Jay Gitlin - Frontier Cities: Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire

Frontier Cities

Encounters at the Crossroads of Empire

Edited by

JAY GITLIN BARBARA BERGLUND

and

ADAM ARENSON

Copyright 2013 University of Pennsylvania Press

All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher.

Published by

University of Pennsylvania Press

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112

www.upenn.edu/pennpress

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Frontier cities : encounters at the crossroads of empire / edited by Jay Gitlin, Barbara Berglund, and Adam Arenson.1st ed.

p. cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8122-4468-7 (hardcover : alk. paper)

1. Frontier and pioneer lifeNorth AmericaHistory. 2. City and town lifeNorth AmericaHistory.

3. BorderlandsNorth AmericaHistory. I. Gitlin, Jay.

II. Berglund, Barbara. III. Arenson, Adam

E46.F76 2013

JAY GITLIN, BARBARA BERGLUND, AND ADAM ARENSON

ALAN GALLAY

DANIEL H. USNER, JR.

BRETT RUSHFORTH

KAREN MARRERO

CAROLYN GILMAN

ELLIOTT WEST

MATTHEW KLINGLE

TIMOTHY R. MAHONEY

PETER J. KASTOR

JOHN NEAL HOOVER

JAY GITLIN, BARBARA BERGLUND, AND ADAM ARENSON

Jay Gitlin, Barbara Berglund, and Adam Arenson

In 1800, a Kansas chief known as Coeur qui Brule wrote to the lieutenant governor of Spanish Louisiana, expressing his desire to visit St. Louis: depuis longtemps je dsire voir la ville [for a long time I have wanted to see the town].

Coeur qui Brule, however, would also have been acutely aware that he would always be a visitor in St. Louis: that the city was, from its inception, a French home, not an Indian one. When a group of 150 Missouri Indians arrived in 1764, while Auguste Chouteau and Pierre de Lacldes workmen were first laying out the town, Laclde hurried back to the site and carefully explained why the Missouri had to leave, disabusing them of their notion to settle in the heart of the new post. Revealingly, before they left, the women and children of the group were engaged to dig a cellar for the companys main building. Yet despite this exclusionary gesture, St. Louis, like other frontier

Fifty years ago, Richard C. Wade provided an insight that continues to generate surprise: Towns were the spearheads of the frontier, he declared in the first sentence of The Urban Frontier (1959). Planted far in advance of the line of settlement, they held the West for the approaching population. As Coeur qui Brule had experienced one hundred and fifty years before that, towns and cities typically preceded rural settlements throughout early North America.

This volume is dedicated to documenting encounters like Coeur qui Brules, and to explicating Wades still-surprising insight that the phrase frontier city is not an oxymoron, not a contradiction in terms. We renew conversations about what the juxtaposition of frontier and city reveal, exploring these fascinating, if unexpected, locales.

Frontier cities are urban settlements that emerge from an initial frontier encounter. They are defined by the interplay between their global contextseconomic, cultural, and political ties, as well as the regulations of uninformed and distant policymakersand their diverse local actors. In frontier cities, natives and newcomers, hemmed in by practical considerations as they shared streets, buildings, and interwoven lives, created the earliest matrix of the American urban experience.

In these urban spaces of encounter, natives and newcomers alike were shaped by both front-door policy decisions and back-door intimacies and interactions. Even the most basic urban places contained many homes, sites of exchange, and roads that entered into, crossed, and left town. Its residents held connections to a wider world, whether through national or linguistic ties, economic networks, or memories of places across the seas or across the mountains that shaped their lives. These qualities gave rise to the Chinese migrants who established fishing camps on the eastern shores of San Francisco Bay in the early 1850s, to the French traders bypassing imperial regulations by throwing casks of brandy over the wall to Indian customers on the Rue St. Paul in eighteenth-century Montreal, and to a young indigenous boy named Elvis playing his air guitar outside the contemporary frontier city of Manaus in Brazil.

Frontier cities thus emerge as ideal places to see the intimate personal interactions of new settlements, their world-changing importance in the process of state-making, and how the legacies of these patterns of global and local interaction continue to shape cities to this day. They have much to teach us about the complex interactions between diverse peoples and nations; about the power of symbols and metaphors; and about productively reframing the dialogue between the fields of urban, early American, postcolonial, and American western history.

* * *

Recognizing that our key terms, frontier and city, have a long history of varied and multiple usages, we begin by offering some broad parameters that reflect the ways frontier and city are conceptualized in this volume. The expansiveness of these concepts is what, in large measure, gives them their appealing and ongoing explanatory power, but we want to make sure that we can all understand how we, and our contributors, are using these simple yet profound terms.

A frontier is fundamentally an edge and thus a potential meeting ground, a place of convergence. Although the words first uses appear in early modern Europe, its contemporary resonance comes from association with the history of the American Westand with westering writ large. Within western history, the term has a contentious yet vitally productive pastrooted in the work of Frederick Jackson Turner and, in particular, his 1893 essay, The Significance of the Frontier in American History. Turner viewed the frontier as an east-to-west moving line where savagery and civilization metwhere hardy pioneers confronted indigenous peoples and the natural environment, and where they established mostly rural settlements whose residents and institutions manifested characteristics, such as individualism and democracy, which Turner perceived as central to American national identity.

While Turners ideas about the frontier are plagued by sentiments common for his time, his positioning of the frontier as the crucible that forged characteristics central to the making of the American nation and his identification of the frontier as a process through which Euro-Americans conquered the American West and built a landed empire can still be very useful analytical frameworks. Recognizing this, we join those scholars who have reconceptualized frontiers as varied and multifarious zones of encounter, produced by the global push of empire-building nation-states. In these spaces, different peoples worked togetherwillingly or unwillinglyas they shaped the environment, created mechanisms of economic and cultural exchange, and established some principles for governance in situations typically structured by unequal power relations.