F.J. Turner

I'm struck by Hugh Brogan's comment that 'even in 1939, when the influence of F.J. Turner was at its height', Auden could have learned about both the economic pressures operating on the loggers and the emptying out of game and people from the forests. Turner's famous essay on the frontier experience as the engine of Americanization contrasts the 'civilization' of the east with the 'wilderness' of the west and sees the fault line between them as the space in which distinctively American ways of being emerge. Interestingly for our purposes, he mentions the Mississippi as one of a sequence of frontiers where this kind of process occurred:

In these successive frontiers we find natural boundary lines which have served to mark and to affect the characteristics of the frontiers, namely: the "fall line"; the Allegheny Mountains; the Mississippi; the Missouri where its direction approximates north and south; the line of the arid lands, approximately the ninety-ninth meridian; and the Rocky Mountains. The fall line marked the frontier of the seventeenth century; the Alleghenies that of the eighteenth; the Mississippi that of the first quarter of the nineteenth; the Missouri that of the middle of this century (omitting the California movement); and the belt of the Rocky Mountains and the arid tract, the present frontier. Each was won by a series of Indian wars

I think it's also interesting that Turner envisions a process of 'becoming-Indian' taking place when a new frontier is first opened up:

[The frontier] takes [the colonist] from the railroad car and puts him in the birch canoe. It strips off the garments of civilization and arrays him in the hunting shirt and the moccasin. It puts him in the log cabin of the Cherokee and Iroquois and runs an Indian palisade around him. Before long he has gone to planting Indian corn and plowing with a sharp stick; he shouts the war cry and takes the scalp in orthodox Indian fashion. In short, at the frontier the environment is at first too strong for the man. He must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish, and so he fits himself into the Indian clearings and follows the Indian trails. Little by little he transforms the wilderness, but the outcome is not the old Europe, not simply the development of Germanic germs, any more than the first phenomenon was a case of reversion to the Germanic mark. The fact is that here is a new product that is American.