er 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 (Turner 37).
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.
If the real frontier ended in 1890, the frontier as an image persisted and does to this day. Americans still think of any far-reaching horizon to which they aspire as a frontier. Moviegoers for decades had the film Western holding up the image of the frontier and of the men and women who challenged it, men and women who both loved it and yet overcame it. The film Western is structured on the desire to establish or restore order, and there are a number of motifs and symbols which recur in these films, from the wagon train snaking across the prairie to the stalwart lawman protecting the people in the towns they built once the wagons stopped.
The silent Western ranged from the serious films of William S. Hart to the more comic and over-the-top films of Art Mix or Hoot Gibson. Both types continued into the early 1930s, though for a time the Western was geared largely to the B-movies of the Poverty Row studios, also known as the films from Gower Gulch. John Ford directed the Western credited as a return to the more serious film Western--Stagecoach in 1939. This is also a return to the Western for Ford after 13 years making other types of film. This ...