FREE ESSAY ON BOBCATS

BOBCATS

The frontier experience was of such importance to the development of American traditions
and institutions that historians often
explain American attitudes in terms of that experience. Frederick Jackson Turner sought
to express the major developments in
American social and political history as a product of the existence of the frontier.
Walter Prescott Webb worried about the
future of an America without a frontier, unless it be the Great Frontier such as other
cultures had once possessed (the sea,
trade), and which had the effect of encouraging individualism and democracy. Film
directors and novelists have emphasized
these ideas to excess, leading toward the misleading conclusion that one can only be free
if one lives outside society and wears
a gun. Groups supporting American Indians often portray them as noble savages who were
innocent victims of civilization (as
well as of American imperialism). Thus, we have theoretical and mythological Wests which
affect the ways we see ourselves
and our past.