The frontier held an important place in American history, both in its reality and as a heroic image that would outlast the frontier itself. The idea of the frontier helped shape the American character. The frontier became a place to which settlers journeyed and a place they had to tame. This created a certain ambivalence in how the frontier was viewed. On the one hand, the frontier was natural and so somehow ideal, celebrated as such by James Fenimore Cooper in the Leatherstocking Tales. On the other hand, the frontier was something to be challenged and beaten. These tensions have been apparent in the popular image of the Wild West, and as a film genre, the Western has developed around this conflict and has shown the frontier both as a place of savagery and a place of beauty, the West as a place to be tamed and a place to be celebrated. These tensions have been evident in film Westerns since the silent era, and accompanying the image of the frontier and standing as the human element of the frontier motif is the theme of community and the creation of a community out of the wildness of the frontier. The Western in its heyday served as a dramatic form depicting in stark relief the battle between good and evil, with control of the frontier as the goal. In later films in the genre, some of the accepted truths of the earlier period are questioned and reshaped for a more cynical age.
In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner delivered a paper at a meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, stating in effect that the frontier was closed. He cited as evidence census data for 1890 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 1).
Turn...