Frederick Jackson Turner Quotes

Up to our own day American history has been in a large degree the history of the colonization of the Great West. The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development.

I think the Lewis and Clark Expedition was the greatest undertaking in American History. I think landing a man on the moon pales next to it.

Westward, ever westward.

The pioneer army perpetually... strikes to the front. Empire plants itself upon the trails.

I like stories in specific time periods. 'The Revenant's' era of American history was fascinating because it was this lawless no-man's land. It defined the idea of the American frontiersman as man conquering nature. In a way, the story of Hugh Glass is about man dominating nature.

Settling other people's land is an American tradition.

Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.

I'm actually writing history. It isn't what you'd call big history. I don't write about presidents and generals... I write about the man who was ranching, the man who was mining, the man who was opening up the country.

The public conviction that a railroad linking the West and the East was an absolute necessity became so pronounced after the gold discoveries of '49 that Congress passed an act in 1853 providing for a survey of several lines from the Mississippi to the Pacific.

And yes, the Homesteaders, including my grandparents who left behind almost nothing, and arrived in Montana with nothing but the clothes on their back, high hopes, faith in God and dreaming of the future.

Now, of course, the great thing about the solar system as a frontier is that there are no Indians, so you can have all the glory of the myth of the American westward expansion without any of the guilt.

After the Great Depression and after public urging, a nationwide public competition was held to determine a design for a memorial that would honor President Thomas Jefferson's bold vision for westward expansion for America.

When you go back and look at American history, it's not terribly different from Canadian history. If you weren't self-reliant on the prairie, you wouldn't survive.

God tipped the country and all the fruits and nuts rolled west.

We need Hawaii just as much and a good deal more than we did California. It is Manifest Destiny.

I used to think I'd like to have been a pioneer on the Oregon Trail, experience untamed America.

The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement, explain American development.

The close relationship between railroad expansion and the genera development and prosperity of the country is nowhere brought more distinctly into relief than in connection with the construction of the Pacific railroads.

The whole westward expansion myth is seen as romantic. But it's a joke, a blot on American history.

It being perhaps the only large tract of country and certainly the first which lying out of the boundaries of the Union will be settled by the people of the United States.

The President [Thomas Jefferson] has been all his life a man of letters, very speculative and a lover of glory, and it would be possible he might attempt to perpetuate the fame of his administration … by discovering … the way by which Americans may some day extend their population and their influence up to the Pacific Ocean

Manifest Destiny on the hoof

It is, beyond question, the destiny of our race to spread themselves over the continent of North America, and this at no distant day.

Our great national drama was a westward expansion that conquered a native population rather than coexisting with it.

There's an undeniable tradition of sexism in this country that ties into the move westward by people of European descent and different ways of looking at Manifest Destiny on the west side of the Mississippi River.