was the
most important single process in American history.

The designation "frontier town" was not, however, a new one. As early as
1645 inhabitants of Concord, Sudbury, and Dedham, "being inland townes
& but thinly peopled," were forbidden to remove without authority;[40:1]
in 1669, certain towns had been the subject of legislation as "frontier
towns;"[40:2] and in the period of King Philip's War there were various
enactments regarding frontier towns.[40:3] In the session of 1675-6 it
had been proposed to build a fence of stockades or stone eight feet high
from the Charles "where it is navigable" to the Concord at Billerica and
thence to the Merrimac and down the river to the Bay, "by which meanes
that whole tract will [be] environed, for the security & safty (vnder
God) of the people, their houses, goods & cattel; from the rage & fury
of the enimy."[40:4] This project, however, of a kind of Roman Wall did
not appeal to the frontiersmen of the time. It was a part of the
antiquated ideas of defense which had been illustrated by the impossible
equipment of the heavily armored soldier of the early Puritan regime
whose corslets and head pieces, pikes, matchlocks, fourquettes and
bandoleers, went out of use about the period of King Philip's War. The
fifty-seven postures provided in the approved manual of arms for loading
and firing the matchlock proved too great a handicap in the chase of the
nimble savage. In this era the frontier fighter adapted himself to a
more open order, and lighter equipment suggested by the Indian warrior's
practice.[40:5]

The settler on the outskirts of Puritan civilization took up the task of
bearing the brunt of attack and pushing forward the line of advance
which year after year carried American settlements into the wilderness.
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. It could not be a fortified boundary along the
charter limits, for those limits extended to the Sou