both sides. The smaller, more ethnographic elements of regional history are advanced to a central position, making differences in culture and ideology a primary point of distinction. While the "middle ground" is, like Limerick's "conquest," a large, synthetic concept, the success it has enjoyed among New Western and New Indian historians has brought an increase in perspectival history and an emphasis on the Indian experience in North America.

Though the anti-frontier slant of the work of Limerick and White has been well-received by a number of scholars, an equally vocal contingent has adopted elements of the frontier construct, while rejecting the implied ethnocentrism of Turner's thesis. Kerwin Klein argues that the institutional baggage associated with term, while unhelpful, creates fewer logistical difficulties that the constructs offered to replace it. Both Limerick's and White's works rest on notions of "west," a term Klein argues is, if anything, more subject to an exploitive and discriminatory history than "frontier." By affixing culture, which Klein argues is popularized more than four decades after Turner introduces the frontier in Ruth Benedict's 1934 book Patterns of Culture, to the concept of the frontier, a more sophisticated reading of the possibilities of the frontier emerges, one which is applicable to the totality of Indian and Euro- American interaction and the concomitant process of acculturation.²¹

Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron recapture the notion of the frontier and introduce it to the parallel concept of the "borderlands" in their 1999 article, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History." In addressing the political context of the frontier, Adelman and Aron argue for a temporal nature of the frontier. This temporal approach, though, avoids the limitation of an "open" and "closed" frontier, based on the introduction of civilization. Rather, Adelman and Aron accent the political geography accompanying the contestation of frontier land, balancing the Turnerian notion of frontier dynamism with Limerick's argument for a history that is recreated over time.²²

The frontier thesis plays a more primary role in Aron's book, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay. The transformation reflects an "opening" of a frontier, embodied by the pioneer Daniel Boone, representative of the American relationship to the "savagery" of the wilderness and the native culture; and the "closing" of the frontier with the emergence of Henry Clay, emblematic of American democracy and the full institution of "civilization." Sharing Klein's use of frontier to delineate areas of cultural interaction, Aron measures points of theoretical congruence and divergence with Turner, arguing that his work "shares Turner's view of the significance of Kentucky, (but) departs from his tidy triumphalism."²³ Aron, like Richard White, focuses on the world created by contact between Euro-Americans and Indians, describing the wealth of new practices and traditions that materialized with the novel hybrid culture of frontier Kentucky while underscoring the particular relevance of power relations and how those relations changed social and political practices. Though Aron, like Klein, preserves neo-Turnerian aspects in his rendering of frontier history, his methodological orientation, like the overwhelming majority of post-Smith frontier history, stresses the importance of ethnohistory as a balancing element of the historical narrative, making the frontier an experience of both Euro-Americans and Indians.

While the land plays an important role in the frontier thesis, Turner's tendency to eschew the specific to work almost exclusively with the theoretical has met with significant opposition from ecological historians. The sharpest of all criticisms of Turner by an ecological historian comes from Donald Worster. With strains of Marxism accompanying his ecological orientation, Worster argues vigorously with Turner's notion of the frontier as a medium of progress, terming his frontier capitalism an "agrarian myth," based on the deterioration of the land through predatory capitalist behavior:

The drive for the economic development of the West was often a ruthless assault on nature and has left behind it much death, depletion, and ruin. Astonishing as it now seems, the old agrarian myth of Turner's day suggested that the West offered an opportunity of getting back in touch with nature.²⁴

To counter this tendency among frontier historians, Worster advocates an "agroecological perspective," including an examination of the ecologies of the past, the interaction between technology and the environment, and the extent to which the elements of culture including ideology and myth form the perceptions of nature and how it is used. Utilizing this schema allows for greater yields from a study of the frontier, one in which the historian plays "the role of cultural analyst, even to the point of presuming now and then to be a self-appointed moral conscience of their society." This role, one unfamiliar to many historians, is embedded in the need to tell meaningful and balanced narratives of the frontier, one which, in Worster's view, includes an elaboration of the story of the Indian population and the ecology that was destroyed as a result of European incursion.²⁵

Turner's relatively undifferentiated description of the function of the land has met with similar elaboration from even neo-Turnerian historians. Most significant among these criticisms is those of William Cronon, who, in Changes in the Land, argues:

the shift from Indian to European dominance in New England entailed important changes well known to historians in the ways these people organized their lives, but it also involved fundamental reorganizations less well-known to historians in the region's plant and animal communities.²⁶

Cronon's approach is both ethnographic and ecological, involving a study of both the role a rapidly changing human population played in the constitution of the New England ecology and the impact of the ecological change on both Euro-American and Indian populations, providing an analysis that demonstrates the complex reciprocal relationship between humanity and nature.

Cronon's work, while not primarily ethnohistorical, details relationships between Indian and European groups, with particular emphasis on the variety of relationships established between various European and indigenous groups. Cronon underscores the importance of avoiding the fallacy of viewing discrete contacts as being representative of "European" or "Indian" cultures, rather, depicting them as specific meetings with historical meanings and precedents. In this sense, the smaller colonial towns and Native American groups parallel the distributed nature of ecosystems and microclimates.

Cronon integrates ethnohistory with ecology fully in his discussion of the lives of the pre- Columbian Indians. Cronon breaks down two primary patterns of migratory subsistence, a split focusing on the differences in practice between the northern and southern natives of New England. Faced with unpredictable seasons and a generally inhospitable climate, the Indians of northern New England relied almost exclusively on hunting and fishing for subsistence. The Indians of southern New England, enjoying a warmer climate less prone to protracted periods of frozen topsoil, augmented their hunting and fishing with agriculture, which provided half to two-thirds of the caloric load of their diet.²⁷ Cronon rails against the notion of an ecologically neutral precolonial North American population, describing the use of small, controlled burning of the forest; movement between different areas of food sources through the year; and the use of multicrop agriculture, including nitrogen-fixing beans, among southern Indians as indicators of an environment-shaping Indian world, though the impact of the human population on local ecosystems was fairly small and consistent, designed to last in perpetuity.

The arrival of Europeans radically altered the relationship between local ecologies and the human presence. To allow for trade and insulation against the vagaries of harsh New England winter, the Europeans cleared a large percentage of the local forest for crop and livestock purposes, while domesticating animals, particularly pigs, that had a widespread impact on the local ecosystems. Between the new livestock and an expanded European population, both of which served as disease vectors, epidemics often spread rapidly, ravaging the local populations, sometimes eliminating entire villages.²⁸ As a result of the rapidly decreasing native population and the increasing dominance assumed by the Euro-American population, differences between notions of property, with Indians employing usufruct rights while Europeans administered ownership rights, were most often settled to the exclusion of the native populations. Reflecting the process of acculturation favored by Limerick, White, and Klein, Cronon describes the concomitant change as one while forces the Indian groups to work within the European system of social organization, limiting patterns of traditional migratory subsistence to smaller regions with greatly diminished animal and food stock.

Cronon locates the changes taking place in the land over this period in a reciprocal relationship with human action. While the land was being radically reordered by the human population, patterns of behavior and the social structure of both the Europeans and Indians underwent a corresponding alteration. From its original role in ordering the precolonial Indians' hunting, fishing, and agricultural endeavors by season and topology, the deforestation of the land limited and changed the use of wood. Fencing, which developed into an important agricultural and legal tool via ownership rights, was later done with stone, to limit the use of and deal with the limitations of the available wood. Most significantly, the decrease in local animal populations and soil fertility led to an expansion of occupied land by Euro-Americans, in order to accommodate continually expanding agricultural and commercial needs.

While not the primary trope of criticism of Turnerian thought, the role of the land in frontier history has been greatly enhanced with the advent of environmental history in the 1970s. Changes in the Land stands as the most significant elaboration of the importance of the land in the history of the frontier in colonial New England. Cronon's work, exploring the importance of ecology, both as a dynamic structuring force of human action, and as a primary element in shaping how populations organize themselves socio-economically, ties the conventional capturing of ethnohistories to the larger physical world, making the study of frontier history a truly interdisciplinary practice.

In popular memory, most conventionally, the story of the American frontier is recalled in terms of a westward migration from East to West, a pattern of migration, in the eyes of Frederick Jackson Turner and the people who have assimilated his "frontier thesis" either consciously or subconsciously, that has uniquely shaped the American experience. Herbert Bolton, while identifying himself as a Turnerian, reshaped the history of the frontier, adding the North American holdings of Spain to the largely Anglo (and periodically French and Dutch) frontier thesis advanced by Turner. In residence at the University of California, Berkeley from 1911 to 1953, Bolton trained over 100 Ph. D. students and 300 M.A. students, while writing a number of historical tracts that established the Spanish frontier as a viable area of inquiry.²⁹

First published in 1921, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest, serves as Bolton's largest literary contribution to the field, introducing the notion of "borderlands" to the frontier. While perhaps the least representative work of Bolton's, ³⁰ The Spanish Borderlands restructured the way the European presence in North America was understood. Rather than a single "European" presence representing each of the European nations in North America, the colonial period developed into a discussion of the actions and motivations of a variety of European belligerents on the North American stage.³¹ The "borderlands" concept, while used in a similar manner to that of the frontier, allows for a further elucidation of power relations; rather than simply a meeting point between two radically different population groups, the borderlands hints at meeting points between European actors, and points where several European actors encounter Indian populations. Adelman and Aron argue for this usage, maintaining, "Absent the imperial dimension of borderlands, the cross- cultural relations that defined frontiers take on a too simple face: 'Europe' blurs into a single element, and 'Indians' merge into a common front."³² While the full political and economic implications of the borderlands were not explored by Bolton, his work left a methodological basis of multiple European incursions that undergirds contemporary work including The Middle Ground, The Legacy of Conquest, and Kerwin Klein's Frontiers of Historical Imagination.

In contemporary historiography, David Weber's The Spanish Frontier in North America, stands as the most broad and thoroughly researched treatment of the Spanish presence in North America, one which was coequal, if not more significant, to the English and French presence for much of the period between 1492 and 1821. Bringing the Spanish experience together with those of English, French, and the myriad Indian groups occupying the territory, Weber's work is a focal point in recent attempts to write a more fully integrative history of the North American frontier.

The Spanish colonization of Florida and New Mexico, its two earliest areas of settlement, provide the primary focus of The Spanish Frontier in North America. Weber traces the colonial history back to the initial exploration of the coastal Eastern United States (including, in the case of Estavƒo Gomes, maritime Canada and the Penobscot River), Gulf of Mexico, West Indies, and present-day Mexico. As issues of settlement are taken up, Weber discusses the ramifications of geography and culture on the early relationship between the Spanish and Indian populations. Spanish settlements in St. Augustine and Fort Tequesta establish a foothold in Florida, while settlement in Santa Fe, Monclova, and Zacatecas roots Spain in the Mexican theater. Weber follows the expansion of Spanish settlement over time, including the impact of expansion into Texas and the creation of missions throughout California.

Spanish interaction with Indian groups is marked by religion and warfare, often in dynamic combination, throughout the colonial period. Settlements in St. Augustine and Santa Fe were surrounded by the religion of the mission, paralleling the northern progression through California, where Friar Junipero Serra established a number of missions throughout the state over a century later. When not actively engaged in proselytization, the Spanish warred sporadically with the native populations. The most consequential of these, the 1680 Pueblo uprising, forced the Spanish out of New Mexico north of El Paso, indicating levels of dissentious and the failure of the Spanish military to universally hold power over the Indian groups. As a result of the Indian threat, the Spanish built military installations to protect their interests.

Along with fighting the Indians, eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Spain fought a series of wars with other European nations in North America. The War of Spanish Succession, fought in 1702, enhanced English power, forcing Spain to relinquish power over Apalachee (part of the Florida panhandle). The War of the Quadruple Alliance, fought almost two decades later, helped reassert Spanish military might and land claims in the American southeast. The War of Jenkins' Ear, fought between 1739 and 1742, further destabilized the Spanish military and emphasized the political and economic difficulties that plagued Spanish America until Mexico gained its independence in 1821. Strong Spanish mercantilist tendencies plagued the colonies and stunted their growth, correspondingly limiting Spanish military might and eroding their base of power in North America, contrasting with the rapid growth of the other Euro-American belligerents which ultimately prevailed.

Weber's work, though broad in scope, focuses on issues of specific forms of diversity. Introducing a wide variety of groups in a Byzantine arrangement of alliance, warfare, and religious conversion, The Spanish Frontier in North America is a study in the complexity of the borderlands and frontier. Weber ultimately shows a willingness to acknowledge the limitations of the research on the subject and the need to problematize historical phenomena in the final pages of the book, stating:

How, then, are we to comprehend the meaning of the Spanish frontier? For those with an aversion to ambiguity or a strong need for absolute truth, the current answer is not comforting...The Spanish legacy in North America, then, is not only what we have imagined it to be, but what we will continue to make of it.³³

Weber, like Turner, utilizes a moderate form of presentism in his work. Acknowledging the role of the historian in shaping the narrative, Weber nonetheless offers a study that attempts to yield the maximum amount of fact-based information while maintaining a sympathy to the ethnography of contemporary history.

Frederick Jackson Turner's frontier thesis, first elucidated over a century ago, stoked fierce debates which continue to today over the nature of American identity, ideology, and culture. The thesis, rooted in turn-of-the-century optimism, has come under increasing fire for its ethnocentrism and lack of clarity as a conceptual tool. The debate has been structured primarily along three conceptual fronts; the agency allocated to the Indian groups in forming the condition of their existence, the role the land plays in forming the frontier and its lifestyles, and the notion of the Spanish Frontier and the concept of the borderlands, explaining the variety of imperial considerations fundamental to the history of the frontier. These three strains of criticism have yielded a new approach to the frontier, often termed "New Western History," which emphasizes a balanced approach to the experience of colonization/invasion/conquest, adding ethnography and a greater interdisciplinarity to the practice of history . The resultant history, a product of the past twenty years of change, is one which has placed the Indian population beside the Euro-American population, as dual participants in the making of the history of the frontier.

Notes

1. Andrew R.L Cayton and Fredrika J. Teute., Contact Points: American Frontiers from the Mohawk Valley to the Mississippi, 1750-1830 (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1998), 3.

2. Kerwin Klein, "Reclaiming the "F" Word, or Being and Becoming Postwestern," Pacific Historical Review, v65, n2 (May, 1996), 180.

3. Joseph Schafer, "Turner's Frontier Philosophy," in O. Lawrence Butler (ed.), Wisconsin Witness to Frederick Jackson Turner (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1961), 27.

4. Frederick Jackson Turner, The Frontier in American History (Dover: Dover Publications, 1996; 1893), 1.

5. Avery Craven, "Turner, Historian," in Wisconsin Witness, 103.

6. Turner, The Frontier in American History, 3-4.

7. Turner, The Frontier in American History, 15.

8. Turner, quoted in Schafer, "Turner's Frontier Philosophy," 41.

9. Kerwin Klein, Frontiers of Historical Imagination: Narrating the European Conquest of North America 1890-1990 (Berkeley, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 117.

10. See Merle Curti, The Growth of American Thought (New York, London: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1943), esp. 3-24.

11. Merle Curti, Probing Our Past (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1955), 33-43. Carl Becker, "Kansas" in Guy Stanton Ford (ed.), Essays in American Thought (Rahway, New Jersey: Henry Holt and Company, 1910), 85-112.

12. Walter Prescott Webb, The Great Frontier (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1952).

13. See Henry Nash Smith, Virgin Land: The American West as Myth and Symbol (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 150).

14. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (New York: W.W. Norton, 1975), 15-16.

15. Jennings, The Invasion of North America, vii, 32-42.

16. Francis Jennings, The Invasion of America, 180.

17. Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (New York: W.W. Norton, 1988), 25.

18. Patricia Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest, 27.

19. Richard White, The Middle Ground: Indians, Empieres, and Republics in the Great Lakes Region, 1650-1815 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 50.

20. Richard White, The Middle Ground, 366-368. Also see Richard White, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own : A History of the American West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991).

21. Kerwin Klein, "Reclaiming the 'F' Word," 179-215.

22. Jeremy Adelman and Stephen Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders: Empires, Nation-States, and the Peoples in Between in North American History," American Historical Review, v104, n3 (June, 1999), 814-817.

23. Stephen Aron, How the West Was Lost: The Transformation of Kentucky from Daniel Boone to Henry Clay (Baltimore, London: Johns Hopkins Press, 1996), 2-3.

24. Donald Worster, "Beyond the Agrarian Myth," in Patricia Nelson Limerick, Clyde Milner II, and Charles E. Rankin (eds.) Trails: Toward a New Western History (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1991), 18.

25. Donald Worster, "Beyond the Agrarian Myth," 31-32. Also see Donald Worster, "Toward an Agroecological Perspective in History," Journal of American History, v.76, n.4 (March 1990),1089-1092.

26. William Cronon, Changes in the Land: Indians, Colonists, and the Ecology of New England (New York: Hill and Wang, 1981), vii.

27. William Cronon, Changes in the Land, 42.

28. William Cronon, Changes in the Land, 86.

29. David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America (New Haven, London: Yale University Press, 1992), 6.

30. See Albert L. Hurtdado, "Parkmanizing the Spanish Borderlands: Bolton, Turner, and the Historians' World," Western Historical Quarterly, v26, n2 (Summer, 1995), 149-167.

31. See Herbert Bolton, The Spanish Borderlands: A Chronicle of Old Florida and the Southwest, (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1996). Also see Herbert Bolton and Thomas Maitland Marshall, The Colonization of North America, 1492-1783 (New York: MacMillan, 1920).

32. Adelman and Aron, "From Borderlands to Borders," 815.

33. David Weber, The Spanish Frontier in North America, 359-360.