“The wilderness masters the colonist,” Turner wrote.
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.
Turner is at odds here, trying to birth the civilizational frontier out of the transmogrification of the European into the American in the wilds of the West. But it was always the interior transformation that we were after. Going native is who we are. And I think it is high time we came home from the deserts and jungles of the world and worked on becoming Americans again. At the burnt end of our empire, Minerva’s owl having flown off sometime during the Obama Administration, we can turn around and see that it was just half of Turner’s thesis that was ever worth keeping. It is not that we ought to civilize others, but that we ourselves must be civilized in the wilderness. We are Americans when we are “in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois,” when we are arrayed “in the hunting shirt and the moccasin.” Instead of hitching our American nature to an abstract, and after Turner’s heyday increasingly eugenicist, notion of progress, we should have stayed in “the Indian clearings” and on “the Indian trails.”
It is not too late to do this. It is not too late to reopen the American frontier in every heart by going into the American land and living on it like true sons and daughters of the continent. This time, though, instead of an inexorable westward “wave,” let there be an ingathering of the exiles, from all corners of the globe where the imperial diaspora has reached. The American continent needs saving, and we, who have become so civilized by our imperium that we are able to incinerate the planet many times over at the touch of a button and the turning of a key, need rewilding—bad. Going among Indian clearings and meandering on Indian trails would go a long way toward teaching us how to be our own masters again, and to give up the cheap substitute of lording it over others.