Frontier town

“ The old order of developing new regions in the West was reversed when the railroad era began. Formerly the country was settled first, and the towns grew up to supply the needs of the rural population. Afterwards the towns were created by speculators far in advance of the farming settlement; and by the conveniences they afforded for selling crops, and buying implements, lumber and household supplies, they attracted farmers to their vicinity. Each new frontier town is an advertisement of the surrounding country, upon the settlement of which it must depend for its existence. ”

“ It has always been a place of considerable importance as a frontier town since the Revolution, although its growth has been slow, the population now amounting to not quite four thousand. The country on both sides of the river here is perfectly flat, and there is no place whence the town may be seen to advantage. A little south of the village, and directly upon the shore, is a strong military establishment, garrisoned, when we visited it, by three companies of Highland infantry. ”

“ But as the voyageurs and their immediate progeny gradually pass away, the community creeps out from the shadow of the past and asserts itself. The ancient town appears to be taking on a new and healthy growth, in strange contrast to the severe and battered architecture of frontier times. ”

“ Forced together into houses for protection, getting in their crops at the peril of their lives, the frontier townsmen felt it a hardship to contribute also to the taxes of the province [51] while they helped to protect the exposed frontier. In addition there were grievances of absentee proprietors who paid no town taxes and yet profited by the exertions of the frontiersmen ”

“ III. All inhabitants of a borough were also deeply interested in the preservation of the boundaries which marked the extent of their dominions, the “liberties” within which they could enforce their own law, regulate trade, and raise taxes. Century after century the defence of the frontier remained one of the urgent questions of town politics, insistent, perpetually recurring, now with craft and treachery, now with violence and heated passion breaking into sudden flame. Every year the mayor and corporation made a perambulation of the bounds and inspected the landmarks ”

“ the outpost of advancing day! The frontier town and citadel of night! ”

“ I ride down the long avenues of private palaces, each one of them worth a township in the Smoky Hill country, and I am convinced that we are mistaken in the opinion that a man must live on the frontier in order to be energetic. ”

“ In the north, the men who built up the lumber interests of the State, who founded a mill town surrounded by the stumps of the pine forests [235] which they exploited for the prairie markets, have acquired wealth and political power. The spacious and well-appointed home of the town-builder may now be seen in many a northern community, in a group of less pretentious homes of operatives and tradesmen, the social distinctions between them emphasized by the difference in nationality. ”

“ On the New England frontier, because it was adjacent to the coast towns, this was not the case, and here, as in seventeenth century Virginia, great activity in protecting the frontier was evinced by the colonial authorities, and the frontier towns themselves called loudly for assistance. This phase of frontier defense needs a special study, but at present it is sufficient to recall that the colony sent garrisons to the frontier besides using the militia of the frontier towns; and that it employed rangers to patrol from garrison to garrison. ”

“ That’s what you may expect our frontier towns to be like.”
“And the neighbourhood?” said Lewis, with lifted eyebrows.
“Oh, the neighbourhood is wonderful enough; but our people there are too slack and stale to take advantage of it. It is a peaceful frontier, you know, and men get into a rut as easily there as elsewhere. The country’s too fat and wealthy, and people begin to forget the skeleton up among the rocks in the north.” ”

“ An act of March 12, 1694-5, by the General Court of Massachusetts enumerated the "Frontier Towns" which the inhabitants were forbidden to desert on pain of loss of their lands (if landholders) or of imprisonment (if not landholders) , unless permission to remove were first obtained. [9] These eleven frontier towns included Wells, York, and Kittery on the eastern frontier, and Amesbury, Haverhill, Dunstable, Chelmsford, Groton, Lancaster, Marlborough, [10] and Deerfield. ”

“ The old frontier conditions have gone. If you want trouble, you must go out to look for it; it no longer comes to you unsought. In a word the broad sea of the wilderness has shrunken to bayous and bays surrounded and intersected by dried areas fit for the cultivation of paper collars and tenderfeet. The frontier still exists, but exists in its isolation only because it is not as commercially desirable as the rest.
This is true of the country at large. It is also true of Pah-sap-pah, the Black Hills. Already a railroad has pushed its way up the main valley. ”

“ To pry into the secret history of his former life, to pass hostile criticisms on it even when known to be discreditable, is not considered a public-spirited act; for those turbulent energies or uncontrolled passions which drove him out of eastern communities may prove of great service to that new country to which he has come. The first element of success in a frontier settlement is that a sufficient number of nomads should be willing to sustain each other in the belief that "this spot is to be a city and a centre." ”

“ As we neared the frontier the country seemed to become populous again. The cottages had lights; lights in the fields and through the trees. Only, as we passed, the strangeness increased, for the population had come from a different planet. Quiet cottages, with the glow of uniforms through the wet panes, fields with a few tireless peasant women, helped by good-humoured soldiers, using even the darkness for a desperate effort to get in the forsaken crops. The sight of arms and wagons seemed all the less fitting in the quiet villages because there was no suggestion of war. ”

“ In this advance, the frontier is the outer edge of the wave—the meeting point between savagery and civilization. Much has been written about the frontier from the point of view of border warfare and the chase, but as a field for the serious study of the economist and the historian it has been neglected.
The American frontier is sharply distinguished from the European frontier—a fortified boundary line running through dense populations. The most significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies at the hither edge of free land. ”

“ That was my first glimpse of the interior of a frontier fort, and, although I saw only the little open space lighted by a few waving torches, the memory abides with distinctness. A body of men met us at the gate, dim, indistinct figures, a few among them evidently soldiers from their dress, but the majority clothed in the ordinary garb of the wilderness. Save for one Indian squaw, not a woman was visible, nor did I recognize a familiar face, as the fellows, each man bearing a rifle, surged about us in noisy welcome, eagerly questioning those who had gone forth to our rescue. ”

“ A new and careless public was carried back once more to the early day whose revivification is always attempted for a preoccupied and unsympathetic community upon the passing away of another old settler. Then the frontier village lifts once more its bedraggled forlornness from the slime of its humble beginnings, and the lingering presence of the red man is again made manifest upon the grassy horizon. ”

“ In American thought and speech the term "frontier" has come to mean the edge of settlement, rather than, as in Europe, the political boundary. By 1690 it was already evident that the frontier of settlement and the frontier of military defense were coinciding. As population advanced into the wilderness and thus successively brought new exposed areas between the settlements on the one side and the Indians with their European backers on the other, the military frontier ceased to be thought of as the Atlantic coast, but rather as a moving line bounding the un-won wilderness. ”

“ Dependent upon outside travelers for news, the latest remedies for ailments, and mail, the inhabitants of the frontier opened the doors of their cabins and their hearts to visitors. Taken into a home, the weary traveler often found himself treated to the best in food and comfort which the limitations of the frontier permitted. Generally sharing the one-room cabin, like any member of the family, he soon learned that he was a welcome guest rather than a stranger in their midst. The loneliness of the frontier stimulated the hospitality of the frontiersman. ”

“ Nothing works for nationalism like intercourse within the nation. Mobility of population is death to localism, and the western frontier worked irresistibly in unsettling population. The effect reached back from the frontier and affected profoundly the Atlantic coast and even the Old World.
But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. As has been indicated, the frontier is productive of individualism. Complex society is precipitated by the wilderness into a kind of primitive organization based on the family. ”

“ The significance of our frontier has not been recognized except in social science. Fortunately its advance is well marked. The movement of the military frontier is preserved in monuments and military post buildings throughout the west. Court-house corner stones record the advance of law and order, we may say, the legal frontier—its earliest landmarks in the far west in the form of prominent trees, high bridges, 292and projecting beams, being pointed out with modest pride by the early inhabitants as memorials of Judge Lynch and the Vigilantes. ”

“ Both native settler and European immigrant saw in this free and competitive movement of the frontier the chance to break the bondage of social rank, and to rise to a higher plane of existence. The pioneer was passionately desirous to secure for himself and for his family a favorable place in the midst of these large and free but vanishing opportunities. It took a century for this society to fit itself into the conditions of the whole province. ”

“ France's frontier line is guarded by forts that stand like sentinels at the gateways of all waters leading to the interior,—Ogdensburg, Kingston, Toronto, Niagara, Detroit, Michilimackinac, and La Vérendrye's string of forts far west as the Rockies. New York's frontier line is guarded by one fort only,—Oswego. Here too, as in Acadia, the peace is a farce. ”

“ In England, a concurrence of circumstances has generally led to the gradual formation of hamlets, villages, and towns. In many instances, towns have grown up in barbarous ages around a place of refuge during war; around a fortalice or castle, and more frequently around the ford over a river, where the detention of travellers has led to the establishment of a place of entertainment, a blacksmith's or carpenter's shop. A village or town never grows to any size in Canada without a saw or a grist mill, both which require a certain amount of water-power to work the machinery. ”

“ The good effects of frontier life are there, genuine democracy, neighborhood feeling, hospitality, courage, and honesty; but along with them are seen the drawbacks of the frontier: ignorance, uncouthness, boisterousness, lawlessness, a lack of enterprise, and contempt for the experience of older communities. ”

“ The vast extent of our unwrought territory is constantly draining fresh life from our older districts, to aid in the establishment of new frontier communities of a somewhat lower or less highly organized type. ”

“ Life on the frontier was filled with hard work, danger, and anxiety. Yet it had its lighter side, and, indeed, it may be doubted whether people anywhere relished sport more keenly or found more pleasure in their everyday pursuits. The occasional family without neighbors was likely to suffer from loneliness. But few of the settlers were thus cut off, and as a rule community life was not only physically possible but highly developed. Many were the opportunities that served to bring together the frontiersmen, with their families, 122 throughout a settlement or county. ”

“ As this was a farmer's frontier, and as transportation and communication facilities were extremely limited, a generally self-sufficient and naturally self-reliant community developed as a matter of survival. The characteristics which this frontier nurtured, and the non-English—even anti-English—composition of its population make understandable the sentiment in this region for independence from Great Britain. This, of course, is supremely demonstrated in the separate declaration of independence drawn, according to the report, by the settlers of the Fair Play frontier. ”

“ The frontier line is necessarily arbitrary and artificial. Friends and kinsmen find themselves separated one from another; villages divided from their natural markets by the barrier of a French customs system. ”

“ I did not remain in the city a day, knowing everything that here preys upon the inexperienced arrival, but went directly to one of those vaguely scattered villages in the immediate vicinity of the town, where spots of nature, still wild or again run wild, can be found in the midst of the remote, neglected precincts of a quickly and carelessly growing human colony. ”