Frontier and American Hero

¶ … Old Western Frontier -- the Pervasiveness of the Western Frontier Hero in the American Imagination The heroic American national character and the search for an ungoverned American frontier are fused in the America national imagination. America envisions itself as a wide-open place, rather than a contained place of tradition like Europe. America is seen in the natural cultural mythos as an area of limitless expansion. Thus, there are little consequences for the environment because of capitalism and industrialism, because national resources are never-ending.

Resettlement of natives and immigrants is of little consequence, because there is so much land. And all restrictive laws regarding the use and abuse of land, people, and morality are seen impingements and infringements upon the ability of masculine commerce and the American spirit to realize their fullest potentials. The frontier is also a place for and of men, where women are encroachers, never at home.

The frontier is a place where men go to flee the control of women, not to seek the solace of women, unless the women are prostitutes, women who make their money from men, or who mimic men in their values, like the Calamity Janes and Annie Oakleys of the West. The West is a place where men colonize the environment with their capable if occasionally violent hands.

However, even if the colonizing violence is occasionally terrible in its effects upon the American soil, it is deemed a necessary consequence of freedom, rather than something to be reigned in. This is how the frontier can embody the paradox that the American frontier is seemingly utterly amoral, in the sense that its "Deadwoods" have no laws, and actions have no consequences, yet the amorality of the West is also paradoxically congruent and keeping with American morals, or at least American values and virtues of self-reliance.

In other words, because the frontier is individualistic, its lawlessness is morally justified. Because the frontier's settlement means that capitalism will come to the desert, so long is gold is found, the killing and taking of the land from Native American peoples is justified.

"The myth of the Western responded to this dilemma," of the paradox of civilization and lawlessness as both uniquely American values, "by inventing the idea of the frontier in which civilized ideals embodied in the institutions of family, church, law and education are revitalized by the virtues of savagery: independence, self-reliance, personal honor, sympathy with nature, and ethical uses of violence.

In effect, the mythical frontier represented and attempt to embody the perfect degree of assimilation in which both the old and new identities came together."(Engle 742) America was a land founded by men breaking away from colonial powers.

But once a new government has been established, and particularly after a Civil War dictated that the federal Union government's laws were here to stay and not to be dissolved by the individual will and local governance, the question arose how to keep those ideals living and embodied in daily life of the national character? The answer was: 'Go West young man!' Thus, "the frontier, as a realm of limitless possibilities and few social controls, hovers, grail-like, in the American psyche, the dream our national identity is based on, but a dream that's always somehow, just vanishing away" (Miller 540) Even if one feels spiritually dead, and one's name is mud in one's local community, one can always transplant one's identity in the Western frontier, and find a new identity in a new America.

However, the sense of 'vanishing' is conveyed in the fact that one must constantly fight to protect one's land in the frontier, and that others are coming to take away one's freedom through laws, civilization, and bringing the institutions one was fleeing to the Wild Western town. The only solution is to go West again, of course, until one finds one's self in California.

"The frontier, as reality and as a symbol, is what has shaped the American way of doing things and the American sense of what's worth doing." (Shames 58) What is worthy is not building laws and a community, or protective and collective structures, but making money and leaving home, and seeking wide-open spaces. This sense of an expanding America and a limitless frontier that is still somehow constantly vanishing often creates identifiable threats in the form of others -- of white women, and Native American peoples.

The myth of the Western portrays the man who is alone, free of female influence -- or who must cast away negative female influences to realize and embody his true masculine self. The coming of women means the coming of civilization, and the original inhabitants of the West must be done away with if men, American men, are able to fully enjoy and realize their masculine freedom, free of government and female control. This myth holds true today,.