Dan Flores

As indicated by the work of painters and photographers, nostalgia and honesty about the West dueled with one another as the frontier ended and the modern West began.

I'm Dan Flores, and this is the American West.

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Shadows of the Frontier

For many Americans, the West occupies a middle space similar to how we imagine phases in our history like the Confederacy, say, or World War II.

It had a beginning, and in the arc of time, it had an end.

And the best one can do with it now is to read about it or watch movies because the real thing, the beating heart, flesh, and blood of it, has now receded into the past.

While that may work for wars or the Great Depression or the societal upheaval that was the 1960s, for the West, not so much.

And there's a simple reason the West is different.

The West was never just a phase, but a place, a remarkable region of the country that still exists and whose present story is intertwined with its past the way morning emerges from sunrise.

When the U.S.

Census announced in 1890 that the West by then had been so broken up by bodies of settlement that a frontier line no longer existed, the West did not end the way the Confederacy did when Grant accepted Lee's surrender in 1865.

My point is that the end of the so-called frontier was hardly a black line across history the way Appomattox Courthouse or Hiroshima-Nagasaki were.

As wild as the western past had been as a part of history, the region's future looked just as exciting and just as troublesome.

Of course, we all know there were Americans upset by the end of the frontier.

Maybe some still are.

Some people in the early 20th century experienced a psychological alarm historians have labeled frontier anxiety.