The American frontier has served for centuries as a mythic stage as well as the perfect mirror, offering up a reflection—for good and for ill—of who and what we have been since the arrival of Columbus in 1492.

One of my all-time favorite scholars, Don Lutz, had this to say about the symbols that form community: “Essentially what they share are symbols and myths that provide meaning in their existence as a people and link them to some transcendent order. The shared meaning and a shared link to some transcendent order allow them to act as a people.”

The American frontier has served as Lutz’s mythic stage as well as a symbolic backdrop for our own ideas about who we are as Americans for centuries. It has been the perfect mirror, offering up a reflection—for good and for ill—of who and what we have been since the arrival of Columbus in 1492.

Here are ten ways, ordered chronologically, in which we have thought about ourselves because of the frontier.

First, when Columbus and the Indians encountered each other for the first time, Columbus was at a loss as to understand the Indians. Like many Europeans (in this day up through the middle of the 1800s), he had believed that a land unfallen—a land of the gods—had existed somewhere in the West. In that direction was Atlantis. As Plato described it in the Timeas:

Now in this island of Atlantis there was a great and wonderful empire which had rule over the whole island and several others, and over parts of the continent, and, furthermore, the men of Atlantis had subjected the parts of Libya within the columns of Heracles as far as Egypt, and of Europe as far as Tyrrhenia. This vast power, gathered into one, endeavoured to subdue at a blow our country and yours and the whole of the region within the straits; and then, Solon, your country shone forth, in the excellence of her virtue and strength, among all mankind. She was pre-eminent in courage and military skill, and was the leader of the Hellenes. And when the rest fell off from her, being compelled to stand alone, after having undergone the very extremity of danger, she defeated and triumphed over the invaders, and preserved from slavery those who were not yet subjugated, and generously liberated all the rest of us who dwell within the pillars. But afterwards there occurred violent earthquakes and floods; and in a single day and night of misfortune all your warlike men in a body sank into the earth, and the island of Atlantis in like manner disappeared in the depths of the sea. For which reason the sea in those parts is impassable and impenetrable, because there is a shoal of mud in the way; and this was caused by the subsidence of the island.

When Columbus met the Indians, he thought, perhaps, he had fallen into a form of paradise.

Second, though, the Spanish (and other Europeans) treated the Indians horribly, often worse than livestock. Several Spanish, however, also recorded the abuses. Most famously was the account detailed by Bartolome de las Casas. When the English began to compete for the conquest of the Americas, they used de las Casas’s records to create what became known as the “Black Legend,” the idea that Spanish Catholicism was dark, brutal, and repressive. In reality, the English treated the Indians no better than had the Spanish, but they were able to make the “Black Legend” a reality as propaganda for centuries.

Third, was “The Passage”—the idea that God or nature would have created a natural highway to Asia. That is, He would not have abandoned an entire people who had yet to become Christian. While offering a more secularized vision of The Passage, Thomas Jefferson certainly subscribed to its existence, especially in his formation of the Lewis and Clark Expedition.

Fourth, and related to the providential nature of the second was the idea—again, secularized by Jefferson—that God created North America as a blank slate upon which a republican society could be written. The Lewis and Clark Expedition certainly epitomized the highest longings of the republicans in practice, but in law and theory, the Northwest Ordinance best manifested it. In particular, it’s anti-imperial intentions and its desire to treat the Indians well. As Article stated:

The utmost good faith shall always be observed towards the Indians; their lands and property shall never be taken from them without their consent; and, in their property, rights, and liberty, they shall never be invaded or disturbed, unless in just and lawful wars authorized by Congress; but laws founded in justice and humanity, shall from time to time be made for preventing wrongs being done to them, and for preserving peace and friendship with them.

If only.

Fifth, “Manifest Destiny” was a perversion of the fourth. While it still somewhat argued for a republican society, it did so through a sort of democratic-imperialist-totalitarianism. Whereas Jefferson’s republic would be peopled by families taking their own chances on the frontier and settling individually, those advocating Manifest Destiny believed that the nation must act as a whole, with the military replacing the independent yeoman family. As John L. O’Sullivan explained in 1838:

The far-reaching, the boundless future will be the era of American greatness. It its magnificent domain of space and time, the nation of many nations is destined to manifest to mankind the excellence of divine principles: to establish on earth the noblest temple ever dedicated to the worship of the Most High—the Sacred and the True. Its floor shall be a hemisphere—its roof the firmament of the star-studded heavens—and its congregation the Union of many Republics, comprising hundreds of happy millions, calling and owning no man master, but governed by God’s natural and moral law of equality, the law of brotherhood—of ‘peace and goodwill among men.’

The land, it seems, was to become a secular church.

Sixth, was the Progressive West, an attempt to remake the West as a region ready to supply the remainder of the country with material for war and conquest as well as to immanentize the eschaton. These progressives wanted to remake America, and they saw it as the paradise; but only if American built the Kingdom of God, here and now. Ultimately, their vision was a secular form of the Apocalypse. As a rather benign example, Teddy Roosevelt wanted to preserve the forests and western resources to prepare the nation for war. At the more extreme end of Progressivism was the desire to remake and “cleanse” the American Indian, that is, to destroy the Indian and save the man. In his own very progressive vision of the West, Frederick Jackson turner claimed:

The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. 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 the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick, he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion.

In explaining that the European (thesis) met the Indian (antithesis) and became the American (synthesis), Turner revealed his own deep progressivism.

Seventh, a brief return to the West as a sort of paradise, but this time, reversing the Black Legend and promoting the idea that Hispanic lifestyle fully and best understood human longings. In architecture, this manifested itself as the Spanish Colonial Revival. In literature, its best advocate was Willa Cather in Death Comes for the Archbishop.

Eighth, the New Deal West. Franklin Roosevelt, who had studied at Harvard University, when Frederick Jackson Turner was a professor there, believed that the American frontier had ended. While many have argued that the New Deal was socialist, it was actually just managerial. Roosevelt wanted to manage what “few” resources were left after the closing of the frontier. The frontier, it seemed, had exhausted our wealth as a people, and, thus, now the remaining wealth had to be carefully planned. As Roosevelt said in his 1932 Commonwealth Club Address:

A glance at the situation today only too clearly indicates that equality of opportunity as we have know it no longer exists. Our industrial plant is built; the problem just now is whether under existing conditions it is not overbuilt. Our last frontier has long since been reached, and there is practically no more free land. More than half of our people do not live on the farms or on lands and cannot derive a living by cultivating their own property. There is no safety valve in the form of a Western prairie to which those thrown out of work by the Eastern economic machines can go for a new start. We are not able to invite the immigration from Europe to share our endless plenty. We are now providing a drab living for our own people.

Ninth, the “New Frontier.” Though a Democrat, too, John F. Kennedy undid almost everything that F.D. Roosevelt had done. In Kennedy’s vision, America was a boundless land of opportunity, and space would, in and of itself, become the New Frontier.  Nothing bettered demonstrated this optimism than the television show, Star Trek, originally called “Wagon Train to the Stars” and featuring (William Shatner) a captain that looked and acted (at least, in an idealized way) as Kennedy.

Tenth, and least satisfying, is what I call the “New Age West,” with the Sun Belt serving as a way station for crystal lovers and UFO fanatics. Perhaps nothing better illustrated this phase of the West than the Kevin Costner movie, Dances with Wolves, showcasing a Union soldier who gradually becomes American Indian in outlook and personality.

In thinking about the frontier, we are forced to ask the following questions.

However one breaks down these categories about the West, it remains clear that the West has dramatically shaped our outlook about ourselves. At points, we embrace the frontier, and, at other points, we reject it. But, even when we reject, we implicitly acknowledge its power to define who and what we are. Lutz was right—we need shared symbols to define us and give us coherence. Nothing in our history, with the exception of the Declaration of Independence, has so defined us as has the American frontier.

I am reminded of Willa Cather’s opening to her 1913 novel, O Pioneers!

One January day, thirty years ago, the little town of Hanover, anchored on a windy Nebraska tableland, was trying not to be blown away. A mist of fine snowflakes was curling and eddying about the cluster of low drab buildings huddled on the gray prairie, under a gray sky. The dwelling-houses were set about haphazard on the tough prairie sod; some of them looked as if they had been moved in overnight, and others as if they were straying off by themselves, headed straight for the open plain. None of them had any appearance of permanence, and the howling wind blew under them as well as over them. The main street was a deeply rutted road, now frozen hard, which ran from the squat red railway station and the grain “elevator” at the north end of the town to the lumber yard and the horse pond at the south end. On either side of this road straggled two uneven rows of wooden buildings; the general merchandise stores, the two banks, the drug store, the feed store, the saloon, the post-office.

In the end, though, the heroine of the story, Alexandra, conquers the land, making it submit to human ambitions.

When the road began to climb the first long swells of the Divide, Alexandra hummed an old Swedish hymn, and Emil wondered why his sister looked so happy. Her face was so radiant that he felt shy about asking her. For the first time, perhaps, since that land emerged from the waters of geologic ages, a human face was set toward it with love and yearning. It seemed beautiful to her, rich and strong and glorious. Her eyes drank in the breadth of it, until her tears blinded her. Then the Genius of the Divide, the great, free spirit which breathes across it, must have bent lower than it ever bent to a human will before. The history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.

And, there, in the heart of the frontier, we find the true American spirit.

This essay was first published here in July 2021.

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The featured image is a United States National Park Service map of the Santa Fe Trail by Robert McGinnis. This file is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.