History of the Frontier
Following the victory of the United States in the American Revolutionary War and the signing Treaty of Paris in 1783, the United States gained formal, if not actual, control of the British lands west of the Appalachians. Many thousands of settlers, typified by Daniel Boone, had already reached Kentucky and Tennessee and adjacent areas. Some areas, such as the Virginia Military District and the Connecticut Western Reserve (both in Ohio), were used by the states as rewards to veterans of the war. How to formally include these new frontier areas into the nation was an important issue in the Continental Congress of the 1780s and was partly resolved by the Northwest Ordinance (1787). The Southwest Territory saw a similar pattern of settlement pressure.
For the next century, the expansion of the nation into these areas, as well as the subsequently acquired Louisiana Purchase, Oregon Country, and Mexican Cession, attracted hundreds of thousands of settlers. The question of whether the Kansas frontier would become "slave" or "free" was a spark of the American Civil War. In general before 1860, Northern Democrats promoted easy land ownership and Whigs and Southern Democrats resisted. The Southerners resisted Homestead Acts because they supported the growth of a free farmer population that might oppose slavery.
When the Republican Party came to power in 1860, it promoted a free land policy—notably the Homestead Act of 1862—coupled with railroad land grants that opened cheap (but not free) lands for settlers. In 1890, the frontier line had broken up (census maps defined the frontier line as a line beyond which the population was less than two persons per square mile).
The frontier's impact on popular culture was enormous, as evidenced by dime novels, Wild West shows, and, after 1910, Western movies set on the frontier. The American frontier was generally the most western edge of settlements and typically more free-spirited in nature than the East because of its lack of social and political institutions. The idea that the frontier provided the core defining quality of the United States was elaborated on by the historian Frederick Jackson Turner, who built his 1893 "Frontier Thesis" around this notion.
The End of the Frontier
When the 11th U.S. census was taken in 1890, the superintendent announced that there was no longer a clear line of advancing settlement, and hence no longer a frontier in the continental United States. Turner used the statistic to announce the end of the era in which the frontier process shaped the American character.
Fresh farmland was increasingly hard to find after 1890, although the railroads advertised some in eastern Montana. Historian Karel Bicha explains that nearly 600,000 American farmers sought cheap land by moving to the prairie frontier of the Canadian West from 1897 to 1914. However, about two-thirds of them grew disillusioned with Canada and returned to the United States. The admission of Oklahoma as a state in 1907 (upon the combination of the Oklahoma Territory and the last remaining Indian Territory), and the admission of Arizona and New Mexico territories as states in 1912, did not end the frontier. These areas contained plenty of unoccupied land, as did the territory of Alaska. Nevertheless, the ethos and storyline of the "American frontier" had passed.
A cowboy
The cowboy, the quintessential symbol of the American frontier, ca. 1887.