I'm not real familiar with "blogging", so I wasn't sure how to approach this, I guess I will just point out a few things I found to be quite interesting. The first thing is that Turner writes "The Frontier is the line of most rapid an effectiveness Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonists." I think this is very true, and worded well. What I took from this part of the reading is that Turner was describing how all the somewhat industrialized colonists from the east had to work hard to adapt to new lives in the west. This new frontier was probably like moving to an entirely new country. Everything would have been different. They would have had to learn how to hunt and farm just to survive. In Turner's words describing the frontier, "He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into Indian clearings and follows Indian trails".
I think this reading assignment was very informational, but I would like to know more about how the new settlers adapted. I'm assuming that the new westerners had a hard time learning from the Indians. If I were an Indian I wouldn't be too happy about these people invading my land. Turner states that the U.S Army had fought a series of Indian wars in Minnesota, Dakota, and other Indian territory, and by 1880 the settlers had moved as far north as Michigan and Wisconsin. Ten years later, settlement of the west was so scattered, there was no longer an actual frontier line.
Friday, August 28, 2009
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