Survival of the American Frontier

"Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line." These undynamic words—the most famous the U.S. Census Bureau ever produced—are the opening lines of Frederick Jackson Turner's 1893 essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." The young historian argued that the frontier—particularly the pursuit of its land—had shaped much of the nation's development and character, and that the disappearance of the frontier marked a transition to a new, more forbidding national era. For almost a century, the frontier thesis has been one of American history's most influential ideas.

Turner and the Census Bureau thought in terms of a national frontier line beyond which there were fewer than 2 people per square mile—a population density equivalent to Washington, D.C., having no more than 125 people. From 1790 to 1880, the frontier line moved steadily westward, from the Appalachians to the Great Plains. But the 1890 Census was the first that could not show a national frontier line; the march of western settlement, especially growth along the Pacific coast, meant that the frontier had largely disappeared west of the Sierra-Cascades and no longer was contiguous east of them. Thus Turner declared the frontier gone.

Nearly a century later, the declaration looks odd and premature. The idea of a single national frontier line seems a vast statistical abstraction, a national average that is locally meaningless. Suppose we apply the nineteenth-century density standard another way—disaggregating it at the county level—and bring it up to date. The 1980 Census reveals 143 counties, all in western states, with fewer than two people per square mile (see figure 1). Every county lies west of the 98th meridian, a traditional boundary of the arid West (and approximately the location of the last national frontier line in 1880). All but the Alaskan counties lie east of the Sierra-Cascades.

The frontier counties have a small total population of 572,000, representing one American in 396. But because western counties are large, the frontier counties have a total area of 949,500 square miles—one-quarter of the United States. For a place that is supposed to have disappeared generations ago, a lot of frontier is left. The frontier counties fall mostly in four areas: rural Alaska, the Owyhee-Bitterroot valleys of the Northwest, the Great Basin in Nevada and Utah, and the Great Plains from Montana to Texas. Alaska, whose license plates proclaim it "The Last Frontier," is 96 percent frontier counties. Nevada is 80 percent frontier, Idaho 44, Montana and Utah 41, New Mexico and Oregon 27, Nebraska 24, South Dakota 21, Colorado 17, Texas 16, and Wyoming 15 percent. California, with four of the nation's sixteen largest cities, has two frontier counties that are 7 percent of the state. The Lower 48 frontier counties total 13 percent of the contiguous United States.

Much other evidence of the frontier's survival, in the frontier counties and elsewhere, does not depend on the nineteenth century's density standard. According to the Interior Department's Bureau of Land Management, 383 million acres of federal public land—all in the West, comprising more than 17 percent of the United States—never even have been surveyed, and over 50 million more acres were surveyed inadequately more than a century ago. Large chunks of western territory have yet to be fully explored—for instance, the northern Snake River Valley in Idaho, the Wah Wah Mountains in western Utah, Monument Valley in northern Arizona, and the Owyhee River canyons near the intersection of Oregon, Idaho, and Nevada.

Discoveries

Every year archaeologists and geologists make extraordinary western discoveries that are large, above ground, and easily visible, had anyone journeyed near them before. The last twenty years have seen the discovery of the Lassen County Indian rock carvings in northeastern California, Leviathan Cave in eastern Nevada, the limestone natural bridge near Arco, Idaho, and single redwoods of particularly large size in northern California. Machu Picchu, the fifteenth-century Inca settlement on a plateau nearly 8,000 feet high in the Peruvian Andes, was found in 1911; 11,900 feet up on Forest Service land in the Toiyabe Range of central Nevada, a spectacular 8,000-year-old American equivalent, Alta Toquima—the summer refuge of possible ancestors of the Shoshones was found only in 1978. Other discoveries undoubtedly have been concealed, especially if the discoverers were Indians.

The continuing land rush

Homesteading—settling on free public land, the most widespread and symbolic act of trying to people the frontier—persists to a surprising extent a half-century after the 1934 Taylor Grazing Act supposedly abolished it. Because Alaska's previous territorial status exempted it from the act, homesteading on federal land in the state lasted into the 1960s, and in 1982 the Interior Department revived it experimentally in central Alaska's Kuskokwim Mountains. On several occasions since 1934—for example, at the 1947 opening of the Buckeye Gillespie Dam on southwestern Arizona's Gila River—the federal government relaxed its prohibition on homesteading to promote settlement near specific projects. Because of legal delays, the federal government in 1981 transferred eleven homestead sites to latter-day settlers whose ancestors had first filed applications before 1934; and as of late 1982, the government still was processing similar applications on 178 more sites—84 in Alaska, 64 in Montana, 14 in South Dakota, 13 in Nevada, and 3 in Idaho. Some states, including Alaska, still allow homesteading on state-owned land.

Squatters

Then there is illegal homesteading that, whether temporary or permanent, amounts to frontier-style squatting on the vast western public lands. More than 3,000 Alaskans are squatting on the 78 million acres of state land, many more are squatting on the larger federal holdings, and some are putting up no-trespassing signs. In 1983 it was revealed that Alaska Governor Bill Sheffield held an interest in an illegal duck-hunting camp on a state waterfowl refuge; he publicly renounced his holding, but his opponent in the last election and three judges, including one on the Alaska Supreme Court, have not given up theirs. In southern California's Mojave Desert, Red Mountain (population 130) is a remote settlement of retirees who live year-round as squatters on federal land. "The entire town is in trespass," says a Bureau of Land Management official.

Sometimes illegal homesteading threatens to turn violent in the old frontier manner. The national forests, parks, rangelands, and wildernesses conceal apparently large numbers of marijuana growers, lumber rustlers, economic refugees, counter-culturalists, and fringe political groups. In one, California's Humboldt County, the sheriff's office received 200 complaints in 1982 from recreationists who had been chased off Bureau of Land Management property by armed cultivators of clandestine pot plants. In the Northwest, paramilitary survivalists have used public lands and army-surplus tanks to prepare for Armageddon. In response, the BLM has begun forming its own armed force—a sort of contemporary cavalry—to patrol its land.

War games

Such low-level violence suggests the military uses of the modern-day frontier. Once it was a place to be defended not only against the Indians, but also—at different times and places—against the British, French, Mexicans, Spanish, and Russians. Today it is a place not to wage or threaten war, but to practice for it. The frontier's size, diversity, and emptiness make it a national security asset of incalculable strategic significance, particularly for training troops and testing weapons. For many years after the 1949 Communist takeover in China, the U.S. Army trained Tibetan guerrillas in the Colorado Rockies. The 1980 Iranian rescue mission practiced on the Utah salt flats. The military operates mountain and desert warfare schools in several other western states, and arctic warfare ones in Alaska.

In 1981 there was a serious Defense Department proposal for a week-long war game in the Mojave Desert to simulate a full-scale Persian Gulf crisis, including destruction of the oil fields and Soviet intervention. The exercise, it developed, could be conducted essentially in secrecy—one minor public road would have to be closed for part of a day. The government has exploded nuclear bombs—some of doomsday size—in the southern Nevada portion of the Great Basin for forty years (and in Alaska's Aleutian Islands until 1973).

Changing, but changeless

The frontier is not what it was in the 1870s. It is smaller, less contiguous and isolated, more law-abiding and regulated, and less rugged, dangerous, and impassable. It has more and higher technology, less free land, and no longer provides a safety valve for people unneeded in cities or settled rural areas. Its products account for a much smaller proportion of the overall economy and of the natural resource subset. The frontier looks different: the nineteenth-century cowboy culture that reached its height during the 1866-90 Cattle Kingdom is gone, replaced by a high-tech culture of agribusiness, big mining and timber operations, and large water projects. Except for Alaska, the frontier has not for generations been the dream of those who seek a fortune or a new life.

Yet the frontier lives on, protected from large-scale settlement by its climate (northern Alaska and central Nevada), its terrain (southern Utah, central Idaho, and eastern Oregon), its distance from metropolitan areas (central Montana, the Western Dakotas, and most of Alaska and Wyoming), its lack of water, its frequent lack of other exploitable resources, and most federal land policies. There is also the simple fact that much frontier land is almost unlivable, economically unattractive, and abundantly surrounded by more such land.

It seems extraordinary that the nation does not acknowledge the unwon West as a huge empty region in our midst, but there are good reasons why we do not know what to make of the surviving frontier. The frontier is off the beaten track; our national governing classes, as well as many of the rest of us, have no reason to notice it. At best, it is a place to fly over. Barring occasional episodes such as the recent Sagebrush Rebellion, the public lands that form the core of the frontier rarely are a high-priority national issue—their uses no longer determine the future of the American economy, and their disposal to settlers no longer controls the course of western expansion. The high growth rate of many western cities and towns masks the fact that they amount to burgeoning urban outposts scattered across the far larger, sparsely populated frontier. (This clustering of growing urban populations has led to the ironic finding of recent censuses that many western states have become so urbanized that the West now is America's most urban region.) Leaving aside the brief Japanese occupation of some of the smaller Aleutians during World War II, the nation has not faced a true military threat on the frontier for well over a century.

Most important, the nation largely accepted Turner's argument that the frontier was passing, that America was about to become what he called a "closed-room society” —more like what Europe was rather than what America had been. We therefore have difficulty grasping that the land future of the American West is not yet entirely decided; we assume that the settlement of the West is over. Thomas Jefferson, believing that Americans would need one hundred generations to settle the West but then would be sustained by it for one thousand, went ahead with the controversial Louisiana Purchase in 1803. Seven generations later, he may have been more prescient than we realize.

Because we ignore the survival of the frontier, we repeatedly misunderstand the West. We allow the western portions of the Great Plains to become dependent on water-intensive farming methods that cannot be sustained in and frontier settings, and now are surprised when—for the third time in a century—nature and the economy cyclically turn hostile, Dust Bowls loom, and the Great Plains promise to become again one of the great failure sectors of American agriculture. We regard figures like James Watt and events like the Sagebrush Rebellion as aberrations when they are the predictable political products of the frontier that have appeared countless times before in the settlement of the West (and the East).

Similarly, environmentalists often seek to protect "scarce, fragile" western areas that turn out to be prevalent and resilient, and developers often seek to exploit different scarce, fragile areas that indeed should be preserved. Neither group trusts the other, so each exaggerates its own claims. The results are overuse in some resource situations, and underuse in others. Because we do not realize that we still have a vast frontier, we cannot arrive at a balanced or stable policy for it.

Turner was not wrong in 1893 to declare the frontier gone, but he frequently has been misunderstood since. A frontier is an area that at most can be marginally cultivated with the agricultural technologies of the time. Since the late nineteenth century our technologies, especially our means of handling water, have not improved enough to make farming or ranching on the western Great Plains—or in northern Alaska or southern Utah—more than intermittently profitable. The few available arable western lands may not have disappeared precisely in 1890, but nearly all vanished sometime between the completion of the first transcontinental railroad in 1869 and the Taylor Grazing Act of 1934. After more than two hundred years of often feverish pioneering, the surviving frontier is what remains.

The future of the frontier

A prodigious amount is left. Consider Alaska, the one-sixth of America that bulks so large in western development plans. The state, even after a decade of extremely high population growth (19 percent since 1980 alone), still has an overall density (0.8 people per square mile) that easily qualifies all of Alaska as frontier by the nineteenth-century standard. Alaska has half the nation's coal reserves, almost half its supply of fresh water, its most fertile fishing grounds, and huge stores of natural gas. Alaska will produce as much oil in the next ten years as the Lower 48 states have since the first well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859. In the 1980s we have an American North almost as large, uninhabited, virginal, rich, and environmentally vulnerable as the American West was in the 1870s.

We also have large parts of the American West essentially unchanged from the 1870s.

It is difficult to predict the fate of the frontier. Coming generations will probably see continued growth of western cities, renewed Sagebrush Rebellions, perhaps some strengthening of water technologies that would allow agriculture along more of the frontier. There conceivably may be some emergency use of the lands—the year after, say, a major West Coast earth-quake, or overwhelming population pressure from Mexico. But the happiest, most likely vision is that centuries from now most of the frontier will be roughly what it is today: the great mythic joyous West of big skies and cattle drives, lonesome roads and oasis towns, energy boomers and water shortages, of cactus and steppe and tundra—of purple mountain majesties that lack the fruited plain. Not for nearly a century has the frontier defined us as a people, but it remains a part of our national life. We no longer are a frontier nation, but we still are a nation with a frontier.