Frontier

A frontier is most often defined as the border between two countries. However, it can also be classified as the area beyond settled or “known” territory, sometimes occupied by a hostile population. The name comes from the Old French frontiere, which means “boundary-line of a country.” For much of history, the idea of a frontier was a little-known concept as kingdoms and city-states had loosely defined borders that changed constantly. However, Ancient empires such as China and Rome did establish distinct borders to mark the edge of their lands and fortified these areas to protect themselves from the “outsiders” beyond. The idea of the frontier as “unclaimed” wilderness ripe for exploration developed in the nineteenth century and was best exemplified by the westward expansion of the United States.

Background

Prehistoric humans were nomadic hunter-gatherers who traveled from place to place to find food. Although they may have defended a hunting ground or other food source, they did not establish any lasting borders. About ten to twelve thousand years ago, humans began living in agricultural communities, which led to the formation of the first civilizations in about 3500 BCE. The idea of boundaries may have been better defined then but still varied greatly by culture and shifted often.

The idea of a mythical “untamed” frontier accessible to humans was likely non-existent. Many ancient cultures believed they lived in a limited space bordered by elements such as water, fire, or air. For example, ancient Mesopotamians believed the world was once covered in water, and the sky and Earth formed from the corpse of a great dragon that was split into two. Earth was a flat expanse of ground surrounded by water and covered by the heavens.

Mesopotamian society was made up of numerous walled city-states that were surrounded by farmland. These city-states were constantly at war, with territory being acquired and lost through military actions and alliances. City-states may have risen and fallen, and borders shifted, but most people would have been concerned with daily survival and would not have been willing to venture beyond the perceived boundaries of their land.

Overview

One of the earliest defined frontiers of the ancient world was established in China in the third century BCE. From about 481 to 221 BCE, China was divided into several states that were constantly at war with one another. Some of these states constructed defensive walls along their borders to keep the other states at bay. In 221 BCE, Shi Huangdi, a general of the Qin state, completed his conquest of the other states and united the nation under his rule. Shi Huangdi ordered the walls between states to be torn down and a larger wall constructed along the new empire’s northern border. The wall was meant to keep out the nomadic peoples of Mongolia and act as a symbolic boundary marking the northern edge of a unified China. Shi Huangdi’s wall was expanded, destroyed, and rebuilt by later dynasties. Known today as the iconic Great Wall of China, the remaining sections of the wall date back to about the fourteenth to seventeenth centuries CE.

The empire that would become Rome started out as a small city-state in central Italy that had grown into an empire by 31 BCE. The Roman Empire reached its greatest extent about 117 CE when it stretched from northern Britain, though Central and Southern Europe, into the Arabian Peninsula, Egypt, and Northern Africa. In many places, the empire’s borders were defined by natural boundaries such as deserts, mountains, or rivers. However, in some areas, Rome built great fortifications to mark the empire’s frontier.

These boundaries were mainly built along the empire’s northern and western borders in Europe and on the Island of Britain. They were necessitated by the hostile tribes that lived along the empire’s frontier in these areas. Chief among them were the Germanic peoples, a loosely affiliated group of tribes tied together by similar culture and language. The Romans had first encountered the Germanic tribes in the third century BCE and succeeded in conquering much of their land over the next few centuries. However, the Germanic peoples were able to halt the Roman advance in the first century CE, forcing Rome to establish a tentative border near the Rhine River in Central Europe.

To protect this border, the Romans built a 340-mile- (550-kilometer-) long line of line of walls, ditches, fortifications, and watchtowers running through what is today Germany. Known as the Upper Germanic-Rhaetian Limes, a Roman term referring to a land border, the defenses included about 120 forts and 900 watchtowers.

In 43 CE, the Romans invaded Britain and forty years later had conquered the southern and central parts of the island. The Roman frontier in Britain was roughly equivalent to the modern border between England and Scotland. To protect the Roman territory from attacks by the Caledonian people of Scotland, Emperor Hadrian ordered a defensive formation to be built about 122 CE. Hadrian’s Wall, as it would later be called, ran for about 72 miles (117 kilometers) from the west coast of the island to the east coast. The fortification included a ditch, an earthen mound, and a stone wall that contained more than 160 watchtowers and 14 posts to house soldiers. In 142 CE, Emperor Antoninus Pius ordered construction of the Antonine Wall, a 37-mile (60-kilometer) turf fortification north of Hadrian’s Wall. However, the Antonine Wall was abandoned about two decades later. Today, the Roman Limes in Germany, Hadrian’s Wall, and the Antonine Wall comprise the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) World Heritage site called the Frontiers of the Roman Empire.

After the fall of the Western Roman Empire in 476 CE, Europe entered a period of political instability where the ideas of borders and frontiers once again had little meaning. Kingdoms rose and fell, regions were conquered and assimilated, and great migrations took place as people moved onto the land once occupied by the Romans. The idea of a national identity within stable borders took more than a millennium to develop.

By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Europe’s great powers began an effort to expand their influence over newly “discovered” lands in Africa, the Americas, and Australia. Great Britain, France, Portugal, the Netherlands, and Spain established colonies throughout the world, claiming lands rich in natural resources they needed back home. By the nineteenth century, many colonists began to further explore the new frontiers these lands offered. In South Africa in the 1830s, colonists of Dutch descent began a mass inland migration to escape the laws imposed by the British who controlled the coastal regions. They were known as the voortrekkers, an Afrikaans term meaning “pioneers.” Colonists in British-held Australia also began to venture into that continent’s frontier, leading to confrontations with the region’s Indigenous peoples.

However, it was in the United States in the eighteenth century that the idea of a frontier waiting to be conquered was most fully embraced. The United States earned its independence from Great Britain with its victory in the Revolutionary War in 1783. As part of the peace terms, Britain handed over a large swathe of land consisting of the modern states of Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Wisconsin, and parts of Minnesota.

The land, known as the Northwest Territory, marked the first frontier of the fledgling United States. Even under British rule, the colonists had long fought over the rights to this region. After independence, the competing claims resulted in numerous conflicts as settlers claimed land with no legal authority to do so. The territory was also home to many Native American peoples who often fought those who tried to take their lands.

In 1787, the US government passed the Northwest Ordinance, designating the region as a US territory and granting Congress exclusive rights to grant land and admit new states in the region. By 1803, the former frontier states of Kentucky, Tennessee, and Ohio had been admitted to the Union. That same year, President Thomas Jefferson purchased 827,000 square miles (2.14 million square kilometers) of North American land from France. Known as the Louisiana Purchase, the new territory included land stretching from the city of New Orleans into modern-day Montana and North Dakota.

This land acquisition almost doubled the size of the United States and expanded the American frontier to the area near the Rocky Mountains. As settlers moved into the new territories, Americans began to believe they had a divine right to move westward and claim all the land from the East Coast to the West Coast. This idea, known as Manifest Destiny, seemed to have been achieved when the United States claimed California and much of the American Southwest from Mexico in the Mexican-American War (1846–1848) and the Oregon Territory in a 1846 treaty with Great Britain.

The latter half of the nineteenth century saw a great migration of settlers into this new American frontier. The pioneers who made the journey west were portrayed as heroic figures, conquering an untamed land and becoming “true” Americans as a result of the experience. This myth was far from reality as the journey west and life on the frontier was harsh and very dangerous. The influx of settlers and the expansion of US borders came at a steep cost to the Native Americans living on the frontier, as many lost their lands and were forced onto reservations.

Although the modern United States is home to more than 330 million people, some remote parts of the country still embrace the romantic notion that they are still part of a mythical frontier. Many towns and attractions still glamorize the pioneering spirit of the Western frontier into the twenty-first century. For example, in 2020, Oklahoma City rebranded itself as the “Modern Frontier” to harken back to its days as a true frontier town in the 1880s.

Bibliography

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