Introduction: the Frontier Opens

In The Epic of America, published in 1931, James Truslow Adams notes the early days of the American dream, as created by the wild frontier:

Two of the strongest influences in our life, religion and the frontier, made in our formative periods for a limited and intolerant spiritual life…. Because the frontiersmen had developed the right combination of qualities to conquer the wilderness, they began to believe quite naturally that they knew best, so to say, how to conquer the world, to solve its problems, and that their own qualities were the only ones worth a man's having…. The American doctrine had developed, through the long training of the common man in local politics, that anyone could do anything.

The frontier became symbolic of the can-do spirit, as well as of the limitless amount of space where a person...