Quotes About Frontier

I like the Western genre, I think it's uniquely American.

The Western, when I do one, will be one long, continuous story.

All I really want to do is someday be in a western. If I could be on a horse with a rifle, I would be a really happy camper.

I never really did a western western.

I've always loved a good Western.

I know I am always pumped, as an audience member, to go and see a Western.

I always wanted to do a Western.

The Western is as American as a film can get - there's the discovery of a frontier, the element of a showdown, revenge, and determining the best gunman. There's a certain masculinity to the Western that really appealed to me, and I've always wanted to do a Western in Hollywood.

I'd love to do a Western.

Space is not just going up and coming back down again. Space is getting into orbit and being there, living there, establishing a presence, a permanence.

I'm actually writing history. It isn't what you'd call big history. I don't write about presidents and generals... I write about the man who was ranching, the man who was mining, the man who was opening up the country.

I'm talking about science on the leading edge, where it's not clear which way things are going be cause we don't know, and I'm dealing with areas which we don't know about.

What defines a Western? I've probably seen three my whole life.

Like most Americans, I am neither a Republican nor a Democrat. I am pro-future, pro-hope, and pro-abundance. I am pro-frontier and will talk to and work with anyone else who shares my belief that it is our goal and destiny to expand life and civilization into space.

They were a borderland people, living on the far rim of empire, where in six or seven generations the American clay had grown sturdy and tall. They were patriots—if that term implied political affiliation rather than a moral state of grace—who were disputatious and litigious, given to violence on the frontier and in the street: a gentle people they were not. Their disgruntlement now approached despair, with seething resentments and a conviction that designing, corrupt men in

And why did I think that the notorious and often fatal obstacles that the pioneers faced—mountain passes strewn with lava rock, hellacious winds and dust storms, rattlesnakes, and descents so steep that the wagons could only be lowered by ropes—would miraculously vanish from the trail for me?

Missouri, a critical frontier state, prospered for many reasons—good soil, river access, fast-growing hardwood forests—but mostly because of mules.

Platte River Road Narratives

The exodus across the plains in the fifteen years before the Civil War, when more than 400,000 pioneers made the trek between the frontier at the Missouri River and the Pacific coast, is still regarded by scholars as the largest single land migration in history.

The very idea of wagon travel across the plains might have been indefinitely delayed had it not been for Narcissa Prentiss Whitman, a dreamy but persistent evangelist from the Finger Lakes of New York, who in 1836 became the first white woman to cross the Rockies. Narcissa Whitman is largely forgotten today, but her impact on American history was enormous, and for a time she was one of the most famous women in antebellum America.

The 1836 Whitman-Spalding covered wagon train was the first to go beyond the Rockies and complete the Oregon Trail.

Historian Richard Slotkin has shown how the myth of Indian savagery was required to justify the subjugation of the tribes so that their prairie kingdoms could be seized by the Americans crossing the frontier after 1843. But that image, faithfully passed down by purple-sage novels and Hollywood westerns, is wildly inaccurate.

It was July 4, 1836. The first white women had crossed the Rockies on Independence Day.

Before the Oregon Trail, America was a loosely coordinated land of emerging industrial centers in the Northeast, and a plantation South, with a frontier of hotly contested soil mutating west. Post–Oregon Trail—with a big assist from the Civil War—America was a continental dynamo connected by railroads and the telegraph from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with certain precedents for settlement, statehood, and quickly establishing large commercial cities.