What was the closing of the frontier?

Overview

As a young teacher at the Hampton Institute in the late 1870s and early 1880s, Booker T. Washington was responsible for helping to instruct and assimilate Native American or Indian men.  The complexity of this assignment –a black teacher trying to instruct red men in the ways of white culture– was not lost on Washington, who recalled his anxiety over the “experiment” in chapter 6 of his memoir, Up From Slavery

I knew that the average Indian felt himself above the white man, and, of course, he felt himself far above the Negro, largely on account of the fact of the Negro having submitted to slavery—a thing which the Indian would never do. The Indians, in the Indian Territory, owned a large number of slaves during the days of slavery. Aside from this, there was a general feeling that the attempt to educate and civilize the red men at Hampton would be a failure.

The decade of the 1880s marked what was later known as the “closing of the frontier” in American history –a period when homestead settlements and railroad lines across what had been considered the “Great American Desert” changed the landscape and culture of the western plains in what appeared at the time to be almost irrevocable ways.  For many white Americans of this era, this change was a triumph for civilization, a sign of “American Progress,” as the painter John Gast indicated in his famous allegorical image from 1872 (right), but for others, not only Indians, but also for many former slaves and reformers, it was a time of hypocrisy and diminished expectations.  Nothing better captures this dichotomy than the experiment in Indian vocational education that Washington described, which had begun at Hampton, but which then continued during the 1880s and 1890s most famously at the Carlisle Indian School headed by U.S. army officer Richard Henry Pratt.  Faculty, staff and students at Dickinson College are currently working to bring together many of the documents and images of the Carlisle Indian School, which existed until World War I, at a new digital resource center.  The materials help illustrate the complex tragedy of the project whose motto was “kill the Indian and save the man.”

Online Textbook Resources

Closing of the Frontier from Digital History (Mintz and McNeil)

Tragedy of the Plains Indians from Digital History (Mintz and McNeil)

Selected Timelines

The West in the 1880s (PBS)

1880s (Henry Ford Museum)

Featured Videos

Here is a typical, modern-day, textbook-style treatment of the concept of “manifest destiny” using the Gast painting (above) in this short video from the Kansas Historical Society.  The video mentions the Shawnee Indian Mission, which conducted one of the nation’s earliest experiments in vocational training for young Indians, during the years before the American Civil War in the Kansas territory.  Below you will also find a short 10-minute video clip from TNT’s “Into the West,” miniseries depicting Native American arrivals in the early days of the Carlisle Indian School (late 1870s-early 1880s).  It’s not exactly “historically accurate” in every respect, but it’s certainly vivid.

 Printable Version

Closing the American Frontier	Previous	Next
Digital History ID 3154

In 1890 the superintendent of the U.S. Census announced that rapid western settlement meant that "there can hardly be said to be a frontier line." In just a quarter century, the far western frontier had been settled. Three million families started farms on the Great Plains during these years.

Contrary to the popular image of the West as a rural region, by 1890 most of the West's population lived in cities. Not only was the Trans-Mississippi West the country's most culturally diverse region, it was also by 1890, the most urbanized.

The Turner Thesis

In 1893, three years after the superintendent of the Census announced that the western frontier was closed, Frederick Jackson Turner, a historian from the University of Wisconsin, advanced a thesis that the conquest of the western frontier had given American society its special character. At the Columbian Exposition in Chicago, marking the 400th anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the New World, Turner argued that the conquest of the western frontier as the nation's formative experience, which had shaped the nation's character and values. Western expansion accounted for Americans' optimism, their rugged independence, and their stress on adaptability, ingenuity, and self reliance.

In actuality, however, the settlement of the West had depended, to a surprising degree, on intervention by the federal government. The federal government had dispatched explorers to survey the region and cavalry units to confine Native Americans on reservations. It also provided land grants that funded railroad building, and, in the 20th century, support for dams and other waterworks.

In his address on the significance of the frontier in American history, Turner referred to the Census Bureau's announcement that the frontier was now closed. He speculated that now that the frontier was settled, a crucial epoch in American history was over.

When John F. Kennedy accepted the Democratic presidential election in 1960, he called on the country to enter a new frontier. Since that time, Americans have repeatedly searched for new frontiers--in outer space and cyberspace and even below the ocean's surface. The frontier remains a potent symbol more than a century after it physically disappeared.

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