We Were There on the Oregon Trail by William O. Steele

But we have in addition to this a recurrence of the process of evolution in each western area reached in the process of expansion. Limiting our attention to the Atlantic coast, we have the familiar phenomenon of the evolution of institutions in a limited area, such as the rise of representative government the differentiation of simple colonial governments into complex organs the progress from primitive industrial society, without division of labor, up to manufacturing civilization. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon. In the case of most nations, however, the development has occurred in a limited area and if the nation has expanded, it has met other growing peoples whom it has conquered. All peoples show development the germ theory of politics has been sufficiently emphasized.

Said Calhoun in 1817, “We are great, and rapidly-I was about to say fearfully-growing!” So saying, he touched the distinguishing feature of American life. The peculiarity of American institutions is, the fact that they have been compelled to adapt themselves to the changes of an expanding people-to the changes involved in crossing a continent, in winning a wilderness, and in developing at each area of this progress out of the primitive economic and political conditions of the frontier into the complexity of city life. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.īehind institutions, behind constitutional forms and modifications, lie the vital forces that call these organs into life and shape them to meet changing conditions. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement.

In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appear these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line.

This text is closer to the original version delivered at the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, published in Annual Report of the American Historical Association, 1893, pp. Editor's Note: Please note, this is a short version of the essay subsequently published in Turner's essay collection, The Frontier in American History (1920).

We Were There on the Oregon Trail by William O. Steele