The Frontier: Hardy Perennial

Utah Historical Quarterly

Vol. 35, 1967, No. 3

The Frontier: Hardy Perennial

BY CARLTONCULMSEE

0ne must be foolhardy to write about the Frontier, because most readers regard it as having long since been laid to rest in the dust of scholarship. But the fact is, because there is an enduring physical basis, Frontier psychology persists in significant senses.

True, the 1890 census-makers saw the "zone between civilization and savagery" so fragmented that a "border" could no longer be traced. Then Frederick Jackson Turner told us the time had come to appraise the effects of the Frontier on our individual and mass psychology and institutions. Although he showed acute insight in pointing out some of these influences, his historical pioneering unfortunately coincided with an influx of philosophic and literary pessimism which helped persuade us that our exuberant national youth was ended. Now, it seemed, we must face a future of circumscribed opportunity and melancholy reality. Now some gloomily accepted a new era from which free land was lacking — and from which the spirit of freedom and self-reliance and the fluidity of society, essences of our democracy, appeared to be vanishing. This view appealed to a sluggish streak in us. Although exhorters encouraged us by reminding us that there would always be New Frontiers for the enterprising, energetic, and courageous, many of us preferred to think that, if the age of experimentation with our institutions had passed, we could largely forgive efforts to drug a social conscience pained and painful in its birth-throes. This mood contained too much economic determinism, Spenglerism, nostalgia for a Golden Age when there was unlimited raw material in the hand of a brash adolescent country, longing for a bouyant phase that had slumped into stodgy middle age.

Most of what Professor Turner's disciples wrote was authentic. But from it we have drawn assumptions that we tend to apply too broadly and yet too rigidly. It would be convenient and comfortable, in a luxurious sadness, if we could view the turn of the century as the opening of a new era in which pioneer individualism surrendered to forces too huge and complex for us. The fact is, as I suggested, important aspects of the Frontier seem destined to survive indefinitely, partly because a solid foundation for the Frontier psychology still exists and partly because our minds are, fortunately, as resilient as they are.

Here is evidence: after 1890 when the Frontier ostensibly was closed, people have settled on wild lands (homesteads, former Indian holdings, and other lands — sometimes in successive waves over tracts that the wilderness had recaptured) totaling an area approximating that of the Louisiana Purchase, which in 1803 doubled the size of our country. These pioneers cut themselves off from established ways of life. They plunged into the wilds with genuine pioneer temerity and entrusted their dreams, their fortunes, and their sanity to the rigors of pioneering under increasingly difficult natural conditions. I know something of the "postfrontier" because my family joined one of these latter-day assaults on the wild lands, I even "proved up" on a 3 20-acre homestead myself.

Rarely were these pioneers prepared for the harsh conditions they encountered, because they moved from the tamed lands or cities to the wild as abruptly as though passing through a door from a snug room to a storm outside. Thus many twentieth century frontiersmen resembled the "gentleman adventurers" who disembarked at Jamestown in 1607 ill equipped to overcome nature's adversities. Most of the hundreds who died at Jamestown, it is true, succumbed to fever; the western frontiersmen found aridity their chief foe. But in neither period were the pioneers inured to the vicissitudes that confronted them.

We may deplore their ignorance, but we must concede that many developed rapidly and revealed much courage. Just as the first Scotch- Irish adapted themselves so swiftly to the "border" that they often caught the Indians off guard, the western frontiersmen quickly gained tougher fibre and made adaptations. It is fortunate, however, that moral victories have been numerous, for the material triumphs over the arid lands have been, for the most part, transitory, illusory, or unrealistically expensive.

The Mormons conquered the desert? Yes, in a manner of speaking. Not to detract from their very considerable physical achievements, we must make larger claims for intangible victories. After more than a century, only about four per cent of Utah's land is cultivated. Most of the remainder is highland or wasteland penetrated briefly by a few herdsmen, hunters, fishermen, and rock hounds. Planes fly over, and some roads hurry us across the barrens. But drive 50 or 100 miles across many a waste; come to an oasis at the mouth of a canyon; see at the edge of town the wind-beaten signs of Rotary, Kiwanis, Lions; guess how the villagers club together against desert and mountain that loom over them, which in many counties threaten to take back their own as the young people flee city-ward. One of Montana's forlorn boasts is that the state possesses more ghost towns than does any other state! But Utah, despite large population increases in a few centers, has a goodly number of declining or dead villages also.

Let us, however, leave this doleful theme. Experts have already emphasized the economic features of the Frontier, sometimes unduly, for we have long lain enmeshed in various physical determinisms. Thus we have tended to depreciate the mental and spiritual aspects of the interaction between man's inner nature and physical nature on the Frontier. Such neglect leads to a gross imbalance in our judgment and to unwarranted pessimism.

We have, it is true, observed how free land helped foster individualism and the democratic spirit. But we might profitably examine the paradox of rugged individuals who were so greedy to devour the Big Barbecue of natural resources that they shouted stridently, successfully for government aid; for troopers to fight the Indians and patrol immigrant and trade routes; for roads; for land-grants for railroads; for reclamation projects, dams, canals, and power plants; for research on a thousand problems posed by hostile nature on the Frontier. Every such demand inevitably made government more powerful, expensive — and demanding on us. It would be fascinating to read epics of rampant individualists who, needing an ally to overmaster the might of the arid West, helped turn "creeping socialism" into a stampede! Do not misunderstand: I do not fear government and its influences through Flaming Gorge and Glen Canyon dams, land-grant universities and research, national forests and national parks. I merely relish the irony of how the Hero with the Winchester turned into the Statesman who allied the Big Sky Country with the industrial city to make Big Government bigger.

But in this article I would emphasize a different influence which rises from the wilderness, And I would point out another paradox akin to the first: the legend of incalculable riches and felicity in the Sunset Lands finds an enduring foundation in physical conditions hostile to men! The explanation is simple. The attraction of the Frontier is its promise of unexploited potentiality. The well-watered lands do not offer this enticement because they comfortably sustain life and hence they hold inhabitants. But half of America west of the 98th meridian ranges from a zone of chronic drought, the High and Dry Plains, the Dust Bowl of old, to lands as malignant to man as Death Valley. Men penetrate these lands but they remain only on condition that they adapt to their stern environment. Despite automobiles and television sets, they change profoundly, in ways that may not be obvious, or they get out. The permanent settlements are confined to relatively small areas supported by costly reclamation projects, military bases, or "retirement colonies." Vast regions remain uninhabited to hint possibilities of inestimable rewards to generation after generation — furs first, then gold, silver, cattle and sheep baronies, coal, political power, oil, uranium, Gilsonite. All these may be appropriated or exhausted, but the fabulous Sunset Lands continue to beckon to the venturesome and enterprising or merely foolish. As a matter of fact, the barrens contain immense reserves of nonmetallic minerals and other wealth, and who knows what new riches science may find in the sand and rocks and the beds of ancient lakes?

Thus the American Frontier (and this includes Canada and Alaska, Matanuska and Mount Kennedy, Great Slave Lake and Hudson's Bay, and the islands and seas about them) is a hardy perennial. It did not end in 1890 or 1900. Scholars may have decided that a chapter of our history ended; but the people? No.

Coming from gentled acres and artificial, stilted cities, people approach the savage lands with dreams and dreads, exhilaration and deep uneasiness, and fear they normally conceal because it shames them — fear controlled and converted into some degree of victory for the spirit. Thus the emotional impact of desert and mountain frontiers finds expression in contrasting modes: delight at beauty manifested in strange, fierce ways; joy that requires effort to quell an undertow of trepidation at nature's blank indifference or sullen opposition; and sometimes frank admission of alienation, fear, or aversion. Philosophic and literary naturalism from abroad gave Americans ideas, models, and courage to be honest and more than honest, to be creative and original in an outraged or belligerent mood. We have, therefore, had books as diverse as Hamlin Garland's dour short stories, Ole Rolvaag's Giants in the Earth, Vardis Fisher's Toilers of the Hills, Rose Wilder Lane's Free Land, but with this in common: the authors told the exorbitant price of "free" land in toil and suffering. The more positive aspect, the undeniable beauty, is shown us best by feature writers for such magazines as Desert, by romantic photographers, poets, painters, and composers of such works as Grofe's Grand Canyon Suite.

But there is a facet that does not fall strictly in either the mood of exultation or aversion. It helps us in our unresting quest for selfrealization. It is this that makes the Frontier, the wild lands, abidingly significant to our national psychology. Admittedly, the urban-industrial complexes, with artificiality and baffling intricacy cutting us off more and more from spontaneous nature, dominate America. But the more that Megalopolis overshadows the smaller towns and decaying rural hamlets, the more we need the influences typified in the Desolation Primitive area south of Lake Tahoe and the Wind River Primitive area of Wyoming, or the new Canyonlands National Park in southeastern Utah.

Periodically we require the wholesome shock of immersing ourselves in undented, unvitiated nature. Let us cease to sneer at Emerson's faith in the curative powers of virgin solitudes. Perhaps, for the nineteenthcentury Romanticists' sentimental beliefs in the benevolence of Mother Nature or nature's affection as an indulgent mistress, we should substitute appreciation for a bitterly tonic effect, that which man receives upon bursting out of the overprotective, punchcard-regulated, filed, dehumanized society to confront the nature our literature presents as alien to humanity in our highest emergence. To face the brooding, towering spirit of adverse nature in the desert, in the majesty and terror of the Canyonland or Grand Canyon abysses, or to stare up at the mighty icecarved heads from the high Uintas to Jasper Park — to outstare these ancient bullies who know not Man and care not a pine needle or a hawk's moulted feather for him — this can be good for us. Even the unmitigated malignity of the poisonous Death Valley sinks can be tonic, although it must be taken in minute doses as a heart patient may take little nitroglycerin pills.

One cannot, of course, attach much spiritual value to coloredpostcard experiences such as one gets from a car window glimpse of those desert flowers that bloom briefly once in two or three springs, or the yucca blossoms we admire as we flee from them at 80 miles an hour. The calendar photos by railroad public relations photographers reduce awesome mountains and canyons, alkali sinks and dunes to docile little dreams for the vacation-planner. You should experience intimately and actually the unseen presences behind treeless peak and cliff and wasteland, behind tundra and muskeg plains, behind rockslide and snowslide, and drought that dips a vulture's beak into your veins in the white hot glare of the summer desert; you must learn to know these in solitude, know fear of them, and learn to subdue the fear. For it is only terror felt and then mastered that makes courage, as only faith that outlasts despair and builds on despair can be real faith.

Assurance we may draw from the unrelenting rigor of the arid and semiarid West is this: some of the world's most inspiring and heartening messages have been given humanity by prophets who stalked hollow-eyed out of desert and mountain solitudes. And to speak in terms the twentieth century accepts more readily, Utah has borne far more than her share of hard-headed but high-minded scientists who have gained national distinction. The toad adversity does truly carry a jewel in its head. And solitude is not always an enemy of society.

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