Document Type
Book
Publication Date
1996
Abstract
As the United States frontier moved west in the nineteenth century, it developed as a locus for the myth of the American superman, a fabled combination of self-reliance and self-development in which the frontiersman fought savage beasts and wild Indians to push a great civilization through plains and forests to the Pacific Ocean. Ironically, to participate in the frontier’s expansion was to contribute to its destruction: as destiny and technology seemed to carry the nation toward its grand fulfillment, the wilderness with its challenging animals and murderous savages diminished. By the 1880s, thoughtful Americans believed that the West could no longer provide the character-building battlefield as it was known to Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, or pioneer women on the Oregon Trail. As the United States reached its geographical limits and its position as an industrial power after the Civil War, the need seemed to arise for a supportive mythic vision, one that would encourage not only the preservation of wilderness values but also their use in justifying America’s development into an empire-building society. As an American myth, the frontier ethos would provide continued revitalization of the nation, keeping it from degenerating into “soft” European or “feminized” ways, as Theodore Roosevelt called them.
Recommended Citation
Evans, Robley. George Bird Grinnell. Boise, ID: Boise State University, 1996. Digital. Western Writers Series, 122.