I touched on this in a paper I wrote in the final year of my undergraduate degree:
Meinig (1986) noted that the progression of the frontier came to define the new American nation as the hardships involved brought immigrant communities together.
With the decline of the frontier up the 1890s, the Native Indians had been supressed to the extent where they were so incoherent they were not able to be a competent ‘other’ to sustain the hostility needed for wilderness (Axtel, 1987) and the feelings among Americans was not one of achievement. A sense of nostalgia quickly formed, as the United States had been built on the frontier spirit, yet it lacked a frontier (Nash, 2014). The response to this was the creation of the national parks, starting in 1872, these sought to restore a lost history which controversially tried to portray ‘virgin landscapes’ (Cronon, 1995 p.2) but importantly they were seen as essential for preserving the American character (Callicott, 2008). The controversy lay in the fact that despite attempting to show this idea of a pristine landscape, instead it was ultimately a lie and the original inhabitants of the land at the time it was trying to portray had been forcefully removed (Cronon, 1995). Consequently we can also see the implementation of aesthetic imaging, and ultimately the commodification of landscape, as the removal of the Indians made it more marketable in being perceived as ‘safer’ but still wild enough to be the wilderness.
With the frontier closed the American people suffered an identity crisis, having been brought up on the idea of the frontier spirit they suddenly found there was no wilderness, no terra incognita and so no frontier.
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