Question of a Frontier

When Antoine LeClaire, George Davenport, and others brought the first steamboat full of land speculators from Saint Louis to sell them plots in what would become the city of Davenport, Iowa, they did not appear to have clear title to the land. Sales were lackluster. Right or wrong, I attribute this to the dominant unanswered question: Who truly owned the land?

When the Sac and Fox tribes crossed the Mississippi River into Illinois in 1831 and 1832, their dispute was with settlers who moved onto the land. Indigenous tribes did not recognize the previously signed 1804 treaty in which Sauk and Meskwawki individuals surrendered tribal lands. This dispute initiated the so-called Black Hawk War. The tribes were routed and a new treaty was signed in 1832. By 1837 all surrounding tribes had fled to the West, leaving the former Northwest Territory to white settlement, and expanding settlement into Iowa and the western parts of Minnesota.

In my autobiography I wrote about Lincoln County in southwestern Minnesota, “the presence and perceived threat of indigenous people had diminished.” In the white-written history of that place, there is scant mention of indigenous people. I included this sentence because the complete omission of indigenous people would be an error. If the tribes had truly fled to the west by 1883 when my great, great grandfather bought his land, they may have been a minor threat. Was southwestern Minnesota part of the frontier? One doesn’t see much to indicate it was. At the same time, how else would we describe it?

In 1893, Frederick Jackson Turner published The Significance of the Frontier in American History. I first read Turner in graduate school, and while his writing is familiar it was easier to disagree than agree with his thesis that once the frontier closed, so too did the defining aspect of American character. Yes, his work led to an expansionist foreign policy and forays by the United States into new territory during the Spanish-American War. At the same time, it is hard to stomach that the strength and the vitality of the America identity lay in its land and a once vast frontier.

I submit that land is land whether it be acres of tribal land ceded under a treaty, land granted or purchased for speculation by the founders of Davenport, or land bought in Minnesota from the railroad, the interaction of individuals and communities with the land and natural environment was more defining of American character. The better question is “What shall we make of this land where we find ourselves?” The perspective for an answer can be very narrow.

We Americans, like my Polish ancestors, often seem completely self-absorbed in ourselves and in our communities in locum. Our vision doesn’t go far beyond our noses. When we talk about character and culture, the native impulse is to tell a single, brief narrative of our lives. It is a combination of essential, defining moments, and multiple, broader narratives set in societal context. Depiction of a frontier may be part of it, yet once basic security and land rights are attained, the frontier fades into the background.

At the root of such stories, we must answer the question J. Hector de Crèvecoeur asked in Letters from an American Farmer, “What then, is the American, this new man?” The proper answer in 2024 is we are male and female, and not one singular thing. We have become Lyndon Baines Johnson’s vision of America, like it or not.

Once the question, “Who owns the land?” is settled, another important dynamic takes the foreground: the interaction of settlers with the natural environment. There is no question about a frontier, except to ask what took us so long to put it in its place?