Tore Olson

But in 1893, at the Chicago World's Columbian Exposition, which is this huge fair held in Chicago in 1893, it was meant to celebrate the 400 year anniversary of Columbus's discovery of the Americas.

And he gives this address and basically says, you know, the frontier is what defines the American character.

It's what makes Americans this process of taming what he called empty land.

They weren't actually empty at all, but that's how he imagined them.

That this really defined the American character, that it made Americans kind of democratic, like small d democratic.

They made them egalitarian, made them individualistic and made them different from Europe.

But then he warns folks as well that, hey, you know, that world is coming to an end.

The frontier is closing and he's really anxious about it, you know, because if he sees the frontier is like what made America great in that period, then he's very worried that something's going to come to an end.

So in many ways, like in dozens of Western films and certainly in Red Dead Redemption 2, which is very much a game about the sort of closing, quote unquote, of the frontier.

Frederick Jackson Turner should be in the credits like he should be given, you know, credit for coining a lot of this mythology.

The problem is that it's really mythology.

It's not really history.

It's just that even the idea of an old West and the new West is.

I'm not convinced that there's such a neat distinction, that there's like a neat perforation mark between one and the other.

Absolutely.

I really think that when Easterners and most of the folks writing this are Easterners right in the US from New York or from Washington or Boston or something.

When they look at the West, what they're really doing is looking into a mirror and trying to figure out something about themselves.

And indeed, so much of the fantasy about the West is really about Eastern anxieties more than anything.

For example, let's take Teddy Roosevelt.

Teddy Roosevelt's one of these, you know, well-known chroniclers of the West.