ost significant thing about the American frontier is, that it lies
at the hither edge of free land. In the census reports it is treated as
the margin of that settlement which has a density of two or more to the
square mile. The term is an elastic one, and for our purposes does not
need sharp definition. We shall consider the whole frontier belt,
including the Indian country and the outer margin of the "settled area"
of the census reports. This paper will make no attempt to treat the
subject exhaustively; its aim is simply to call attention to the
frontier as a fertile field for investigation, and to suggest some of
the problems which arise in connection with it.

In the settlement of America we have to observe how European life
entered the continent, and how America modified and developed that life
and reacted on Europe. Our early history is the study of European germs
developing in an American environment. Too exclusive attention has been
paid by institutional students to the Germanic origins, too little to
the American factors. The frontier is the line of most rapid and
effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. It finds
him a European in dress, industries, tools, modes of travel, and
thought. It takes him from the railroad car and puts him in the birch
canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the
hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the
Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before
long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick;
he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In
short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the
man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so
he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails.
Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not
the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more
than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark.
The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. At first, the
frontier was the Atlantic coast. It was the frontier of Europe in a very
real sense. Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American.
As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so
each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled
area the region still