As a native American historian I have been influ­enced by the writings of an earlier genera­tion of native American scholars. In his Land of the Spotted Eagle, Lakota author Luther Standing Bear wrote in 1933 that “the Indian, by the very sense of duty, should become his own historian” and that the Indian should also stress “philosophical conceptions.” Standing Bear was one of the first native American authors to stress the importance of history. I was also moved by Nez Perce anthropologist Archie Phinney who wrote an unpublished paper in 1944 entitled “The Indian Intelligentsia.” He made a number of important points, including the need to publish articles focusing on the subject of the native American.

Moved by these and other individuals, I take this opportunity to critique some historical writings by two noted white American historians, Frederick Jackson Turner and Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr.

In July 1993, historians and others in the academic community will recognize the one hundredth anniver­sary of the well-known “Turner Thesis”, also called the “frontier thesis.” Frederick Jackson Turner, a historian at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, presented a paper entitled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” at the Chicago World’s Fair in 1893. He put for­ward four points. Most significantly, he proposed that the frontier ended in 1890 when the invisible “frontier line” ceased to exist. In other words, the Americans whose ancestry lay in Europe had finally settled the entire United States.

The frontier experience, or westward expansion, according to Turner, had a marked impact on the settlers who moved from east to west in successive waves over two and a half centuries. It helped them to develop a new national identity, or a “composite” culture characterized by an English-speaking Anglo-American nation. The frontier experience also helped the Americans to pro­mote noted national characteristics, including a faith in democracy and individualism. Turner defined the term frontier as the “meeting point between savagery and civi­lization.” The frontier area, he argued, represented “free land,” and since the land was unused, this justified white settlement of the land. Thus the white population peo­pled the continent, and the frontier ceased to exist by 1890 (Taylor, 1972, pp. 3-4).

For much of this century, historians and other scholars have debated the Turner Thesis: a few defending it, the majority criticizing it, and still others rejecting it com­pletely. But regardless of its status, it remains one of the best known historical interpretations in United States history, and its author has had a profound impact on the historical profession. Turner’s focus has done much to promote the serious study of the American West. A group of historians founded the Western Historical Association in 1961, and they also produce their own journal, the Western Historical Quarterly (See Footnote 1). Additionally, various history departments now offer specialized courses in Western American history.

The one hundredth anniversary in 1993 will inspire more written responses regarding the Turner Thesis and revive this long-standing debate. Perhaps this time the handful of native American historians with doctorates in the field might express their views regarding the thesis. As a native his­torian, I take this opportunity to voice my own views.

I maintain that the Turner Thesis has little if any value for native American historians, especially those who write tribal history. Like other critics, primarily non- Indians, I too reject the Turnerian argument that the frontier ended in 1890. The Anglo-Americans did not settle the entire region of the country. I therefore agree with non-Indian historian Patricia Limerick who writes that “if unrestricted use of the public domain is crucial, the frontier ended in 1934 with the Taylor Grazing Act and the leasing of grazing rights on the public lands” (1987, p. 25).

Although she did not elaborate on this point, her assessment certainly applies to Nevada where the federal government controls approximately 87 percent of the land. Much of this land lies under the jurisdiction of the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), the bureaucratic child of the Taylor Act of 1934.

Before passage of the Taylor Grazing Act the white Nevadans labeled the frontier in Nevada as public domain land because most of it had never been settled by whites. But this does not mean the land was unclaimed and uninhabited by humans. In actuality, this land is the Aboriginal territory of four native tribes, including the Western Shoshone who occupied the eastern half of the state.

The Shoshones never viewed their home as a frontier or part of the public domain either before or after 1890, a point they made in 1932 when the Senate Subcommittee of the Committee on Indian Affairs held part of its hearings in Elko, Nevada. When asked about the subject of land, one Shoshone spokesman, Harry Stanton of Ely, stated: “we are on the public domain, but then I don’t see why they call that public domain because we lived on that land for many years…here in Temoak’s territory they can’t call it that” (Survey of Conditions).

He called Shoshone country “Temoak’s territory” in recognition of Chief Temoak who was the principle sign­er of the Treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863. This treaty, the only one negotiated between the federal government and the Great Basin Shoshones, acknowledged the Western Shoshones as the owners of a sizeable land base in Nevada which the natives called Temoak’s territory (See Footnote 2). The Shoshones never called their land the frontier or the public domain, and this was the point made by Stanton in 1932.

A few historians are questioning whether the academ­ic profession should use the Turnerian idea of the fron­tier. In a 1991 publication, Patricia Limerick asks an important rhetorical question: “does the concept of the frontier require the presence of Anglo-Americans?” She never answered her question, but had she posed it to trib­al people, their answer would have been yes. The con­cept of the frontier is a white creation, made popular by Frederick Jackson Turner a century ago. When Turner used the idea, he was actually referring to Indian country where the whites encountered the Indians. Before con­tact, the Shoshones in the Great Basin called their homeland Pia Sokopia, not the frontier.

I also reject Turner’s idea of “free land.” Turner gave his readers the impression that the Indians did not possess any land. Hence the whites of the nineteenth century could move westward and claim the land as they pleased. What Turner’s readers do not know is that, in this centu­ry, Congress rejected the notion of free land. In 1946 it passed the Indian Claims Commission Act which allowed the tribes to sue the federal government for past injustices, including the illegal seizure of land in the nineteenth century. Under the Indian Claims Commission, the government compensated or paid the tribes for the land that was stolen from their ancestors decades earlier. In reality, there existed no free land, and Turner’s idea remains nothing more than a myth.

Other scholars have criticized Turner’s concept of free land. Such was the case in March 1970 when various native American scholars held the First Convocation of American Indian Scholars at Princeton University. The American Indian Historical Society of San Francisco, directed by Rupert Costo (Cahuilla) and his wife Jennette Henry Costo (Cherokee), sponsored this gathering. The convoca­tion’s purpose was to point out new directions and to pre­sent a “true history” of native America. Jennette Henry Costo presented a paper entitled “The American Indian in American History.” In it she found fault with Turner’s “free land” concept:

Thus the concept of Indian land as “free, unoccupied land,” was woven into the philosophy of historic inter­pretations . In this way, it was denied that the native American had rights to his land [in the nineteenth cen­tury] (Indian Voices, 1970,p. 109).

Costo made an accurate assessment when she stated that Turner’s ideas had been reinforced by disciple his­torians, the most noted being Ray Allen Billington, who made liberal use of the phrase “free, unoccupied land” in his history of the American West (Indian Voices, 1970, p. 109). It is no surprise that a sizable number of white Americans never realized that native Americans had owned land in the earlier days when the pioneers moved West.

One non-Indian historian, David A. Nichols, pro­vides a harsh yet highly accurate assessment of the Turner Thesis. He writes that Turner viewed the “Indians as not very important” and that the “Indian was part of the landscape,” having the same importance as rocks or trees. Nichols sums up his evaluation by writing that Turner’s “scholarship has been significantly respon­sible for the unjustified neglect of the Indian in American history” (1972, pp. 384 & 386).

However, one must not believe that Turner neglected the Indian entirely in his thesis. He mentions the word “Indian” 35 times, and he also gives the names of at least two native groups, the Cherokee and the Iroquois. Yet, other than these passing references, Turner gives no sub­stantial treatment to the Indians. To him, the Indian was a “savage” whose way of life was vastly inferior to whites. Turner also perpetuated the stereotypical image of the Indian being a warlike savage who shouted battle-cries and took scalps (Taylor, 1972).

Although Turner stresses that the settlers had become Americanized by their frontier experience, he fails to recognize that they had also become Indian-ized. In one instance he briefly mentions the settlers adapting “Indian corn” as part of their diet (Taylor, 1972). What he fails to emphasize, however, is that corn became the staple of the white American’s diet during the period preceding and following 1890. Here is a clear example of the Turnerian view of the Indian being unimportant in American history.

As this century progressed, a number of scholars attempted to shake off the influence of Turner. They wrote about the various facets of native American histo­ry. Unfortunately, these same historians continued to be influenced by Turner. Thus, when they wrote Indian his­tory, especially tribal history, their focus concerns only the seventeenth, eighteen and nineteenth centuries with little, if any, discussion of the twentieth. Perhaps non-Indian historian Colin Calloway summed it best when he wrote in 1988: “historians and the general pub­lic alike seem to have been comfortable with the notion that Indian history ended in 1890 with Wounded Knee and the official closing of the frontier.” In short, Turner’s thesis continued to leave its imprint on the profession of history for much of this century.

However, since 1970, a handful of scholars who write tribal history have broken free of the Turner pattern. In their publications, the fol­lowing individuals give full treatment to tribal history, including the post-1890 period: Edmund Danziger, Jr., The Chippewas of Lake Superior (1978); John Finger, Cherokee Americans: The Eastern Band of Cherokees in the Twentieth Century (1991); Morris Foster, Being Comanche: a Social History of an American Indian Community (1991); Patricia Ourada, The Menominee: A History (1979); and Veronica Tiller, The Jicarilla Apache Tribe: A History, 1846-1970 (1983). One hopes that other scholars will follow.

Like Frederick Jackson Turner, Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr. is also an established historian. He has written several books, including noted biographies of Franklin Roosevelt and John F. Kennedy. Unfortunately, for most of his career, Schlesinger gave less attention to native Americans than did Turner. In his monumental Pulitzer Prize winning book, The Age of Jackson (1944), he makes only three passing references to Indians: Andrew Jackson’s successful military efforts “in putting down some Indian uprisings” in the War of 1812; the establish­ment of the Choctaw Academy in Kentucky by mission­aries to Americanize young Indians; and some white mis­sionaries who “were arrested for violating a Georgia law forbidding whites to dwell among the Indians [Cherokees] without state licenses.”

What Schlesinger fails to mention in his Age of Jackson is the subject of Indian Removal. In 1830, during President Jackson’s administration, Congress passed the Indian Removal Act which paved the way for mass removal of thousands of native Americans whose ances­tral homelands lay east of the Mississippi River. Although precise figures are not available, some scholars maintain that 60 to 75 thousand Indians were removed west of the river in the 1830s, including the so-called Five Civilized Tribes (Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek and Seminole). In 1838 alone, five thousand Cherokees were marched westward on the well-known Trail of Tears. According to non-Indian historian Ronald Satz, Andrew Jackson “was certainly the most prominent advocate of Indian removal, and he con­doned the use of bribery and brute force to promote emi­gration (Anderson, 1991, p.40).

Frederick Jackson Turner covered the subject of Indian removal better, for he at least alluded to the sub­ject, writing that the Indians “became an object of politi­cal concern” and that “our Indian policy has been a series of experimentations on successive frontiers” (Taylor, 1972, pp. 6 & 8).

One wonders why Schlesinger omitted Indian removal from his book since he firmly believes that eth­nic people must be part of general United States history. As late as 1991, he wrote that “I believe in the pluralistic approach to the writing and teaching of history” and “I believe in the importance of teaching Americans the history of other cultures” (Schlesinger, 1991, p.41). Apparently, the topic of Indian removal does not fit into his definition of pluralistic history.

Schlesigner’s most recent book, The Disuniting of America (1991), is also a controversial text. He wrote it for two reasons: to strike back at those educators who want to minimize the study of Western Civilization in public schools and replace it with the study of American minority groups. He also wanted to stress that Americans must down-play excessive multiculturalism and, instead, emphasize our oneness to maintain a solidified United States. The author is fearful that we might fall apart like the former Soviet Union if we do not take these steps.

Of the two points, Schlesinger places more emphasis on the first one. Although he readily admits that the historical profession has largely neglected different facets of American history, including women and racial minorities, he argues that the profession cannot rule out the impor­tance of the nation’s Anglo-American heritage. In short, Schlesigner has become the defender of old guard history. He writes that “for better or for worse, American history has been shaped more than anything else by British tradition and culture” and “to deny the essentially European origins of American culture is to falsify history” (pp. 24 & 81).

To Schlesinger, the United States has been a suc­cessful nation because it created a “new national identity” with an “American culture.” This homogeneity was the result of assimilation (Schlesinger, 1992, p.27). However, what he fails to mention is that one race of people, the native Americans, was subject to forced assimilation for a good part of this nation’s history. Furthermore, the Indians, because of their cultural per­sistence, were not completely transformed.

In the 1890s, my grandfather, Thomas Premo (Shoshone), was one of thousands of young natives sent to the Carlisle Indian School in Pennsylvania. The objective of this federally-operated school was to eliminate their “Indian-ness.” But when my grandfather left the school in the 1900s, he returned to the Duck Valley Reservation in Nevada, married a Shoshone woman, and continued to speak the Shoshone language for the rest of his life. Although he also spoke English, my grandfather never resembled the so-called “national” and “American” char­acter that Schlesigner writes about. Nor did he, or thou­sands of other native Americans, contribute to the “dis­uniting of America” because they were different.

It would do Schlesinger some good if he read about the history of federal government policy towards native Americans. He would quickly discover that this nation did much to disunify the tribes. One therefore finds the Seminole of Florida separated from their kinsfolk in Oklahoma, which was the legacy of Indian removal. If Schlesinger studied the native history of this country, he could very easily write a new book entitled, The Disuniting of Native America. He could also write a lengthy account of the failures of assimilation as they applied to native Americans.

The native American remains largely the invisible minority in The Disuniting of America since Schlesinger makes only seven passing references to them. But he finally gives more recognition to them in a 1992 article in The Atlantic, “Was America a Mistake?” In it he actu­ally refers to two living tribal individuals: Ben Nighthorse Campbell and Russell Means.

Schlesigner wrote this article in response to the revisionists who want to rewrite the last 500 years of American history. He agrees and disagrees with the critics of the Quincentennial. Schlesinger maintains that Indians did receive negative treatment over the centuries. However, the revisionist argument of geno­cide does not apply to the Spanish who wanted to pre­serve the Indian population as a labor force.

He upholds the age-old argument that Columbus dis­covered America. In doing so, he opposes the revisionist argument that Columbus did not discover American but only encountered it. To him, the Western Hemisphere is the “New World,” not an Old World as the revisionists assert. As for his title, “Was America a Mistake ?” his answer is no. If Columbus did not discover this part of the world in 1492, some other European explorer would have. Additionally, he views the European penetration of the Western Hemisphere as a positive force, and he writes:

The opening of the Americas ushered in a new era of human history. Not only did the gold and silver and furs of the New World stimulate economic growth, commercial integration, and intellectual analysis in the Old; even more, the age of exploration began to draw the world together into new potentialities of unity, and a new recog­nition of the varieties of human existence challenged the human intellect and the human imagination (p. 27).

If Schlesinger decided to interview today’s native Americans about the Quincentennial, he would certain­ly hear a different viewpoint.

Well-known American historians, past and present, have not given native Americans their rightful place in American history. This has been the case over the last one hundred years, from 1893 to 1993. When the acade­mic community recognizes the one hundredth anniver­sary of the Turner Thesis this year, I hope native Americans will be fully recognized as an integral part of this nation’s history.

Steven Crum is on the faculty of the University of California at Davis.

Footnotes
1.For recent publications on the history of the American West, see the following: Nash ,G.D. (1991). Creating the west: Historical inter­pretations, 1890-1990. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.; Limerick, P.N. and others (eds.). (1991). Trails: Toward a new western history. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas.
2.For a history of the Western Shoshone claims, see: Rusco, E.R. (Summer 1992) Historic change in Western Shoshone country: The estab­lishment of the Western Shoshone National Council and the traditionalist land claims. American Indian Quarterly, 15,337-360.

References

Anderson, W.L. (1991). Cherokee removal: Before and after. Athens: University of Georgia Press.

Standing Bear, L. (1933). Land of the Spotted Eagle. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.

Calloway, C.G. (Ed.). (1988). New directions in American Indian history. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

Indian Voices: The first convocation of American Indian scholars. (1970). San Francisco: The Indian Historian Press.

Limerick, P. (1987). The Legacy of conquest: The unbroken past of the American West. New York: W.W.Norton.

Nichols, D.A. (1972). Civilization over sav­age: Frederick Jackson Turner and the Indian. South Dakota History, 2,384,386.

Phinney, A. The Indian Intelligentsia. FRC Box 13583, Northern Idaho Agency, Record Group 75, National Archives, Pacific Northwest Branch.

Schlesinger, Jr., A.M.(1953). The age of Jackson. Boston: Little, Brown, and Company.

Schlesinger, Jr. A.M. (July 8,1991) The cult of ethnicity, good and bad. Time, p.27.

Schlesinger, Jr. A.M. (1991). The disuniting of America. Knoxville: Whittle Direct Books.

Schlesinger, Jr. A.M. (1992, September). Was America a mistake? The Atlantic, p. 27.

Survey of conditions of the Indians in the United States. Hearings before a subcommittee of the committee on Indian affairs, U.S. Senate, 72ndCong. 1st sess., Pt. 28, Nevada, pp. 14830-14834.

Taylor, G.R. (1972). The Turner thesis: Concerning the role of the frontier in American history. (3rd ed.). Lexington: D.C. Heath and Company.