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After reading Slotkin’s The Fatal Environment, I was impressed but unconvinced with Slotkin’s concept of the “Frontier Myth.” While Slotkin provides an extremely thorough examination of how the “myth” of the frontier has been molded to explain Westward expansion, I think the breadth of his work makes some parts of his narrative superfluous.
Much like Ian, I found Slotkin’s Part III – “The Metropolis vs. The Frontier” to be one of his most effective sections. I would like to add to Ian’s analysis that while Slotkin argues that “humanity does in fact exist in nature,” I think Slotkin also believes that in the minds of nineteenth century American industrialists, humans were very separate from nature (iasolcz). This is seen in “The Language of the Frontier Myth” when Slotkin discusses the dispossession of Native Americans. While arguing that Indians were human despite white industrialist ideas that assumed otherwise, Slotkin outlines nature as something “primarily inhuman” (79). He asserts that throughout the Indian wars and American industrialization, the myth emerged that an inherent struggle existed between this inhuman realm and that of human “civilization,” and that it was this conflict that fueled tensions during Westward expansion (79).
Additionally, Part III set the framework for the remainder of Slotkin’s narrative by juxtaposing both perceptions of the frontier in popular culture – as found in many of Cooper’s novels – and the expansion of democracy and politics to the West with the idea of a separate, civilized “Metropolis” that dominated American culture (109-110). I thought this section was particularly interesting because it covered similar topics to our previous readings, particularly Turner’s “Frontier Thesis.” Unlike Turner, however, Slotkin emphasizes the expansion of the frontier as a result of the specific economic, political, and national concerns that emerged within the Metropolis. For example, he ties the spread over the frontier in the 1840s to the increased prevalence of “‘Jacksonian’ ideology” in the early nineteenth century (114).
Slotkin’s section on the railroad also relates to our reading of William Cronon and the development of Chicago in Nature’s Metropolis. Both Slotkin and Cronon emphasize the importance of human actors in bringing change to the environment. They also argue that the development of the railroad and the opening of the frontier was a direct result of the injection of capitalist ideals into the economy –this brings us back to Cronon’s “geography of capitalism” (15, 26). Like Slotkin notes, railroads made access to “nodes of superabundance” increasingly easy (211). However, Slotkin also seems to take Cronon’s analysis one step further and questions whether capitalism might have molded the perception of the railroad opening the frontier. While questions like this are certainly intriguing, this kind of curiosity from Slotkin ultimately turned me away from his narrative. I think these questions detracted too much from an environmental history and instead created a massive study in historical psychology. This was only furthered when Slotkin included his chapters on George Custer. Although the story of Custer’s Last Stand was an effective lens to introduce perceptions of the frontier in the nineteenth century, Slotkin’s perpetuation of the hero myth throughout the book seemed to be a thoughtful, but unnecessary addition to his main argument.