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Frederick Jackson Turner2 quotes
What the Mediterranean Sea was to the Greeks, breaking the bond of custom, offering new experiences, calling out new institutions and activities, that, and more, the ever retreating frontier has been to the United States directly, and to the nations of Europe more remotely. And now, four centuries from the discovery of America, at the end of a hundred years of life under the Constitution, the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history. — Frederick Jackson Turner · 1893The frontier is the outer edge of the wave-the meeting-point between savagery and civilization... And line of most rapid and effective Americanization. The wilderness masters the colonist. — Frederick Jackson Turner · 1893Lyndon B. Johnson1 quote
For this is what America is all about. It is the uncrossed desert and the unclimbed ridge. It is the star that is not reached and the harvest that's sleeping in the unplowed ground. Is our world gone? We say farewell. Is a new world coming? We welcome it, and we will bend it to the hopes of man. — Lyndon B. Johnson · 1965Robert P. Porter1 quote
Up to and including 1880 the country had a frontier of settlement, but at present the unsettled area has been so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that there can hardly be said to be a frontier line. In the discussion of its extent, its westward movement, etc., it can not, therefore, any longer have a place in the census reports. — Robert P. Porter · 1891Willa Cather1 quote
There was nothing but land; not a country at all, but the material out of which countries are made. — Willa Cather · 1918