building the american landscape - Univerza v Novi Gorici

profitable, annual rendezvous between hunters, Indians and explorers to exchange
goods, skins and necessities.
The problem of trade regulations was undoubtedly the motivating factor for the
expansion towards the West. At first, at the end of the eighteenth century, the
settlers in search of fortune and better living conditions ventured into the regions
furthest inland, so as not to have to depend on the instability and volatility of the
foreign market, regulated by strict, unilateral restrictions imposed by the United
Kingdom. This stage of the internal emigration from the coast westwards (the
phenomenon was as yet isolated, based on individual initiative) represented a
moral alternative rather than a real, economic solution to the political whims of the
homeland (in particular to the events around the so‐called Boston tea Party in 1773,
which sparked protests against oppressive, British taxation). With the arrival of
independence many things changed. The migratory flows at first supported the
process of agricultural development, then, towards the 1860s they became a
relentless phenomenon.
The epic of the frontier [Figures 128‐132] was a crucial process in the logic of the
construction of the American landscape. However, the aesthetic implications of the
frontier and exploratory expeditions were devised intellectually and culturally only
thanks to the land and gold rush, as Olmsted’s experience in the Yosemite Valley in
California shows.
If the scientific explorations brought the experts face to face with the geological and
botanical marvels of the American continent, the predatory mechanisms sparked by
the rush for land and gold also created a broader awareness of the restrictions and
precariousness of some natural resources, which it was decided needed protection
Frederick Jackson Turner (1861‐1932), the historian who idealised and summarised
the “tradition” of the frontier and the expansionist movement in the USA, founded
his theories on this consideration. Turner realised that the frontier represented an
unusual trait, which was not easily found in other historical contexts. His Frontier
Thesis, held to be the Declaration of Independence of American historians, was
revised within the essay The Significance of the Frontier in American History,
published in 1893 as the text for a conference held by the American Historical
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