Quotes About Frontier

We were also fortunate enough to engage in our service a Canadian Frenchmen, who had been with the Chayenne Indians on the Black mountains, and last summer descended thence by the Little Missouri.

before the last boundaries were fixed—when there were no highways, only horse paths, and train tracks, and the Gold Rush was on in Nevada.

skirts of the unknown, and the white men rushing out of a tumble-down hovel, with great gestures

The fledgling and ragtag American army turned its state into a semi-plausible advantage, encouraging enlistees to wear their own hunting shirts to build on the reputation of frontier marksmen.

Some people like danger and adventure, some like to be free of civilization, and some like to live by their wits. It was those special people who headed west.

It should not be denied... that being footloose has always exhilarated us. It is associated in our minds with escape from history and oppression and law and irksome obligations, with absolute freedom, and the road has always led West.

Under the rough and ridiculous circumstances of life in the Rocky Mountains there was something exciting and vital, full of rude poetry: the heartbeat of the West as it fought its way upward toward civilization.

The ferocious virtues that had been necessary for survival on the American frontier were theirs: they were men who lived freely, wastefully, independently, and they lived by killing--animals as a rule, men if necessary.

Home is a notion that only the nations the of homeless fully appreciate and only the uprooted comprehend. What else would one plant in a wilderness or on a frontier? What loss would hurt more?

An acquaintance with books and learning was not a thing that a frontier boy like John Wesley Powell could take for granted; he had to seize it as he could. Abe Lincoln said it for every such boy with brains and dreams in his head: "The things I want to know are in books; my best friend is a man who'll git me a book I ain't read.

the north and south ends, there wasn't much to Bridger's Wells: Arthur Davies' general store, the land and mining claims office, Canby's saloon, the long, sagging Bridger Inn, with its double-decker porch, and the Union Church, square and bare as a New England meeting house, and set out on the west edge of town, as if it wanted to get as far from the other church as it could without being left alone.

No other frontier has ever inspired so many of its people to write. The scenes of California, and the experiences of getting there an dliving there, were so often extraordinary and dramatic that they cried out for description.

People always underestimate the impact of technology. To give you an example: In the 1970s the frontier for offshore development was 200 meters, today it is 4 000 meters.

I just wish the world was twice as big and half of it was still unexplored.

It's hard now to imagine that kind of travel and the daily tasks they simply took for granted. If a wagon axle broke, you had to stop and carve a new one. To cross a river, you sometimes had to build a raft.

Cowboys of the Old West were workers, not gunslingers, and they did not go looking for trouble. But when trouble found them, the rules were unequivocal. If someone was killed in a fair fight, that was not murder, it was an incident. On the other hand, shooting an unarmed or fleeing man ~ even if he was a sworn enemy ~ was strictly forbidden, and transgressors were quickly brought to frontier justice.

Before his marriage Lincoln enjoyed close relations with young women and almost certainly found outlets for his sexual urges among the prostitutes who were readily available on the frontier.

Theodore) Roosevelt considered his experience with 'fellow ranchmen on what was then the frontier' to be 'the most educational asset' of his entire life, instrumental to his success in becoming president.

flour and lumber." The entire settlement consisted of a few hundred people, fifteen log cabins, a tavern, a church, a blacksmith, a schoolmaster, a preacher, and a

Maybe thinking you're supposed to 'have a life' is a stupid way of buying into an untenable 1950s narrative of what life *supposed* to be. How do we know that all of these people with 'no lives' aren't really on the new frontier of human sentience and preceptions?

frontier spectators

In the history of the United States, we find that women were regularly preachers on the American frontier. Ironically, Baptists, who in some fundamentalist churches now bar women ministers, had more female preachers than any other denomination. Women pastored almost half of all Baptist churches in the state of Maine in the mid-nineteenth century. This was also the case in almost half of the Baptist churches in Michigan and Wisconsin.

There's a huge expanse of this continent that so seldom gets photographed.

Pioneer women were very tough - they had to be, because the men go off for long periods of time, and the women would have to be able to protect themselves and their homes.