Frontiers

The frontier is a core concept in geography. Its meaning denotes location at the outer edge of territory, but its use and significance derive from two separate traditions, one associated more with Europe and the other with the United States, although the term applies to regions across the world. The European usage focuses on the frontier as a political boundary between places, a line of separation; the American frontier emphasizes interactions within the borderland of settlement. The meanings grow from the different historical experiences and traditions that are involved in their interpretation. A frontier can be a line or an area, its location and extent stable or changing. The relationships along it can be amicable or confrontational, can flow through or across and are easily or tightly controlled. Although a frontier is a spatial periphery, it can be among the most critical of regions in the way it draws interest and resources from the core in the core powers’ attempt to control and manage it.

The European frontier is associated with boundaries between principalities or states—the outer limits of the Holy Roman Empire, say, or [Page 1171]the boundary between Normandy and Brittany. The word frontier reflected difference but did not dictate the degree or significance of that difference. As 18th-century Europe became a distinct set of nation-states, with more politically homogenized space and regularized borders, the term denoted regions elsewhere. The word indicated the speaker's perception of a little known, lightly occupied area, potentially rich in resources, possibly an object of colonization. To Europeans, the Americas were frontier territory.

Within North America initially, European settlers, and later Americans, saw the frontier beyond their own permanent settlements, demarcating divisions between Native American space and their own, the boundaries quite close. The term was a European import to the Americas, and like other cultural imports, it gradually transformed in its new home. After independence, the U.S. preoccupation with national expansion made the frontier a central concern. The term meant the area in the process of incorporation into Euro-American settlements. The American frontier crossed the Appalachian Mountains and kept pushing west. It was characterized by spatial elasticity rather than fixity.

Throughout the 19th century, the American government used its decennial censuses to keep track of its population's westward movement. Each census showed the country's center of population and outer edge drifting west. The census even established a clear statistical measure for the frontier: an area with a population density between 2 and 6 people per square mile (a higher density meant that it was settled; a lower density meant a wilderness). Maps showed the national territory divided by settlement category as well as a frontier line, the contiguous edge between frontier and wilderness.

Native American settlements and people became synonymous with the frontier, the whole process of expansion presuming their displacement. Their boundaries, once loosely fixed, kept changing—but in their case, retreating. Throughout the 19th century, references to the frontier increasingly coupled Indians and disputed space. In his famous 1893 essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” Frederick Jackson Turner, the foremost historian of the frontier, described the frontier as “the meeting place of civilization and savagery,” Euro-Americans and Indians. The frontier drew the former, looking for land and opportunity. Promoters described the frontier as ripe for appropriation and transformation and applauded those moving in as benefiting both themselves and the nation.

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