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Photograph by Fred Welch

RAy ALLEN BILLINGTON A Founder and First President of Western History Association The Frontier and I Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021

RAy ALLEN BILLINGTON

hat Leonard J. Arrington, the persuasive editor of The Western Historical Quarterly, should invite me to prepare an unabashedly Tpersonal account of my love affair with Western history is both embarrassing and humiliating. Embarrassing because I had been guilty of suggesting that he publish such a seriesof articles by frontier historians, drawing my inspiration from a similar series currently appearing in one of the sociological journals, and little suspecting that I would be his first victim. Humiliating because I had proposed the reminiscences of the more elderly statesmen of the profession, those whose writing careers might reasonably be expected to be nearing an end. To realize that I am classed with those who have one foot in the academic grave, with those whose memories must be probed before too late, comes as a shock. Old age, after all, is always ten years in the future; it was when I was thirty or forty or fifty, and it is now that I am sixty-six. But, painful as may be the task, I am prepared to answer the questions the editor has posed, ques• tions that provide such guideposts as exist for this stroll backward along memory lane. I do so, however, fully aware that reminiscences rarely mirror the past accurately and often violate the goddess of objectivity worshipped by all historians. John Crow of the University of London tells of a visit to the site of the Battle of Waterloo made by a descendant of the Duke of Wellington to commemorate the seventy-fifth anniversary of that battle. There he was introduced to the one surviving French soldier. "Do you," the soldier was asked, "remember Napoleon?" "Oh yes," answered the old man. "He was very tall and wore a long white beard."

Ray Billington is now senior research associate at the Henry E. Huntington Library and Art Gallery, San Marino, California. His Westward Expansion has been read with delight by a whole generation of students of the American West. This is the first of a series of autobiographical essays by distinguished Western historians. 6 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY January

The papers of , father of all frontier his• torical studies, provide countless examples of the fallibility of the human memory. Four times in his later years he was asked to reconstruct his early career, and particularly to explain the steps that led to his enuncia• Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 tion of the frontier thesis in 1893. Four times he did so, sometimes in letters thirty pages long, and each time he was hopelessly wrong. Thus he described to Carl Becker in 1925 the origins of his doctoral dissertation on the Wisconsin fur trade: [Professor William Francis] Allen assigned me, in one of his classes, a thesis on the subject "Common Lands in Wisconsin." ... I soon saw that it wasn't a subject that would get me far, and while I was looking over the material, Dr. Draper happened in the library (then in the State capitol) and looking over my shoulder said that I might be interested in some old French fur trader's letters from those villages. Of course I was glad to see them, and he let me loose on a box of papers, waterstained, tied in deer thongs, written in execrable French which, however, did me no harm for I was guiltless of any knowledge whatever of French. . . . So I learned Kanuck French, and fur trade history from these manuscripts.... Thus, while a Junior, I did the thesis, which in substance, I later turned in for my doctoral dissertation. It was my own idea - by accident.

That passage could be cited in courses in methodology as an example of the unreliability of the human mind. True, Turner did prepare a paper in Professor Allen's course during his junior year, but the subject was a French landholding in his native Portage - the Grignon Tract - and had nothing to do with the thesis that he later prepared for the master of arts degree at Wisconsin and submitted in revised form for the Johns Hopkins University doctorate. That Lyman C. Draper, former director of the State Historical Society Library, showed him the old documents is unlikely, for he was ill that winter and spent most of his time under a doctor's care in New York. More probably the new director, Reuben Gold Thwaites, was responsible. And certainly Turner's glib reference to learning "Kanuck French" was a masterly overstatement. His struggle to master that language over the next years, as told in letters to his fiancee, forms a saga of heroic and tragic proportions. His inability cost him the hoped-for chance of earning his doctorate in one year at Hopkins. "The Hopkins instructor," Turner confessed, "had hard work to keep a sober face when I read some French aloud at his request." If Frederick Jackson Turner could be guilty of such distortions, there is scant chance that the truth will be well served as I address myself to the 1970 RAY ALLEN BILLINGTON 7 first of the questions suggested by Editor Arrington: How did I become interested in frontier history? As I reconstruct those distant days, the major turning point in my academic life occurred on March 15, 1924 - almost a half-century ago. On that day I was expelled from the for conduct Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 "highly objectionable and morally reprehensible." This was a fitting climax to the three years spent at Ann Arbor, where I had majored in campus activities, was a virtual stranger to the excellent library, and gloried in any grade above a "D." My life was the campus newspaper, for I had every intention of a journalistic career. There was, I suppose, just retribution in the fact that a journalistic caper terminated my Michi• gan years and turned me toward an academic future. My sin was editing a self-proclaimed "scandal sheet" designed to raise money for an addition to the student union building. By modern standards, the mild double meanings that filled the columns of The Union County Clarion would bring yawns rather than blushes to a profanity-oriented college generation. But if I did not deserve expulsion for immorality, I did for stupidity; my assumption was that college professorswere too clean of mind to recognize even the most innocent double entendre. Thirty-five years in academic circles taught me how wrong I was. That March 15 date set my life on a new course. The University of Wisconsin was finally persuaded to admit me as a mid-term junior. "We will," wrote President Edward A. Birge to President Marion Le Roy Burton of Michigan, "admit Billington as a matter of comity and amity." At Madison that fall of 1924, alone in a rooming house, with no friends or fraternity brothers to lead me astray, with no student offices or publi• cations to monopolize my time, I made the startling discovery that attend• ance at class could be rewarding, that study was fun, and that the library reading room held as many charms as a meeting of the committee on the junior prom. This was an eye-opening experience. So was the realization that the little group of intellectually oriented students to be found on the Wisconsin campus offered more stimulating companionship than I had dreamed existed. That year and a half in Madison pointed me not simply to an aca• demic career but to a career in history. My intention was to major in literature, and courses under such master teachers as James F. A. Pyre (who made a ritual of searching every pocket for his watch as the hour drew to a close) and R. E. Neil Dodge (who stretched my imagination by requiring a daily theme) did not diminish the excitement of the subject. But they were overshadowed - far overshadowed - by two superb in- 8 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY January structors who first kindled my enthusiasm for history: Carl Russell Fish and Frederic Logan Paxson. What a pair they were! Fish, boasting an exaggerated Harvard accent, colorful in dress and mannerism, rich in anecdote, an actor who made Cotton Mather or Daniel Boone come alive on the platform, made the past live anew as he led us through the survey Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 course in American history or his famed semester of Representative Ameri• cans. Paxson, precise in manner and speech, coldly efficient in his organi• zation of the subject, rich in knowledge and exact in phraseology, com• pressed such a deal of information into his semester courses on the frontier and recent America (which began with the Civil War then) that the stu• dent felt capable of arguing with an encyclopedia when he had crammed for an examination. Why did those courses, and others in history, spark my interest more than courses in literature or philosophy? I have not the slightest idea. I only discovered that I could master historical books more readily, that I enjoyed them more, and that an "A" was more easily attained from Fish or Paxson than from any other instructor. By the time I graduated from Wisconsin in February, 1926, I had found Clio to be an alluring mistress and was on the verge of committing myself to her life• time pursuit. That resolution was deepened during the year and a half that I spent at the University of Michigan in pursuit of a master's degree; pride com• pelled me to have one degree from that institution. Michigan offered no work in frontier history, but I added to my scant historical knowledge and deepened my burgeoning enthusiasm with seminars under Ulrich B. Phillips and Claude Halstead Van Tyne. The subjects that I chose for investigation were hardly western-oriented: Northern Railroads in the Civil War in Phillips' seminar, The Quartermaster's Department in the Revolutionary Army, 1777-1778 in Van Tyne's. Hardly earth-shaking topics, but Van Tyne assigned his, and Phillips encouraged me to believe that Civil War railroading could blossom into a doctoral dissertation. Only after nearly two years of fruitless labor did I learn of the list of "Doctoral Dissertations in Progress" and discover that the subject had been preempted. I have never ceased to bless that thesis writer who saved me from the worse-than-death fate of becoming a Civil War historian. I was committed to history now, and the charming young lady who had helped lure me back to Ann Arbor agreed that a professorial husband would be acceptable, largely because we could attend endless dances as chaperones (we did chaperone one dance shortly after our marriage in 1928, but that ended that). Edward Channing was my great god then, and Edward Channing was at Harvard, so there I turned my Model T 1970 RAY ALLEN BILLINGTON 9 Ford in the fall of 1927. And there I experienced another stroke of good fortune: Channing's seminar was filled, leaving me with no choice save that offered by a young man named Frederick Merk. Merk's seminar, and the course that he offered that year jointly with Professor James Blaine Hedges - Turner's famous History 17 on the History of the West Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 - rekindled my enthusiasm for frontier studies. In the seminar that enthusiasm was misdirected, for I elected to study the land policy of Canada's Prairie Provinces on the theory that no one knew much about the Canadian West, and that I could easily become an authority. I soon found that no one cared much about the Canadian West, and that if I wanted a teaching post I must return to the fold of orthodoxy. Before I could do so, I was seduced into another detour. During my second year I enrolled in Arthur Meier Schlesinger's History 55 - The Social and Intellectual History of the United States - then newly added to the Harvard curriculum. Here was a subject that was fresh and chal• lenging; I experienced something of the thrill that had made Paxson's course on the frontier a revelation. Too, graduate student gossipheld that this new subject would soon be taught everywhere, and that trained in• structors would be in such demand that they would be assured lucrative posts. Guided partly by this commercial motive, partly by the challenge of an unexploited discipline, I asked Schlesinger rather than Merk to direct my dissertation. Under his able direction, I expanded a term paper prepared in History 55 on "The Social Backgrounds of the Know Nothing Party" into a thesis, and finally into my first book, The Protestant Cru• sade, published in 1938, five years after the degree was awarded. Before I could become too immersed in social history ever to emerge, fate intervened once more in the person of James Blaine Hedges. Hedges not only engineered my appointment as his successor when he left for Brown in 1931 but a few years later laid before me a once• in-a-lifetime opportunity. For some time, he wrote me early in 1938, the Macmillan Company had been seeking two authors to prepare a text• book in frontier history. He was willing, but the search for a collaborator of comparable distinction had failed. Now the publishers had authorized him to select a younger man. Would I be willing to write the fourteen or fifteen chapters needed to carry the story of American expansion to the Mississippi, while he wrote the second half on the trans-Mississippi West? We would use the outlines developed by Turner for his History of the West and would divide the royalties on a fifty-fifty basis. Here was the loud knock of opportunity. Too, here was a chance to return to what I now realized to be my true love - the frontier - rather than continuing 10 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY January with the multivolume history of bigotry that was my ambition as a social historian. Even Arthur Meier Schlesinger urged me to accept. On No• vember 30, 1938 Hedges and I affixed our signatures to a Macmillan con• tract (one did not ask for advances in those days) and I was again - and finally - committed to a career in frontier history. Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 The next nine years, most of them spent teaching at , went into the writing of that book. I realized, in retrospect, that I read far more widely and deeply than was necessary; my practice was to take careful notes on every book and article pertinent to the chapter under preparation, then do a draft of the chapter that usually covered between 150 and 200 typed pages. The first draft of my original fourteen chapters, which I have preserved as a monument to my industry and stupidity, filled more than three thousand pages. During this painfully slow process I enjoyed only one moment of triumph. When I completed Chapter VII of the original fourteen, I staged a mild celebration on passing the half-way mark. Then, as I looked over the chapter and realized its length and com• plexity, I decided to divide it into two chapters, Chapters VII and VIII of fifteen. As 1 did so 1 realized that 1 had completed eight of fifteen chap• ters and was more than half done. I never did understand mathematics. This burst of unearned progress did me little good, for Hedges found that textbook writing was not for him. He needed the excitement of the quest for knowledge, the thrill of discovery. Serving warmed-over intel• lectual fare proved so distasteful to him that he asked to be relieved of his task after he had completed three chapters. He would, he said, be con• tented to appear on the title page as a mere "with the collaboration of ... ," while royalties could be adjusted to a 12 to 3 percent division. This meant a dozen extra chapters for me to prepare, and they were done less thoroughly, 1 am afraid, than those in my original section - a fact that has occasioned me some amusement for the trans-Mississippi portion has generally been judged superior by reviewers. Eventually the task was finished on a warm spring day in 1947. My remark to my wife at that supreme moment was one of which 1 am immodestly proud. "I have," 1 told her, "just finished a book. I'm going to have a cigarette before 1 start another one." With the publication, in the spring of 1949, of Westward Expansion, my commitment to the field of Western history was unshakable, partly because of the time invested in that overlarge book, partly because my enthusiasm for frontier studies was now too high ever to wane. So other books followed, usually on the invitation of a persuasive editor: The Far Western Frontier, 1830-1860 (1956) in the New American Nation Series 1970 RAY ALLEN BILLINGTON 11 which was contracted over a jovial dinner with Henry S. Commager; The Westward Movement in the United States (1959) which was suggested by Louis L. Snyder and accepted as an opportunity to publish some of the exciting source documents I had stumbled across in my reading; Frontier and Section: Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner (1961) Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 proposed by William E. Leuchtenburg over a post-midnight drink at a meeting of the American Historical Association; The Frontier Thesis: Valid Interpretation of American History? (1966) which originated in the mind of Kenneth L. Culver, history editor for Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., and was undertaken not only to spread the gospel of Turnerism but to test his generous estimate of the royalties he was sure would accrue; America's Frontier Story: A Documentary History of West• ward Expansion (1969) done in collaboration with my good friend and former student Martin Ridge, and again on his suggestion; and Dear Lady: The Letters of Frederick Jackson Turner and Alice Forbes Perkins Hooper, soon to be published by the Huntington Library, and the result of a proposal by Walter Muir Whitehill who offered to supply materials essential to their editing. Few scholars of any reputation, I submit, can boast a publishing record that shows as little initiative as this one. Even the Histories of the American Frontier Series, the eighteen• volume collaborative history of the American frontier which occupies my time as editor, was the brain-child of an enterprising publisher. When Ranald P. Hobbs, then vice-president of Rinehart and Company, asked me to serve as his history editor, he proposed that one of my principal duties should be the assembling of a multi-volume history of westward expansion, designed for both the collegeand trade markets, and with each volume prepared by one of the leading experts in the field. When I failed to convince Merle Curti and other competent scholars to undertake the initial volume on the significance of the frontier in the nation's history, I was forced to assume that assignment myself. This led eventually to America's Frontier H eritage (1966). If I have little occasion to be proud of a publication record that reveals slight originality and but scant interest in pushing back the borders of knowledge, I can find even less consolation in estimating the life-span of my books or their impact on this or later generations. Westward Ex• pansion has, fortunately, continued to attract readers for twenty years and shows no indication of losing the modest popularity it has enjoyed; each new competitor lowers sales (and royalties) for a year or two before they resume their steady climb. It has justified two revisions- in 1960 and 1967 - each a laborious task involving the complete recasting of the ex- 12 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY January tensive bibliography to include critical comments on all recent books and articles. But to claim significance, or a long life, for such a volume is pre• sumptuous. It is simply a synthesis of the work of hundreds of other schol• ars, built on the foundation of Frederick Turner's theories, and follow• ing the pattern that he might have followed had he been capable of any• Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 thing so unoriginal as a general survey. Yet I console myself that it has been purchased by from three thousand to nine thousand young persons each year for almost a quarter century, and that some of them at least have read its 933 pages. If even a few of these captive readers have awakened to the fascination of Western history, or recognized the importance of our frontier heritage, the effort spent in Westward Expansion was not wasted. Similarly The Far Western Frontier, 1830-1860 has enjoyed steadily ex• panding use as supplementary reading in university courses and has been presumably read by some fifteen thousand persons since 1956. Yet if I were to hope for wide use and a long life for any book I have written, it would be for America's Frontier Heritage. That book was designed not only to enlighten, but to convert. I believe, as must all of us who study Western history, that the frontier played a significant role in shaping the character of the American people and their institutions. I believe that we as a people differ from our European ancestors partly because the three centuries needed to settle the continent were years of unusual opportunity for self-improvement for all Americans, but particu• larly for those living on or near the frontier. Ready access to hitherto un• exploited natural resources instilled in generations of pioneers a deepened faith in democracy and the equality of men, a tendency toward social and physical mobility, a capacity for the inventiveness and adaptability re• quired by new problems, a disrespect for tradition and intellectualism. To exist in the shrinking world of today, we must recognize that other peoples, without frontiering backgrounds, do not share these traits to an identical degree. We must learn that our ideals and institutions are not necessarily exportable, and that our neighbors should not be criticized for behavioral patterns that differ from ours. When I began the serious study of frontiers, in the late 1930s and 1940s, these ideas were thoroughly unpopular. During those years the his• torical profession was reacting against the over-enthusiasm of Frederick Jackson Turner's many disciples, most of whom went far beyond their master in asserting that the frontier was the sole force molding the nation's institutions, not simply one of many. This exaggeration, and the changed intellectual atmosphere of the Great Depression years, triggered a torrent of attack. Some critics, eag-er to further one-worldism by proving- the like- 1970 RAY ALLEN BILLINGTON 13 ness between nations, denied any influence that set the Americans apart, and deplored the nationalism that was generated by the frontier school. Others, anxious to foster the collective action needed to conquer the de• pression and Hitlerism, rebelled against the concept of individualism im• Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 plicit in Turner's teaching. Still others, determined to bend historical studies to the needs of the day, preached the need of urban and industrial studies rather than the investigation of an outworn rural past. Turner suffered with his ideas; he was accused of being a monocausationist, of inexact definitions and language, of vague and unprovable theories, and of propagandizing a false doctrine that not only misled a generation of historians but laid the basis for World War II and its aftermath of misery. If these attacks were to be repulsed, and both Turner and his theories returned to their proper place in historiography, some counterattack must be launched. This would not be easy, for Turner had overstated his case and advocated concepts that would not stand the test of today's scientific scholarship. He had been guilty, in his seminal essay, of writing that "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development" - an unfortunate exaggeration that made rebuttal difficult. He had believed that the physical environment of the frontier altered the character of the frontiersmen, when modern scientists agreed that environmental deter• minism is impossible. He had taught that frontier traits still helped shape the American character, but geneticists and biologists had proven that acquired characteristics could not be inherited. Turner's critics could argue, with the best scientific backing, that pioneers had not been altered by the frontier environment, and that even if they had, the changes would not have affected future generations. To meet these arguments, and help restore Turner and his theories to their rightful place in interpreting the past, two things were necessary. One was to explain how Turner, who was far better versed in geographi• cal and biological sciences than most of his generation, could be guilty of such unscientific nonsense. The other was to demonstrate that the frontier environment had in some manner altered the behavioral patterns of the pioneers, and that those altered patterns had persisted in lessening degree down to the present. The clue to Turner's own views lay in both his unpublished corre• spondence and a proper understanding of the state of scientific knowledge during his day. The quest for the former took me to the Henry E. Hunt• ington Library, where the Turner papers were opened to scholars on January 2, 1960. As I read, over the next six months, I realized the in- THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY January justice done Turner by his critics; far from being a monocausationist he was a pioneer in preaching the then little-known concept of multiple cau• sation in history; far from being scientifically unoriented he was a trail• breaker in interdisciplinary studies, a leading light in the newly formed Social Science Research Council, and a careful student of geology, geogra• Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 phy, and biology. Over and over again he protested to his friends: "I am not a geographic determinist." With this training, how could Turner advance a theory based on environmentalism and the inheritability of acquired traits? I found the answer to this question in the scientific literature of the 1880s and 1890s. Geography, in which he immersed himself, was a rising young discipline at that time, wedded to rigorous scientific methodology, and concerned largely with the relationships between physiography, natural resources, and climate. The great god of the geographers was the German, Fried• rich Ratzel, who with his principal American disciples- Nathaniel S. Shaler and Ellen Churchill Semple - taught as an indisputable truth that the physical environment was the basic molding force in altering the be• havioral and thought patterns of the races of man. Turner probably did not discover Ratzel until after he published his 1893 essay, but Ratzel's views were in common currency among the scientific writers he did read. The best scientific authority of his day would agree with him that a fron• tier environment would alter the character of the pioneers. Scientists would also agree in the 1890s that the traits thus acquired would be passed on from generation to generation. "If," wrote Henry Fairfield Osborn in the Atlantic Monthly for March 1891, "there is any principle in in• heritance which has appeared self-evident and not required any demon• stration at all, it is that acquired characteristics are inherited." This was the intellectual diet on which Turner had been raised; nothing was more natural than that he should believe that frontiering endowed the fron• tiersmen with distinctive traits, and that these had been handed down through later generations to the present. This is a subject that I plan to develop fully in what I hope will be my next major book, a biography of Frederick Jackson Turner. While Turner might stand acquitted of scientific quackery, my task was only half accomplished. His theory passed the test of plausibility in its day, but modern scientists have proven that man's character is not altered by changing physical environments, and that acquired character• istics are not inherited. How, then, could the frontier environment endow pioneers with the traits described by Turner: "that practical, inventive tum of mind, quick to find expedients; that masterful grasp of material 1970 RAY ALLEN BILLINGTON 15 things, lacking in the artistic but powerful to effect great ends; that rest• less, nervous energy; that dominant individualism, working for good and for evil, and withal that buoyancy and exuberance which comes from freedom." Equally baffling, how could these traits be handed down to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 subsequent generations? These were the problems to which I addressed myself in preparing America's Frontier Heritage. My methodology was obvious, and probably that used by Turner as he developed his own theories. I first read all travel accounts written by visitors from overseas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, stressing especially those who visited the Western settlements. In each I sought an answer to one question: What did the visitor find in America that he considered unique? This proved a fruitful quest, for the travelers were almost unanimous in isolating certain char• acteristics - faith in democracy, belief in equality, mobility, inventiveness, acceptance of progress - which existed among Americans in exaggerated degree. Most also agreed that these traits were most evident in areas on or near the frontier. This was not conclusive proof that the frontier re• shaped behavioral patterns, of course; the travelers were impressionisticin their observations and subjective in their judgments. But with empirical evidence lacking, the unanimity of opinion among visitors from overseas that the United States did differ from their homelands, and that these differences were most observable in the successive Wests, provided indica• tion that Turner was not entirely false in his conclusions. But if so, how did the frontier exert its influence? In seeking the answer to that question I read as much modem sociology, anthropology, and social psychology as seemed pertinent. As I did so enlightenment dawned. While behavioral patterns are not altered by changing physical environments, they are altered by changing social environments. This I take to be an accepted scientific fact. With this established, I could ask myself another question: Did life on the frontiers create a distinctive social environment capable of changing the behavioral and thought patterns of the pioneers? Travel accounts, and particularly the observations of literate frontiersmen in their newspapers, magazines, and journals, suggested that it did. Observers agreed that in the broad zone where men first met and subdued raw nature, the opportunity for individual self-advancement was greater than in the thickly settled areas of the East or Europe. This was provided by the availability of hitherto untapped natural resources in the form of land, mineral or forest wealth, power, and animal life. Nor were these resources rapidly exhausted. Instead the flow of capital and tech• nological know-how from east to west allowed men to peel off successive 16 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY January layers of wealth over the course of a number of years. In a broad zone near the cutting edge of civilization a variety of exploiters - fur trappers, miners, cattlemen, farmers, town-planters, flour millers, distillers, news• paper editors, lawyers, merchants - could "grow up with the country," Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 gaining wealth and prestige as they did so. The social atmosphere in these successive zones, I reasoned, differed from that of heavily occupied communities in one all-important respect: there the opportunity for self-advancement was greater; there progress was the expected order of life. Nothing was static; the individual had only to bestir himself to improve his lot and better his status. Even those incapable of doing so believed that opportunity was just around the comer and radiated the go-ahead spirit that was everywhere. In such a world men would disdain social distinctions; the servant who might become a man of substance by the tum of a shovel or a fortunate land speculation was less inclined to be servile toward his "betters" than one in a stratified society where vertical mobility was difficult. There men would be inclined to move about in their perpetual quest for wealth; mobility would become a way of life and attachment to place lessen. There men faced new prob• lems in government and technology and were required to experiment with untried techniques to capitalize fully on the existing opportunities. There wastefulness became a habit, for the road to affluence was by exploitation rather than conservation. The social atmosphere of the frontier, then, helped endow pioneers with those very traits postulated by Turner: belief in democracy and equality, mobility, inventiveness, wastefulness, and a host more. Moreover, I felt, the traits induced by this social environment were transmittable over both space and time. Children reared in an atmosphere in which all men were potentially equal would be less inclined to adopt a rigid stratification system for themselves and their children. A youngster who had been moved frequently from farm to farm as his parents ad• vanced with the frontier would be more prone to move himself, and his children after him. So certain traits have persisted with diminishing in• tensity down to the present. In general, it seems to me, those linked with a farm culture have eroded away most rapidly as urbanization progresses, while those without such dependence on a rural way of life have endured. Those vestiges, I firmly believe, account in part (and only in part) for the differences that today distinguish the United States from England or France or Japan. Committed as I was to that belief, and certain that I had proven my point to the satisfaction of the most skeptical critic of Frederick Jack- 1970 RAY ALLEN BILLINGTON 17 son Turner, I was deeply disappointed in the reception afforded America's Frontier Heritage when it was published in 1966. Let me hasten to modify that statement by acknowledging that nearly all reviewers were generous in their evaluations, and that sales have been flatteringly large, largely to unwilling victims in classrooms whose instructor has assigned Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 the volume as collateral reading. I am aware, however, that most re• viewers who found good in the book, and most professors who decree that it be read by their students, are already part of the Western history fra• ternity. I recognize that they approve of the volume because it bolsters their own prejudices. Grateful as I am for this acceptance, I am sadly conscious that I failed to influence two groups that I particularly hoped to convert. One was the general public, which usually pays proper attention to any work appraising the national character. Instead my book was apparently dis• missed as just another polemic beating the dead horse of Turnerism; it was scarcely mentioned in the New York Times Book Review, the Satur• day Review, the Atlantic Monthly, and similar journals catering to the nation's intellectual elite. Even more disappointing was the reaction of many young, social science-oriented historians. This group has held that the frontier played no role in shaping the national character and that courses in its history should be displaced by the study of the great immi• gration movements of which the peopling of the United States was only a part. My hope was to convince them, in the social science language that they understand, of the scientific validity of the modem significance of the pioneer era of our history. Instead Robert F. Berkhofer, Jr., con• cluded his thoughtful appraisal of the volume with: "Billington would seem from the viewpoint of the last decade's thinking to be squeezing new data and new assumptions about human behavior into an old conceptual framework to the distortion of both description and explanation." Pro• fessor Berkhofer's opinion, I am afraid, typifies that of many younger scholars whose memories fail to reach back to the days of rural America and whose training has occurred in an era in which the "progressive his• torians" have been discredited. This disappoints me, for I vastly admire the works of not only this critic but of others with similar persuasions, and hope for their aid in restoring the frontier theory to its proper place among the forces molding the national past. This is not to admit defeat, only discouragement. Frontier history can endure and gain the academic respectability that is denied it by so many academicians only if its disciples recognize their sins and amend their ways. Today's sophisticated student generation demands two things 18 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY January of any discipline: relevance and analytical interpretation. The classroom teacher who spends hours laboriously tracing the exact routes of explorers, or tabulating the exploits of the Mountain Men, or dealing in burdensome

detail with the adventures of the handful of overland pioneers who braved Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 the Oregon and California trails before the rush of the forty-niners, is offering his pupils no bridge between past and present. He is denying them theory or subject matter that will allow them to understand the complexities of the world in which they live. Similarly too many in• structors use frontier history as a medium for entertainment rather than analysis. This is understandable; to a generation of Americans bred on television and cinema "westerns," or accustomed to the lurid frontier tales peddled in pulp magazines and paperbacks, the West is to be enjoyed rather than understood. Haunted by this image, the teacher is all too often inclined to entertain rather than instruct, seeking to best his com• petitors on their own grounds. The derisive label of "cowboys and In• dians" attached to such courses symbolizes the disrespect in which they are rightly held. I make this harsh judgment as one who taught a course bearing that designation for twenty years at . If frontier history is to survive and prosper, its advocates must do three things. They must agree that knowledge of the nation's pioneer past is essential to an understanding of today's social order, and demonstrate to readers and students alike that the nation's traits and institutions are understandable only through knowledge of the pioneer period. Second, they must pay less attention to the distant past and more to the usable near-present, no matter how glamorous the former or prosaic the latter. Finally, they must abandon description for analysis and narration for interpretation. We need courses that will appraise the economic results of the fur trade rather than repeat the tale of Hugh Glass and the grizzly bear, that will relegate the glamorous history of overland stagecoaching to a brief mention and dwell instead on the impact of the railroads on re• gional development, that will pay less attention to prospectors and more to the eastern capitalists who elevated mining to an important role in the national economy, that will focus on the business activities of ranch owners rather than on adventures of cowboys, that will concentrate on the unromantic fanner who really transplanted civilization to the successive frontiers and not on the outcasts who preceded them in the march across the continent, that will compare urbanization in the West with city growth in the East and explain any differences detected. To do these things• to recast frontier history to the needs of a society which glorifies urban 1970 RAY ALLEN BILLINGTON 19 industrialism at the expense of the rural past - will not be easy, but the transition must be made if our academic discipline is to survive. Yet one more alteration is necessary. The Western historian of the future must abandon the provincialism that had burdened our subject for generations. He must view the successive Wests not as isolated islands to Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 be dissected with antiquarian-like thoroughness, but as stages in the growth of a nation and significant only in relation to that growth. Fron• tier history is true history only when understood as a segment of national history or world history. Localism is a luxury that has been outmoded in the shrinking planet of today. The scholar who can fit western urban growth into the national pattern, who can demonstrate the impact of frontier mining on the nation's price structure, who can show that a trans• continental railroad altered the economy of East as well as West, is fulfill• ing his obligation to Western history no less than to history in general. This is not to deny the importance of local studies, even of antiquarian minuteness. The mosaic of the past is formed of many stones, and he who polishes one stone to glittering brightness makes his contribution just as does the student who draws the broad outlines. But if the classroom teacher of the future hopes to revitalize frontier studies, he must shed his provincialism and recognize the national and global implications of his subject. Happily, such a trend is apparent today. Increasingly scholars are resisting the temptation to glamorize as they reconstruct the socioeconomic framework of the earlier Wests. Rodman W. Paul and Clark C. Spence, among others, have revealed Western mining in terms of technological and economic advance. Lewis Atherton and Gene M. Gressley have ex• plained cattle ranching in terms of business enterprise and capital flow. Richard C. Overton, Robert G. Athearn, and others have demonstrated the importance of railroads to the national economy no less than to the peopling of the Far West. Duane A. Smith, James B. AlIen, and especially Robert R. Dykstra have pioneered significant studies in the field of West• ern urbanization. Paul W. Gates, Allan Bogue, and Gilbert C. Fite have focused attention on the sociology and economy of pioneer farming. Leonard J. Arrington, W. Turrentine Jackson, Gerald T. White and a host more have carried on important investigations in the industrialism of the West. These are trail-breaking historians; if the profession will follow, it will be assured happier days ahead. To do so does not mean to stifle the romance of the frontier. The West as image will exist forever in the popular mind. But the West as an 20 THE WESTERN HISTORICAL QUARTERLY January integral part of the developing nation, the West as a social, political, and economic force felt in past and present, must be the province of academic historians. For today, even more than in the past, the serious study of

the frontier is essential if the American people are to understand their past Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/whq/article/1/1/4/1922717 by guest on 30 September 2021 and recognize the distinctive features of their own culture. If the Western History Association and The Western Historical Quarterly can contribute to this understanding, Western history should regain its rightful place among the disciplines and the nation benefit in its time of greatest need.