THE FIRST EUROPEAN accounts of the West were written by people for whom locating and defining their large subject presented no very serious difficulty. The West, which lay between Europe and Asia, was America. The Atlantic Ocean made a boundary too broad to be ignored, even had the wild American bays and inlets resembled their Old World counterparts–which, of course, they did not. However, when European settlements were established in America, the problems of location and definition appeared at once, and became more urgent as time passed. Frontiers shifted constantly and, sometimes, rapidly. "The West" soon came to be associated with the vague region into which no frontier had yet intruded– almost a synonym for uncertainty. In 1728, for instance–some 120 years after the founding of Jamestown in the huge colony that had been chartered as Virginia in 1584–William Byrd gazed westward at the crests of the Appalachians enraptured with "that Place, which the Hand of Nature had made so very remarkable."' He was speaking of the vast continental interior that retreated ahead of him as he surveyed a boundary between the colonies of Virginia and North Carolina. His chief reason for finding this region "remarkable" was that he had no idea how far it extended. To have discovered the West and to be lost were much the same thing.

About a hundred years later, when James Fenimore Cooper wrote The Prairie in 1827, the interior region had been penetrated by whites and was in the process of being subjected to the political control of the United States, which had devised a battery of irresistible techniques for its division and settlement. ² This relatively new circumstance did not dispel the aura of mystery that hung about the West. Dying Natty Bumppo faces westward at the end of Cooper's novel, much as Byrd had faced west in 1728, and can see no more than Byrd could. The reason is not merely that he has gone blind; it is that he is looking toward what Cooper calls an "unknown world." ³ Presumably, the unknown would remain unknown until the line that divided it from the known dissolved–an event which seems to have occurred sixty-three years later, when the U.S. Census of 1890 officially declared that a line of frontier settlements could no longer be identified. ⁴ That is, emigration had erased the frontier. It was then, while the frontier faded and vanished, that four young Americans attempted to look back and discover what the West had been–even what it might still signify.

Theodore Roosevelt was the eldest of the four, born into a well-to-do New York business family in 1858. Next was Owen Wister, the son of a Philadelphia physician, born in 1860. Frederic Remington and Frederick Jackson Turner were born about a month apart in 1861, both sons of small town newspaper editors. The former grew up among the rivers and lakes of northern New York; the latter among the similar landscapes of central Wisconsin. Each of the four had different "gifts," as Natty Bumppo might say. Roosevelt was a politician, Wister a publicist, Turner a humanist, Remington a romantic. Yet they all shared Byrd's taste for the remarkable and Cooper's interest in the unknown, and their individual investigations, considered together, had a large collective effect on the course of American cultural history.

When Turner, a thirty-two-year-old professor of history at the University of Wisconsin, delivered a paper at the 1893 American Historical Association meeting in Chicago, outlining his "frontier hypothesis," Roosevelt, at thirty-five, had already published eight books. In addition, he had served as a member of the New York State Assembly at Albany, had lived as a rancher and deputy sheriff in North Dakota, and had lost a New York City mayoral election. He was currently U.S. Civil Service Commissioner, a post he would soon resign to sit on the New York City Police Commission. Versatile, resourceful and energetic almost to a fault, Roosevelt possessed many of the traits Turner assigned the better sort of frontiersman–although he later described himself to Remington as "a literary man with a large family of small children and a taste for practical politics and bear hunting." ⁵

Roosevelt writes with the same vigor of conception and clarity of demonstration that played such important parts in his public life. The literary habit was already well established in him when he graduated from Harvard in 1880 and began to pursue his varied interests. He entered Columbia University Law School in September, married Alice Hathaway Lee, of Cambridge, in October, and embarked with his bride the following spring for a five-month tour of Europe before returning to law school in October 1881. For most people, this schedule would have been quite full enough, but Roosevelt was also campaigning for the New York Assembly and beginning his career as a writer. An October 17, 1881 diary entry noted: "am working fairly hard at my law, hard at politics, and hardest of all at my book which I expect to publish this winter." ⁶ Not only was Roosevelt elected an assemblyman in November, days after his twenty-third birthday; he almost kept up with his self-imposed publication schedule. On December 2, he sent his manuscript for The Naval War of 1812 off to G. P. Putnam's, where it was published in the spring.

The Naval War of 1812 did what Roosevelt wanted it to do, filling gaps left by other historians, providing detailed accounts of individual battles and–most important–presenting a balanced view of emotionally volatile events. Roosevelt managed all this by paying close attention to the various strategies used in the war, and by sensibly showing why some strategies succeeded better than others. He was no more unbiased than he would be in more frankly patriotic works such as The Rough Riders (1899) or America and the World War (1915), but he managed to explain his biases by dealing with facts in a reasonable manner. He based his judgments on the unstated premise that even wars operate in accordance with rules which may be discovered, and which will be found to make sense–the broadly defined but powerful norms of sanity, utility, and morality he had learned to value as a child and at Harvard.

Roosevelt's tacit assumption that life was sane, useful and good was seriously shaken on February 14, 1884, when his wife and his mother died only hours apart, two days after the birth of his first child. That summer, he dropped out of active political life and went to live on a ranch he owned in North Dakota, leaving his infant daughter in the care of his sister, Anna. He stayed on the ranch for about two years, writing more or less steadily, even while he also practiced the strenuous life that transformed him from a frail asthmatic into a robust outdoorsman. Three books came directly out of the North Dakota experience–Hunting Trips of a Ranchman (1885), Ranch Life and the Hunting Trail (1888), and The Wilderness Hunter (1893). Ranch Life shows best why Roosevelt struck out for North Dakota in the wake of his personal tragedy of 1884, and why he would continue to regard the West as having a special importance.

To turn from The Naval War of 1812 to Ranch Life is not to encounter the expansiveness often associated with the West, but to notice a reduction in the scale of experience. The chief reason is that Roosevelt abandoned in the latter book the long historic memory that informed the former. The isolated environment of the ranch, with its minimal landscape, engaged the senses but did not confuse the mind with too much complexity. Roosevelt observed that life in the "arid belt"–as he liked to call the northern plains–was difficult but invigorating, and that the surroundings were beautiful but treacherous. The wild animals, thinly scattered over broad areas, seemed unusually cunning and resourceful. Range cattle and domestic animals brought in from elsewhere either died quickly or acquired traits that allowed them to thrive. Men who proved themselves capable of enduring the rigorous climate, the hard work, and the isolation tended to develop appropriate and useful virtues. They were physically strong, mentally quick, and morally insightful but direct. Wherever he looked, Roosevelt seemed to find analogies with the larger, more complex world he had temporarily left behind him. The division of labor at a cattle roundup, the workings of parapolitical organizations like the Montana Stock Raiser's Association–even the extralegal justice administered by summarily hanging horse thieves, cattle rustlers and the like–reassured him by demonstrating on a small and therefore comprehensible scale the fundamentally sound principles that supported Anglo-American civilization. In short, the arid belt served Roosevelt simultaneously as a retreat from painful personal experience and a lucid model of sometimes cloudy history. The region was plainly of the world, but not, somehow, in it.

This made the education Roosevelt underwent there easy in one way and hard in another. A talented if not profound thinker, who, at twenty-six, had already begun to make a name for himself in letters and politics when he went west to live in 1884, Roosevelt quickly grasped the rudimentary social order and the practical concerns related to raising livestock. In the first five chapters of Ranch Life, he concentrated on matters that not only showed how far apart North Dakota and New York were, but suggested that there was a continuity between them. Although he called the North Dakota prairies "barbarous, picturesque, and curiously fascinating," he made sure to explain how they could be put to good use by erecting log houses and outbuildings in cottonwood groves along the watercourses, taking care not to overstock the ranges, letting wild grasses cure standing on the stalk for winter pasture, and employing other management practices which were not at all barbarous and which only those who did not understand them would be likely to regard as picturesque. On the other hand, what made these practices "fascinating" was that they were all adaptations of European technology and methods of organization. They represented high standards of efficiency and utility being applied on a large scale. Therefore, even when Roosevelt allowed himself to wax sentimental about "grim pioneers" enduring western prairies (rather than having a gay time in eastern towns, presumably), his self-indulgent rhetoric usually had a hardpan of historic truth not far underneath. For example, he insisted on ridiculously comparing himself and his fellow ranchmen with "primitive peoples," but deftly gave the comparison resonance by calling western ranches "a primitive industry" and thus establishing the same linkage between ranchmen and industrialimperial power which he would himself affirm in 1898 by founding the Rough Riders. The first five chapters of Ranch Life present a coherent account of how well the systems that had allowed Europeans to found commercial and manufacturing empires along America's eastern seaboard worked in the Dakota plains and badlands.

Dealing with discontinuities between the East and the West was much more difficult for Roosevelt because it required him to examine personal differences among individuals rather than merely generalizing about the behavior of groups. This he tried to do in the next three chapters of Ranch Life, which he entitled "Frontier Types," "Red and White on the Border," and "Sheriff's Work on a Ranch." These chapters proceed quite differently than the first five chapters. They consist mostly of anecdotes about Roosevelt's contact with outcasts for whom the industrial order had no place, and who therefore seemed bound for extinction. Roosevelt concentrated on the eccentricities that seemed to make each individual among the outcasts unique, but he also ascribed one characteristic to all of them in common. The outlaw he pursued down more than a hundred miles of the icebound Little Missouri River could later write to him from jail with what Roosevelt recognized as "a delicious sense of equality–an assertive expression of manhood that seemed to transcend legal distinctions." Indians like those he told of outfacing on the prairie near his ranch were "very apt to have a good deal of the wild beast in them." Cowboys were universally possessed of a "free spirit." Trappers, he said, "fear neither man, brute nor element." Hunters comprised "the archetype of freedom." No particular sequence informs Roosevelt's accounts of the outcasts. Indeed, his anecdotes may be arranged in almost any order without changing their collective meaning: just beyond the frontier Roosevelt called "the border," a perilous "freedom" beckoned men to forsake utility, efficiency, and history–all the values, in short, that made ranching identifiable as an "industry."

The last four chapters of Ranch Life concern Roosevelt's direct personal experience of the freedom he associated with extra-social behavior. These chapters are arranged in an order of ascent, ranging from the badlands near Roosevelt's ranch on the Little Missouri River to the peaks of the Coeur d'Alene Mountains far to the west. "The Ranchman's Rifle on Crag and Prairie" tells of hunting antelope and deer, which served as a source of fresh meat for the ranch. "The Wapiti, or Round-Horned Elk" recounts the pursuit of larger and scarcer game somewhat farther away. Although the elk taken were used as food, the chief reason for hunting them was to get the antlers, which were displayed as trophies. "The Big Horn Sheep," which continues in the same vein, concerns animals Roosevelt linked with "snow-clad, desolate wastes, ice-coated crags, and the bitter cold of a northern winter." Roosevelt claimed of the particular hunt he recounted that "I was out for meat rather than sport," but the account emphasizes the hardship and danger of the pursuit, the wild strength and beauty of the quarry, and the splendor of the snow-covered landscape. Roosevelt rode home after-ward, he said, "by moonlight" as the thermometer hovered at twenty-six degrees below zero. Aching, exhausted and half-starved, he also "froze [his] face, one foot, and both knees." However, he was able to confirm at last that "the great ram's head was a trophy that paid for all." "The Game of the High Peaks: The White Goat," finally, tells of an even more dangerous adventure in search of a much more exotic beast. No mention is made of using the carcass for meat, although taking the horns and hide seems an act of sacramental importance. As the altitude of the hunt increases, efficiency and utility are replaced by a sense of wonder akin to that felt by westwardgazing William Byrd in 1728. Together, the four hunting chapters chronicle a transcendence–if only a temporary one–of the practical concerns of ranching, politics, and industrial management. The crucial point for Roosevelt in 1886, when he made his goat hunt, was not that cattle ranching succeeded so well as an industry that frontier conditions were fading out; it was that the frontier might survive in the mind even after "industry" had removed it from the land. Having gone west to escape the painful complications with which history must often deal, he had discovered a principle by which he believed history was governed. Plainly, the hardest part of his North Dakota education was also the most potent.

Just after returning from his 1886 hunting expedition into the Coeur d'Alene Mountains, Roosevelt was offered the Republican nomination for Mayor of New York City. As though to confirm his recent discovery, he conducted a vigorous campaign, lost the November election, and departed without remorse for England, where he married Edith Carow, a long time friend, in December. He finished Ranch Life while in Rome, on his honeymoon. Returning with his bride to Sagamore Hill, the family home on Long Island, he then began work on a project that was probably more ambitious than anything else he would ever attempt–including his ambitious strategies of presidential politics. Diffidence, which rarely troubled him, was surely no impediment when he decided to call his new project simply The Winning of the West.

Roosevelt planned in 1887 to trace the course of European exploration, emigration and settlement across the entire North American continent. As it happened, politics, war, and other pressing concerns interrupted him, and he never executed the massive study he had conceived. Still, the four volumes he managed to complete suggest the sweep of his initial vision. The first volume centers on the period between French penetration of the Ohio Valley in 1763 and the organization of Kentucky in 1776. The second takes up the subject of international intrigue in the interior between 1777 and 1783, years dominated by the Revolutionary War. The third treats developments related to accelerated migration and settlement between 1784 and 1790–Indian wars, western separatist movements, and the organization of the Northwest and Southwest Territories in 1787 and 1788. The fourth addresses increasingly complicated problems of frontier impatience and intractability, especially as they spawn elaborate land speculation schemes in the last decade of the eighteenth century and give new force to the Louisiana Purchase and subsequent westward exploration in the first decade of the nineteenth century. In all, The Winning of the West covers about a century-and-a-half of turbulent history in the great interior valleys and along the "western waters"–also spanning, in Roosevelt's own life, the period between his emergence from the relative obscurity of his North Dakota ranch in 1886 and his entry into national politics as Assistant Secretary of the Navy in 1897. The student of personal experience would never have a better chance to weigh in the large balance scales of history the great concerns he thought he had glimpsed, schematized and miniaturized, in the arid belt.

When G. P. Putnam's Sons brought out the first two volumes of The Winning of the West in 1889, Frederick Jackson Turner was taking courses toward his Ph.D. in history at the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. He also married Caroline Mae Sherwood of Chicago the same year, a few days before his twenty-ninth birthday, and went to work as an assistant professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he earned a yearly salary of $1500. Like Roosevelt, Turner was intense, bookish, and inclined to stubbornness. Unlike Roosevelt, he distinguished sharply between the life of the mind and the life of action. The latter, he thought, had always been required by the conditions present along a "frontier," which he later defined as "the meeting point between savagery and civilization."⁷ The former consisted chiefly of reflective contemplation about the manifold significance of various frontier situations. Looking back, he would later suppose that he had belonged to the party of the mind since his boyhood in Portage, Wisconsin, on the banks of the Wisconsin River, where he had observed the pioneer commerce between East and West from a very early age. This kind of observation was raised to another power when he entered the University of Wisconsin as a freshman in 1880 and quickly discovered the Draper collection of historic documents at the Wisconsin State Historical Society, where he spent countless hours, even as an undergraduate, poring over the accumulated records of exploration and settlement. An expansive energy kept Roosevelt constantly on the move looking for outlaws, big game, political contests and other challenges–all of which he regarded as materials he could use in the conduct of his ubiquitous "work." Turner's method was less spectacular and probably more efficient–although the "work" he produced by it is hard to measure in quantitative terms: he moved only when he had to, used well whatever was at hand, and said as little as possible. By practicing such subtle strategies he would not only get the admiration of students in the seminars he taught at Wisconsin and Harvard, he would significantly change the way in which American history was studied and written.

The Wisconsin State Historical Society was a good but not great library when Turner worked there on his Master's degree between 1885 and 1888, meanwhile earning a meagre living as a tutor in rhetoric and oratory at the University. Had the library been more extensive, Turner might have taken even longer to finish his thesis than he did, because he was almost compulsively exacting–but he completed the brief, scholarly study, or at least seemed to do so, in 1888, the same year Ranch Life (Roosevelt's fifth book) was published, profusely illustrated with lively pictures by Frederic Remington. In 1889, the year he reviewed the first two volumes of The Winning of the West–noting that Roosevelt might profitably have consulted the Draper collection–he recast the same thesis into a Ph.D. dissertation at Hopkins as "The Character and Influence of the Indian Trade in Wisconsin." The thesis-cum-dissertation–which had already served him as the basis of several speeches–was soon printed as a monograph, and would before very long make identifiable contributions to the frontier "hypothesis" of 1893, his most famous single work. ⁸ This work, in its turn, would be published in several versions, each of which Turner would thoroughly mine for the principles he used in the related writings on the frontier, sectionalism, and geo-cultural evolution that would occupy him until his death in 1932. ⁹ Finding just where one of these works leaves off and the next begins is therefore well-nigh impossible, but so many fresh starts, each one of which depends so thoroughly on all the others, shows one thing very clearly: as is appropriate for a historian governed by such rigorously reflective tendencies of mind, Turner never finished anything. From first to last, his forte was beginnings.

Turner's amazing capacity for the study of historic genesis not only sustained the historian in the life of the mind; it generated a new history and ordained a new generation of exciting historians. ^l0 It also raises questions concerning ways in which the life of the mind as reflective contemplation may legitimately be conducted, and what worthwhile results it may be expected to produce. Specifically, did Turner's curiously self-consuming study produce new formulations of human experience as affected by frontier conditions, or merely reformulations of Turner's experience as a student of the material he repeatedly, even exhaustively, addressed in his own works? And what, really, was this material? Did it justify the grandiose distillations of which Turner seemed to speak when he announced that "line by line as we read this continental page from West to East we find the record of social evolution," or was it rather less substantial and more vaporous to begin with–a fragmentary record that looked coherent to Turner mainly because of his isolated background and his insular habits of mind?

In his 1889 review of The Winning of the West, Turner showed himself as both a parochial introvert fascinated by his own isolation, and a bold thinker who would contribute importantly to new schools of historical thought. ¹¹ The insulated westerner made his appearance at the outset, when, in the first sentence, Turner somehow felt obliged to acknowledge that "America's historians have for the most part, like the wise men of old, come from the East." The man of ideas appeared at the close, when Turner commended Roosevelt for seeking to understand "the widest significance of the events which he describes." Yet both the naïf who seemed surprised to discover that most American historians, like most other Americans, came from the East, and the sophisticate who sought for germs of general truth in records of everyday occurrences joined to make the humanistic scholar, who aimed to shape himself into an instrument for understanding the world around him. Even when he urged that the great central valley was nurturing "a new composite nationality . . . a distinct American people speaking the English tongue, but not English," he was merely attempting to find a position from which it might be possible to recognize the West as a "promising . . . region for study." ¹²

Throughout life, Turner's characteristic metaphor for this study was "reading"–an activity which, for him, meant building a continuity between the observer and the sequence observed. In his 1889 review, he linked the idea of "right perspective" in American history with the idea of "a connected and unified account of the progress of civilization across the continent." The new historian had to "read" events and circumstances from a "right perspective," in order to explain how change came about. Naïveté was necessary to see that change was happening, and sophistication was equally necessary to study relationships among changes observed. The scholar who possessed both qualities would gravitate toward the study of frontiers, because the most exciting changes could be read there.

Roosevelt viewed the matter much differently. "I believe," he would later argue in a speech to the American Historical Association, "that forces working for good in our national life outweigh the forces working for evil, and that . . . we shall yet in the end prove our faith by our works, and show in our lives our belief that righteousness exalteth a nation." Or again, in the same place, "the greatest historian should also be a great moralist." ¹³ His most characteristic metaphor for the historian was that of the moral teacher, whose stories illustrate episodes in the ongoing conflict between good and evil forces. Wars, such as the one he wrote about in his first book, inevitably attracted his attention as instances of the same exciting "work" he set out to trace in The Winning of the West. While the doer applied himself to sorting out facts about naval battles, North Dakota ranch life, and geo-political expansionism–schooling himself, however unwittingly, for ever more active roles in government–the reader turned to the study of frontier trading posts, attempting to trace the logic of a transaction in which he felt sure that much more than pelts and glass beads had been exchanged. The two approaches were not necessarily antithetical. Neither did they necessarily disagree. They merely lacked a common ground, even though they ostensibly shared many of the same concerns and subjects.

Turner's most succinct statement of his frontier hypothesis is his essay, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History," of which he delivered a shortened version at the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago. He acknowledged in a note that this essay grew out of an 1892 article he had written on "Problems in American History" for Aegis, a student publication at the University of Wisconsin. ¹⁴ It also, of course, grew out of his earlier work on the Wisconsin fur trade, and shows signs of having been influenced by a number of the historians he admired, including William Allen and James Truslow Adams (his major professors at Wisconsin and Hopkins, respectively), and Woodrow Wilson (who spent a year at Hopkins on a visiting appointment while Turner was there working on his Ph.D.). Whlesuch grounding in personal experience meant much to Turner himself, it meant considerably less to his Chicago audience, who received the performance without enthusiasm. "The Significance of the Frontier" neither refuted nor advanced any arguments, and it was worth little as a truncated version of American history, although Turner claimed at the outset that "American history has been in large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West." Roosevelt, for all his enthusiasm, would never be so drastic. Furthermore, Turner made his alarming claim without offering to reinforce it from any of the usual authorities. He did, of course, refer to some more or less conventional sources, such as works by Henry Cabot Lodge, Henry Adams, and others, as well as to sources rather more unconventional–certain geologic, climatic, and economic theories, often untranslated from the German or Italian–but his "hypothesis" did not depend on any of these. ¹⁵

He seemed, rather, maddeningly to take for granted the self-evidence of his often outrageous observations, based, for the most part, on the study of census data, topographic charts and old records, which he selected as he pleased and juxtaposed when it suited his purpose. The result reflected his ingenuity, and he was obviously delighted with it. But The Dial, in 1893, called him an "amateur" historian and a "sensational" theorist. ^l6 Roosevelt read the essay in its published version the next year and wrote Turner a letter in which he noncommitally observed that "you have struck some first class ideas, and put into definite shape a good deal of thought which has been floating around rather loosely." ¹⁷ Understandably, Turner regarded this as faint praise. When he reviewed the fourth volume of The Winning of the West in 1896, he faulted Roosevelt for using "history as the text for a sermon,"and wished that he would show "more sobriety of judgement." ¹⁸ However, Roosevelt had seen correctly in 1894 what Turner's detractors and supporters alike have only rarely taken into account: Turner aimed to convince not by arguing, citing authorities or amassing and analyzing facts, but by the far more ambitious means of establishing and manipulating point of view.

Accordingly, "The Significance of the Frontier" does not follow the frontier in time as it passes from one stage to another–or even in space as it advances across the continent. Turner chose instead to address his subject as a cluster of shifting phenomena he called sequences of "evolution," "successive terminal moraines," or "the outer edge of the wave"–metaphors which, if they seem perversely calculated to exasperate his audience of historians, also express his insistence on the frontier as an event rather than a place. At the essay's center is a consideration of "The Frontier . . . [as] A Field for Comparative Study of Social Development," in which the "trader's frontier," the "rancher's frontier" and the "farmer's frontier" are delineated as elements in the developmental process. Spreading outward from the center, the essay (antecedently) traces "the stages of frontier advance" from the tidewater regions to the Rockies and Great Plains, and (later) considers three chief factors in the advance: army posts, which protected settlers against the various perils of the wilderness; salt springs, which reduced their dependence on seaboard communities, and gave them the means to preserve their food without returning east for supplies; and the ubiquitous "land" that drew them ever westward.

The whole is enclosed within a web of speculations about relationships between the idea of the frontier and the mind of the historian. Its opening section introduces the theme of motion by briefly suggesting the frontier as "rebirth" and "fluidity," culminating in the image of the "wave." The latter and more extensive portion, which closes the essay, unveils the grand topology which Turner claimed could be seen only in the mind. This is nothing less than the governing order, in Turner's view, of American history–a design produced by the kinetic frontier's shaping of the culture at large. Some of its chief features are a "composite nationality" consisting of numerous European peoples more powerfully united by shared experience than by the English tongue they have in common; an "industrial independence" from Europe, achieved as western trade with the great interior valleys frees American coastal cities from dependence on France and England; political institutions favoring growth and internal improvements; a land policy–often most powerfully operative when least fully formulated or controlled– which fosters individualism, nationalism, and democracy; and a various but identifiable national intelligence characterized by skepticism, restlessness, confidence, and energy. Many of Turner's auditors had no doubt whatever that these colorful images were still "floating around rather loosely"–if not quite wildly– when Turner presented them at Chicago, but what holds them firmly in the orbital pattern Roosevelt called a "definite shape" is plain enough: they are not ideas at all, strictly speaking, but expressions of what Roosevelt called "thought,"or a thinking process, executed by an eccentric, vigorous, and brilliant intellect. Whatever Turner supposed he was trying to do at the 1893 Chicago meeting, his real aim was to offer some impressions of his own thoughts about a problem which seemed to him significant.

Turner much later wrote to Merle Curti, a former student, that the main difference between himself and other historians was perhaps that he tried to keep "relations" among the many different aspects of his subjects "steadily in mind" as he wrote. ¹⁹ In another letter written at about the same time he said that he regarded his students not as real or potential vehicles for transmitting his own views but as "companions . . . gathering source materials for criticism and consideration." ²⁰ When he argued in his famous 1893 paper that "what the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely," he was obviously both considering "relations" and practicing "consideration,"even though many of his listeners probably thought he was merely indulging a weakness for unrestrained hyperbole, and some of his followers have subsequently claimed that he was laying down a law. His freehanded rhetoric accurately reflects his eclectic technique and expresses his delight in the surprises that language and the mind could together effect by achieving new "perspectives." His insistence on the continuing interest of the sets of intellectual goals he liked to call "problems" unmistakably states his deep mistrust of solutions. What Roosevelt described as the "definite shape" into which he forged "The Significance of the Frontier," then, was quite simply and overwhelmingly the shape of Turner's own mind. He was much too bright either to accept answers or give them, and far too honest to pretend that he knew any. He spoke only the truth his reading had enabled him to see when he confided to his Chicago audience what it was that interested him most about the frontier: "movement has been its principal fact."

Owen Wister, a thirty-two-year-old graduate of Harvard Law School when Turner delivered his Chicago paper, had already, by then, given up the idea of practicing law and decided to devote himself to writing. That he, too, was interested in movement he showed by spending the summer of 1893 at home in Philadelphia, working on a historical discourse of undetermined length, which he called "The Course of Empire." He hoped to see this work published serially in Harper's Monthly magazine, where two of his short stories about the West had already appeared. ²¹ However, the editors had informed him, before he set out for Chicago and the World's Fair in September, that his project would have to wait until he had produced "a series of pure adventure" in order to attract to himself and his subject the popular attention felt to be necessary for success in a large national magazine."So now," Wister wrote in his diary, "my next duty is to hunt material of adventure voraciously." ²² The fact that neither Roosevelt nor Turner would have understood what he meant shows mostly that Wister was more a man of his times in the century's last decade than either of them.

By temperament and inclination the most aloof of the four young men who set out to locate and define the frontier, Wister was also the most anxious to please the large, anonymous public of readers that sustained great publishing houses by subscribing to journals and buying books. Roosevelt, whom Wister had known slightly at Harvard, took the approval or disapproval of readers much more nonchalantly. When Turner and others criticized him for slipshod scholarship in The Winning of the West, he acknowledged that they were right, and explained that he had been busy with other "work." In his view, the rightness of his aims, and of his industry in pursuing them, rendered apology and accommodation unnecessary. Turner, who soon became sensitive to the judgments of fellow historians as they began to question his methods and conclusions, was wounded in a very personal way by public criticism–but not because he had failed to please. Rather, he supposed that when others expressed skepticism about his views, he had not been wholly successful in bringing them around to a "right perspective"– and his usual resort in such cases was to a more meticulous reading of his own compelling text. Wister, on the other hand, relied for approval on his publishers and his friends–both of which he chose with care–and on his readers, whom he regarded with mixed awe and apprehension. He wore the patrician mantle somewhat stiffly, instead of with Roosevelt's easy carelessness, and he was much too unsure of himself to entertain the creative introspection Turner conferred upon his students like a sacred fire. When he met Frederic Remington, he quickly discovered his own ignorance about both art and the West–two subjects about which he had considered himself well schooled. Yet he had an ear for the complicated tonalities of folklore and mass communications which enabled him to detect a popular yearning for something he called "the Past." Insofar as he recognized and exploited the nostalgic possibilities of the frontier in American culture, he was far and away the most modern of his fellow students.

Wister was a myth-maker of considerable skill and determination who set out, in a calculated way, to fashion the cowpuncher into a hero on the model of a Gawain, a Tristan or–to use one of his favorite analogies–a prodigal son. How well he succeeded may be judged partly on the basis of the hundreds of horse operas in print, film, and television that have sprung more or less directly from his vision of what happened when people were transplanted from eastern cities, where they could not help being "all varnished over with Europe," to the wide open spaces of the western plains, where they became "real Americans." ²³ Whether or not the so-called "cowboy Western" would have bloomed with such prolific vigor, and across such a broad front, without Wister remains a question. However, the initial appearance of the genre clearly involved the young man's eccentric response to the conjunction of three circumstances. The first was a passionate attachment to the full-blown mythic romance of Wagner's operas, which he had mastered as a student of music at Harvard before making a pilgrimage to Bayreuth in 1882, where he saw Parsifal and played a piano composition of his own for Franz Liszt. The second was his painful neuralgia, accompanied by severe mental depression, which came to a crisis in 1885, when, having been called back from Europe by his father, he was working as a clerk at a Boston banking house. The third was his treatment by the Philadelphia neurologist and friend of his family, S. Weir Mitchell–also a prolific writer of Revolutionary War romances–who sent him west for the summer of 1885 to undergo a "rest cure" on a Wyoming ranch.

All three circumstances guided Wister's thinking about "The Course of Empire" in 1893, and each of them left a mark on the essay that eventually resulted, which was called "The Evolution of the CowPuncher" when it appeared in the September 1895 issue of Harper's Monthly. A Wagnerian aura emanated from several set scenes designed to show off the cowboy's "heroic" virtues, and appeared throughout as Wister's insistence on the cowboy as a racial (Saxon rather than Teuton) type whose potency depended on a pure blood line and a "clean" environment free from the "hordes of encroaching alien vermin, that turn our cities into Babels and our citizenship into a hybrid farce." ²⁴ The mental depression that afflicted Wister when he first went west comes out as a pessimistic view of world affairs in general and American culture in particular, culminating in the observation that "present signs disincline us to make much noise on the Fourth of July." Wister's experiences of Wyoming played a larger part in his essay than did either his characteristic gloominess or his fondness for operatic spectacle. The summer he spent at Major Frank Wolcott's Deer Creek ranch, where he found "air . . . better than all other air" in 1885, had miraculously relieved him of frustrations that had only weeks before seemed insurmountable. ²⁵ Why shouldn't the West promise a cure for America's cultural malaise as well, asked Wister–and promptly declared the nation cured of even "that unparalleled compound of new hotels, electric lights, and invincible ignorance which has given us the Populist"–so that "no cause for lament" any longer clouded its history in the long term. Nonetheless, tourism and electricity throve, and even ignorance and Populism did not seem likely to go away very soon. Either Wister was a fake, or his prescription was more complicated than it looked. Both were true, as it happens.

At first glance, "The Evolution" does not offer much support for Wister's hope. What Wister seemed to count on was a triumphal awakening of the "slumbering untamed Saxon"–stripped of the sissified manners and genteel inhibitions with which the Old World had burdened him–in the vast reaches of America's prairies and mountains. Wister thought that the awakening had happened, but also acknowledged that it had run its course in a mere thirty years, and that the collective Saxon had been driven underground again before he could exert any appreciable influence on the ailing American body politic. Even worse, the Saxon Wister described was far from reassuring. Driven away from England because of failing fortunes, he had emigrated to America, where he came to a bad–but none too early–end: From 1865 to 1878 in Texas he fought his way with knife and gun, and any hour of the twenty-four might see him flattened behind the rocks among the whiz of bullets and the flight of arrows, or dragged bloody and folded together from some adobe hovel. ²⁶ So much flattening and folding, presumably, welded the Saxon into a "unit" which had subsequently been "dispersed" by the relentless amenities Wister called "Progress"–but not to contemplate the powerful Jeffersonian ideas of revolution that caught Turner's eye, or even to carry on the "good work" admired by Roosevelt. He went to town for a job; he got a position on the railroad; he set up a saloon; he married, and fenced in a little farm; and he turned "rustler," and stole the cattle from the men for whom he had once worked. ²⁷ Whether or not the Saxon's progress from boyish killer to aging sneak thief in the space of a single generation was truly degenerative, for Wister to call him a "good soldier" was ludicrous. The studious young Philadelphian with a flair for colorful if sometimes turgid rhetoric appeared to be right about one thing only: the fortunately imaginary criminal whose dubious development he chronicled in "The Evolution" had "never made a good citizen."

In fairness, it must be noted that Wister did not intend his essay as a celebration of stupidity, slaughter, and debasement–and that the essay was almost certainly not what he had in mind when he began working on it as "The Course of Empire," a project he probably modeled after Roosevelt's The Winning of the West, the first two volumes of which he read when they came out in 1889, the same year he decided to give up law for a writing career. "The Evolution" is best understood as a document that reflects the author's double culture shock when he was told on one hand that he had to write "a series of pure adventure" in order to satisfy the rather lurid tastes of magazine readers and told on the other hand by Frederic Remington that these same readers were despicable almost beyond expression because their ideas of adventure were so tame. Most of the information in "The Evolution" came directly from Remington, whom Wister met by chance at Yellowstone Park just after the House of Harper had sent him away to search for "adventure" like a knight errant instead of encouraging him to stay at home and study ideas like a historian. Remington, at thirty-one, may have had several ideas, and he had certainly had some adventures, but he had a great many more opinions, and even more impressions, all of which were vivid, frag-mentary, and excited. Consequently, Wister encountered at Yellowstone in 1893 the very antithesis of the "rest cure" he had gone west in 1885 to accomplish.

Remington had spent much of his majority wandering in inhospitable regions, and had acquired some firsthand experience of both the "work" Roosevelt associated with the frontier and the interchange between "savagery and civilization" that Turner thought must occur whenever the two came into contact with each other. Born at Canton, New York on the eve of the Civil War, he early became a voracious but selective reader of materials about the West. The journals of Lewis and Clark, James Fenimore Cooper's Leatherstocking Tales, the western writings of Washington Irving, and the pictures of George Catlin and other artists began forming his expectations of the frontier before he ever went there. In 1878 he entered Yale University art school, where he proved an indifferent student, but dropped out the following year when his father suddenly became ill and died.

When he came into his inheritance in 1883, he bought a quarter section of prairie land near the town of Peabody, Kansas, and tried, unsuccessfully, to start a small sheep ranch. 1884 found him at Kansas City, where he promptly lost the money he had gotten from the sale of his Peabody property. In the fall of the same year he married Eva Caten, a young woman from Gloversville, New York whom he had begun courting about four years earlier. By summer the marriage seemed likely to fail, because Remington's scheme to earn money by selling pictures to New York periodicals for illustrations was not working out. Eva returned to her parents, and Remington made his way to Arizona, where he sketched Indians and soldiers sweltering in the heat and dust, in the fall taking the sketches to New York City, where he tried, without success, to sell them. However, U.S. and Mexican military forces decided, in 1885, to escalate their pursuit of the hostile Apache chief, Geronimo, who had been conducting sporadic raids on isolated Arizona settlements since about 1880. Remington's desert pictures thus became suddenly newsworthy, although none of them depicted anything resembling a "war," and his career as an illustrator was successfully–if ironically– launched.

Popularity came almost overnight. By 1888, when Remington illustrated Roosevelt's Ranch Life, he was making hundreds of pictures per year for large periodicals such as Harper's Weekly, Harper's Monthly and the Century, as well as turning out canvases of his own at an astonishing rate. He also began that year to publish essays in the Century, beginning with a fine series on Indian reservation life designed to follow up the serial publication of Roosevelt's book in the same magazine. In 1890, he covered the "Sioux uprising" in South Dakota for Harper's Weekly, where he barely missed being present at the encampment on Wounded Knee Creek when units of the U.S. Seventh Cavalry massacred more than two hundred Indians, most of them women and children. When Wister met him at Yellowstone in 1893, he had ricocheted back from north Africa and Russia, where he had gone with a college friend to find "new types." His most recent projects had been an article on the Manhattan slums, done with Julian Ralph, a bear hunt in the mountains of New Mexico with General Nelson Miles, and an excursion to Sonora, where he elatedly believed that at a rancho named San Jose de Bavicora, he had, "in the year of 1893, . . . rediscovered a Fort Laramie after Mr. Parkman's well known description." ²⁸

Remington possessed Roosevelt's energy, but not his deft judgment– Turner's naïveté, but not his passion for sophisticated scholarship. Because his experience of the West was at first hand, he knew its details minutely; because he was temperamentally unsuited for either the life of action as Roosevelt practiced it in politics or the life of the mind as Turner pursued it in humanistic letters, he could piece the details together only as they related directly to himself. He was an artist rather than a man of judgment or of intellect, and his language, like his pictures, appealed more to the senses than it did to reason. Therefore, when he told Wister at Yellowstone about the "punchers" he had found in Sonora and New Mexico, or later wrote to him, urging, "make me an article on the evolution of the puncher–`the passing' as it were–I want to make some pictures of the ponies going over the hell-roaring malpais after a steer on the jump," he was speaking his own mind in his own way–which was also a way that Wister would never be able to comprehend properly. ²⁹ Wister, in turn, wrote "The Evolution" in his own way, which was nothing like what Remington wanted. The result is a curiosity that shows how Wister's relatively conventional mind, making a calculated appeal to the conventional tastes of a genteel reading public, attempted to deal with an iconoclasm which challenged conventions of all sorts.

Wister's technique was disarmingly simple. He merely plastered over Remington's turbulence with a coating of continuity–of unity, even– stated in stiffly formal sentences. Although Remington had written in an essay called "Horses of the Plains" that there were many kinds of western horses, the cowboy's mount was designated in "The Evolution" as "the horse." Remington's pictures showed that cow punchers came in all shapes and colors, but Wister placidly insisted that "the cowpuncher" was "the American descendent of Saxon ancestors," conceding that he had "borrowed" some equipment and habits from the Spanish, and even the Mexicans. Most important, Wister treated with schoolmasterly sternness the novelty and multiplicity of the frontier:

Destiny tried her latest experiment upon the Saxon, and plucking him from the library, the haystack, and the gutter, set him upon his horse; then it was that, face to face with the eternal simplicity of death, his modern guise fell away and showed once again the mediaeval man. It was no new type, no product of the frontier, but just the original kernel of the nut with the shell broken. ³⁰