Land of Savagery, Land of Promise: The European Image of the American Frontier in the Nineteenth Century

1982 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 63
Author(s):  
W. Eugene Hollon ◽  
Ray Allen Billington
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Frontier

scholarly journals Global West, American Frontier

2009 ◽  
Vol 78 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-26 ◽  
Author(s):  
David M. Wrobel
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Developing Regions ◽  
The West ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
Common Assumption ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Global Context ◽  
Travel Writings ◽  
The Common ◽  
Travel Writers

This article questions the common assumption that nineteenth-century audiences in America and around the world viewed the American western frontier as an exceptional place, like no other place on earth. Through examination of travel writings by Americans and Europeans who placed the West into a broader global context of developing regions and conquered colonies, we see that nineteenth-century audiences were commonly presented with a globally contextualized West. The article also seeks to broaden the emphasis in post-colonial scholarship on travel writers as agents of empire who commodified, exoticized, and objectified the colonized peoples and places they visited, by suggesting that travel writers were also often among the most virulent critics of empire and its consequences for the colonized.

scholarly journals Simulated authenticity: Storytelling and mythic space on the hyper-frontier in Buffalo Bill’s Wild West and Westworld

2020 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 409-428
Author(s):  
Jane Lovell ◽  
Sam Hitchmough
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
United Kingdom ◽  
American West ◽  
Advanced Technology ◽  
Theme Park ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
Frontier Myth ◽  
The United Kingdom ◽  
Buffalo Bill ◽  
Wild West

This article explores how the mythic, nineteenth-century American frontier is authenticated by postmodern forms of storytelling. The study examines accounts of William Cody’s extensive 1902–1903 Buffalo Bill’ s Wild West tours in the United Kingdom and the futuristic television series, HBO’s Westworld (2016–), which is set in an android-hosted theme park. Comparing the semiotics of the two examples indicates how over a century apart, the authentication of the myth involves repeating motifs of setting, action and character central to tourist fantasies. The research illustrates how some elements of the myth seem to remain fixed but are negotiable. It is suggested that both examples are versions of a ‘hyper-frontier’, a nostalgic yet progressive, intertextual retelling of the American West and its archetypal characters, characterised by advanced technology. The implications for tourism are that simulating the authenticity of the frontier myth creates doubts in its veracity paradoxically due to its lifelikeness.

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-6
Author(s):  
Mark Walczynski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native American ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Aboriginal People ◽  
River Channels ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
History Of ◽  
European Trade ◽  
Frontier Settlers

This chapter provides an overview of the history of Starved Rock in Illinois. The land that today comprises Starved Rock State Park and the adjacent countryside was nearly continuously occupied by Native Americans until the early nineteenth century. Although the Rock itself was not an occupied Native American site per se, like a semi-permanent village, it was a place where, for millennia, Native Americans camped, sojourned, and in a few instances had their earthly remains interred. West and north of Starved Rock, along the ancient river channels that once crisscrossed the Illinois Valley, aboriginal people hunted, fished, and farmed. Oblivious to the movement of Europeans from the Old World to the New, the Indians in the Starved Rock area established a village named Kaskaskia. European trade goods that made the chores of killing, cleaning, and cooking easier reached the Kaskaskia a decade or so before French missionaries and traders made their debut at Starved Rock. By the early nineteenth century, American frontier settlers would arrive and change the entire dynamic of the Starved Rock area. Their attitudes concerning the use of lands and waterways, and their exploitation of natural resources, embodied values that would have seemed utterly foreign to the Indians who proceeded them.

The History of Starved Rock

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark Walczynski
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Native Americans ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Early Nineteenth Century ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
American Midwest ◽  
History Of ◽  
Frontier Settlers

This book provides an overview of the famous site in Utica, Illinois, from when European explorers first viewed the bluff in 1673 through to 1911, when Starved Rock became the centerpiece of Illinois' second state park. The land that today comprises Starved Rock State Park and the adjacent countryside was nearly continuously occupied by Native Americans until the early nineteenth century. By the early nineteenth century, American frontier settlers would arrive and change the entire dynamic of the Starved Rock area. The book pulls together stories and insights from the language, geology, geography, anthropology, archaeology, biology, and agriculture of the park to provide readers with an understanding of both the human and natural history of Starved Rock, and to put it into context with the larger history of the American Midwest.

Black Robes and the Book of Heaven

2021 ◽  
Vol 101 (1) ◽  
pp. 80-100
Author(s):  
Thomas S. Bremer
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Rocky Mountains ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
American West ◽  
Nez Perce ◽  
Intermountain West ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
Native Peoples ◽  
Historical Accounts

Abstract Protestant and Catholic sources tell different stories about four Nez Perce emissaries from beyond the Rocky Mountains who arrived in St. Louis in the fall of 1831. Although their respective historical accounts reveal little about why native peoples would find it advantageous to send a delegation to an American frontier town asking for help, they reveal much about the contrasts between these rival groups of American Christians in the nineteenth century as well as their common objectives in Christianizing the American west. A third version of Christian missionaries arriving in the intermountain west from an indigenous oral tradition offers a different interpretation of Christianity’s consequences for the native peoples of the region.

An Uncertain Destiny: Indian Captivities on the Upper Connecticut River

1983 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 189-210 ◽  
Author(s):  
Colin G. Calloway
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
New England ◽  
Physical Abuse ◽  
Great Plains ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Connecticut River ◽  
American Frontier ◽  
Northern New England

The prospect of being taken captive by Indians was one of the greatest terrors for pioneers on the American frontier. From seventeenth-century Massachusetts to twentieth-century Hollywood, Indian captivity has been regarded as a fate worse than death, and western frontiersmen advocated saving the last bullet for oneself to prevent it. Whites inhabiting the trans-Mississippi west in the nineteenth century had in fact every reason to dread falling into Indian hands and a good idea of what was in store for them: among the nomadic tribes of the Great Plains, male captives were tortured (before being put to death), female captives were invariably subjected to sexual and physical abuse and generally condemned to a life of drudgery, while captive children might be killed out of hand or taken into the tribe. In the northeastern woodlands, however, the fate in store for whites captured by Indians was by no means so certain. A study of the experiences and narratives of captives on the upper Connecticut River during the era of Indian raids from Canada suggests that to be captured by Indians in northern New England was a terrifying and traumatic experience, but was certainly no guarantee of death, torture, abuse, or even mistreatment.

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