# 13 – The American Frontier

I think what Jackson is saying here in regards to the American frontier is that the land between the Atlantic and the Pacific has been settled for some time now. Transport and communication from coast to coast has become much easier and satisfactory. No longer did we have just horse mail carriers but the coming telegraph and telephone. The westward movement has finally come to a close. Now we must disperse ourselves between the coasts that have been settled many places between. The furthering “out there” of the West can no longer be substantiated. There is nowhere else left to explore. Nothing we haven’t contained, conquered, spanned across.
The thing here is for us, at that point in history, to not lose our sense of purpose and progress. There had long been this fascination with moving westward to make a new life. As I said, the coasts were beginning to grow closer together. Nothing would be or could be the same. By the time of his writing, the Civil War had ended just a few years before and his fears might have been that we were succumbing to fighting each other without a unifying goal of progress to bring us together. We had conquered the frontier, nature in many ways, but we had not actually been able to conquer our fatal human nature of war and false altruism.