The frontier trail: Rethinking Turner and reimagining the American West

THE "NEW WESTERN HISTORY" has been getting a lot of press lately. A recent cover story in U.S. News and World Report announced that historians had now shown that the American West was not "some rough-hewn egalitarian democracy, where every man had a piece of land and the promise of prosperity, but a world quickly dominated by big money and big government"; not a land "where the sodbuster might dwell in sweet harmony with nature, but a nearly unmitigated environmental catastrophe"; not a society of close-knit pioneer families, but one in which men, women, and children were "torn apart by the great desert emptiness of the West." These revisions led to an inevitable conclusion: "The Turnerian view of the West is falling apart these days."' This is news? In a world of dizzying intellectual fashion changes-from modernism to postmodernism to claims of the "end of history" itself-it may come as something of a surprise that historians of the American West have taken so long to overturn the interpretation of a century-old conference paper. Delivered in 1893 to a meeting of the American Historical Association, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History" by Frederick Jackson Turner