A young historian named Frederick Jackson Turner gave a speech at the Chicago World Fair which, at that time, everybody totally ignored. It was not until much later that his statement gained wide distribution and great influence. Three years before Turner’s speech the U.S. Census Bureau had announced the disappearance of a frontier line. This gave Turner an opportunity to reflect upon the frontier and the influence it had exercised.

In his paper, the historian claimed that it was a fact that the frontier had disappeared, that all the land had been settled. Nevertheless, the process of moving from the East to the West shaped the American character. The people of European roots while settling deeper and deeper into wilderness lost their original values and ideas and became more American.

Turner started his speech with the words: “The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward explain American development”.[1] With these words he also started the study of American West and presented a ‘frontier thesis’ which has been the topic of discussions till this day.

In his work ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’[2], Turner says:

 

 

 

He aims that the first settlers that arrived on the east coast in the 17^th century acted and thought like Europeans. Then, the next generations settled further inland. In this way they lost a lot of their “Europeanness”. Every generation was becoming more and more American.

He also says: ‘But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. And has been pointed out, the frontier is productive of individualism’. (376) The settlers became more democratic and less tolerant of hierarchy. They became more individualistic and distrustful of authority. That is why the two governments: of Europe and America were so different.

It is very often repeated that the frontier is the meeting point between the savagery and civilization. And from that point comes the change. As Turner put it: ‘To the frontier the American intellect owes its striking characteristics’(377). In other words the European life entered the continent and was modified by its wilderness, coarseness, strength, acuteness and inquisitiveness. The settlers knowing so much of the world and at the same time so little about its laws and hardships, had to start from scratch on this completely new for them land. Little by little the wilderness was becoming transformed by them but the outcome was not the old Europe, but America, a completely new world, new rules and new ideas.

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