ThoughtLeaf (Richard Slotkin)

"It is by now commonplace that our adherence to the 'myth of the frontier' - the conception of America as a wide-open land of unlimited opportunity for the strong, ambitious, self-reliant individual to thrust his way to the top - has blinded us to the consequences of the industrial and urban revolutions and to the need for social reform and a new concept of individual and communal welfare. Nor is it by a far-fetched association that the murderous violence that has characterized recent political life has been linked by poets and news commentators alike to the 'frontier psychology' of our recent past and our long heritage. The first colonists saw in America an opportunity to regenerate their fortunes, their spirits, and the power of their church and nation; but the means to that regeneration ultimately became the means of violence, and the myth of regeneration through violence became the structuring metaphor of the American experience."

- Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860 (1973), p. 5

ThoughtLeaf (Patricia Nelson Limerick)

"In Western America, neither loser nor winner wasted much time in wondering how the other party felt. Western property users developed a style of maneuvering that made them resemble drivers who plunge into intersections, uninterested in the presence or intentions of other drivers. Given the limits of the Western environment and especially of water, there have been only so many avenues to prosperity. Users of those avenues have always encountered each other at intersections; hydraulic mining got in the way of farmers; farmers got in the way of cattle ranchers; urban water users got in the way of irrigators; dam builders got in the way of recreational river rafters. Collisions have occurred, but for most of the nineteenth century, and for much of the twentieth, traffic has been unevenly distributed, and sequentially jammed intersections - an effect urban dwellers know as gridlock - have not been much of a risk.

"In our own times, the calculation of risk changes. Mining, oil drilling, farming, recreation, tourism, fishing, hunting, lumbering, manufacturing, power generating, and real estate developing - all the Western routes to power and prosperity are heavily traveled. At their intersections, the tension builds. Regulatory devices - courts and executive agencies - have attempted to keep traffic flowing, while the habit of blaming the traffic cop for the traffic jam has provided another source of resentment directed at the federal government. The multitude of intersections where interests conflict are not guaranteed to produce compromise. Property and profit have been for decades, and remain today, very sensitive subjects."

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"In Western America (and elsewhere), the dominance of the profit motive supported the notion that the pursuit of property and profit was rationality in action, and not emotion at all. In fact, the passion for profit was and is a passion like most others. It can make other concerns insignificant and inspire at once extraordinary courage and extraordinary cruelty. It was the passion at the core of the Western adventure."

- Patricia Nelson Limerick, The Legacy of Conquest: The Unbroken Past of the American West (1987), pp. 75-76, 77

ThoughtLeaf (William Cronon)

"By the end of the nineteenth century, Chicago was filled with temples of commerce that were also, less obviously, mausoleums of landscapes vanishing from the city's hinterland. The grain elevators and Board of Trade celebrated the new speculative furor of the futures markets while simultaneously commemorating the tallgrass prairies being plowed and fenced into oblivion. The acres of sweet-smelling lumber stacked along the South Branch of the Chicago River testified to the fencing of the prairie and the growth of the city itself, but were also graveyards for the white pine forests rapidly disappearing from Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Chicago's refrigerator cars and packing plants betokened a revolution in the way its citizens killed and sold animals, but were also monuments to the slaughtered bison herds. Behind each urban structure were the ghost landscapes that had given it birth. In sinking roots into the western soil, the city was remaking the countryside after its own image."

- William Cronon, Nature's Metropolis: Chicago and the Great West (1991), p. 263