True confession time: as a kid, I skated through American history…the entire affair seemed unduly agrarian to me. Sad to say, Young Master Curmudgeon was a bit of a snob.

To shame our early snobbery (plus, to learn something) we turn today to Frederic L. Paxson’s History of the American Frontier 1763-1893. Pretty informative as titles go. Paxson gives us a completely factual, highly detailed account of how Americans moved past the colonial experience and spread across the continent. The frontier turns out to have a specific mathematical definition: six persons or fewer per square mile; more than that and the area becomes settled. Paxson tells us how through legislation, deeds, grants, and treaties that boundary of six per square mile, that boundary between the frontier and the settled, moved west. For this description the book was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1925.

Or, put another way: it’s the serious version of How the West Was Won, minus Debbie Reynolds.

A few notes on nomenclature, just because we must these days. This work is not Saturday morning cowboys and Indians. When the author means Black Hawk or Tecumseh, he calls the individual by name, and when he means the Seminole or Creek, he calls the group by their tribal name. In aggregate, he does usually refer to Native Americans as Indians, which apparently makes some readers twitch; but he also calls them native Americans with some frequency, a usage we adopt here as a dandy intersection between modern sensibility and the author’s own wording. Paxson makes a more trenchant observation about the white settlers in that regard: that by the time our volume opens, the British settlers were several generations and nearly two centuries removed from the mother country. Those English and Scotch-Irish descendants (plus the Germans who began arriving around 1710) were American, not English, as we shall see. And the frontier experience was therefore that of native Americans and Americans trying to figure out what to do with the continent. Subject to all kinds of foreign intrigue and nefariousness, of course, just to keep it lively.

Unsurprisingly, this most American of stories opens with…the French. As in the French and Indian War. The war itself is outside the scope of Paxson’s work, but its settlement had major impacts on America. In the first place, it kicked out the French, or at least the French relinquished their colonial claims on North America, leaving the continent to the English and the Spanish. Secondly, the British crown had in the past been expansive in granting lands “from sea to sea” to its colonies, even though settlement had only reached the Appalachians. The Treaty of Paris of 1763, which ended the war, announced a Proclamation Line that basically ran the ridge of the Appalachians, reserving to the crown the lands west of them. Bummer for the colonies, and interesting in that it set a pattern for much of U.S. territorial expansion.

A third and more profound impact of the war on American development was that of national identity…or as our author puts it, “just who won the war, anyway?” The French and Indian War had been the largest British military operation in North America to that date, but much of the fighting was done by American-born troops. At the end of the war the British had expected to enjoy peace on the continent; instead they found restive colonies with a newfound sense of identity, and flush with victory. No management problem is harder.

What the British did with the crown lands west of the Proclamation Line refutes a certain modern version of “stolen lands.” The Brits did, in fact, recognize native American title to unsettled lands, and set in place a system in which the crown negotiated and paid for land rights. Native American use of the land was episodic and non-exclusive, and the Brits negotiated land rights with each of the tribes who had an overlapping claim to the area in question. Only after all tribal claims were satisfied was the land made available for grant or sale. Of great significance, it is an approach that the United States continued after the Revolution.

The key question is whether the native Americans understood what they were negotiating away, a question on which the work does not completely take a stand. Paxson is generally sympathetic to the native Americans (this from a white guy writing at the beginning of the twentieth century) and points out that the finer points of ownership in fee simple may not have registered with the chiefs who agreed the treaties. However, in the same breath he points out that once the chiefs brought back the agreements, individuals or groups of individuals would often refuse to be bound by the contract since they disagreed with it…so somebody was understanding something. Add in the fact that tribal organization was looser than we often imagine, and that the chiefs had little power to enforce a treaty. (In later years, Woodrow Wilson and Barack Obama would both know the feeling.) And often the native Americans were given free use of the lands until the settlers actually cleared them, which some thinking native Americans figured would be approximately never.

History is much more real than we ever understand, children.

The pattern of settlement during this phase of national expansion was truly all about the hunger for land, and the basic unit of settlement was the family. I mean all the family…instead of sending the men ahead to clear and prepare for settlement, most arrived as a unit. Basic survival dictated the pattern. As titillating as the phrase “bachelor farmers” sounds, the unsparing need to find shelter, clear and work fields, hunt and feed oneself, and the unrelenting isolation of frontier life made it a poor fit for bachelors and spinsters. In this eastern, agrarian (there’s that word) phase, there was a generational beat to the expansion: the parents cleared a farm and raised the kids, the kids moved only as far out as necessary to find new, attractive lands, and then repeated the process.

“Rinse and repeat” makes it sound easy, which the process was not. Consider the Harrison Land Act of 1800, and its modification by the land law of 1820. The Harrison Act attempted to goose sales and monetize the nation’s land holdings by placing sales offices on the edges of the frontier, where the buyers were; and it extended credit to enable sales. The Act did, indeed, increase sales dramatically. However, the buyers were “poor and optimistic,” leading many to default on their loans and lose all their holdings. Worse, since there was no incentive for the government to seize land sitting out in a sea of other empty land, the bankrupt tenants remained, leaving their paying neighbors to consider defaulting themselves. The reform passed in 1820 eliminated the credit facility, and in return reduced the purchase price and minimum purchase amount.

Enter the Mineral Empire and its vehicle, the Railroad.

Technology moved rapidly during the first half of the nineteenth century, and it heavily influenced American expansion. The steamship suddenly made one-way rivers into two-way aquatic highways. Rail had captured the world’s imagination, and numerous local and regional lines arose in the U.S., often with truly shady financing behind them. Discovery of gold in California and silver in Colorado in the mid-nineteenth century made communication with the Far West necessary, and rail made it possible. It also radically changed the pattern of inhabitance: instead of families of farmers slowly moving forward by generations, whole towns sprung up around a strike, often in complete isolation. Instead of families sharing labor, one had single men sharing recreation. As rail crossed the country, it also destroyed the notion of a reserved Indian Territory in which life in the wild would be preserved: the lines cut the landscape, and the native Americans observed the speed with which they allowed white people to set up shop. (Cheyenne, WY, we are told, was created when a crew unloaded it off a train one morning.) The period of treaty-making with individual tribes was ended by the Indian Appropriation Bill of 1871, which set the basic mechanism that is still in place today.

The frontier did not fully close for another twenty years, but the end was clear. Paxson began the research that led to History of the American Frontier at the turn of the twentieth century; he knew men and women who had been frontier people, and who were adapting to modern life. That authenticity of knowledge pervades the book. Only two other authors we have encountered — Gibbon and Edmund Taylor — write with that voice. We try to avoid “must see” recommendations on this site (seems a tad eager), but if one has any historical interest in the United States, curmudgeons everywhere recommend Paxson.

Atypically, he buries one of his more important ideas in a footnote. Speaking of the bank act of 1816, Paxson offers up that “no historian has yet treated the tariff or internal improvements with adequate learning and dispassion,” my emphasis added.

Learning and dispassion, that’s what we’re about around here. Plus a little Debbie.

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