Frontier myth

The frontier myth or myth of the West is a term given to the popular romanticization of the Wild West frontier.

In the United States, the frontier was the term applied to the zone of unsettled land outside the region of existing settlements of Americans. In a broad sense, the notion of the frontier was the edge of the settled country where unlimited free land was available and thus unlimited opportunity.

Being a frontiersman in the so-called Wild West, a cowboy, rancher or gold miner were idealized within American mystery. Mark Twain colorfully related that accounts of gold strikes in the popular press had supported the feverish expansion of the mining frontier and provoked mining “stampedes” during the 1860s and 1870s: “Every few days news would come of the discovery of a brand-new mining region: immediately the papers would teem with accounts of its richness, and away the surplus population would scamper to take possession…”

Similarly the life of the hardy cowboy driving dusty herds of longhorns northward from Texas to the cattle markets Abilene and Dodge City, Kansas, was romanticized by the eastern press. This transformed the cattle industry until the late 1870s. The former image of cowboys as ne’er-do-well and drifter changed significantly. They were now glorified as men of rough-hewn integrity and self-reliant strength.

There were two ‘Wests’ – the real West in which farmers, ranchers, miners and prostitutes and criminals pursued their happiness and the legendary West that took deep root in the American imagination.Western novels, or cowboy novels, portrayed the west as both a barren landscape and a romanticized idealistic way of living.

American historian Frederick Jackson Turner published The Significance of the Frontier in American History in 1893, read before the American Historical Association in Chicago during the World’s Columbian Exhibition (Chicago World's Fair). This work perpetuated the Frontier Thesis and myth of the frontier, detailing the meeting of civilization and wilderness, and announcing the end of the frontier era. His belief that the success of America was tied to western expansion, produced characteristics of vigilantism, crudeness, and also democracy and civilization that were uniquely recognizable as American.

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