Ohio History Journal

  • 1
  •  
  • 2
  •  
  • 3
  •  
  • 4
  •  
  • 5
  •  
  • 6
  •  
  • 7
  •  
  • 8
  •  
  • 9
  •  
  • 10
  •  
  • 11
  •  
  • 12
  •  
  • 13
  •  
  • 14
  •  
  • 15
  •  
  • 16
  •  
  • 17
  •  
  • 18
  •  
  • 19
  •  
  • 20
  •  
  • 21
  •  
  • 22
  •  
  • 23
  •  
  • 24
  •  
  • 25
  •  
  • 26
  •  
  • 27
  •  
  • 28
  •  

Book Reviews

Book Reviews

 

 

 

Frontier America: The Story of the Westward Movement. By Thomas

D. Clark. (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1959. xi??832p.

illustrations, maps, appendix, bibliography, tables, and index. $6.75.)

This is not an easy kind of book to write. It is the history of a move-

ment of population that affects every section of the country. It covers

frontier areas and periods with no exact terminal points and with no

two alike. It embraces political, social, economic, military, and diplomatic

history, and it must deal with local, regional, and national problems. To

organize and synthesize this wealth of material is a difficult task, but the

author of this volume meets all the requirements, and the product is a

fine piece of historical writing.

The book begins with a general chapter on the characteristics and

significance of the frontier, without quite accepting the Turner thesis

other than by implication. Then, disregarding Turner's Old West east

of the Alleghenies, the author starts the story of frontiers with Anglo-

French rivalries over the Ohio Valley-Great Lakes triangle and devotes

approximately half of the volume to the history of the forest and prairie

frontiers until bridgeheads are established across the Mississippi. The

early chapters are chronological, but the treatment shifts over to a topical

one as the zones of settlement become more complex and frontier prob-

lems and developments require particular consideration.

The latter half of the book deals with expansion to the Pacific by

means of trade, war, and the flow of settlers, discusses the diversified

frontiers of the vast trans-Mississippi West, and concludes with accounts

of transportation, the Indian problem, and the final stages of westward

settlement. Here the organization is necessarily topical by areas or

types of frontiers, but one cannot discard the chronological approach

entirely, and to reconcile the two is a difficult matter. Nevertheless

this reviewer believes that the chapter, "State-Making Along the Mis-

sissippi," belongs with the older agricultural frontier, and not after the

accounts of the fruits of manifest destiny, and that consideration of the