linas and the vigilantes of
California, are types of that line of scum that the waves of advancing
civilization bore before them, and of the growth of spontaneous organs
of authority where legal authority was absent. Compare Barrows, "United
States of Yesterday and To-morrow"; Shinn, "Mining Camps"; and Bancroft,
"Popular Tribunals." The humor, bravery, and rude strength, as well as
the vices of the frontier in its worst aspect, have left traces on
American character, language, and literature, not soon to be effaced.

[34:1] Debates in the Constitutional Convention, 1829-1830.

[34:2] [McCrady] Eminent and Representative Men of the Carolinas, i, p.
43; Calhoun's Works, i, pp. 401-406.

[35:1] Speech in the Senate, March 1, 1825; Register of Debates, i, 721.

[36:1] Plea for the West (Cincinnati, 1835), pp. 11 ff.

[37:1] Colonial travelers agree in remarking on the phlegmatic
characteristics of the colonists. It has frequently been asked how such
a people could have developed that strained nervous energy now
characteristic of them. Compare Sumner, "Alexander Hamilton," p. 98, and
Adams, "History of the United States," i, p. 60; ix, pp. 240, 241. The
transition appears to become marked at the close of the War of 1812, a
period when interest centered upon the development of the West, and the
West was noted for restless energy. Grund, "Americans," ii, ch. i.

II

THE FIRST OFFICIAL FRONTIER OF THE MASSACHUSETTS BAY[39:1]

In the Significance of the "Frontier in American History," I took for my
text the following announcement of the Superintendent of the Census of
1890:

Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of
settlement but at present the unsettled area has been so
broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can
hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its
extent, the westward movement, etc., it cannot therefore any
longer have a place in the census reports.

Two centuries prior to this announcement, in 1690, a committee of the
General Court of Massachusetts recommended the Court to order what shall
be the frontier and to maintain a committee to settle garrisons on the
frontier with forty soldiers to each frontier town as a main
guard.[39:2] In the two hundred years between this official attempt to
locate the Massachusetts frontier line, and the official announcement of
the ending of the national frontier line, westward expansion