In a recent bulletin of the Superintendent of the Census for 1890 appeal these significant words: “Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken iiito by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports.” This brief official statement marks the closing of a great historic movement. Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization ol the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance ol American settlement westward, explain American development. …

[This] development has exhibited not merely advance along a single line, but a return to primitive conditions on a continually advancing frontier line,and a new development lor that area. American social development has been continually beginning over again on the frontier. This perennial rebirth, this fluidity of American life, this expansion westward with its new opportunities, its continuous touch with the simplicity of primitive society, furnish the forces dominating American character. …

The frontier is the line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. 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 a 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. … Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs. … The fact is, that here is a new product that is American. …

The Atlantic frontier was compounded of fisherman, fur-trader, miner, cattle-miser, and farmer. Excepting the fisherman, each type of industry was on the march toward the West, impelled by an irresistible attraction. Each passed in successive waves across the continent. Stand at the Cumberland Gap and watch the procession ol civilization, marching single file—the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer—and the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with witter intervals between. …

The most important effect of the frontier has been