Frederick Jackson Turner’s Frontier Thesis, first presented in 1893 but gaining prominence throughout the early 20th century and into 1920, had a profound impact on Canadian history, even though it was initially centered on American westward expansion. Turner argued that the frontier experience shaped American democracy, character, and society by fostering individualism, self-reliance, and egalitarianism. His theory resonated in Canada, where the concept of the frontier was also crucial in shaping national identity, economic development, and the narrative of westward expansion.
For Canada, the frontier was the vast and often harsh expanse of the prairies and beyond, a land of opportunity but also fraught with challenges. Like their American counterparts, Canadians viewed the western frontier as a place of untapped potential, where settlers could carve out new lives. The Canadian government’s settlement policies, such as the Dominion Lands Act, aimed to attract immigrants to the West, turning it into an agricultural breadbasket while simultaneously ensuring national control over territories that could otherwise fall under American influence.
Turner’s idea that the frontier acted as a “safety valve” for social and economic pressures also applied to Canada, though with critical differences. Canada’s frontier expansion was more controlled and deliberate, marked by significant government intervention, especially in the construction of the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) and immigration policies. These efforts were aimed at preventing American annexation and ensuring that Canada’s western provinces would develop in alignment with national economic interests. While Turner’s thesis emphasized the role of individualism, Canadian expansion was more collective, with a focus on state-supported settlement and resource extraction.
Moreover, Turner’s argument that the frontier experience ended by the 1890s had particular resonance in Canada by the 1920s. In both countries, the “closing” of the frontier—marked by the settlement of the prairies and the taming of vast wildernesses—forced a reckoning with national identity. In Canada, this led to increased debates about Indigenous relations, as the completion of the frontier phase coincided with policies that sought to assimilate Indigenous peoples, often through the residential school system and the extinguishment of Indigenous land rights. The frontier's closing also triggered the development of Canadian nationalism, as the western provinces sought to assert their political and economic influence within Confederation.
Yet, unlike in the United States, where Turner’s thesis framed the frontier as a source of democratic strength, in Canada the narrative of westward expansion was more nuanced. The Canadian frontier was not only a place of settlement but also of negotiation, where French, English, Indigenous, and Métis communities contended with the expanding British colonial state. The Red River Rebellion and the creation of Manitoba, followed by the North-West Rebellion of 1885, highlight how the Canadian frontier was a site of conflict as much as opportunity.
Turner’s thesis also influenced Canadian historians, who began to reassess the importance of the frontier in shaping the country’s development. Historians like Harold Innis and Donald Creighton took inspiration from Turner’s emphasis on geography and resource-based economies but adapted these ideas to fit Canada’s unique experiences. Innis, in particular, would expand on Turner’s frontier ideas by exploring how Canada’s economy was shaped by the extraction and export of natural resources, from fur to fish to timber, rather than agricultural expansion alone.
In conclusion, while Turner’s Frontier Thesis was developed in the context of American history, its implications for Canada were equally significant. The idea that the frontier shaped national identity, political structures, and economic systems resonated deeply with the Canadian experience. Yet Canada’s version of the frontier was marked by a stronger role for government intervention, more complex relationships with Indigenous peoples, and a distinct national narrative that intertwined expansion with colonialism and state-building. The Frontier Thesis thus remains a critical lens through which to understand both Canada’s westward expansion and the broader forces that shaped its emergence as a unified, transcontinental nation.
Frederick Jackson Turner
The Frontier in American History
(New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1920, 1947; reprinted by Holt, Rinehart and Winston Inc., 1962), pp. 257-262.
The last chapter in the development of Western democracy is the one that deals with its conquest over the vast spaces of the new West. At each new stage of Western development, the people have had to grapple with larger areas, with bigger combinations. The little colony of Massachusetts veterans that settled at Marietta received a land grant as large as the State of Rhode Island. The band of Connecticut pioneers that followed Moses Cleveland to the Connecticut Reserve occupied a region as large as the parent State. The area which settlers of New England stock occupied on the prairies of northern Illinois surpassed the combined area of Massachusetts, Connecticut, and Rhode Island. Men who had become accustomed to the narrow valleys and little towns of the East found themselves out on the boundless spaces of the West dealing with units of such magnitude as dwarfed their former Experiences. The Great Lakes, the Prairies, the Great Plains, the Rocky Mountains, the Mississippi and the Missouri, furnished new standards of measurement for the achievement of this industrial democracy. Individualism began to give way to cooperation and to governmental activity.
Even in the earlier days of the democratic conquest of the wilderness, demands had been made upon the government for support in internal improvements, but this new West showed a growing tendency to call to its assistance the powerful arm of national authority. In the period since the Civil War, the vast public domain has been donated to the individual farmer, to States for education, to railroads for the construction of transportation lines. Moreover, with the advent of democracy in the last fifteen years upon the Great Plains, new physical conditions have presented themselves which have accelerated the social tendency of Western democracy.
The pioneer farmer of the days of Lincoln could place his family on a flatboat, strike into the wilderness, cut out his clearing, and with little or no capital go on to the achievement of industrial independence. Even the homesteader on the Western prairies found it possible to work out a similar independent destiny, although the factor of transportation made a serious and increasing impediment to the free working-out of his individual career. But when the arid lands and the mineral resources of the Far West were reached, no conquest was possible by the old individual pioneer methods. Here expensive irrigation works must be constructed, cooperative activity was demanded in the utilization of the water supply, capital beyond the reach of the small farmer was required. In a word, the physiographic province itself decreed that the destiny of this new frontier should be social rather than individual.
Magnitude of social achievement is the watchword of the democracy since the Civil War. From petty towns built in the marshes, cities arose whose greatness and industrial power are the wonder of our time. The conditions were ideal for the production of captains of industry. The old democratic admiration for the self-made man, its old deference to the rights of competitive individual development, together with the stupendous natural resources that opened to the conquest of the keenest and the strongest, gave such conditions of mobility as enabled the development of the large corporate industries which in our own decade have marked the West.
Thus, in brief, have been outlined the chief phases of the development of Western democracy in the different areas which it has conquered. There has been a steady development of the industrial ideal, and a steady increase of the social tendency, in this later movement of Western democracy. While the individualism of the frontier, so prominent in the earliest days of the Western advance, has been preserved as an ideal, more and more these individuals struggling each with the other, dealing with vaster and vaster areas, with larger and larger problems, have found it necessary to combine under the leadership of the strongest.
This is the explanation of the rise of those preeminent captains of industry whose genius has concentrated capital to control the fundamental resources of the nation. If now in the way of recapitulation, we try to pick out from the influences that have gone to the making of Western democracy the factors which constitute the net result of this movement, we shall have to mention at least the following:--
Most important of all has been the fact that an area of free land has continually lain on the western border of the settled area of the United States. Whenever social conditions tended to crystallize in the East, whenever capital tended to press upon labor or political restraints to impede the freedom of the mass, there was this gate of escape to the free conditions of the frontier. These free lands promoted individualism, economic equality, freedom to rise, democracy. Men would not accept inferior wages and a permanent position of social subordination when this promised land of freedom and equality was theirs for the taking. Who would rest content under oppressive legislative conditions when with a slight effort he might reach a land wherein to become a co-worker in the building of free cities and free States on the lines of his own ideal?
In a word, then, free lands meant free opportunities. Their existence has differentiated the American democracy from the democracies which have preceded it, because ever, as democracy in the East took the form of highly specialized and complicated industrial society, in the West it kept in touch with primitive conditions, and by action and reaction these two forces have shaped our history.
In the next place, these free lands and this treasury of industrial resources have existed over such vast spaces that they have demanded of democracy increasing spaciousness of design and power of execution. Western democracy is contrasted with the democracy of all other times in the largeness of the tasks to which it has set its hand, and in the vast achievements which it has wrought out in the control of nature and of politics. It would be difficult to over-emphasize the importance of this training upon democracy. Never before in the history o the world has democracy existed on so vast an area and handled things in the gross with such success, with such largeness of design, and such grasp upon the means of execution.
In short, democracy has learned in the West of the United States how to deal with the problems of magnitude. The old historic democracies were but little states with primitive economic conditions.... Western democracy has been from the time of its birth idealistic. The very fact of the wilderness appealed to men as a fair, blank page on which to write a new chapter in the story of man's struggle for a higher type of society. The Western wilds, from the Alleghanies to the Pacific, constituted the richest free gift that was ever spread out before civilized man. To the peasant and artisan of the Old World, bound by the chains of social class, as old as custom and as inevitable as fate, the West offered an exit into a free life and greater well-being among the bounties of nature, into the midst of resources that demanded manly exertion, and that gave in return the chance for indefinite ascent in the scale of social advance.
"To each she offered gifts after his will".
Never again can such an opportunity come to the sons of men. It was unique, and the thing is so near us, so much a part of our lives, that we do not even yet comprehend its full significance. The existence of this land of opportunity has made America the goal of idealists from the days of the Pilgrim Fathers. With all the materialism of the pioneer movements, this idealistic conception of the vacant lands as an opportunity for a new order of things is unmistakably present....
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