The west :: essays papers

The westThe West was a form of corporation rather than an area. It is the term applied to the region whose accessible conditions result from the application of older institutions and ideas to the transforming influences of free land. By this application, a in the altogether environment is suddenly entered, freedom of opportunity is opened, the cake of custom is broken, and unseasoned activities, new lines of growth, new institutions and new ideals, are brought into existence. The wilderness disappears, the West comme il faut passes on to a new margin and, in the former area, and a new society has emerged from this contact with the backwoods. Gradually this society loses its primitive conditions, and assimilates itself to the flake of the older complaisant conditions of the East but it bears within it enduring and distinguishing survivals of its frontier experience. Decade after decade, West after West, this rebirth of American society had gone on, and left its traces behind i t, which reacted on the East. The history of our political institutions, our democracy, is not a history of imitation, of simple borrowing it is a history of the exploitation and adaptation of organs in response to changed environment, a history of the job of new political species. In this sense, therefore, the West has been a constructive twitch of the highest significance in our life. The West, as a phase of social organization, began with the Atlantic gliding, and passed across the continent. But the colonial tidewater area was in close partake in with the Old World, and soon lost its Western aspects. In the middle of the 18th century, the newer social conditions appeared along the upper waters of the tributaries of the Atlantic. Here it was that the West took on its distinguishing features, and transmitted frontier traits and ideals to this area in later days. On the coast were the fishermen and skippers, the merchants and planters, with eyes turned toward Europe. Beyond t he falls of the rivers were the pioneer farmers, largely of non-English stock, Scotch-Irish and German. They constitute a distinct people, and may be regarded as an expansion of the social and economic life of the middle region into the backcountry of the South. These frontiersmen were the ancestors of Boone, Andrew Jackson, Calhoun, Clay, and Lincoln. Washington and Jefferson were profoundly bear upon by these frontier conditions. The forest clearings have been the seed plots of American character.