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ELLIOT WEST: My name is Elliot West. I am the Alumni Professor of History at the University of Arkansas. I have taught here since 1979.

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I teach courses on the American frontier, on American Indian History, and on the mythic West, the West of the imagination. Frontier, it's one of those words

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that has a particular distinctive American meaning. Elsewhere in the world, frontier simply means a border or a boundary, as in the frontier between France and Germany, for instance.

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But here, over time, frontier has taken on a whole different cultural and emotional baggage. Frontiers to Americans are places of opportunity, of excitement, of danger, of the exotic, and of challenge.

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So for example, one of the most popular television shows in American history begins each of its episodes with the words "space, the final frontier." And advertisers use the word frontier to their advantage.

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They talk about frontiers in this and frontiers in that. Journalists talk about frontiers of disease and epidemiology. All of this, then, gives frontier a distinctive American meaning and it's

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based-- it's deeply based in American history. Among students of American history, frontier has an additional meaning. It refers especially to the ideas of the historian

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Frederick Jackson Turner. Turner, in 1893, was a young professor of History at the University of Wisconsin. And he gave a paper in Chicago at the annual meeting

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of the American Historical Association. The title of that paper was "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." And in this paper, Turner argued that the frontier experience

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has been the single most important factor in making American history distinctive, making it different, its own history apart from that of its mother cultures in England and in Europe.

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What Turner was saying was that as settlement moved out of the more developed areas into new areas that this settlement changed. It had to change.

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It had to evolve. It had to adapt to those new circumstances. And as it did, its people changed, responding to the challenges of these new places.

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And they took on the traits, that Turner said, have come to be distinctively American traits. And he specifically referred to the traits of individualism, the traits of democracy, the traits

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of a kind of inventiveness, an ability to adapt to new circumstances. All of these things, Turner said, are unique to the American people,

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are distinctive to the American people. And all of those things, he said, came out of the frontier experience. So what Turner was saying was that if you take an American

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and you stand up in front of a room and you put him or her next to someone from England or someone from China or someone from Thailand, and you ask how is the America different from those others,

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and they make list of the things that make that America different, those lists-- that list will tell you that these traits came out of the frontier experience, came out of this experience

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as Americans moved gradually into the interior of the continent and became their own people. Turner's ideas became very influential, and for a few decades in the early 20th century,

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this was the most powerful idea among all American historians. However, historians more recently have come to challenge it, or really began to challenge in the 1930s, but more recently, especially, they

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have come to take on this idea and to point out its many flaws and its many blind spots, so that the frontier among some historians, some American historians, is now a more or less debunked

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notion, that is Turner's frontier. Other historians, however, now argue that frontier remains a vital term and one that can explain so much about the American experience.

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What these historians argue is that a frontier was not just a line moving from the East Coast into the interior toward the West Coast, that is the expansion of English society.

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But rather, a frontier was a place where different cultures converged, where many peoples came together, and they came together in conflict, and they came together in confluence,

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and they borrowed from each other, and they produced distinctive cultures, distinctive ways of life, a distinctive history that is very much a part of the North American history.

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So today, we can take the word frontier, take it from its original meaning under Frederick Jackson Turner and expand it and revise it. And it still becomes, I think, a highly useful

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and a highly evocative term to help us understand the history of this remarkable continent. With these newer ideas and new definitions, newer definitions of frontier, we

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began to understand that the expansion of various empires, of various invader states, whether it's England or Spain or France or Russia, had a very complicated and complex influence on the course

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of North American history. Some of these influences were horrific. The long-term consequences of the expansion of frontiers, English and Spanish and French and Russian frontiers

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into the interior in the long run were catastrophic for native peoples. They brought diseases. They brought cultural disruption.

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They brought conquests. They brought dispossession to these people. In the long run, frontiers took an extraordinary environmental cost on the North American continent,

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terrible costs in the disruption of ecosystems and the destruction of land and timber, and the horrific accounts of what happens to the land during gold and silver rushes, for example.

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So frontiers takes on many negative meetings, as well as positive meanings, like those positive meanings under Frederick Jackson Turner. But at the same time, frontiers are crucial

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for us to understand, again, the complexity of the story, and how, for example, while in the long run native peoples suffered cataclysmically because of frontiers, in the short run,

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they could benefit enormously. They had access, for the first time in their long histories, to trade goods of Europeans that they put to their own advantages.

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Some of these Indian peoples used the things that were brought by the Europeans to build their own empires, and so we see the rise of native empires in the interior

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of the continent, like those of the Comanche peoples in the Great Plains, and other Indian peoples of the Far West. So in the short run, frontiers could have a very mixed meaning

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for native peoples. But in any case, I think, what we have to understand is that the movement of different peoples into the interior of North America,

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the complex interactions of these newcomers, these invaders, with native peoples and with the environment, all of that is critical to understanding the course of North American

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history. And if we're going to understand that history in its fullest sense, we've got to take frontiers in this wider, newer meaning into consideration.

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Frontiers changed over time, most obviously in the early periods of colonial occupation of the English and the Spanish and the French and the others. These frontiers moved very feebly and slowly

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into the interior. They had very few of the advantages that would come later for these expansionist cultures. But later, especially as we move into the 19th century,

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we see terrific changes that are taking place, not just in the United States and not just in North America, but across the world. And these changes had enormous effect

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on the course of frontier history. For instance, a couple of obvious examples, the technological revolutions that occurred during the 19th century.

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During the 19th century, the ability of people to move themselves and to move things and to move information rocketed ahead with astonishing speed. So with the coming of the railroad,

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for example, and the invention of the telegraph, and the invention of-- and the development of new methods of movement, people were able to reduce the difficulties of space and time.

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And that, naturally, had a terrific effect on the expansion of the frontier. So for example, we see railroads being built into the interior to the Pacific coast.

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We see the first transcontinental telegraph lines strung from the Mississippi Valley to California in 1861, a matter of less than a year. We see the development of new technologies

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of all sorts of other technologies of movement. And all of this, plus the development of a very powerful federal government in the 19th century, especially with the impact of the American Civil War,

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all of this turned frontier expansion into something like a juggernaut, so that it sped across, sped across the continent and began very rapidly to dispossess and to defeat Indian peoples

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and to begin to exploit and to develop the resources there. So if you look at the frontier in the 18th century-- Let's say the frontier in Kentucky in the 1770s and '80s-- the frontier and then in the early 19th century,

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the frontier, the early 1800s, the time of the Lewis and Clark expedition, the frontier of Missouri and Arkansas in the 1820s. And then we look at the frontiers in the 1860s,

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and 1780s, we see entirely different experiences. So the course of American frontier history then is influenced by the larger course of developments larger, of course, of history and the nation

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and the continent and across the world. It reflects that. The discovery of gold in California was one of the great coincidences

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of American history. In February of 1848, the United States signed the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo with Mexico, ending the war that we had fought with Mexico from 1846

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until 1848. And this treaty gave the United States the possession of the Far West, of California, of the American Southwest.

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But almost precisely at that time, something else happened. Within 200 hours of the signing of a treaty, gold was discovered on the American River in northern California.

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Gold was discovered, and it's turned out to be far and away the richest gold strike in world history up until that time. And one of the richest up until today.

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And what it did was immediately inspire the movement of tens of thousands and hundreds of thousands of people to the Pacific coast. And from that, expansion continued into the interior,

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westward to California, eastward out of California into the interior, others began looking for precious metals elsewhere in the West. 10 years after the discovery of gold, what was at the time

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far and away the richest silver strike in world history was made just across the Sierra Nevada in Nevada, in Virginia City, Nevada. Others began to look for gold and silver elsewhere.

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They found it in British Columbia. So this becomes a global phenomenon. It triggers a global search for wealth. And gold was found, almost within a few years

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after in California, in Australia, for example. And this proved to be an extraordinarily rich gold discovery itself. And then gold was found in Canada, western Canada.

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And later in the 20th century, gold was found in southern Africa. In all of these cases, the rush for gold and silver produced the rapid, far more rapid acquisition of territory

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by these invaders, by these empires, and a far more rapid dispossession of native peoples, whether we're talking about native peoples in Australia or British Columbia or South Africa.

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So the discovery of gold, the gold frontier in California was to have an extraordinary impact, not just on the history of North America, but on the history of the entire world.

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The 19th century was a century of extraordinary technological innovations and revolutions. This happened not just in North America and the United States, but across the world, and they naturally

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had a great impact upon the expansion of societies into the interior of North America, for example. The revolutions in transportation, the development of the railroad, in particular.

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But also the development of other and new forms of shipping, new more rapid and more complete forms of shipping, of steam boats and steam ships. The revolutions in communication.

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What I would argue was the greatest revolution in human communication in the history of human communication, the development of the telegraph, which was occurred--

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the modern telegraph was invented in the 1840s, just at the time that Americans, that others were moving into the Far West. The first transcontinental telegraph line

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was completed to the Pacific coast in 1861. So suddenly, information moved far more rapidly than it ever had before. There were innovations, other kinds of technologies,

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innovations in mining, innovations in agriculture, the development of new kinds of machineries. All of these, then, occurred simultaneous with the movement of the American people

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into the interior of the continent. And they, naturally, took advantage of it. And what this meant was that the course of American frontier expansion, the pace of American expansion

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occurred accelerated to an extraordinary degree in the 19th century, so that the frontier that-- these global frontiers, these imperial frontiers that had crept slowly into the interior

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during the generations before, now this frontier, led by the United States, leapt into the interior and began to conquer its peoples and began to develop it and began to exploit its resources

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with a far greater speed and completeness than we had ever seen before. So in that sense, the technological revolutions of the 19th century are critical to understanding

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the course of frontiers here and then later, frontiers across the world. Well, it was fascinating. It's certainly one of the most important parts

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of studying the frontiers is to ask the question what did this mean for those indigenous peoples, those native peoples who had lived, in this case, in North America, they and their descendants

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and their ancestors for tens of thousands of years. Well, it's a very mixed answer. Initially, frontiers could offer great advantages to Indian peoples.

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It offered them trade goods. It offered them materials that they had never seen before, and materials of enormous use to them, metal goods, for instance.

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One of the most important consequences in Native American history in the last 300 years was the arrival of the horse, and how the horse transformed native cultures and led

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to the rise of extraordinary native empires in the interior, empires like those of the Comanche people, and of the Lakota and Cheyenne peoples of the Great Plains, empires of native peoples in the Pacific Northwest,

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like those of the Nez Perce, who rode horses, literally rode horses into a new age of power and influence. So initially, frontiers offered Indian peoples a great deal. And they used that to their advantage.

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One of the most important points, I think, to remember is that for much of the history of frontiers of North America, the real powers were not those that we see in the usual maps, the real powers are not the Spanish and the English

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and the French, the real powers were Indian peoples, Indian peoples who dominated, for example, the lower Mississippi Valley, Indian peoples who dominated the far Pacific coast,

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Indian peoples who dominated the areas of the interior of the Columbia Plateau, and above all, Indian peoples who created these extraordinary empires in the continent's midsection.

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At one time, an alliance of Lakota and Cheyenne and Arapaho and Comanche and Kiowa peoples formed, in effect, an empire that stretched from southern Canada all the way deep down into Mexico.

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This was an empire larger than any-- larger, far larger than any nation in Europe, and many times the size of England, for example. And larger, at that time, than the United States itself.

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So frontiers, at first, triggered the rise of new centres of native culture and of new native power. Over time, however, as the long-term consequences

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of frontiers began to be felt, and especially as the United States, this rapidly growing land-hungry power, began to expand into the interior, with the advantage of this technological revolution that

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was so important to understanding the course of frontiers. In the long run, these frontiers were utterly catastrophic to Indian peoples.

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The discovery of gold, for example, in California led to what was the closest thing we really have ever had in American history to true genocide, that is the effort by established governments to eliminate

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and destroy Indian peoples, to make the way for settlement and to the further development of the Pacific coast. Frontiers brought, along with opportunities, along with new goods, they brought

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diseases, diseases that Indian peoples had never encountered before, and diseases that were absolutely catastrophic, diseases like smallpox and tuberculosis and malaria and influenza and measles.

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And these diseases were responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands, ultimately hundreds of thousands of native peoples in the interior.

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This is one of the single worst things ever to happen in world history, the impact of these diseases and the collapse of Indian populations. And over time, of course, especially as the United States

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began to use its numbers, again, to use its military power, began to use its powerful federal government, and began to use its technologies to expand into the interior, in the 19th century,

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the story of indigenous peoples becomes increasingly depressing, increasingly one of deep and ongoing tragedy. So by the end of the 19th century,

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we can say that Indian peoples have lost, essentially, lost control of their own birthright, lost control of their lands. But, and this is absolutely crucial to understand,

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what they had not lost was their sense of themselves and their determination to survive. And so, one of the most common misunderstandings about the frontier is that it resulted

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in the vanishing, the end, of Indian peoples and Indian cultures. It did not. It did not.

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There are more native peoples alive today, in America today, far more than there were at the beginning of the 20th century. And what's most important to understand

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is the dozens of Indian peoples in the Far West, and other areas where the frontier has had its course, those people have continued to persist and to preserve their own cultural heritage, their own ways of life,

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their own ways of thinking, their own artistic forms, their own religious beliefs, their own cultures. And that has made American life-- that, in many ways, is one of the most extraordinary aspects

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of frontier history, the persistence, the persistence of Indian peoples. We might ask ourselves, then, what in the end is the legacy of the frontier and of frontier histories

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to indigenous peoples, to American Indian peoples. And obviously, that legacy is quite mixed. Initially, frontiers offered great opportunities, and they allowed Indian peoples a new era

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of power and affluence. They allowed them to refashion their lives and to experience extraordinary, extraordinary changes that they had never--

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unlike any of those they had ever known before. In the long run, the legacy of the frontier was catastrophic. The frontiers brought diseases. They brought conquest.

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They brought dispossession. And ultimately, they brought the attempt by the American government to suppress native cultures themselves.

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Ultimately, however, the legacy of the frontier, in my opinion, for Indian peoples is one of survival and persistence. In the face of these extraordinarily daunting challenges, Indian peoples have managed

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to preserve their cultures, dozens of cultures across what is today the United States, to a degree that is quite remarkable. It's one of the great American success

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stories, the persistence of Indian cultures in the face of these catastrophic changes, in the face of these cataclysmic developments that were brought by the frontier.

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In many ways, for as much as we celebrate and heroise the European American frontiersmen and pioneers who marched into the interior, the great stories of innovation, the great stories of persistence and of meeting

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challenges have really been those of Indian peoples. In many ways, to me, at least, they are the heroes, the ongoing, the long-term heroes of this story of American frontiers.