building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

environment. In other words, the American man also found the means to organise
himself into a society by submitting and adapting to nature. Nature in Turner’s idea
is the element, which has tempered and formed the modern American:
The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The
wilderness masters the colonist. It finds him a European in dress,
industries, tools, modes of travel, and thought. It takes him from the
railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of
civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts
him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian
palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn
and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp
in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at
first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it
furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and
follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but
the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of
Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of
reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is that here is a new product
that is American. 264
The significance of the frontier was expressed especially by the forces of the
landscape and of nature, and from here a different approach arose as well as a
different idealisation of nature and the landscape from those of Europeans.
The American town, as we have seen, also represented a further piece in this
process. It created a sort of dialectic link with nature and somehow became the
fruit of an unstable process, as it was continually evolving. Furthermore, the frontier
not only implied close contact with the wilderness, but its many‐sided nature
contained a project for progress and civilisation. The stage of conquest was
followed by one of exploitation [Figures 130‐134].
When Turner worked out his thesis in 1893, “the frontier”, according to an
interpretation given by the census offices ‐ a territory inhabited by fewer than two
inhabitants per square mile‐ had been declared closed just three years before, but
the power of his reflection was stronger than a simple interpretation of events,
which had long since been banished to the past. He was capable of providing a key
264 TURNER, Frederick Jackson, The Frontier in American History, New York, Henry Holt and Company,
1920 [first ed. 1893], pp. 3‐4 (Italian translation La frontiera nella storia americana, Bologna, Il
Mulino, 1975, pp. 33‐34)
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