What Remains of the West?

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 35, 1967, No. 1

What remains of the West?

BY EARL POMEROY

eventy-two years ago the members of the American Historical Association moved 700 miles west from their usual meeting place to Chicago, which some historians wanted to see because it was having a fair, though one of them, the librarian at Harvard University, complained that the Association's program was "a pitiful show," of such quality as not to warrant "asking any reputable writer to take part. . . ." What they heard included probably the best-known paper ever read at a historical society meeting, so well known that, unlike most other academic doings, it became part of the standard subject matter of history itself, summarized in most of the college textbooks of American history. The speaker's message to them was twofold: first, that in coming west they had come to the most significant part of the United States and, second, that they had come too late, for its most significant experience was behind it. He quoted the words of the Superintendent of the Census, who reported that for the first time he had been unable to show on a map a continuous boundary between settled and unsettled land: "the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line."

In later years historians and other Americans differed over how significant an influence the frontier had been in American history and in the development of American character more than they differed over the idea that the frontier and the processes it represented no longer existed. While Frederick Jackson Turner himself extended his course in the history of the West each year until he retired in 1924 and included lectures on the West during and after the first World War, most others in the field have stopped with the 1890's. His successor at the University of Wisconsin, Frederic L. Paxson, in the year of Turner's retirement published a textbook that for many years was standard, calling it the History of the American Frontier, 1763—1893; and he concluded not only that the frontier was gone, but that the social process that the frontier dominated had reached its end in the 1880's, that the best farm lands of the public domain were gone by 1880. Some of the other textbooks start earlier than Paxson's, but as far as I know only one has ended significantly later — the work of a member of this Association. In the 1930's some of the economic historians who minimized western influences relative to eastern influences in American history suggested, in fact, that most of the land suitable for family farms and therefore capable of serving as a safety valve for supporting the democratic influences of the frontier as Turner described them was gone by the time Congress passed the Homestead Act in 1862. This was more of a rollback than most people will accept, whether economic historians themselves, members of graduate seminars in western history, members of historical societies, including the Western History Association which con- centrates on the Far West of the second half of the nineteenth century, or the producers and consumers of westerns on television.

It has long been clear enough, at least to far westerners, that the census definition of settled land as land having six inhabitants per square mile makes no sense in dry country some of which would not support that many coyotes comfortably. (It is true that large expanses of it are quite adequate for grazing cattle on government permits, and still other areas nearby support intensive irrigation agriculture beyond the dreams of middle western corn-and-hog men.) We commonly pay respects to John Wesley Powell, who in 1878 recommended developing small parts of the arid West as 80-acre irrigated farms, but much more of it in grazing units of 2,500 acres. Yet having noted all of that, we continue to measure the West by middle western yardsticks. Even one of the founders of the Western History Association, whose journal and meetings all but define the West as the cattle and mining country, applied these conventional criteria so broadly that a commentator protested against his looking for the virtues of the yeoman farmer on the Hispanic-American frontier. No one who surveys western history in a textbook includes Alaska and Hawaii, whether because they are not contiguous with the 48 older states or, as I suspect, because they do not fit easily into the common stereotype of territories inhabited by pioneer farmers who came by Conestoga wagon and filled the land to middle western density, no less, no more. These two possible explanations are essentially one, for contiguity was decisive only for farmers who moved relatively short distances between similar kinds of farm lands, and who therefore might want to drive farm animals or float them on rafts or take bulky equipment and household goods in their own wagons. Long before Alaskans turned from dog-sled to airplane, westerners used means of transportation that enabled them to move long distances without stopping at settlements along the road to refresh themselves and their animals. Contiguity was of no importance for the large number of emigrants to the Pacific Coast who came by sea — probably a majority between 1848 and 1869. As late as the first World War, a large amount of intercoastal passenger traffic into the Pacific Coast States still moved by steamship, and steamships competed with the railroad for passengers even between Los Angeles and Seattle. On the plains railroads rapidly supplanted river boats, but early emigrants often compared travel over the transcontinental railroads to a maritime voyage — the plains and desert like the sea itself, the cars swaying like ships, the passengers bereft of other company for several days between the Missouri River and the coast. Once the railroads came, fewer emigrants moved by wagon than go by highway today into Alaska.

Alaska and much of the rest of the West this side of the Rockies, moreover, seem to some persons to depart from the usual specifications for the frontier because government is so prominent there. Critics of the New Deal in the 1930's referred to the "synthetic frontier" of the Matanuska Valley, implying that government had not subsidized settlers on other frontiers. Such distinctions between the older and the newer Far Western States and Territories may be most significant for what they reveal of conventional versions of western history, and especially the common disposition to forget that over much of the West population was unstable (even outside the mining territories), that most western communities drew heavily on outside capital, and that agriculture often lagged behind commerce and mining. The Matanuska Valley project was, of course, synthetic in a sense that did not occur to most outsiders: in that it assumed the first step in economic development should be subsistence agriculture, although throughout the West subsistence as opposed to commercial agriculture was hopelessly out-of-date, and Alaska could not easily support either. The planners were not blind to the needs of Alaska alone in this respect: they talked also of the development of subsistence farms in the mountains of Appalachia and in the Tennessee Valley, where the proprietors would make their own shoes and perhaps sell picturesque peasant craft work to tourists and to buyers from New York department stores.

The planners forgot that, with few exceptions, subsistence farming had been a significant stage in the development of only those parts of the West where natural watercourses could carry crops from farms to market, as along the tributaries of the Ohio River, where farmers floated corn and kegs of whiskey and pickled pork to Cincinnati. Until railroads opened up the wheat country of eastern Washington, the miners of Idaho and Montana ate bread made from flour milled thousands of miles away in the East and Middle West, butter from New York, and hams from Germany. The early settlers around Great Salt Lake could not so easily depend on imported food, nor did they wish to. But the pioneers of 1847 had not harvested their second crops before they began trading with emigrants to California and Oregon, anticipating Utah's services in distribution over twentieth-century truck and railroad lines, as the members of the Mormon Battalion in the Mexican War anticipated Utah's dependence on the twentieth-century military establishment. Meanwhile the first generation of settlers in Utah departed from the middle western agricultural tradition in a different direction, that of developing manufactures to fulfill the Mormon doctrine of self-sufficiency, and so instituted a kind of far western equivalent of Henry Clay's American System without a protective tariff, or of mercantilism without colonies. As Leonard Arrington has pointed out, in emphasizing industrialization they may have given inadequate attention to agriculture. But they gave more than their neighbors. Agriculture languished also along the coast, where the early American inhabitants for many years devoted themselves primarily to commerce and mining — first commerce in pelts, hides, and tallow, then commerce in the consumers' goods that miners and those serving miners bought. Such commercial and industrial economies demanded and received governmental services, arrangements for social encouragement and guidance or control, far beyond the experience of older agricultural frontiers, and in that respect closer to twentieth-century Alaska than to late-eighteenthcentury Ohio and Kentucky.

In the 1930's the spectacle of government building great dams, extending credit, dispensing relief, and moving settlers about in the whole West, not merely in Alaska, seemed to reconfirm the impression that the old West was gone. If anyone doubted it, the further spectacle of farmers abandoning their homesteads in Arkansas and Oklahoma to move to the relief rolls of Los Angeles County dramatized the lesson. Yet the early Far West, especially from the 1840's, had depended heavily on governmental expenditures and other eastern and foreign contributions. The United States Treasury financed steamship and stagecoach service and ultimately railroad service; during the Mexican War it paid the New York Volunteers and the Mormon Battalion, who brought themselves as settlers in addition to spending their military pay; it paid salaries in territorial government; and it maintained military forces in peacetime that sometimes escorted settlers through Indian country and always stimulated the economy, even when, as in the expedition against the Mormons in 1857, their purpose was not to stimulate but to coerce. Legislation for railroads was the major demand of California and Oregon in the 1850's and 1860's, as it was to be for Alaska in much of the next century; and the first of the gold rushers, in 1849, arrived in ships that would not have been there but for a subsidy. Private investments by outsiders in the fur trade, mining, cattle, development of townsites, and railroads were probably no less substantial than the government's contribution; and although western mines disgorged large returns, the West as a whole may have recaptured about as much from eastern miners and investors. In consequence of such contributions, the fastest-growing parts of the Far West — the mining frontiers of California, Colorado, and Nevada — were able to live in cities while neglecting agriculture, and thus to anticipate the urban shape of the next century. Utah was the great exception, but more religiously and socially than economically; although until the development of hard-rock mining in the present century, it drew less risk capital than some of its neighbors. Nevertheless much of the Mormons' stock of dollar exchange came from outsiders, including immigrants, tithing members abroad and in the East, and Gentile transients, including those sent out to govern and harass. Pioneer Utah, like pioneer California, was significantly more urban than the contemporary territories and states of the Mississippi Valley. And although the pioneers raised more corn than Jim Bridger may have expected, still as a producer of corn, Utah, like most other Far Western States, has remained behind the rocky hillsides of Young's birthplace, Vermont.

Economic historians, and particularly the historians of western cities, have established the urban dimensions of the frontier generally and the subsidiary role of agriculture in the early Far West. Yet, whether inside or outside a framework of the history of the westward movement, there have been few attempts to project past the 1890's the kinds of social analysis that Turner and his successors attempted for the frontiers of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Some historians have looked to sociologists' studies of leadership and problem-solving in wartime housing developments for theories of behavior that they might apply to new communities on the frontier, but they have not themselves written the history of twentieth-century communities. John C Parish, in a well-known article on "The Persistence of the Westward Movement," which he published in 1926, dissented from the idea that it had stopped, which must have seemed particularly unreasonable to him as a resident of Los Angeles, but he did not claim that very much had persisted: he saw a "distinct slowing down" of migration into the West. When the members of the American Historical Association went west 50 years ago, in July 1915, not merely to Chicago but to San Francisco, for a special or intercalary meeting in conjunction with the Panama-Pacific International Exposition, the dominant theme of the program was the Pacific Ocean. And no professional historian discussed the American frontier of the 60-odd years since the Mexican War, or suggested that what the members saw about them on the coast raised questions about commonly accepted interpretations of American development.

In fact, taken as a whole, the Mountain and Pacific States and Territories had slowed down remarkably in the 1890's and thus seemed to illustrate the implications that Turner drew from the report of the Superintendent of the Census: two of them, New Mexico and California, the largest, grew only slightly more than the rest of the country, and a third, Nevada, lost population. The line of settlement at the next census, that of 1900, fell back, demonstrating, said one historian, that the migrations of the 1880's had been overlarge, that more farmer families had settled the western plains than the plains could hold.

But there has been a different story in the present century. In the first decade the Far West grew at a rate about three times faster than the rest of the country; it did nearly as well in the fifth decade, during and after the second World War. In only one decade of the century, the 1920's, have more than half of the 13 Mountain and Pacific States and Territories grown at less than the national rate, and this same decade was the one in which California grew faster than since the 1850's, increasing by nearly two-thirds. And California had as many people as 11 of the other 12 put together. In three decades of the twentieth century, the national center of population moved west an average distance almost as great as the average movement for the entire nineteenth century — 46 against 47.7 miles—, and in the 1950's the distance was nearly one-fifth greater—-57 miles.

The largest movements of population have been very different from the classic advances of farming families on the middle western frontier. In the 1950's the Mountain and Pacific States together increased at over twice the national rate. Like Florida, the non-Western State that grew the most absolutely and relatively, the Far Western States were heavily urban and non-agricultural, beyond the national average. Within the region, the states that grew the fastest were the most urbanized, and their growth was chiefly in urban population. Thus in Arizona and Nevada, whose total populations increased by 73 per cent and 78 per cent, urban population increased by 119 per cent and 133 per cent. The one exception was Alaska, only 38 per cent urban, which increased by 76 per cent, but here the increase in urban population was greatest of all —150 per cent. The population of Anchorage increased nearly three times. And although Alaska is less urban than most other Western States, it is also far less agricultural, with only about one-half of one per cent of its labor force employed on farms. It is clear that the great growth of the new West of the present century has been in cities rather than on family farms.

Moreover, it does not consist chiefly, as one sometimes hears, of elderly pensioners and coupon-clippers, living in mobile homes that never move. (The only two Far Western States where the percentages of inhabitants over 65 years of age run over the national average are Washington and Oregon, which in turn are younger than the states of the upper Mississippi Valley.) The typical new westerner figures in processes of economic development that would require him to live in town even if that were not already his preference. They are processes that have more to do with manufacturing and distributing than with farming, though even the new agriculture absorbs far more capital than pioneer homesteading did, and requires urban management on a large scale. They are processes that have drawn heavily on capital investment from outside, including investment by the United States government, which has financed much of the development of both formerly prosperous states like California and formerly depressed states like Utah.

Writing the economic history of Utah, Leonard Arrington has described the role of national expenditures for relief, reclamation, and military research and development in supporting the state's remarkable growth in recent years. In Oregon, which like Utah seemed to face a bleak economic future after the last war, much of the prosperity of the last 10 years is attributable to the increase in expenditures by the national government; and these two states are probably more nearly typical than atypical.

Alaskans complain of neglect, but an Alaskan newspaper explaining why Alaskans did not respond to Senator Barry Goldwater's indictments of big national government said recently that Alaska "is probably the top beneficiary from federal spending among all 50 states." On different bases others have made similar comments on California, which has had the lion's share of contracts for research and development and for space and aircraft industries, and on Washington, where one aircraft manufacturer dominates employment in manufacturing and accounts for the state's shift from dependence on lumber. Incidentally, recent western elections tend to confirm the experience of the nineteenth-century West — that dependence on the government for economic assistance has not subverted the vitality and independence of western politics. The two newest states have proved no more predictable than the others, Republican Hawaii going Democratic in 1960 while Democratic Alaska went Republican; in 1964 all of the Far West supported the Democratic ticket nationally except Arizona, which elected a Democratic governor while Democratic California elected her second Republican senator and Democratic Washington elected a Republican governor. And Utah's dependence on the national government has not kept her from electing Republicans as well as Democrats in the 1950's and 1960's.

Thus we may at least argue that the recent Far West, the contemporary Far West, resembles the early Far West in some significant respects. It is heavily urban and commercial and industrial rather than rural and agricultural; it depends heavily on government; it is fast-growing; it is young; it is politically heterodox or at least erratic. It has abandoned agriculture less decisively than the pioneer generation that farmed in more or less middle western style in the brief interval between the decline of the fur trade and the hide trade in the 1830's and the discovery of gold in 1848. And its economy seems dangerously unstable to critics who wonder what will happen to it after the first Americans land on the moon or when the supply of water becomes so short or the supply of smog so long that the rest of southern California's aircraft and missile factories move to Kansas. More than a century ago, other critics wondered what would happen to the far western economy when the beaver and longhorned cattle were gone, when the Mexican War ended, when the gold ran out, when the emigrant trains stopped. They warned westerners to stop relying on fortune and go back to the soil.

In time they did. Especially from the 1880's to the first World War, much of the Far West moved into what Americans had come to regard as a more normal pattern of western development. Newly completed railroads had land to sell, and empty eastbound freight cars to fill. The goods they brought out from the East undersold and destroyed western factories, and although there was seldom a sustained absolute decline in manufacturing, except in Utah, which had had least to waste on luxuries in early days and had had about the highest freight charges to pay, yet the new competition temporarily discouraged further investment. In the 1880's and 1890's the railroads developed effective refrigerator cars, cut rates on agricultural produce, and extended their feeder lines into the farm lands. The results included the great booms in agricultural settlement that, especially in the 1880's and in the decade or so before the first World War, brought more farmers into some counties of the Mountain States and the eastern parts of Oregon and Washington than have been there since. Even then, most of them were farmers in the traditions of the western Mississippi Valley and the plains rather than in those of the Ohio Valley and New York and Pennsylvania. More came to raise wheat than orchard fruits, although the promoters stressed the more glamorous crops. There were never many Ohioans setting out peach trees in Montana along what Jay Cooke had advertised as the "banana belt." And the citrus lands of southern California attracted more speculators and dreamers than orchardists; the increase in California's population during the 1880's, decade of the great townsite boom in the southern counties, was less than that in the Pacific Northwest. But during the 1880's the percentage of employment in agriculture in the Far West as a whole rose significantly, whereas nationally it entered a rapid decline, as befitted a time of declining farm prices and expanding industry. Even in those Western States where the employment on the farm declined relative to employment in cities, it increased sharply in numbers — in Oregon by three-fourths, in Utah by one-half, in Washington over three times. In 1880 no Far Western State had as much as the national level of employment in agriculture, and the level in California, biggest producer of all, was less than half as high — 21.1 per cent against 49.5 per cent. By 1890 New Mexico was above the national level, by 1900 these two and Wyoming, with Montana tied, by 1920 these four and also, in ascending order, Colorado, Arizona, Oregon, and Utah, or 8 of 11. Yet in the nineties the retreat began. It was no novelty for homesteaders to sell out and move on in a few years: this had been a common practice in the Mississippi Valley, where, as James C. Malin has pointed out, taking out a mortgage on a farm was not unlike trading in futures on margin. But by the middle 1890's large areas had not only exchanged farmers but lost them. Fifty counties in 10 states lost population. Although the percentage of employment in agriculture continued to increase in 8 states, against the national trend, the increases were small, averaging just over 3 per cent of total employment, whereas increases in the eighties had averaged 8.3 per cent. And the 3 states with relative decreases were states with larger-than-average populations — California, New Mexico, and Oregon, which among them had more farm workers than all the other 8 together. The general histories of the West emphasize the increase in California's agricultural output in these years, when the nation was learning to eat her oranges, raisins, prunes, and canned peaches. And yet the value of agricultural production in California, which had increased at more than the national rate in the 1880's along with the percentage of employment in agriculture, increased at less than the national rate in the 1890's and in the 1900's. Production grew at barely more than the national rate in Oregon, then the second largest agricultural producer in the Far West.

Soon settlers moved once more into new areas as prices recovered and hopes rose after the depression of 1893. Perhaps the most spectacular movement of farmers was across the Canadian boundary, where nearly 600,000 Americans entered Alberta and Saskatchewan between 1897 and 1914. Homesteading picked up markedly also in the states of the western Missisippi Valley, where, in fact, original entries reached an all-time peak in the early 1900's. But in the Mountain Territories and States, entries for the 17 years 1906-22 were nearly 5 times larger than total entries over the preceding 43 years, from the first entries under the Homestead Act. Idaho doubled in population between 1900 and 1910, thanks largely to irrigation; so did Nevada, which had lost population 10 years before though its growth was in mining as well as in farming. Then came another retreat. By 1916, just before the boom in farm prices during the first World War, the American-born population of Saskatchewan and Alberta had fallen off by about 70 per cent. No one knows what happened to these more than 400,000 American farmers, but at least they did not take up farms just south of the border. Between 1910 and 1920 the number of far western counties losing population reached a record 81, over twice the number between 1900 and 1910. The percentage of employment in agriculture declined in 5 of 11 states, and these 5 had five-eighths of the farm workers. Perhaps more significantly still, despite the approving comments of the advocates of reclamation and of admirers of the traditional family farm, those states where agricultural employment was high tended to be less prosperous than those where it was low. Even the value of agricultural products per farm worker ran over twice as high, for instance, in California, with 18 per cent of employment in agriculture, as in New Mexico, with 45.1 per cent. Idaho with 47.5 per cent in agriculture, against 13.4 per cent in 1870, was doing considerably better by that test but remained one of the poorest of the Far Western States by the tests of per capita income, as she still is. Further, between 1910 and 1920 the total value of agricultural production increased at less than the national rate in Montana, another poor state, even while the percentage of population employed in agriculture increased much more there than in any other state.

The problems of far western farmers in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century are too complex for any one explanation. Competition overseas and the beginnings of decline in demand for animal power and animal fodder affected farmers everywhere. But westerners seemed to suffer particularly by trying to follow the examples of farmers in older parts of the country. By shipping to the Eastern States, they incurred charges for freight and handling that might easily consume their profits, and that exaggerated the effects of drops in sales. Moreover, to produce eastern-type crops for eastern markets they had to incur heavy costs for machinery and for water at a time when both machines and the techniques of large-scale irrigation were highly experimental, assuming that they could absorb these costs as well or persuade the eastern consumer to pay premium prices. He might be willing to pay a premium for western fruit out of season, but the seasons themselves varied with the weather in East and West, and his willingness varied with the business cycle. Moreover, there was no such premium for western grain, which had to compete simply on price.

In the long run some of these new western farmers developed both successful techniques and profitable markets, including markets in the West itself as western population increased, and it would be too much to suggest that they would have done better by waiting till later. However, many of their attempts to extend an older agricultural frontier into the Far West corresponded less to geographical and economic reality than to a theory of history. The theory had appealed first to politicians most of whom had not seen the Far West and who, therefore, assumed that 160 acres would support a family as well there as in the Ohio Valley when they supported homestead bills; it appealed later in the nineteenth century to the railroads, territorial and state immigrant agencies, and other promoters who advertised western agricultural opportunities, and who thought of the urban economies of early years, resting on mining, trapping, stockraising, and lumbering, as essentially abnormal. Still later the theory appealed to politicians rationalizing their opposition to self-government or the development of transportation for Alaska, who could point to the slowness of agricultural development — which, of course, was as irrelevant to Alaska's main opportunities as it had been to the opportunities of Nevada, Colorado, and Montana in their early years. Although in Alaska the government was slow to foster what agriculture was possible by surveying lands and building roads, in the older Western States public policy had its effects once gold and silver mining had fallen to the corporations and thus ceased to dominate popular visions of western opportunity.

Tempted by extravagent subsidies into overbuilding, railroads sought to realize both capital gains and continuing revenues by selling land to farmer-immigrants, who came increasingly by railroad from the farming states of the Mississippi Valley rather than from the commercial and industrial states that had furnished most of the earlier populations. Irrigation projects financed by both government and railroads attracted into farming many novices who supposed that on small irrigated plots they could enjoy the amenities of urban life and at once escape the rigors of eastern winters and realize profits from selling citrus fruit and citrus land at more than conventional agricultural rates. In the Southwest, any resemblance to traditional agriculture was slight and transitory, for while nostalgia for simpler ways advanced with the complexity of industrial society in older states and supported a new great migration far larger than that of the 1840's, nevertheless over much of the desert, family farms soon gave way to corporate agricultural assembly-lines and to suburban housing developments and freeways.

The appeal of theory persisted even during the depression of the 1930's, when the troubles of western agriculture became disasters. The end of the frontier became apparent at the most unsophisticated levels — in fiction, where Grandpa told Jody that there wasn't any more westerin', and in politics, where Franklin D. Roosevelt offered the largess of government as substitute for the opportunity of free land. Even most of the academic critics of traditional ideas of western opportunity limited themselves to minimizing the agricultural safety valve — the possibility of absorbing the urban unemployment on frontier farm lands—, while Walter Prescott Webb, who carried geographical determinism further than Turner had, defined his great frontier as "a vast and vacant land without culture," "without population," "as distinguished from ... an occupied or civilized country," and specifically excluded Asia and tropical Africa because they were already well populated. Advocates of the TVA and other projects for relieving poverty in the southern mountain country described the mountaineers as authentic frontier types perpetuating pioneer virtues past the pioneer era. The essential qualities of frontier life were little changed in the backwoods, wrote the author of an article on "The Surviving American Frontier" in 1931, who saw "the common environmental qualities of relative poverty and isolation" remaining as "an effective bulwark against the invasion of business system and business thought."

In fact, of course, the backwoods frontier of subsistence agriculture has little in common with the most essential qualities of frontier life. It supports only caricatures of commonly posited western traits — in place of nationalism, xenophobia; in place of individualism, hookworm. In place of perhaps the most essential condition of frontier life, abundance, it offers an economic dead end. It does not depress standards of living temporarily, as a means to an end, but permanently; and there is no end. The backwoods are not even in a class with such fossil frontiers as much of the mining-town and dude-ranch country, which once were on the make but now subsist as three-dimensional, life-sized dioramas for tourists. Rather, the backwoods are the stagnant backwashes where those who could not keep up with the main stream of frontier advance found lodging after their wiser and more vigorous predecessors staked out the best opportunities. Far from embodying what we like to think of as western traits today, their descendants include the clay-eaters and rednecks of Alabama and Mississippi who are just now receiving news of the Declaration of Independence and of the Union's victory in the Civil War.

To identify the frontier with the backwoods and with subsistence farming is not much more misleading than to identify it exclusively with the high mountains, the desert, and cattle raising. Over much of the duderanch country, in those parts where the cattle industry was not a growth stock for eastern and foreign speculators, there were neither cattle nor cowboys before the dude-ranchers brought them in to amuse paying guests. Tourist agencies now offer pioneer history where "high desert plateaus and air-conditioned facilities make heat no problem at any season" (to quote a recent advertisement for southeastern Utah, an area that pioneers generally got out of before they could make much history). The differences between fossil frontiers or frontiers of failure and the real thing may explain why the parts of the West that look most like the frontiers of television and the pulps often prove least conspicuous for what we think of as western traits, such as democracy and willingness to try new ways. The recent voting records of some parts of southern California recall that there are great differences between social mobility and the movements of the monorail at Disneyland, the stagecoach at Knotts' Berry Farm, and the races at Arcadia, educational headquarters of the John Birch Society.

Southern California, long the fastest-growing part of the West, has been slow, in fact, to establish itself as an exhibit of the frontier process, except on television. Bernard De Voto refused to call it western, repudiating it with special emphasis, even horror. Visiting the coast in 1914 and spending his winters at Pasadena after 1924, Frederick Jackson Turner had frequent occasion to describe again the closed frontier that he had traced at Chicago in 1893, and saw no exceptions about him. Being strongly committed to the spirit that he had described as springing from free land and abundant resources on earlier frontiers, he sought replacements for them as vital forces in American society, looking to the exploitation of coal and iron in the factories of Eastern States and to the extension of national power overseas, "in some respects the logical outcome of the nation's march to the Pacific. . . ." He did not, however, describe in the far western landscape the stories of the succession of frontiers that had passed over it, some of them in his own lifetime, and that demonstrated the limitations of the old test of six inhabitants per square mile, of the old definition of the frontier as primarily agricultural. The grounds of the Huntington Library, where he worked, had been closed frontier, that is, fully occupied lands, successively for Indian hunters, Spanish missionaries, Mexican cattle ranchers, and American orange growers. On a clear day — and most days in southern California were clear then — he could see the resort hotels at Pasadena, ramparts of the frontiers of the healthseekers and tourists, the laboratories of the California Institute of Technology, and the derricks of Huntington Beach, outposts of the coming frontiers of petrochemistry and smog. In the census records of national development, he saw in the West nothing "so full of meaning as the figures which [told] of upleaping wealth and organization and concentration of industrial power in the East in the last decade" (this was in 1910) ; in fact, he saw the grim spectre of population increasing faster than the supply of food once drawn so bountifully from virgin land. For him, virginity in natural resources seemed to have no more gradations than in biology.

Nor has Turner stood alone in discounting the possibilities of new western frontiers. Frank Norris, who lamented the passing of the material for the American epic, saw the frontier "gone at last" with the United States Marines at Peking in the Boxer Rebellion, where another Californian, Herbert Hoover, soon to become a millionaire overseas, was one of the besieged Americans. Sociologists agreed in principle that the environment of people and things governs the development of personality more than the environment of land and climate. But David Riesman explained his other-directed man, by contrast, as man advancing himself by manipulating other men rather than by raiding nature — as if the subjugation of nature were at an end, and as if those who had raided it before had done so alone and with their bare hands.

We are on shaky ground when we talk of western traits, especially because for so long we have assumed that the most desirable or the most American traits were western. The fact is that many western traits and types have their close parallels in the East. The Mormon pioneer built Zion after social blueprints drawn or revealed in New York and Ohio. As W. O. Clough has pointed out, the western bad man was contemporary with the eastern robber baron, whose spirit no one enshrines in romantic novels or probes sympathetically for anomie. This pair and other pairs — salesmen and boomers, speculators in stocks and in real estate — appeared more than accidentally in the same generation, for the West of a century ago, like the West today, was closely associated with the East, and so similar to the East that westerners talked at length of similarities and for that matter of differences, which often seem most striking in communities that are halfway similar. The dweller in a large city, Robert S. Lynd has written, "tends to be a highly developed roving predatory animal. His culture resembles a frontier boom-town with everywhere the clatter of new buildings going up and disregard for the niceties of living in pursuit of the main chance." The principal human predators in the West of the Pacific Slope and the Rocky Mountains resembled easterners still more because typically they came from the East. Their example may recall again the narrowness, the inadequacy of the agricultural base for society in the Far West. The promotional spirit of Americans who looked out to El Dorado on the western frontier and to Cathay beyond arose in large part from the industrial and financial forces that had transformed American society in the older states in the first half of the nineteenth century. Without vision sharpened in the counting houses of New York and Boston, they could not have seen the new opportunity so clearly; without steam engines, express companies, and newly tempered instruments of national government, they could not have seized it so firmly.

But the West supports more advanced forms of patterns of behavior that in the East are only tendencies, in individualism, in dissidence, in democracy, in urban congestion. The evidences of physical mobility are fuller nearly everywhere in the Far West than in the older states except Florida, which of course is not old except in the most technical historical sense and where the high incidence of residents that were in a different house five years before has less to do with habits than with the processes of senescence and retirement. Nonpartisanship may be a function of urban growth, the specialized, nonpolitical needs of metropolitan communities, the visibility of nonpolitical personalities in a world of long-distance commuting, syndicated journalism, and television. Yet Hiram Johnson's progressives in California preceded Fiorello LaGuardia's Fusionists in New York, and had longer and wider impact. Whether the western progressive movement was simply successor to the movements of westerners led by Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, and Bryan, or instead, as Turner suggested, an effort "to find substitutes for that former safeguard of democracy, the disappearing frontier," there was no overlooking the vigor of its western roots.

Far from being diluted and attenuated as the pioneer ancestry recedes, moreover, some traits inherited from pioneer times seem not only to persist but to find reinforcement in twentieth-century migration. Long ago, wrote Frank Norris (1901), the westerner "has put off the red shirt, he has even abandoned the revolver. . . . But scratch the surface ever so little and behold — there is the Forty-niner." The very mobility and adaptability of twentieth-century society, which finds it possible to live comfortably almost anywhere, seem sometimes to make it easier for emigrants from the older states to select the regional personalities that correspond to their own. Feeling free to leave, they also may feel more committed and converted than settlers of earlier years who cherished the memories of former homes at the other ends of roads too long and arduous to travel again. Who can deny that Salt Lake City continues to draw its saints, San Francisco its sinners, Anchorage its adventurers in the respective spirits of their pioneer days?

Both westward migration and some Western States continue to grow with a continuing vitality that confounds those who saw it ending with the supply of free land arable by the standards of 1890. Within the last generation it has, in fact, recovered the dynamism, the optimism of the generation that followed the migrations to the New Zion in 1847 and to the New Babylon in 1849; and it has achieved relationships to the rest of the country similar to those it had then, in rate of growth, in social patterns, in values. Somehow this Far West, which to many observers seemed to have badly overestimated the future more than a century ago and filled up with settlers beyond its capacity to support them, seems still to unfold new opportunities, whether because its human stock has so effectively dedicated itself to making the choices that lead to a richer life or because even the vast areas of it that once seemed useless have repeatedly afforded space for new technology to open new resources. Here in Salt Lake City, in a metropolitan area that by all ordinary calculations should never have appeared at all and that celebrated the beginning of its second century by growing 50 per cent in 10 years, it is especially hard to believe the announcement that the frontier was gone was not premature.

On November 21, 1867, the first number of the Deseret Evening News was issued in Great Salt Lake City. The News was originally started as a weekly, progressed to a semi-weekly in 1866, and became a daily in 1867. According to the Deseret News of January 20, 1875, "the News is not only the oldest weekly, but the oldest semi-weekly and daily in the Rocky Mountain Region. ... It is the pioneer paper of the entire vast region spreading between the Missouri River and the Pacific Ocean, and the line of the British Possessions and Mexico, a stretch of country more than a thousand miles from North to South and nearly two thousand miles from East to West."

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