Dbq Turner's Frontier Thesis

Faith Picotte History 310 (T-Th) Homework Ch. 8

1.Turner’s frontier thesis is deceptively draws and allure your inquisitive imagination into a grand scale visionary picture of settlements of specific regions, and the social societal processes. Americans realized the frontier formed and promoted a composite nationalist American society. The English dominated the coastal region., later continental immigrants flowed towards the free lands of the frontier. “The Scotch-Irish and the palatine Germans, or Pennsylvania Dutch,” furnished the stock of the colonial frontier. With these people were also the free indentured servants or redemptioners, who at the expiration of their time of service, passed to the frontier” (source

Frontier needs and ideas were conditioned for American nationalistic system to legislate internal improvements in tariff and land. Frontier conditions worked against sectionalism both economically and socially. Promotion of democracy was its vital effect as was individualism. “Professor Herbert L.Osgood, in an able article, has pointed out that the frontier conditions prevalent in the colonies are important factors in the explanation of the American Revolution, where individual liberty was sometimes confused with absence of all effective government.”(Source 1). Frontier individualism encouraged democracy from its onset in its promotion. The frontier states of the union came with democratic suffrage provisions had a high reactional influence on people of older states to move there. “The rise of democracy as an effective force in the nation came in with western preponderance under Jackson and William Henry Harrison and it meant the triumph of the frontier -- with all of its good and with all of its evil elements.” It is the energy which the mountain breeze and western habits import to those emigrants. They are regenerated politically they soon become working politicians, the difference sir between a talking and a walking politician is immense” (Source

The push towards the western frontier led to various forms of environmental and people push. These and the skirmishes with Indian Modified Turner thesis. Young Jedidiah Smith, a Methodist clerk from Ohio led a fur-trading up the Missouri river to Yellowstone and beyond. This steady move led them away from European influence to an American experience of their own political, economic and social independence of American history. Fur traders were followed by railroad mining and timber companies, gold rush and various other enterprises who had control over them. “Control and direction of these enterprises lay with capitalists and managers outside the region Is it more important that fur trappers dressed in “hunting shirt and moccasin,” as seen in (source 2). Or that they usually took order from company officials in the east, as revealed in (source 3). N.J. Wyeth’s instructions in Robert Evans at the fort hall trading post’s running.” (Source