Frederick Jackson Turner The Great West Essay

There is great debate on Frederick Jackson Turners thesis on whether or not the great west is where American character was formed. The West was more a form of society than an actual area. The term is applied to the region in which the social conditions resulted from the application of older set colonies. By this application a new environment was entered. A new environment of freedom and of opportunity was opened and a new line of activities, ideas, customs, and growth were brought into existence in the Great west. Their opportunistic, individualistic, and willingness to accept innovations are of reasons I agree with Turners analysis that true American character was formed in the great west.
Being stripped from industrialization and modes of travel to being arrayed in "the hunting shirt and moccasins"(Turner, 167) and "put into

the birch canoe"(Turner, 167) this is how a new product that is American comes to be. This is known as the Great West. People working in factories leave what they have behind in chance of opportunity. The West was in other words another title for opportunity. This is a place where mines had yet to be mined and fertile valleys awaited to be seized and cropped and all the natural resources were available to the most opportunistic and boldest.
Robert Baird in his primary source describes the west to immigrants and travelers in that the people who live in the west as people who "think nothing of making a long journey, of encountering fatigue, and of enduring every species of hardship."(Baird, 177) This shows the significance in which that the people who did come to the Great west had specific traits of character that "distinguish the population of the west," (Baird, 177) as opportunistic and hardworking people. Thus setting the west as the place in where true American character was formed because to this modern day "opportunistic" is seen as a trait of American character.
With the Americans that moved west, it included freed indentured servants of non-English stock.

Because coming to the West meant new opportunities for these people, it meant picking up everything they could take and moving. What this was, was continual rebirth that Americans had to deal with. With continuing to rebirth, a person becomes different as in there is a sense of finding themselves a sense of individualism. In other words a sense of what is now American character. "Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American." (Turner, 166 ) Turner writes "In the crucible of the frontier the immigrants were Americanized, liberated and fused into a mixed race." The west being a unique place as Turner states, it also has its own national identity and is not sectional but rather it is like a melting pot where these immigrants were "Americanized". This is shown in Frank Marryat's primary source of drawing in "A San Francisco Saloon" (Marryat, 182) in which it shows the diversity of the West. Depicted in Marryat's drawing are Chinese, Spanish, and white male gold miners, as well as some dressed in top hats in a gambling

saloon.
Free land is something which lies at the heart of Turners individualism. The self made man was the western mans ideal, the man in which they all could become in the west. Turner fashioned the freedom of the individual to seek his own opportunities. The independent self made man plays a major central role in Turners thesis in that Americas west was a place where true American Character was formed.
Pride and arrogance are also of two American characteristics in which were formed in the Great West. Though these characteristics are characteristics that were not formed on their own but rather characteristics that are still seen in modern day American character. Opportunism and individualism are of two characteristics that partly make up the pride and arrogance characteristic of American character.
This pride of being American comes from the success in the opportunities that the travelers took with the availability of land in the West. The success in that New York Journalist , John L. O'Sullivan called Manifest Destiny. Manifest Destiny meaning that the United States at this time, "had a divinely appointed mission , so obvious as to be beyond dispute, to occupy all of North America."(Foner, 267)
Arrogance can be seen as a characteristic in which Manifest Destiny was seen as a way to spread the "superior race" that is, white people of European origins. "During the 1840's, territorial expansion came to be seen as proof of the innate superiority of the "Anglo-Saxon race." (Foner,374) They saw the Indians, Mexicans and other races in the Western as unfit to be a part of America.