In a recent Bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890
appear these significant words: "Up to and including 1880 the
country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the
unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of
settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. 
In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it
can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census
reports," This brief official statement marks the closing of a
great historic movement.  Up to our own day American history has
been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the
Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous
recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, ex-
plain American development.
     Behind institutions, behind constitutional forms and
modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into
life and shape them to meet changing conditions.  The peculiarity
of American institutions is the fact that they have been
compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding
people--to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in
winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this
progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions
of the frontier into the complexity of city life.  Said Calhoun
in 1817, "We are great, and rapidly--I was about to say
fearfully-=growing!"2 So saying, he touched the distinguishing
feature of American life.  All peoples show development; the germ
theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized.  In the case
of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a
limited area; and if the nation has expanded, it has met other
growing peoples whom it has conquered.  But in the case of the
United States we have a different phenomenon.  Limiting our
attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon
of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the
rise of representative government; the differentiation of simple
colonial governments into complex organs; the progress from
primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to 
manufacturing civilization.  But we have in addition to this a
recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area 

This is the introductory section of Turner's famous paper.

     1A paper read at the meeting of the American Historical Association
in Chicago, July 12. 1893. It first appeared in the Proceedings of the
State Historical Society of Wisconsin, December 14, 1893, with the
following note: "The foundation of this paper is my article entitled
'Problems in American History' which appeared in The ’gis, a publication
of the students of the University of Wisconsin, November 2, 1892.... It is
gratifying to find that Professor Woodrow Wilson--whose volume on
'Division and Reunion' in the Epochs of American History Series has an
appreciative estimate of the importance of the West as a factor in
American History--accepts some of the views set forth in the paper above
mentioned, and enhances their value by his lucid and suggestive treatment
of them in his article in The Forum, December, 1893, reviewing Coldwin
Smith's 'History of the United States'" The present text is that of the
Report of the American Historical Association for 1893, 199-227. It was
printed with additions in the Fifth Year Book of the National Herbart
Society, and in various other publications
     2"Abridgment of Debates of Congress," v, p. 706.

                              ******

reached in the process of expansion.  Thus American development 
has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a
return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing
frontier line, and a new development for that area.  American
social development has been continually beginning over again on
the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American
life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its
continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society,
furnish the forces dominating American character.  The true point
of view in the history of this nation is not the Atlantic coast,
it is the Great West. Even the slavery struggle, which is made so
exclusive an object of attention by writers like Professor von
Holst, occupies its important place in American history because
of its relation to westward expansion.

     In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave--the
meeting point between savagery and civilization.  Much has been written
about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase,
but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it
has been neglected. 

     The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the
European frontier-a fortified boundary line running through dense
populations.  The most significant thing about the American
frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land.  In
the census reports it is treated as the margin of that settlement
which has a density of two or more to the square mile.  The term
is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not need sharp
definition.  We shall consider the whole frontier belt, including
the Indian country and the outer margin of the "settled area" of
the census reports.  This paper will make no attempt to treat the
subject exhaustively: its aim is simply to call attention to the
frontier as a fertile field for investigation, and to suggest
some of the problems which arise in connection with it.
     In the settlement of America we have to observe how European
life entered the continent, and how America modified and devel-
oped that life and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the
study of European germs developing in an American environment. 
Too exclusive attention has been paid by institutional students
to the Germanic origins, too little to the American factors.  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 short, at the frontier the
environment is at first too strong for the man.  He must accept
the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits him-
self into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. 
Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is
not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs,
any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the
Germanic mark.  The fact is, that here is a new product that is
American. At first, the frontier was the Atlantic coast.  It was
the frontier of Europe in a very real sense.  Moving westward,
the frontier became more and more American. As successive
terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each
frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a
settled area the region still partakes of the frontier
characteristics.  Thus the advance of 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 ad-
vance, 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.
     In the course of the seventeenth century the frontier was
advanced up the Atlantic river courses, just beyond the "fall
line," and the tide water region became the settled area.  In the
first half of the eighteenth century another advance occurred. 
Traders followed the Delaware and Shawnee Indians to the Ohio as
early as the end of the first quarter of the century.3 Gov.
Spotswood, of Virginia, made an expedition in 1714 across the
Blue Ridge. The end of the first quarter of the century saw the
advance of the Scotch-Irish and the Palatine Germans up the
Shenandoah Valley into the western part of Virginia, and along
the Piedmont region of the Carolinas.4  The Germans in New York
pushed the frontier of settlement up the Mohawk to German Flats.5
In Pennsylvania the town of Bedford indicates the line of
settlement.  Settlements soon began on the New River or the Great
Kanawha, and on the sources of the Yadkin and French Broad.6 The
King attempted to arrest the advance by his proclamation of
1763,7 forbidding settlements beyond the sources of the rivers
flowing into the Atlantic; but in vain.  In the period of the
Revolution the frontier crossed the Alleghanies into Kentucky and
Tennessee, and the upper waters of the Ohio were settled.8  When
the first census was taken in 1790, the continuous settled area
was bounded by a line which ran near the coast of Maine, and
included New England except a portion of Vermont and New
Hampshire, New York along the Hudson and up the Mohawk about
Schenectady, eastern and southern Pennsylvania, Virginia well
across the Shenandoah Valley, and the Carolinas and eastern 


     3Bancroft (1860 ed.), iii, pp.  344, 345, citing Logan MSS.;
[Mitchell) "Contest in America," etc.  (1752), p.237. 

     4Kercheval, "History of the Valley'.: Bernheim, "German Settlement in
the Carolinas"; Winsor, "Narrative and Critical History of America," v, p.
304; Colonial Records of North Carolina, iv.  p. xx: Weston, "Documents
Connected with the History of South Carolina," p. 82; Ellis and Evans,
"History of Lancaster County, Pa.," chs. iii, xxvi. 

     5Parkman, "Pontiac," ii; Griffis, "Sir William Johnson," p. 6;
Simms's "Frontiersmen of New York." 

     6Monette..'Mississippi Valley,.' i, p.311.

     7Wis. Hist. Cols. xi, p. 50; Hinsdale, "Old Northwest," p. 121;
Burke, "Oration on Conciliation," Works (1872 ed.), i, p.473. 

     8Roosevelt, "Winning of the West," and citations there given;
Cutler's "Life of Cutler." 

                              ******


Georgia.9  Beyond this region of continuous settlement were the
small settled areas of Kentucky and  Tennessee, and the Ohio ,
with the mountains intervening between them and the Atlantic area
thus giving a new and important character to the frontier.  The
isolation of the region increased its peculiarly American
tendencies, and the need of transportation facilities to connect
it with the East called out important schemes of internal
improvement, which will be noted farther on. The "West," as a
self-conscious section, began to evolve.
     From decade to decade distinct advances of the frontier
occurred. By the census of 187010 the settled area included Ohio,
southern Indiana and Illinois, southeastern Missouri, and about
one-half of Louisiana. This settled area had surrounded Indian
areas, and the management of these tribes became an object of
political concern. The frontier region of the time lay along the
Great Lakes, where Astor's American Fur Company operated in the
Indian trade,11 and beyond the Mississippi, where Indian traders
extended their activity to the Rocky Mountains; Florida also
furnished frontier conditions.  The Mississippi River region was
the scene of typical frontier settlements.12
     The rising steam navigation13 on western waters, the opening
of the Erie Canal, and westward extension of cotton14 culture
added five frontier states to the Union in this period.  Grund,
writing in 1836, declares: "lt appears then that the universal
disposition of Americans to emigrate to the western wilderness,
in order to enlarge their dominion over inanimate nature, is the
actual result of an expansive power which is inherent in them,
and which by continually agitating all classes of society is
constantly throwing a large portion of the whole population on 

     9Scribner's Statistical Atlas, xxviii, pl. 13: McMaster, "Hist. of
People of U.S.," i. pp. 4,60,61; Imlay and Filson, "Western Territory of
America" (London, 1793); Rochefoucault-Liancourt, "Travels Through the
United States of North America" (London, 1799); Michaux's "Journal," in
Proceedings American Philosophical Society, xxvi, No. 129: Forman,
"Narrative of a Journey Down the Ohio and Mississippi in 1780'90"
(Cincinnati, 1888); Bartram, "Travels Through North Carolina," etc. 
(London, 1792); Pope, "Tour Through the Southern and Western Territories,"
etc.  (Richmond. 1792); Weld, "Travel Through the States of North America"
(London, 1799); Baily, "Journal of a Tour in the Unsettled States of North
America, 1796-'97" (London, 1856); Pennsylvania Magazine of History, July.
1886; Winsor, "Narrative and Critical History of America," vii, pp.
491,492, citations. 

     10Scribner's Statistical Atlas, xxxix.

     11Turner, "Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin"
(Johns Hopkins University Studies, Series ix), pp. 61 ff. 

     12Monette, "History of the Mississippi Valley," ii; Flint, "Geography
and History of the Western States," "Abridgment of Debates of Congress,"
vii, pp. 397, 398, 404: Holmes, "Account of the U.S."; Kingdom, "America
and the British Colonies" (London, 1820); Grund, "Americans" ii, chs. i.
iii, vi (although writing in 1836, he treats of conditions that grew out
of western advance from the era of 1820 to that time); Peck, "Guide for
Emigrants" (Boston, 1831); Darby, "Emigrants Guide to Southwestern States
and Territories"; Dana, "Geographical Sketches in the Western Country";
Kinzie, "Waubun"; Keating,.'Narrative of Long's Expedition"; Schoolcraft,
"Discovery of the Sources of the Mississippi River," Travels in the
Central Portions of the Mississippi Valley," and "Lead Mines of the
Missouri"; Andreas, "History of Illinois," i, 86-99; Hurlbut, "Chicago
Antiquities"; McKenney, "Tour to the Lakes"; Thomas, "Travels Through the
Western Country," etc.  (Auburn, N.Y.,1819). 

     13Darby, "Emigrants' Guide," pp. 272 ff; Benton. "Abridgment of
Debates," vii, p. 397. 

     14Debow's Review, iv, p. 254: xvii, p. 428.


                              ******

the extreme confines of the State, in order to gain space for its
development.  Hardly is a new State or Territory formed before
the same principle manifests itself again and gives rise to a
further emigration; and so is it destined to go on until a
physical barrier must finally obstruct its progress."15
     In the middle of this century the line indicated by the
present eastern boundary of Indian Territory,  Nebraska, and
Kansas marked the frontier of the Indian country.16  Minnesota and
Wisconsin still exhibited frontier conditions,17 but the
distinctive frontier of the period is found in California, where
the gold discoveries had sent a sudden tide of adventurous
miners, and in Oregon, and the settlement in Utah.18 As the
frontier had leaped over the Alleghanies, so now it skipped the
Great Plains and the Rocky Mountains; and in the same way that
the advance of the frontiersmen beyond the Alleghanies had caused
the rise of important questions of transportation and internal
improvement, so now the settlers beyond the Rocky Mountains
needed means of communication with the East, and in the
furnishing of these arose the settlement of the Great Plains and
the development of still another kind of frontier life. 
Railroads, fostered by land grants, sent an increasing tide of
immigrants into the Far West. The United States Army fought a
series of Indian wars in Minnesota, Dakota, and the Indian
Territory.
     By 1880 the settled area had been pushed into northern
Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, along Dakota rivers and in
the Black Hills region, and was ascending the rivers of Kansas
and Nebraska. The development of mines in Colorado had drawn
isolated frontier settlements into that region, and Montana and
Idaho were receiving settlers.  The frontier was found in these
mining camps and the ranches of the Great Plains. The
superintendent of the census for 1890 reports, as previously
stated, that the settlements of the West lie so scattered over
the region that there can no longer be said to be a frontier
line.

     15Grund, "Americans" ii, p. 8.

     16Peck, "New Guide to the West" (Cincinnati, 1848), ch. iv; Parkman,
"Oregon Trail"; Hall, "The West" (Cincinnati, 1848); Pierce, "Incidents of
Western Travel"; Murray, 'Travels in North America": Lloyd, "Steamboat
Directory" (Cincinnati, 1856); "Forty Days in a Western Hotel" (Chicago),
in Putnam's Magazine, December, 1894: Mackay, "The Western World," ii, ch. 
ii, iii: Meeker, "Life in the West"; Bogen, "German in America" (Boston,
1851); Olmstead, "Texas Journey"; Greeley, "Recollections of a Busy Life";
Schouler, "History of the United States," v, 261-267; Peyton, "Over the
Alleghanies and Across the Prairies". (London, 1870); Loughborough, "The
Pacific Telegraph and Railway" (St. Louis,1849); Whitney, "Project for a
Railroad to the Pacific" (New York, 1849); Peyton, "Suggestions on
Railroad Communication with the Pacific, and the Trade of China and the
Indian Islands"; Benton, "Highway to the Pacific" (a speech delivered in
the U.S. Senate, December 16, 1850). 

     17A writer in The Home Missionary (1850), p. 239, reporting Wisconsin
conditions exclaims: "Think of this, people of the enlightened East. What
an example, to come from the very frontier of civilization!" But one of
the missionaries writes: "In a few year Wisconsin will no longer be
considered as the West, or as an outpost of civilization, any more than
Western New York, or the Western Reserve." 

     18Bancroft (H. H.), "History of California," "History of Oregon," and
"Popular Tribunals": Shinn. "Mining Camps" 

                              ******

     In these successive frontiers we find natural boundary lines
which have served to mark and to affect the characteristic of the
frontiers, namely: the "fall line;" the Alleghany Mountains; the
Mississippi: the Missouri where its direction approximates north
and south: the line of the arid lands, approximately the ninety-ninth 
meridian: and the Rocky Mountains. The fall line marked the
frontier of the seventeenth century; the Alleghanies that of the
eighteenth; the Mississippi that of the first quarter of the
nineteenth; the Missouri that of the middle of this century
(omitting the California movement); and the belt of the Rocky
Mountains and the arid tract, the present frontier.  Each was won
by a series of Indian wars.
     At the Atlantic frontier one can study the germs of
processes repeated at each successive frontier.  We have the
complex European life sharply precipitated by the wilderness into
the simplicity of primitive conditions.  The first frontier had
to meet its Indian question, its question of the disposition of
the public domain, of the means of intercourse with older
settlements, of the extension of political organization, of
religious and educational activity. And the settlement of these
and similar questions for one frontier served as a guide for the
next.  The American student needs not to go to the "prim little
townships of Sleswick" for illustrations of the law of continuity
and development.  For example, he may study the origin of our
land policies in the colonial land policy: he may see how the
system grew by adapting the statutes to the customs of the
successive frontier.19  He may see how the mining experience in
the lead regions of Wisconsin, Illinois, and Iowa was applied to
the mining laws of the Sierras,20 and how our Indian policy has
been a series of experimentation on successive frontiers.  Each
tier of new States has found in the older ones material for its
constitutions.21 Each frontier has made similar contributions to
American character, as will be discussed farther on.
     But with all these similarities there are essential
differences, due to the place element and the time element.  It
is evident that the farming frontier of the Mississippi Valley
presents different conditions from the mining frontier of the
Rocky Mountains. The frontier reached by the Pacific Railroad,
surveyed into rectangles, guarded by the United States Army, and
recruited by the daily immigrant ship, moves forward at a swifter
pace and in a different way than the frontier reached by the
birch canoe or the pack horse.  The geologist traces patiently
the shores of ancient seas, maps their areas, and compares the
older and the newer.  It would be a work worth the historian's
labors to mark these various frontiers and in detail compare one 
with another.  Not only would there result a more adequate
conception of American development and characteristics, but
invaluable additions would be made to the history of society.

     19See the suggestive paper by Prof. Jesse Macy, "The Institutional
Beginnings of a Western State." 

     20Shinn, "Mining Camps"

     21Compare Thorpe, in Annals American Academy or Political and Social
Science, September, 1891; Bryce, "American Commonwealth'. (1888), ii, p.
689. 

                              ******
     Loria,22 the Italian economist, has urged the study of
colonial life as an aid in understanding the stages of European
development, affirming that colonial settlement is for economic
science what the mountain is for geology, bringing to light
primitive stratifications. "America," he says, "has the key to
the historical enigma which Europe has sought for centuries in
vain, and the land which has no history reveals luminously the
course of universal history." There is much truth in this.  The
United States lies like a huge page in the history of society. 
Line by line as we read this continental page from West to East
we find the record of social evolution.  It begins with the
Indian and the hunter; it goes on to tell of the disintegration
of savagery by the entrance of the trader, the pathfinder of
civilization; we read the annals of the pastoral stage in ranch
life; the exploitation of the soil by the raising of unrotated
crops of corn and wheat in sparsely settled farming communities;
the intensive culture of the denser farm settlement; and finally
the manufacturing organization with city and factory system.23 
This page is familiar to the student of census statistics, but
how little of it has been used by our historians. Particularly in
eastern State this page is a palimpsest.  What is now a
manufacturing State was in an earlier decade an area of intensive
farming.  Earlier yet it had been a wheat area, and still earlier
the "range had attracted the cattleherder.  Thus Wisconsin, now
developing manufacture, is a State with varied agricultural in-
terests.  But earlier it was given over to almost exclusive
grain.raising, like North Dakota at the present time.
     Each of these areas has had an influence in our economic and
political history; the evolution of each into a higher stage has
worked political transformations.  But what constitutional
historian has made any adequate attempt to interpret political
facts by the light of these social areas and changes?24
     The Atlantic frontier was compounded of fisherman, fur-trader, 
miner, cattle-raiser, and farmer.  Excepting the
fisherman, each type of industry was on the march toward the
West, impelled by an irresistible attraction.  Each passed in
successive waves across the continent.  Stand at Cumberland Gap
and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file-the 
buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian,
the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer-and 
the frontier has passed by.  Stand at South Pass in the
Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider
intervals between.  The unequal rate of advance compels us to

     22Loria, Analisi della Proprieta Capitalista, ii, p. 15. 

     23Compare "Observations on the North American Land Company," London,
1796. pp. xv, 144; Logan. "History of Upper South Carolina," i. pp.
149-151; Turner, "Character and Influence of Indian Trade in Wisconsin,"
p. 18; Peck, "New Guide for Emigrants" (Boston, 1837), ch. iv; "Compendium
Eleventh Census" i, p. xi. 

     24See post, for illustrations of the political accompaniments of
changed industrial conditions. 

                              ******

distinguish the frontier into the trader's frontier, the
rancher's frontier, or the miner's frontier, and the farmer's
frontier.  When the mines and the cow pens were still near the
fall line the traders' pack trains were tinkling across the
Alleghanies, and the French on the Great Lakes were fortifying
their posts, alarmed by the British trader's birch canoe.  When
the trappers scaled the Rockies, the farmer was still near the
mouth of the Missouri.
     Why was it that the Indian trader passed so rapidly across
the continent?  What effects followed from the trader's frontier? 
The trade was coeval with American discovery.  The Norsemen,
Vespuccius, Verrazani, Hudson, John Smith, all trafficked for
furs.  The Plymouth pilgrims settled in Indian cornfields, and
their first return cargo was of beaver and lumber.  The records
of the various New England colonies show how steadily exploration
was carried into the wilderness by this trade.  What is true for
New England is, as would be expected, even plainer for the rest
of the colonies.  All along the coast from Maine to Georgia the
Indian trade opened up the river courses.  Steadily the trader
passed westward, utilizing the older lines of French trade.  The
Ohio, the Great Lakes, the Mississippi, the Missouri, and the
Platte, the lines of western advance, were ascended by traders. 
They found the passes in the Rocky Mountains and guided Lewis and
Clark,25 Fremont, and Bidwell. The explanation of the rapidity of
this advance is connected with the effects of the trader on the
Indian. The trading post left the unarmed tribes at the mercy of
those that had purchased fire.arms--a truth which the Iroquois
Indians wrote in blood, and so the remote and unvisited tribes
gave eager welcome to the trader.  "The savages" wrote La Salle,
"take better care of us French than of their own children; from
us only can they get guns and goods." This accounts for the
trader's power and the rapidity of his advance.  Thus the
disintegrating forces of civilization entered the wilderness. 
Every river valley and Indian trail became a fissure in Indian
society, and so that society became honeycombed.  Long before the
pioneer farmer appeared on the scene, primitive Indian life had
passed away.  The farmers met Indians armed with guns.  The
trading frontier, while steadily undermining Indian power by
making the tribes ultimately dependent on the whites, yet,
through its sale of guns, gave to the Indian increased power of
resistance to the farming frontier. French colonization was
dominated by its trading frontier; English colonization by its
farming frontier.  There was an antagonism between the two
frontiers as between the two nations.  Said Duquesne to the
Iroquois, "Are you ignorant of the difference between the king of
England and the king of France? Go see the forts that our king
has established and you will see that you can still hunt under
their very walls.  They have been placed for your advantage in
places which you frequent.  The English, on the contrary, are no
sooner in possession of a place than the game is driven away. 
The 

     25But Lewis and Clark were the first to explore the route from the
Missouri to the Columbia. 


                              ******
forest falls before them as they advance, and the soil is laid
bare so that you can scarce find the wherewithal to erect a
shelter for the night"
     And yet, in spite of this opposition of the interests of the
trader and the farmer, the Indian trade pioneered the way for
civilization. The buffalo trail became the Indian trail, and this
became the trader's "trace:', the trails widened into roads, and
the roads into turnpikes, and these in turn were transformed into
railroads.  The same origin can be shown for the railroads of the
South, the Far West, and the Dominion of Canada.26 The trading
posts reached by these trails were on the sites of Indian
villages which had been placed in positions suggested by nature;
and these trading posts, situated so as to command the water
systems of the country, have grown into such cities as Albany,
Pittsburgh, Detroit, Chicago, St. Louis, Council Bluffs and
Kansas City. Thus civilization in America has followed the
arteries made by geology, pouring an ever richer tide through
them, until at last the slender paths of aboriginal intercourse
have been broadened and interwoven into the complex mazes of
modern commercial lines; the wilderness has been interpenetrated
by lines of civilization growing ever more numerous.  It is like
the steady growth of a complex nervous system for the originally
simple, inert continent.  If one would understand why we are to-day 
one nation, rather than a collection of isolated states, he
must study this economic and social consolidation of the country
In this progress from savage conditions lie topics for the
evolutionist.27

     26"Narrative and Critical History of America," viii, p. 10;
Sparks' "Washington Works" ix, pp. 303, 327; Logan, "History of
Upper South Carolina," i; McDonald, "Life of Kenton," p. 72;
Cong. Record, xxiii, p.57.

     27On the effect of the fur trade in opening the routes of
migration, see the authors "Character and Influence of the Indian
Trade in Wisconsin."

.