Bobcats Essay, Research Paper

The frontier experience was of such importance to the development of American traditions and institutions that historians often

explain American attitudes in terms of that experience. Frederick Jackson Turner sought to express the major developments in

American social and political history as a product of the existence of the frontier. Walter Prescott Webb worried about the

future of an America without a frontier, unless it be the “Great Frontier” such as other cultures had once possessed (the sea,

trade), and which had the effect of encouraging individualism and democracy. Film directors and novelists have emphasized

these ideas to excess, leading toward the misleading conclusion that one can only be free if one lives outside society and wears

a gun. Groups supporting American Indians often portray them as “noble savages” who were innocent victims of civilization (as

well as of American imperialism). Thus, we have theoretical and mythological Wests which affect the ways we see ourselves

and our past.