In his writings, Turner talks about the frontier and its gradual expansion westward. I find this aspect of American history to be very interesting. It is fascinating to look at how the American’s at the time went about claiming new land. Turner mentions how the frontier was the “meeting point between savagery and civilization.” (Turner) This is very important because it shows how little they new of the land beyond the frontier, and how there were still “savages” there that needed to be conquered. In the years leading up to 1800, the newly formed government was focused on many things: making sure it didn’t collapse, the XYZ affair, pirate wars, and eventually the election of 1800 and all that Jefferson’s presidency would bring. The government was not focused on the native peoples west of the border. It seems while historians focus so intently on the formation of the nation that there is not much to be said about the frontiersmen until the Whiskey Rebellion of 1791. The frontier was not a safe place to live because as America stretched farther and farther west, the Indian’s land was once again being encroached upon. Wilentz devotes a portion of Chapter 5 to talk about the expropriation of Indian land. William Henry Harrison was a major character in the buying of Indian land. He completed the Greenville Treaty with nearly a dozen tribes which gave the US land rights to southern Indiana, most of Illinois and parts of Wisconsin and Missouri for “two and a half cents or less per acre.” (72) While they were buying this land from the natives, they were taking complete advantage of them and buying it for far less than its worth. Most natives were not happy, “‘The white people…,’ one Shawnee chief complained, ‘destroyed all that God had given us for our support'” (72) While the frontier was a means of expansion and “a steady movement from the influence of Europe” (Turner), the government did not care how detrimental of an action it was from the Indian’ point of view.<\/p>\n

AJBeane spends a good amount of time talking about how Europe influenced the westward expansion of the United States and many of the points they make are quite pertinent to my post. They raise the point that what America really wanted at this time was to form their own identity and not be associated with Britain or Europe in any way. Americans didn’t want to be known as coming from German heritage or French or any other European nation, they wanted to be their own entity and by expanding westward they were happy to be moving farther away from Europe and its stretching, global influence.
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In his writings, Turner talks about the frontier and its gradual expansion westward. I find this aspect of American history to be very interesting. It is fascinating to look at how the American’s at the time went about claiming new land. Turner mentions how the frontier was the “meeting point between savagery and civilization.” (Turner) … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Westward Expansion”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":123,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[141,164,309,326],"class_list":["post-496","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-frontier","tag-indians","tag-turner","tag-wilentz"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/123"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=496"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/496\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=496"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=496"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/his141-fall2013\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=496"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}