Frontiers and the Far West
The Far West, Heidegger in South Africa, and the feeling of living at the ends of the Earth.
I’ve just finished reading Howard Lamar’s book The Trader on the American Frontier. It’s a delightful short read held in high regard by several other eminent Far Western historians. He presents a very interesting deconstruction of the Jefferson-Turner romance of the frontier, and has unblocked me on a longstanding quandary about the nature of this “frontier” idea that my Far West has inherited. Surely a lot of ink has been spilled about this topic, but it has felt fruitful to draft my own ideas here.
The quandary is thus: is there something real, larger than the last two hundred years of Far Western history, and larger than a cultural attitude or happenstance, that gives the land this quality where it beckons man to adventure in nature? I argue that it can’t be a simple demarcation of the western boundary of the country, it can’t be a certain technological-supremacist attitude that’s so endemic to the area, and it can’t be the critical role it plays in Western history. I think all of these things are not unique to the Far West, and Lamar points in the direction of a real answer.
I’ve been curious for a while about the idea of the frontier — there’s something about the texture of living in Oregon and California that feels like “the end of the earth” or somehow draws one into the adventure of the natural world. And it does this in a way that other naturally beautiful places don’t quite — Greece, South Africa, the Alps. I’ve been all over dramatic parts of the world and walked away with the sense that they’re somehow “more settled” than the West Coast. But what is that unsettledness that beckons?
Obviously, this is not a literal or a particularly careful conception. But is it just home state bias? Yes, we look to the West and we see empty land — as has been explained to me by a map gallerist friend and by Pekka Hämäläinen’s books, this is a quirk of Eurocentric maps. But Yes, settlers arrived on the West Coast generations before the frontier closed in the interior. Yes, people have been in Oregon for a very long time in a way that we seem to intentionally forget. But people come to the Far West from all over the world — that’s what it’s been explicitly about for a couple centuries, after all, because it beckons in a certain way.
From a Heideggerian perspective, “frontier” may be simply a collective attitude. It’s a enframing of a territory as a domain of resources-to-be-exploited. Heidegger’s Essay on the Question Concerning Technology cites the example of a dam in the Schwarzwald — in constructing a hydroelectric plant, the managers and workers operate in a regime of resources to be programmed, constraints to be satisfied. The essence or the meaning of the forest and river are obscured in the enframing.
Certainly the American West is a place of dams enframing watersheds. Look at what we’ve done to the Colorado and the Columbia Rivers. As the frequent New York Times coverage indicates, there’s much to be said about the programming of these watersheds and what implications may precipitate for regional governance. But I don’t believe that what we’ve done to mold the land is essentially different from any civilization. We know that the Hetch Hetchy aqueduct was built explicitly to emulate the Romans. “Frontier as a place of exploitation” is insufficient to explain how the Far West beckons.
Indeed, there are frontiers in the Old World. In Cape Town a few years ago, I read Noel Mostert’s phenomenal history literally titled Frontiers. For the British in South Africa, at least until Cecil Rhodes arrived, the idea of the frontier was very different from its form in the Far West. The frontier between the Cape Colony and the Xhosa polities was simply a demarcation line in sparsely-populated territory. It didn’t exactly carry the connotations of resources-to-exploit or adventure that we project onto the American West.
Now, it’s true that enframing came to South Africa. With the gold mines, we got Johannesburg and the subjugation of the overwhelming majority of the country, reducing them to serfs managed on a balance sheet and kept in place with internal passports. Oswald Spengler thought Cecil Rhodes actually exemplified the ascendant attitude of technological supremacy and that perhaps he, perhaps to Nietzsche’s disappointment, would represent the man of the future. The attitude came, and yet it did not make Southern Africa into a frontier in the Jeffersonian sense.
I love South Africa. It extends, as Mostert describes, a warm and welcoming feeling of utter oldness. And yes, I may be one of the overeducated Manhattanites who rushes from my Upper-West-Side haunts to worship at the African altar of common humanity, but it’s utterly enthralling. Table Mountain is probably the most distinctly beautiful place I have ever been. The springboks and marauding baboons and the entire floral kingdom of succulents are an undeservedly charming gift. But it is the oldness and the warmness of it that charm, not the idea of youth or adventure that drapes the Far West.
From a historical perspective, this should be utterly jarring. South Africa exists as it does because it was the first milestone in European global exploration. Go and read some verses from the Lusiads, as Mostert highlights:
“In me the Spirit of the Cape behold,
That rock, by you the Cape of Tempests nam’d,
By Neptune’s rage, in horrid earthquakes fram’d,
When Jove’s red bolts o’er Titan’s offspring flam’d.
With wide-stretch’d piles I guard the pathless strand,
And Afric’s southern mound, unmov’d, I stand:
Nor Roman prow, nor daring Tyrian oar
Ere dash’d the white wave foaming to my shore;
Nor Greece, nor Carthage ever spread the sail
On these my seas, to catch the trading gale.
You, you alone have dar’d to plough my main,
And, with the human voice, disturb my lonesome reign.”
There it is — the Portuguese become the first modern Western men as they surpass the sea-charts of the Romans and Phoenicians. We mustn’t forget that the Cape of Good Hope singularly marks the moment that Europeans escaped the cage of the Mediterranean and embraced our Faustian destiny. Here the rock signifies a genuine spiritual and existential emergence into the grand world. The beginning of the Age of Exploration. The beginning of the Atlantic worldview, of plantations run by chattel slaves, of trade, trade, trade.
We don’t give the Portuguese Empire enough credit for what it heralded.
So, we have to conclude, what it means to be the Far Western frontier is not the simple fact of demarcation, it’s not the collective attitude of exploitation and programming, and it’s not even that it played a pivotal historical role in the development of the Western mind. To return to the Heideggerian point, we should look at the character of the land itself. Perhaps we can grant that there’s something about the Far West, as a place properly conceived, that really does beckon to adventure. And Lamar seems to agree.
Similar to Hämäläinen, Lamar argues that the “frontier” idea hangs like a veil above the history of the Far West. Look at all the empty space, even in a map from 1800, that obscures the reality of indigenous polities. The emptiness represents opacity, says my gallerist friend, more than it does the reality. But it encourages the enframed mind to imagine empty space. Certainly, and hence my initial anxiety that the frontier is a collective attitude more than a real quality.
Similarly, imagine the seventeenth- or eighteenth-century history of the Far West. Before Lewis and Clark, before the English language ever seriously graced the region. Lamar points out that the vast majority of Europeans in the Far West for a couple of centuries were French traders. Or they were Spanish in New Mexico. They didn’t have title to expropriate land from the natives, they didn’t farm or settle the way Anglo-Americans would, and they didn’t manage to bring serious epidemics to the region until 1837. When Lewis and Clark arrived at the foothills of the Rockies, as Stephen E. Ambrose details, they stayed in a Mandan village and were neighbors to French traders who had been intermarried with the Mandans for generations.
In short, Lamar argues, there’s an entire Far Western multicultural trading world living in a span of two centuries that Anglo-American history obscured with maps of empty space. It’s simple enough for us to look under this veil to probe for the true character of the land. And he agrees with me about the beckoning to adventure: in the final sentence of his work he expresses that “everyone agreed that the beaver was more fun than the plow.” The land beckons!
Somewhat surprisingly, Lamar blamed Jefferson’s vision for obscuring the Far West. Jefferson feared the West and believed that the country should make a steady trot in the direction, intermarrying with the natives like a good Migration Period European kingdom and turning everyone into settled farmers. He got, of course, the Indian Removal Act followed by a mad dash to California that bypassed the Great Plains for generations, followed by grand massacres on the Pacific Slope the magnitude and responsibility for which is still being apprehended today.
Perhaps it shouldn’t be too surprising. The Midwest, after all, is made of counties that are hewn from Jefferson’s Grid. So are the agricultural patterns all across the irrigated Far West. Jefferson’s plan accomplishes enframing on a scale that must have made the Kingdom of Prussia envious. Of course it required seeing the Far West as an empty grid waiting to be filled out — how else could a migration of planetary proportions be accomplished? Let us not forget the genealogy that runs from the grid to the advent of railroads to the creation of futures markets at the Chicago Board of Trade. (And to Black-Scholes, and to FTX, and on into the Faustian future.) Indeed, the origin of the financial system — the one that Roosevelt expanded to the entire globe — is the regularization that began with Jefferson.
So there you have an interpretation — the Far West is a place that has always beckoned man to adventure, due to dramatic geography and the predominance of trade and seasonal economic activity. It’s a frontier only in the sense that Jefferson declared it so, and to be a frontier is simply not the character that we so cherish about it.
Doctor Lamar, you leave me satisfied.
