This 1887 photograph depicts a family in Custer County, Nebraska. They have begun to build a house (center), which suggests some optimism, yet their isolation and the rude dugout (upper left) illustrates their vulnerability. Were such people self-reliant individualists or needy dependents?
In 1893 historian Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the boundless expanses of the frontier gave rise to democracy, individualism, and "withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes with freedom."Insofar as the frontier was then receding before the advance of urbanization and industrialization, Turner's readers had cause for alarm. Historians adopting the Turnerian analysis—and there were many—were generally pessimistic about the prospects for American democracy.
Philosopher John Dewey (1922) was among those who dissented. He argued that rather than promoting democracy, the frontier had a "depressing effect upon the free life of inquiry and criticism." Some historians insisted that democracy flourished not in the West but in urban and industrial areas. In recent decades scholars have challenged Turner's
Assertions that frontier peoples were self-sufficient and their democratic institutions vital.
Richard White (1991) insisted that the West, more so than any other region, had been "historically a dependency of the federal government." Donald Worster (1992) contended that its predominant economy—cattle-raising and irrigation agriculture—was developed mostly by large corporations.
During the past two decades, moreover, many scholars have asked the following question: How can anyone claim that the frontier promoted democratic sensibilities if it came at the cost of dispossessing the Indians—missing from the photograph—who had previously ranged over this land?
Source: Donald Worster, Under Western Skies (1992); Richard White, It's Your Misfortune and None of My Own (1991); Peggy Pascoe, Relations of Rescue: The Search for Female Moral Authority in the American West, 1874-1939 (1990); Patricia Limerick, Legacy of Conquest (1988); and Elliot West, The Contested Plains (1998).
Creeks, where they found enough timber for home building, fuel, and fencing. Later arrivals had to build houses of the tough prairie sod and depend on hay, sunflower stalks, and buffalo dung for fuel.
Frontier farm families had always had to work hard and endure the hazards of storm, drought, and insect plagues, along with isolation and loneliness. But all these burdens were magnified on the prairies and the High Plains. Life was particularly hard for farm women, who, in addition to childcare and housework, performed endless farm chores—milking cows, feeding livestock, raising vegetables, and so on. “I. . . am set and running every morning at half-past four o’clock, and run all day, often until half-past eleven P. M.,” one farm woman explained. “Is it any wonder I have become slightly demoralized?”
World History
