When was frontier closed

Congress passed the Forest Reserve Act in It allowed the president to preserve timberlands for the nation's use.

Many Americans wanted to preserve the wilderness for its own sake. Naturalist John Muir wrote several articles defending conservation of forests, "not only as fountains of timber and irrigating rivers, but as fountains of life.

Sequoia National Park was created shortly thereafter. Nostalgia for the untamed wilderness profoundly affected photography. Photographers no longer had the mission of accurately presenting unexplored lands. They emphasized artistic interpretation, as unexplored territory became internal.

Realistic photographs with a sharp, clear focus made way for a softer focus, and landscapes often appeared shrouded by mists. The Pictorialists, as they became known, portrayed the West as a mysterious, mythical place.

The closing of the wilderness had an enormous influence on both serious scholarship and popular literature. Alice C. Fletcher, an ethnologist at the Smithsonian, held views that opposed Turner's. She lamented the closing of the wilderness, not because it was detrimental to American society, but because it ended a distinct Native American way of life.

She wrote a series of articles called "Personal Studies of Indian Life," which appeared in Century Magazine from Outposts stimulated the spirit of individualism and inventiveness, putting a special premium on democracy and versatility.

American society, moreover, owed to the frontier its special characteristics of earthiness and practicality. The final settlement of the West was one of the most dramatic stories of the Gilded Age. According to the map little changed. The continental boundaries of the United States were almost the same in as they had been in The great prairies between Kansas and Nebraska in the East and the Rocky Mountains in the West had previously been considered unsuitable for settlement.

They were sometimes called the Great American Desert on account of their inhospitable terrain and climate. These central plains had the most extreme temperature range in the United States from Bismarck, North Dakota, where the mean temperature fell to minus 45 degrees Fahrenheit in winter, to Phoenix, Arizona, where the temperature was degrees in summer.

Nevertheless, this last frontier of nineteenth-century America was invaded by three successive waves of pioneers-miners, ranchers, and farmers. In three decades they settled more land in America than their eastern predecessors had done in years. Between and million acres of land had been settled and million acres were cultivated, but between and , million acres were settled and million acres were cultivated. The foundation of this final settlement was new technology, which Improved communications and the laying of transcontinental railroads.

The settlers were both native Americans from the states of the Mississippi Valley and the Old Northwest and immigrants from Europe. Native Americans moved West because they felt that the pressure of increasing population in the East was narrowing their opportunities. The immigrants, as we have seen, were attracted by advertising campaigns run by states and steamship companies.

They were dispersed throughout the West by railroads and labor bureaus. Indeed, it was the revolutions in transportation and communication of railroad and telegraph that made possible the superhuman endeavor of taming a wilderness.

It was not agriculture but mining that first provided the incentive for settling the mountains and desert and ranching that led to the opening of the Great Plains. In gold was discovered in Pike's Peak, Colorado, and silver in Nevada. The gold rush of soon died away, for the precious lodes in Colorado were particularly heavy and required special, expensive machinery for the extraction of ore.

However, silver was a different proposition, and the rush to exploit the Comstock Lode reached its climax in the Big Bonanza of Silver and copper were also discovered in Montana at Butte in and The mines of Colorado yielded gold and silver at Silverton , Leadville , Ouray , and Cripple Creek Idaho yielded gold in the Caribou Mountains in ; gold at Bonanza in ; and silver, lead, and zinc at Couer d'Alene from Nevada yielded gold, copper, and lead in Eureka from In Arizona mines were opened at Prescott , Lordsburg , Globe , and Tombstone for the extraction of gold, silver, and copper.

Most dramatic of all, prospectors discovered gold in the Black Hills of South Dakota in In the Homestake mine was opened. It became the largest gold mine in the Western Hemisphere. As to miners' methods, prospectors used placer mining, collecting pans or cradles of sand and gravel from the bed of streams and shaking or rocking them in running water.

The heavier gold nuggets and dust sank to the bottom of the pan while the lighter sand was washed away. Lode mining was more complex and involved the use of stamp mills to pulverize veins of quartz containing gold.

Gold was extracted after mercury had been poured into the pulverized material and formed an amalgam with it. Lode mining on federal lands necessitated the use of heavy machinery and more permanent occupation than placer mining. Since the prospectors were usually migrants from the Pacific Coast, the mining frontier moved from west to east. This transient society was almost exclusively made up of men working in remote areas without their families. They wanted to make a lucky strike and then enjoy their new wealth back home.

The usual local community was a rowdy camp that sometimes became a ghost town, deserted after a local mine had proved barren. Fortunes were made and lost by individuals who struck lucky and squandered their money. On their return to Nevada they threw open their home and entertained parasites in a most lavish way. When their mine petered out, they had nothing to fall back on.

Sandy returned to prospecting, and his wife took in washing to sustain them. Mark Twain, who spent a couple of years in Virginia City, provided the most memorable account of the silver boom in Roughing It The rude manners of the frontier are illustrated in an anecdote about Jim Baker, a western scout.

He was not used to city spittoons and simply spat out his tobacco on the carpet of a hotel lobby in Denver. Each time the porter moved the cuspidor closer to his range, he spat in a different direction. Finally the porter placed the spittoon right under his nose.

Jim looked up and said, "You know, if you keep movin' that thing around I'm li'ble to spit in it. At the end of the Civil War the ranching frontier was based in Texas. Its climactic conditions were ideal for raising cattle and its land policy suited the owners. Texas had never ceded its public domain to the federal government and now it allowed ranchers to acquire land for grazing at 50 cents an acre.

This generous policy encouraged mammoth ranches such as the XIT Ranch in the Texas Panhandle which contained over 3 million acres. The staple breed of cattle was the Texas longhorn which was so numerous and extensive as to threaten crops growing in Arkansas and Missouri as it roamed or was being driven north to market.

In Joseph McCoy devised a route whereby cattle would be driven north from southern Texas to Abilene, Kansas, along Chisholm's trail to the west of any settlement. The journey was known as the long drive. Between and a total of 5. In Philip D. Armour established a meatpacking business in Chicago, and he was followed by Gustavus Swift and Nelson Morris.

Meatpacking made use of the assembly-line process long before it was adopted in industry. Each worker had a particular task on the line. In the Armour plants each part of the animal was processed. Besides meat the hogs and cattle provided glue, sausage casings, fertilizer, and pepsin. Armour once claimed, "I like to turn bristle, blood, bones and the insides and outsides of pigs and bullocks into revenue.

After the Civil War it seemed that ranching was one route to fortune. The grass they ate cost nothing, and the expense of the drive was estimated at less than a cent per head per mile. But the long drive was not really cost-effective. On the coast of California, west of the Rock Mountains, settlements grew with interest first being on the potential for gold and silver followed by timber, ranching and farming evolving along with government policies such as the homestead and the transcontinental railroad.

By , 14 new states emerged from the western territories with Colorado being admitted into the Union in , a hundred years after the US acquired the status of nationhood and was called the Centennial State. North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Washington, Idaho and Wyoming were admitted between the year to following the northwest ordinances that provided the criteria for the recognition of states.

Utah was admitted in once the Mormon in the region, who were led initially by Brigham Young, renounced polygamy. In , the Census Bureau broadcast the closure of the frontier, meaning that in the west there was no apparent tracts of land without settlers.

This news was a distinguished event in American history; the frontier represented danger because of the Natives who lived in the region but also freedom and opportunity. The frontier also had a limitless aspect upon which Americans could extend their institutions and democracy through Manifest Destiny.