The frontier stands in American history as both a reality and a concept, a locale--one that moved, it is true, but still a locale--and as an idea, an attitude that helped shape the American character. The idea of Manifest Destiny told Americans that they would inevitably extend their domain from the Atlantic to the Pacific, which meant that the frontier would have to cease being the frontier and be civilized by settlers. The frontier became, then, a place to which settlers went, and they goal in American life was to battle the frontier and to bring it into the American fold.
Frederick Jackson Turner offered a paper at a meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago in 1893 that said in effect that the frontier was dead and that there was proof of this fact in the 1890 census data which showed that the country no longer had a frontier settlement:
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.
Turner analyzes the significance of the frontier in American history and finds that the frontier helped to form what has come to be known as the American character:
From the conditions of frontier life came intellectual traits of profound importance. The works of travelers along each frontier from colonial days onward describe certain common traits, and these traits have, while softening down, still persisted as survivals in the place of their origin, even when a higher social organization succeeded.
The West attracted Americans who wanted to be part of the taming of the frontier. The frontier developed a mythos of its own and stood in sharp contrast to the civilized East. Turner finds that the frontier served as a force to develop democracy in American life. The development of the nation is related to t...