The Transformation of the World (73 page)

Transgression and Statization

One of the merits of the ecological approach is that it sharpens one's feel for frontier
processes
. It is hardly possible to describe frontiers statically. They are spaces where effects occur that it would be an understatement to describe
as “social change.” These processes are varied in kind. Two are especially widespread:

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 The “transfrontier process,” that is, the movement of groups across ecological boundaries. A good example of this is the Boer treks in South Africa as they began in the last third of the eighteenth century. When fertile, easily irrigable land became scarce in the Cape Colony, many Afrikaans-speaking whites abandoned European-style intensive agriculture and took up a seminomadic way of life. Some of these—estimated at a tenth of the total—attached themselves to African communities. At the beginning of the nineteenth century, people of mixed origin (
griquas
) formed social organizations, townships, and even parastate structures (East and West Griqualand). Such “transfrontiersmen” appeared in South America too, though not in the midst of scarcity but in conditions where an abundance of wild animals made it possible to hunt for livestock and horses. Still, there were great similarities with Africa: in particular, transfrontier communities in the interior were virtually ungovernable from outside. Ethnic-biological mixing typically occurred, and it was only in the nineteenth century that racial doctrines produced attempts to draw clear lines of separation. Further examples were the Caribbean “buccaneers” and the Australian “bushrangers”: quasi-military bands, consisting mostly of former convicts, who were suppressed by government action after 1820.
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 The seizing of frontiers by the state. Even if colonization and frontier violence could initially proceed without constant military support, and even if the justice system by no means unambiguously differentiated between criminal and law-abiding behavior, the state was always on hand where it had to guarantee landownership. Already in the early modern period, the most general contribution that governments made to frontier settlement was the sweeping legalization of land occupations and the flat rejection of indigenous peoples' property rights. Frontier regimes differ in the thoroughness with which the state assumes the tasks of measuring, allocating, and registering land. And it was precisely in the “Wild West,” so anarchic in the popular imagination, that landownership was tightly regulated from very early on. Governments rarely went so far as to influence the concentration of ownership, however. American frontiers, with their seemingly limitless supply of land, meant that the utopia of relatively equal distribution and general prosperity was theoretically achievable. This had been Thomas Jefferson's grand vision: a society without an underclass, where the bonds of scarcity were shattered. It is revealing here to compare the United States with Canada and Argentina, where frontier land was initially treated as a public good. In Canada it was mainly small farmers, highly mobile and venturesome, who took up the state's offer of land—and speculation began to appear •
at an early date. In Argentina the land fell into the hands of big landowners; they often leased it to tenants on favorable terms, but in the long run everyone who had believed in the egalitarian frontier spirit fell prey to disappointment. If despite similar environmental conditions and similar links to the world market, the two countries developed opposite structures of landownership, this had to do with the fact that in Argentina government policy was aimed toward export-led growth, whereas in Canada it attached greater importance to a balanced social order. The ruling oligarchy was itself interested in landownership in Argentina but not in Canada.
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2 The North American West

An Exceptional Case

The frontier in the United States, especially between 1840 and 1890, stands out from all others for a number of reasons.

First
, no other settler movement in the nineteenth century involved such large numbers; it filled a continent with people, to a far greater extent than in Australia. This was true of the overall long-term process but also of particular episodes of dramatic acceleration. The Californian gold rush, for instance, was the largest continuous migration in the history of the United States: 80,000 people flooded into the state in 1849 alone, and by 1854 some 300,000 whites were living there. The “gold rush” to Colorado in 1858 was of comparable dimensions.
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Structurally similar experiences occurred in the Witwatersrand (South Africa), New South Wales (Australia), and Alaska, but they were more localized and less associated with a settlement push across a vast land mass.

Second
, no other frontier had such an impact on society beyond its immediate areas. Nowhere else were structures of frontier society so successfully integrated into a national context. The American West did not develop into a backward and marginal “internal colony,” partly because of a geographical peculiarity of the United States. After the midcentury gold rush, the region of extraordinary economic dynamism that took shape along the Pacific coast was not mainly the result of mechanisms of extensive land acquisition. The true frontier thus lay
between
the long-dynamic East Coast and an economically up-and-coming region on the other side of the continent; it was topographically a genuine “middle ground.” From the point of view of social history, the basic distinction that should be drawn is between two kinds of frontier society: (1) a West of farms and small towns, inhabited by middle-class people and marked by families, religion, and closely knit communities; and (2) a much more turbulent pioneer West, defined by livestock herds, gold prospecting, and army outposts, where the characteristic social type was the young single male, often employed seasonally,
highly mobile, and exposed to dangerous working conditions. In addition, as a special regional form, there was (3) the society that sprang up in the wake of the gold rush in California. It clashed so sharply with many features of the conventional West that there has long been controversy as to whether, or in which sense, Pacific California should be included at all in “the West.”

Third
, the nineteenth-century American frontier operated without exception as a mechanism to exclude the local native population. The picture was much the same in South America, whereas in Asia and Africa greater scope remained here and there for indigenous people. Earlier, on North American soil, there had definitely been instances of assimilation between “Indians” and Europeans; the French, much more than the English or Scottish, had reached a kind of modus vivendi with the Indians in the eighteenth century. In relations between the Spanish and native peoples in today's New Mexico, a stable “frontier of inclusion” had developed in conditions of approximate equilibrium.
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This was not repeated in the US sphere of control, where the reservation gradually developed as the characteristic way of treating native people. The more the center of the landmass filled up with settlers, the less it was possible to drive the Indians into an open “wilderness.” After the Civil War, and a fortiori after the end of the Indian wars in the 1880s, the system of scattered special areas became the norm. In no other frontier—although there are similarities with the homelands in twentieth-century South Africa—did this encircling isolation of the indigenous population occur on such a scale.
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Fourth
, as a scholarly concept and a popular myth (little affected by academic “de-heroization”), the frontier has been the great integrative theme of national history since long before Turner gave it a name. Around 1800 Jefferson was in no doubt that the future of the United States would lie in the western continent, and in the 1840s the ideological motive of the Manifest Destiny was repeatedly used to justify an aggressive foreign policy. In this sense, some historians have interpreted the US maritime expansion in the Pacific—spearheaded by whaling—as the carrying of the frontier beyond the country's land borders.
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The opening up of the West was and is seen as the distinctive North American form of nation building. The integrative force of the theme is due also to the fact that at some point in its history, nearly every region in North America has been a “West.”

The vast research on the question cannot be summarized here.
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At one extreme, the history of the West has been completely divorced from the frontier concept: this was to some extent inevitable when the focus shifted almost entirely to particular regions and localities, since that meant giving up Turner's basic idea that the various geographical and sectoral frontiers were ultimately interrelated parts of a single process. Another direction in American studies, to which our present treatment is closer, rejects the tendency to reify the West, seeing it not as a region describable in terms of objective geographical features, but as the outcome of relations of dependency. In this optic, “West” denotes a
special kind of force field rather than a place that can be marked on a map. Other perspectival changes refer to the multiplicity of social actors—which cannot be reduced to a simple opposition of ranchers and Indians—and to the increasingly urban character of the West in the twentieth century. Cities never figure in the classic Western movies of the 1930s and 1940s, although at the time when they were made parts of the West were already among the most urbanized areas in the United States. Revised historical interpretations rarely feed only on advances in empirical knowledge. Consequently, the debate between neo-Turnerians and their opponents cannot be decided only by reference to advances in research. Each revisionism has a political backdrop, and attempts to dismantle the Turner orthodoxy may also, for example, involve a critique of American “exceptionalism.” If the frontier evaporates, then at least that claim to a special American way goes by the board.

As far as nineteenth-century world history is concerned, however, one cannot fail to be struck by the distinctiveness of the United States. We have already seen that its patterns of urbanization did not simply reproduce those of the Old World, and that its suburban sprawl defined a neo-European path that drew it closer to Australia typologically. If Europeans had not regarded the conquest and settlement of the West as such a unique phenomenon, they would not have described and commented on it with such fascination, or taken it as the starting point for fantasies and fictions of their own. America's striving to acquire a “normal” national history finds itself confronted with Europe's astonishment at the special development of the American frontier. Europeans will therefore not criticize American “exceptionalism” as vigorously as some American historians have done. In South Asian or East Asian eyes, America's peculiarities are even more apparent: in crowded spots of the planet they inspire ceaseless wonder at the abundance of fertile land. In many parts of Asia, nearly all highly productive areas were settled and cultivated by 1800; virtually all reserves of land were in use. America could not but appear as a land of plenty and waste.

Indians

A consideration of what is distinctive about the North American frontier must look first of all at the relationship between Euro-Americans and American Indians, taking account of the fact that any generalization about these extremely heterogenous groups is reckless to the extreme. As happened earlier in the Caribbean and Central and South America, the size of the indigenous population here fell sharply in the wake of the European invasion. A
general
accusation of genocide on the part of whites is exaggerated. But some American ethnic groups were certainly wiped out, and there were some dramatic regional irruptions. In California, where approximately 300,000 Indians had lived at the start of the Spanish settlement in 1769, only 200,000 remained by the end of the Spanish period in 1821. After the gold rush, a mere 30,000 survived until 1860. Disease, starvation, and sometimes murder—one leading historian has spoken of
“a program of systematic slaughter”
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—were the causes of this decline. It was a catastrophe for the survivors too, since the white society of California made no offers to integrate them.
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American Indians exhibited great diversity, with neither a uniform way of life nor a common language, and so it was difficult for them to coordinate armed resistance against the whites. The spectrum went all the way from bison hunters on the western plains to settled Pueblo farming communities to the sheep-breeding and jewelry-producing Navajo and the very loosely organized fisherfolk of the Northwest. Often they had little or no contact with one another; there was no unified Indian consciousness and solidarity, no united front against the invasion; and often cruel warfare arose even among related or neighboring tribes. So long as Indians were in demand as allies of the whites, they were sometimes able to play off British, French, Spanish, and rebellious settlers against one another. But this was no longer an option after the British-American war of 1812; the opportunity had passed for a pan-Indian resistance, organized from the North in a spirit of militarized religious fervor.
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In all future Indian wars, renegade Indians would fight on the Euro-American side and provide logistic support.

One thing common to most of the Indians of the Great Plains was the impact of a technological revolution. There is no other way to describe the use of horses for riding and carrying, which had first been introduced in the early seventeenth century in the Spanish-held south of North America.
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With the horse came firearms, which the French deployed to strengthen their Indian allies against the Spanish. Horses and muskets radically changed the lives of tens of thousands who had not set eyes on a white man before. As early as the 1740s there were reports of horse herds, horse trading, horse theft, and horseback combat, and by 1800 virtually all Indians west of the Mississippi had adapted their lifestyle to some degree to the animal. Whole peoples reinvented themselves as centaurs. This was not true only in ancestral lands on the edge of the plains. Sometimes following chosen migration routes, sometimes pushed westward by the Euro-Americans, Indian peoples from the Northwest such as the Lakota Sioux settled on the Great Plains and came into conflict there with farmers or rival horse-riding nomads. Whereas a relatively stable peace was negotiated in 1840 among the mounted hunters and warriors (Sioux, Comanche, and Apache, for instance), fighting continued between nomadic and settled Indian peoples: the bloodiest source of conflict in North America during the four decades before the Civil War.
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On the other hand, the horsemen relied on farmers and vegetable growers to keep them supplied with carbohydrates and to exchange objects from the East for their hunting produce (mainly dried meat and skins).
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This was perfectly possible, because low-tech Indian agriculture (no ploughs, no fertilizer) had achieved a high productivity from which Euro-Americans also initially profited. In 1830 the Great Plains were more densely populated than ever before. It has been estimated that 60,000 Indians then shared the vast habitat with up to 900,000 domesticated horses, 2 million wild horses, 1.5 million wolves, and up to 30 million bison.
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