Turner's frontier thesis has not gone unchallenged within the historical and social scientific professions. A number of social scientists have raised questions about both its theoretical and its substantive validity. In his book on the Burned Over District of upstate New York and northeastern Ohio historian Wesley Cross noted that the frontier Burned Over region had good soil productivity, largely equal sex ratios, and a relatively sizable population, all things one would not expect to find on Turner's frontier, raising questions about whether that part of the American frontier was really a frontier at all. Historian Richard Wade contended that urban areas on America's frontier, like Pittsburgh, Louisville, and Cincinnati, were the motors of American geographical expansion, raising questions about Turner's contention that the frontier was the motor of American history. Historians Patricia Limerick and Richard White jettisoned the notion that the frontier was central to American history entirely replacing it with the thesis that contact and conquest are central to an understanding of American history and central to our understanding of the history of the American West, America's most recognisable and mythically imagined frontier thanks to, monumental paintings, dime novels, and Hollywood films. Limerick and White argued that it was not the frontier that made America. It was, instead, they argued, contact and conquest, the contact of Americans and the American military with those who were already there, the American First Peoples, contact with other European imperialists, like the French, the Spanish, and Britons, the conquest of the First Peoples, and the establishment of boundaries with other European imperialists, that made America America.
Dean May, in his historical ethnography Three Frontiers: Family, Land, and Society in the American West, 1850-1900 (New York: Cambridge University Press, Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Modern History series, 1994), trods a middle path between those of the frontier school and those of the contact and conquest school. Drawing on censuses, tax rolls, court records, probate records, wills, diaries, reminiscences, and what he calls folk histories, histories by amateur community and family historians, May argues that settlers in three different agrarian frontier settlements in the Far West--Sublimity, Oregon; Alpine, Utah; and Middleton, Idaho (May's hometown)--brought with them their different cultures and imprinted these somewhat different cultures on the land in their settlement patterns, their material culture, and their interactions in a conquered and bounded American West.
Sublimity, which was settled in the late 1840s and early 1850s, was dominated by migrants from the South who had spent some time in the American Midwest. These Southerners cum Midwesterners, who immigrated to Oregon in family and neighbour groups, brought with them, May argues, the more traditional culture of the yeoman farmer. As a result, they settled in kin/neighbour communities that dotted the rolling Willamette Valley landscape. Those in these kin/neighbour communities interacted largely with each other. Their homes mimicked those of the plantation South while their cemeteries were kin cemeteries. Sublimity's economy was dominated by subsistence agriculture. Land acquired through the Donation Land Claim Act was substantial and much of it went unfarmed as patriarchs intended to pass it on to their sons when they came of age.
Alpine, although initially settled by "native" American Mormon converts, eventually became home to Mormon converts from the industrial areas around Manchester, England in the 1850s. While these English immigrants, prompted by the paternalistic LDS leadership to "gather to Zion" like other Mormons all across the globe, brought with them a culture impacted by industrialisation, they also brought with them, May argues, a relatively new and more traditional Mormon culture which they imprinted, just as did other Mormons gathering to Zion, into the land, in Alpine's case into the mountainous Wasatch Range in what is today Utah County. All Mormon villages, including Alpine, were quite similar. All of them were based on Joseph Smith's monumental grid based plat for Mormon Nauvoo. Mormon village grids were aligned to the cardinal directions. Each grid, in turn, was subdivided into quarter acre lots. The streets that defined the grid were six rods each. Irrigation ditches, which eventually bordered the streets of Mormon villages all across the West, brought much needed water into Mormon villages throughout the arid West. Every Mormon village, including Alpine was grounded in a cultural ideology of sectarian separatist independence, interdependence, religious grounded interaction, mutual aid, communalism, and subsistence farming. Each Mormon village had the central purpose of helping each Mormon become a worthy Saint and of helping each worthy Saint traverse the Mormon path from preexistence to fleshly existence to eternal existence.
Middleton, which was settled by Southerners cum Midwesterners fleeing the devastation of the American Civil War of the 1860s, argues May, brought with them a more modern culture that had been transformed by industrialisation and the American Civil War. The culture of Middleton's migrants was acquisitive, materialistic, and individualistic. As a consequence, settlements along the Boise River in the Boise Valley of Idaho, made possible by the Homestead Act, were spaced out, the nuclear family dominated, interactions were largely commercial, financial, and consumerist, and farmers grew produce for the market, particularly the markets of nearby mining towns.
While each of the three communities settled at various times were initially different in terms of their culture and hence in terms of the structuration of their economies, their politics, and their imprinted material cultures, by the 1900s, May argues, their cultures were converging. The acquisitiveness, materialism, and individualism that dominated Middleton was impacting and becoming dominant in Sublimity and Alpine as well, though to a lesser extent in Alpine thanks to its Mormon culture. Each of these three communities were, just like the US itself, May argues, becoming rational and efficient bureaucratic societies dominated by formal or written legal rules. They were becoming what Max Weber calls modern, in other words.
I highly recommend May's book to those interested in the history of capitalism and modern capitalism since May's book addresses the debate over whether the US was capitalist from the beginning or not, those interested in community or village studies since May addresses concerns related to community ethnographies, those interested in theory and culture theory since May's book addresses central concerns in social science theory and culture theory, those interested in frontiers since May addresses central issues relating to frontier theory, and those interested in the history of the American West. Fascinating book.
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