Originally Forested Frontiers

Abstract

Land Fever: Dispossession and the Frontier Myth. By James M. Marshall. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1986. viii + 239 pp. Illustrations, appendixes, footnotes, index. $21.00. Whenever the term "frontier" is mentioned, there is commonly a reference to Frederick Jackson Turner or to the so-called "frontier thesis;' "frontier hypothesis;' or "Turner thesis?' Such references usually do not involve anything very substantive because there is in fact no such thesis or hypothesis. The Turner thesis is a vague collection of ill-formulated notions that frontier scholars, without much examination, are prone to use as a touchstone to grace their prose or to buttress insufficiently examined conclusions; it is not an analytical proposition. Indeed Turner himself, as Roger L. Nichols remarks in his introduction to American Frontier and Western Issues, used the term "frontier" carelessly, even indiscriminately. Thus the American scholars who have for decades been calling for tests of the Turner thesis through comparative frontier studies have themselves done no such thing, for rigorous testing would reveal the Turner thesis as a polite scholarly form of simple American chauvinism. The present assembly of material provides an appropriate context to examine a pair of discrete notions often referred to when scholars try to become specific about the Turner thesis. The first, the notion that most American frontier scholars associate with the Turner thesis, was plagiarized by Turner from the Italian geographer Achille Loria and presented in a celebrated 1893 paper to the American Historical Association. It states that the availability of "unoccupied" land for pioneer colonization acts as a social safety valve, allowing the depressed elements of a metropolitan population to escape deprivation and institutional strictures by removing to the frontier. There they can seek economic success and develop new social forms in proportion to their willingness to invest their labor in developing the land. The American national consciousness has come to accept this idea as constituting the essence of the American historical experience prior to 1890. However, Schmink and Wood's Frontier Expansion in Amazonia, Baker's An Indian Rural Economy, and Hemming's Changes in the Amazon Basin all provide clear evidence that the settlement of new land does not have an egalitarian or democratizing effect. Indeed, not only do metropolitan elites supply the elites on the frontier, but a migrating proletariat achieves no measurable improvement in condition. Furthermore, metropolitan credit structures, frontier policymaking, and other institutional devices ensure this result. In his introductory essay to The African Frontier, Kopytoff remarks that the liberating social effect of the American frontier was unique — and incidentally, the claim of American uniqueness encompasses the real merit of the Turner thesis in American scholarship. But Cayton's The Frontier Republic and Marshall's Land Fever suggest otherwise. In Cayton's work we find that Congress virtually gave away the Ohio country not to the little people in search of opportunity, but to representatives of existing New England elites, who contributed little or nothing to the subsequent development of the Ohio Valley and who got rich without much effort. In Marshall's Land Fever we see metropolitan banking forms and credit mechanisms transplanted to the frontier, effectively ensuring that the homesteader who first labored to clear and "improve" the land then promptly lost it owing to his lack of investment capital and his looming mortgage. Thus, those who controlled capital ended up in control of the developed land, forcing hapless laborers to move on further west or lose still more status. In other words, as Kopytoff remarks about the internal African frontier, the institutions of the metropolis were transplanted and reimposed on the frontier, in a somewhat simplified form perhaps, but without essential change. Social forms are endlessly replicated, and the frontier exercises a conservative influence rather than a liberating one. As Nichols observes in American Frontier and Western Issues of a recent work by Ralph Man, "More geographic than social mobility existed on most frontiers?' Another, related, aspect of the frontier experience often referred to under the general rubric of the Turner thesis is the idea of frontier cultural reversion: that the frontier environment molds the cultural behavior of the frontiersman by forcing him to revert to a more primitive cultural state as he struggles to adapt himself to the initially unfamiliar environment of the frontier zone. Schmink and Wood's Frontier Expansion in Amazonia and Hemming's Change in the Amazon Basin both suggest otherwise. In a period when we understand the ecological issues involved much more clearly than at any earlier time, and when the popular scientific press floods the world with