Adventurous. Rugged. Individualistic. Free of the oppression of institutions and the restraints of civil society. Living on the edge of danger, unsure of whether or not the day would be their last. These are all classic characteristics of the American frontiersman of western lore.
To be sure, men like Daniel Boone possessed a fanciful, adventurous side. Born in a log cabin in Pennsylvania, Boone spent much of his life on the western frontier of America, taking part in military campaigns, acting as a backwoods guide, embarking on extended hunting expeditions, fighting Indians, and establishing settlements deeper into the American interior. Yet men like Boone also exhibited a more "civilized" side. Both Boone and his frontier counterpart Davy Crockett served their fellow frontier settlers as state legislators, Boone in the Virginia Assembly and Crockett in Tennessee. Intermingling politics with business, Boone spent a good part of his time engaged in activities not characteristically associated with frontiersmen, such as contracting with the assembly to provide supplies to western militias, dabbling in business as the operator of a general store, speculating in land, and petitioning the Federal Land Commission and Congress to secure land grants in the West. Crockett found his way into national affairs as well, serving three terms in Congress as a U.S. representative.
Just as frontiersmen like Boone and Crockett were not quite as rugged as they were often portrayed, individualism did not characterize all of the activities taking place on America's western frontiers. Even the famed frontier historian Fredrick Jackson Turner, noted for his interpretation of the frontier as a definitive factor in the development of the American character, had to acknowledge that the transplanting of whole communities by opportunity-seeking easterners meant that many Americans living on the frontier skipped the primitive frontier phase of settlement almost entirely. Some enterprising businessmen even offered up for sale ready-made homesteads, cleared of timber, fenced in, and ready for seed, therefore eliminating much of the back breaking work and uncertainty often associated with frontier life.
Those living in the West built on a long tradition of communal activity and support, and the very nature of the frontier and the dangers present on it necessitated such cooperative behavior. The practice of traveling in wagon trains across the Great Plains, for example, grew in part out of the need to provide protection against hostile Indians, which these larger groups afforded, and which the mythical, Indian-fighting frontiersmen of lore would not have required.
Thus it was the rare individual who fit the frontier mold, and perhaps this rarity helped stimulate the attraction on the part of many Americans to the fiction of the rugged, individualistic frontier lifestyle. But if the life of the frontiersman in Boone's Kentucky and Crockett's Tennessee was not wholly the life of adventure and complete abandon, then when and where did this myth originate?
Many credit Daniel Boone's contemporary and fellow land speculator, John Filson, for introducing Americans to the archetypal "frontiersman" personified by Boone himself. In part attempting to attract interest in the west of the early Republic so as to bolster the value of his own Kentucky landholdings, Fil-son published The Adventures of Col. Daniel Boon in 1784 to much acclaim. In the book Filson presented Boone in an Enlightenment-inspired image, that of a "natural man," born of a simpler time and free of the apparent constraints and restrictions of civilized society.
Perhaps it is no coincidence that the myth of the American frontiersman, first invoked shortly after the ratification of the Constitution and the birth of the new American nation, accelerated during the first half of the nineteenth century. James Fenimore Cooper's "Leatherstocking Tales" (beginning with The Pioneers in 1823), Davy Crockett's autobiographical work, A Narrative of the Life of David Crockett of the State of Tennessee (1834), and Timothy Flint's The First White Man of the West, or the Life and Exploits of Col. Dan'l. Boone, The First Settler of Kentucky (1854), expanded on the concept of the American frontiersman as a unique element of the unexplored American West. This booming interest in the American frontiersman coincided almost seamlessly with the growing American belief in "Manifest Destiny," the idea that Americans were fated to spread their civilization across the entire North American continent. In this sense then, the myth of the American frontiersman was one of empire and civilization as much as a symbol of its rejection, and would remain so throughout the twentieth century as Americans set their sights across the Pacific and toward Asia.
Born of speculation and profit and nurtured by the quest for a landed empire, the American frontiersman personified, and continues to personify, the American belief in the individualism of the American people and the exceptionalism of the American experience. Although perhaps more myth than reality, the memory of the American frontiersman remains a powerful force in the shaping of American identity.