![]() ![]() In that view America's best days lay in the past, in a time when life's essentials were laid bare and challenges brought out the best in human nature. Civilization of course contains its own problems, and as Americans found themselves confronted increasingly by those new problems, their concept of the frontier acquired a nostalgic component. However the frontier might have been defined, it was a transitional phenomenon, a passing phase on the road to civilization. Frémont all found enthusiastic audiences among Americans who felt themselves drawn to the frontier or who only dreamed of going there. The novels of James Fenimore Cooper, the histories of Washington Irving and Francis Parkman, and the government reports of John C. The frontier was thus fraught with ambiguous meaning, but it was a place few Americans could ignore. ![]() It was violent and perilous, but it was also a land of opportunity, where an enterprising person with a sharp ax could become the master of his own destiny. ![]() Images of the frontier in early American literature vary greatly, from a place of darkness and dread, the domain of the devil, to a happy, peaceful realm of opportunity for the human spirit to recover a presumed primeval innocence cleansed of civilization's corruption and indeed even a place to achieve union with God. As settlers confronted the interior of a vast continent full of exotic people, animals, and plants as well as geographic and geologic wonders, they came to realize that although they intended to transplant and perpetuate European institutions and to exploit the new continent for European purposes, indigenous circumstances were inevitably going to make life in America significantly different from that in the Old World. The concept of a frontier-some kind of dividing line between nature and civilization-was present in some form or other in the minds of European discoverers and explorers of North America almost from the beginning, and early on it became a defining phenomenon in American history. ![]()
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