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 the existence of the frontier and to the passage of legislation regarding tariff, land, and internal improvements that were themselves related to frontier needs and ideas. Turner says that the purchase of the Louisiana Territory was especially important:
[It] was perhaps the constitutional turning point in the history of the Republic, inasmuch as it afforded both a new area for national legislation and the occasion of the downfall of the policy of strict construction. But the purchase of Louisiana was called out by frontier needs and demands.
Turner says that the frontier...