When the census said the frontier line had dissolved
The American frontier was the advancing edge of settlement that crept west from Jamestown in 1607 until the last contiguous territories became states in 1912, along with all the folklore it spawned. In 1890 the Census Superintendent announced there was hardly a frontier line left to map, yet his successors kept drawing one.
The Census Bureau counted land as frontier if it held fewer than two people per square mile, and the frontier line marked the outer limit of European-American settlement. That line moved west from the 1600s onward, though outposts such as Los Angeles and Salt Lake City sprang up far beyond it. Thomas Jefferson strongly encouraged the westward push after the Louisiana Purchase, feeding the expansionist creed later called manifest destiny.
When the era began and ended is disputed. Some historians confine the Old West to the years from the end of the Civil War in 1865 to 1890, when Superintendent William Rush Merriam said the census would stop tracking the frontier; in practice the line stayed in reports until 1920. The Library of Congress and Oxford often push the end into the first two decades of the 1900s, and one framework runs a Western Civil War of Incorporation from the 1850s to 1919.
Colonial powers expanded differently. Only a few thousand French settlers went to Canada, clustering in villages along the St. Lawrence, while their fur traders roamed the Great Lakes without putting down roots. In northern English colonies, poor roads kept frontier farming at subsistence level, and by the 1760s these communities were strikingly egalitarian; river-linked Southern districts, by contrast, turned into slave plantations. Land in America was cheap and widely owned, unlike in Britain, and ownership carried a vote.
In 1893 Frederick Jackson Turner argued that the frontier forged a new American character, a thesis that shaped generations of scholarship. Hine and Faragher describe frontier history as building communities, farms and states, a story of conquest but also of merging peoples. Popular media from the 1850s to the 1910s exaggerated the West’s violence and romance, giving rise to the Western genre.
Source: American frontier
