What Will My Sidekick See?
My Friday’s Thought to Ponder for the Weekend-What will my Sidekick See?
Yep, you know it. I am here on the front porch with the Grandson, embracing the day. We are counting cars as they drive by. Right now, that is what is essential to the mighty toddler. I sit back and ask myself what this little boy will see when he grows up. To answer this, I will have to refer to someone else. This will take me to someone that I think impacted America in a historical sense.
The guy that I am referring to is Frederick Jackson Turner. He is known as one of the very first American historians. Before FJT, the historians in American were trained overseas in places like Munich, Berlin, or London. Our country was young and evolving, but we did not have any Doctorate Historians in America that completed their schooling in America. FJT was one of the first. He received his Doctorate from the University of Wisconsin, where he studied the fur trade with the Native Americans. He would often write about America, comparing the emergence of civilization in a land of savage wilderness.
FJT is famous for writing his “Frontier Thesis.” In his book “The Significance of the Frontier,” he has a passage that I think about. “Stand at the Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file-the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur-trader and the hunter, the cattle raiser, the pioneer farmer-the frontier has passed by. Stand at South Pass in the Rockies a century later and see the same procession with wider intervals between. The unequal rate of advance compels us to distinguish the frontier to the trader’s frontier, the rancher’s frontier, or the miner’s frontier, and the farmer’s frontier.”[1]
As I conjure up the observations of Frederick Jackson Turner, well more than a century past the South Pass in the Rockies, I ask myself this. “Where will my Grandson stand, and what procession will he see?” I feel I honestly cannot phantom what that will be, but I would venture to say that it would be an incredible adventure from my foxhole.
This is my Friday’s Thought to Ponder for the Weekend.
The Vet
[1] (Turner, 1961)
Turner, F. J. (1961). Selected Essays of Frederick Jackson Turner: Frontier and Section. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc.
