In his book The Urban Frontier Richard Wade described frontier cities as the “spearheads of the frontier.” Like all classic descriptions, it is succinct, evocative, and elusive. The literal sharpness of the metaphor—the “spearhead,” piercing ahead of the wave of settlement—suggests that frontier cities have a precise location and function, serving as intermediary between the core system behind it and the frontier out in front of it.1
Yet, on the other hand, the fact that a spear is thrown suggests volatility—of speed, of location—that has long complicated historians’ efforts to define and understand the phenomenon. After all, cities and towns, unlike spears, do not move through the air. No town or city ever really “moved” with a frontier, though of course many individuals, traders, speculators, boosters, workers and occasionally even buildings did.2 A city is dynamic but also geographically stationary; the frontier is dynamic and geographically in motion. The frontier city—defined by its interaction with a moving entity—was a volatile and unstable place. To some it may seem that the concept of “frontier city” is, by its very nature, paradoxical. After all, relatively few urban places on the frontier had the time to develop into frontier cites—or frontier urban places with city or metropolitan characteristics—before the frontier was on the move. Most frontier towns were fleeting and transitory places that, by the nineteenth century, sprouted up out of nowhere and either quickly developed into something else or stagnated, declined, or even disappeared. Those towns that survived and did develop into “frontier cites,” often became recognizably “urban” only after the frontier had moved on, and they began losing the very frontier qualities that interaction with the frontier had given them. Thus even the most developed frontier cities were “frontier cities” for only a very short time before they matured into central places or entrepôts in a more settled urban system. The frontier city, therefore, is at best a moving target that is notoriously hard to identify and study.
This is not to say that there are no frontier cities. As the essays in this volume attest, there were frontier cities, places that had urban characteristics on the frontier. Yet, given the fact that the “frontier” and “city” only coexisted in relatively few places, one wonders how useful this seemingly paradoxical concept, defined literally as an urban place on the frontier, remains. Or do we need to expand the definition of the “frontier city” to include towns and cities that remained close enough to the receding frontier to continue to provide a range of frontier-oriented services and functions and thus retained some of their “frontier” quality. The literature suggests that historians have taken the second course of analysis. Grasping and then resolving the paradox of the frontier city involves exploring in depth the dynamic nature, over time, of the interactions between the frontier town or city and the frontier. By examining the changing nature of the interactions between the two across an ever-changing zone of encounter that lay between them, one can recognize patterns that suggest a broader definition of a frontier city.
Even though they operate within a dynamic context, most cities establish a specific function and predictable interactions with other towns and cities within the system. In contrast, the frontier city operates on or near the edge of a system. Beyond that edge was somewhere out there, a territory that was still not quite integrated into the hub’s activities. It was tentative, unsettled, and, particularly across a “hard” or a “closed border,” difficult, dangerous, or provocative to cross. Some have called this zone a “near frontier” to describe an area across the hinterland that was still not quite integrated into the frontier city’s activities. Others have used the “borderlands” or even “the middle ground” to evoke this sense of insecure, undependable, and contested zones of encounter. The English word liminal has it root in Latin notions of boundary, and that just beyond the limen, or threshold. The Romans merely ran a road out through an area and drew a map to show that it was their territory. They called it part of the Empire even while admitting it was not yet really theirs, economically, socially, or politically. From the perspective of the center, such in-between places, border zones, and borderlands were analogous to the urban “zone in transition” or “zone of emergence,” to use two intra-city terms from the Chicago School of sociology. In varying degrees, almost every urban place that played a role in some phase of the transformation of such a zone from frontier to a settled region warrants the term “frontier” town or city.
Situated near such a zone, the frontier city’s basic function as an intermediary between the center of the system and its expanding frontier was affixed to a fluid and unstable frontier. As a result it stood generally alone and unconnected to stable structures. Its functions and interactions were, for the most part, unsettled, ad hoc, and discursive, making the town economy one-dimensional, fragile, unstable, and volatile. The result of such instability was that relatively few urban places on the frontier actually developed into urban places one could call towns or cities. Most were proto-urban places that have been described as camps, outposts, stepping-off places, entry points, outfitting points, transfer points, relay points, or simply nodal points. In any case, the range of adjectives applied to the word “point” suggests the variety and lack of clarity about what exactly happened at such places on the map.3
Many, indeed in some areas, most, frontier settlements failed to survive. “Towns in mining districts are like mushrooms,” an observer in Denver remarked in 1860. “Houses spring up today and tomorrow a rich new discovery is made and away go the mines, traders, merchants, and all and perhaps the town is never heard of again.”4 In each of these places, residents had to fight aggressively to develop to the next stage of urban growth, or they would find themselves struggling and their city would become stalled in a secondary or tertiary place in the urban system, no longer able to provide services and goods to expanding settlements. In something like “up or out,” frontier cities either achieved and maintained dominance, lost their “frontier” character, or, as in many cases, simply withered away or disappeared.
Those that did survive became commercial outposts, supply depots, small trading communities, transshipment centers, meeting grounds, or termini. Even so, few of these places warranted the designation of a town, much less a city. Carl Abbott notes, for example, that few such “tenuous forts[s] or tiny trading post[s]” could be “counted as a town,” for they lacked any of the “characteristics of a town,” which he details as having the intention of permanence, a private real estate market, a seat of government, and a diverse local economy sustaining commercial relations between people on the frontier and the core of the system.5 As places where frontier adventurers gathered and rested, rather than founded and settled, such places lacked a sense of permanence. Since developing a deeper function with more intensive interactions often took time, by the time a frontier outpost became a town or city that warranted the designation of “frontier city,” the frontier on which it was located may have moved away.
Even so, if a frontier city is defined, like any urban place, both by its internal structure and dynamics on the ground where it is located, as well by its function in and interactions with regional, national, and even global systems in which it plays a role, then it is apparent that the “frontierness” or frontier nature of a place, could linger long after the frontier had receded. A frontier city was defined by the nature of its interactions with the frontier and the impact those interactions had on its structure. Its frontier quality, ethos, or milieu, rooted in its frontier interactions and experiences, could continue to imprint itself on the city’s economy, society, politics, and culture, as well as in its relationship or interactions with other urban places and its surrounding hinterlands, for many years. The people of the town and the frontier traded and interacted directly, and operated within each other’s space.
The presence of the “frontier” and the feeling that it was adjacent or near pervaded life in a frontier city. Its proximity created an air of tentativeness, anxiety, unsettledness, as well as a stirring and exciting town life. It was a place that essentially existed in the future. The residents of almost all such towns believed that their city was the “city of the future,” giving it an unreal “future city” atmosphere, as David Hamer argues.6 In spite of whatever security was established or settled arrangements put in place, such frontier towns still had a tentative, reckless, hectic quality. Their residents understood that the space out by the frontier was not yet under control; they were in an outpost, on the edge, at the periphery, of controlled and safe and systemically integrated areas.
Thus, while the definition of any “frontier city” is fleeting and transitory, a city could remain a frontier city, even as it evolved and the frontier receded, taking with it the frontier conditions that had shaped the city, so long as it maintained some direct interaction with the frontier. A frontier city was a town that served as a stepping-off place, or a supply depot to the frontier without the use of intermediary merchants at smaller places established between the frontier city and the frontier. D. W. Meinig suggests that the emergence of the depot or the “commercial outpost . . . would likely channel subsequent developments,” especially given the considerable investments needed to reach distant outposts.7
Frontier cities engaged in increasingly regular trade with the center because the ability of its merchants to supply those across the frontier with goods exceeded local supplies or production capacity, and because it had also outgrown the capacity of its surrounding hinterland. Compelled, as a result, to import goods and services, frontier cities welcomed the trade, as self-sufficiency meant isolation, and direct arrangements for imports meant connection. Hence, in the interest of flexibility, a more useful definition of a frontier city might be any town or city in which all, most, or at least some of its people—as merchants, public officials, traders, workers, and travelers—operated in a framework in which they still had direct access to the frontier.
Over time, the key factors that shaped the nature of interactions across this zone of encounter between the frontier city and the frontier across North America were the movement of the frontier itself, the political and social values, goals, and policy that shaped the interactions between the frontier city and the frontier, and contemporary business and banking methods and communication and transport technology. Of these, the business methods and communication and transport technology contributed most to the volatility of the frontier city and its changing interactions with the frontier and the system, as the specific cases in the essays by Elliott West, Alan Gallay, and Matthew Klingle in this volume demonstrate. In this essay, I plan to reflect on these and other cases, to lay out some general principles to define the frontier cities’ evolution.
The impact of the changing business methods and the technology of transport and communication on both the internal development of the frontier city, and its interaction with the metropole, was most apparent during three critical phases of early urban development on the frontier: 1) the establishment of an isolated outpost; 2) the emergence of a “commercial outpost”; and 3) the development into a central place or regional entrepôt with an organized hinterland. Put roughly, each of the stages represents: 1) an incomplete early form of frontier city or town; 2) the “classic” frontier city or town, and 3) the waning of a town or city’s frontier stage.
When, for example, a frontier settlement or town lay far out, beyond any reasonable access to the center of the system, its economy was isolated and separated from the larger economy of the regional or national system. When “interior” outposts or towns had limited access from the coastal plain, rivers (or, later on, from the railroads), residents, for the most part, were on their own and had to rely on a combination of self-sufficiency, a rudimentary barter system of exchange with each other as well as with an occasional merchant who settled there. These settlements maintained an uneasy dependence on interactions with Native Americans, relieved only occasionally by interactions with “the outside.”
The outposts, missions, or forts, spread across the British, French, or Spanish empires in North America in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries operated as such relatively isolated “frontier outposts,” connected by discursive, irregular, slow-motion, intermittent networks of trade and exchange that were unable to generate the dynamism and feedbacks of a system. Politically, as Abbott notes, they engaged in the “punches, and counter punches . . . of imperial feints,” and hence could not advance economically with any regularity. Connected only discursively and intermittently to the metropole, the outposts of the French and Spanish Empires remained isolated for decades.8
In later generations, the technological advances shrank the years spent in this uncertain first phase. While interior places like Lexington, Worcester, or Springfield, Massachusetts, Lancaster, Pennsylvania, or Augusta, Maine depended on single traders with connections to Boston, New York, or London, bringing a stock of goods on perhaps an annual basis, those in Lexington and Louisville, Kentucky, Cincinnati, Ohio, and St. Louis, Missouri relied on the occasional overland freight or keel boat until the arrival of the steamboat in the 1810s.9 Steamboats increased the volume and frequency of trade and the motivations to make large shipments by flat boat to New Orleans to sell surpluses in the southern market. On the upper Mississippi river in the 1820s and 1830s, riverside settlements such as Keokuk and Dubuque, Iowa, or Alton, Quincy, and Galena, Illinois experienced such isolation only for a season or two before the steamboat made each a point of commercial exchange. But interior places such as Springfield, New Salem, and Rockford, Illinois, or Iowa City and Des Moines, Iowa, would not be drawn into the system for years.10
In general, this frontier outpost stage was relatively short-lived for any frontier place on the coast, or major navigable river, or with the equivalent of direct access to the railroad depending on the scale of commitment and activity coming from the entrepôt. On the coast of North America, British settlements like Boston, Philadelphia, or even Charleston were outposts for only a few years. So too, places established on the westward-moving frontier of the United States experienced this outpost stage—with its classic marker of self-sufficient production and barter trade to support an occasional shipment from the outside—for less than a decade.
Further west, the invention of steamboats and then railroads combined with the telegraph to shorten this stage dramatically. Indeed, by the time one reached the Far West, towns that were established as outposts—as opposed to trading posts or forts—were plugged so quickly into the larger economic and urban system that few residents saw any need to produce goods and services to maintain self sufficiency. Usually within the first season, while the town or city itself remained a work in progress, one could acquire most of one’s needs from the first merchants who, in return, would buy wheat, lumber, or minerals to ship to the market. Over time, from the seventeenth century to the early twentieth, as a result, this stage became shorter and shorter, as access improved and thus “outposts” just appeared, pretty fully supplied, without having had to rely on self-sufficient farming and craft production at all.
A far more critical phase of development that was much more affected by technological developments in communication and transport occurred when this initial outpost initiated more regular and sustained contact with the metropole. Attracting more investment, such a city became a true economic outpost: in D. W. Meinig’s characterization, a “fixed point of commercial exchange.” The arrival of a permanent merchant class “triggered the local market” and thus “plugged the local economy into the regional market.”11 Wherever this happened—on the Upper Mississippi River at Alton in 1815, Quincy about 1825, Galena in 1827, and Rock Island, not until 1835, on the Upper Missouri at Kansas City about 1850, St. Joseph about 1843, Omaha in 1854, or further west at Denver in 1858—commercial outposts transformed themselves into central places or regional entrepôts with widespread trading contacts.12 As these connections became ever more permanent, “frontier cities” gradually lost their frontier function and identity.
Exorbitant prices were a classic marker of the frontier commercial outpost. A nascent frontier economy was initially supported by capital brought by settlers and merchants. This support could last for a season, several years, or in some cases, a decade or more. Whatever specie merchants received, they quickly transmitted it to the metropole to settle credit obligations. Because it took so long for orders to be received and for goods to be shipped from the metropole, merchants were compelled to order most of their inventory early so it would arrive before the start of the season. This forced them to tie up much of their capital in their inventories. As a result, they carried a heavy debt load which precluded further expansion of business.
The depth of investment from the metropolis combined with the increased flow of trade and people to that point from both the metropolis and the hinterland, to establish a classic frontier city as a commercial outpost.
Seventeenth-century Boston was a good example of a settlement that quickly became a commercial outpost. In spite of the effort of town officials to limit the number of local merchants who had the right to trade, other merchants began to establish connections with London and British merchants. Such contacts, secured often by family and social connections or by previous business contacts or references, began to assure a steadier supply of goods and enabled merchants to stock shelves with some degree of regularity. When goods flooded the town, prices dropped and profit margins declined, eventually compelling many merchants to seek efficiencies through functional (wholesale or retail) or product specialization, or supplying more remote settlements.13 Alan Gallay has found a similar dynamic in the development of the frontier economies of Goa, Macau, and Manila, each of which enhanced its role in the international trade system by supplying other frontier cities across Asia.
Though some Boston merchants were initially able to set up outposts immediately west of Boston and up the Connecticut River, high costs, depleted supplies, and intense competition precluded any great success. For a while Boston traders had outposts scattered across western and central Massachusetts and up along the Maine coast. When resources there declined, others went further west and north, including one merchant who set up a monopoly on the Connecticut River at Springfield. But Indian hostility and resistance from Dutch, Swedish, and especially French traders against English intrusion constrained their success.14
A similar shift away from a frontier configuration in a town’s mercantile sector was readily apparent in the transformation of trade in late colonial New York City. In the mid-seventeenth century, the New York market, like that of most frontier venues, was dominated by unspecialized merchants or “general importers” who ran general stores which they supplied directly from England and from which they sold goods into the frontier districts of the upper Hudson River valley. Like all such merchants, they struggled to find sufficient capital to maintain an inventory suitable to the local or regional market. As the volume of trade increased, however, wholesalers appeared, along with commission agents, who advised the supplier back in England what to send, and then aggressively disposed of the goods in the market place. Merchants began to sink their capital into processing raw materials for market, or using some local or regional resources to manufacture products that could become a substitute for imports.15
In Cooperstown, New York, and countless other places, merchants established reliable supplies of goods for nearby farmers, who in turn focused increasingly on production for market. Operating in the framework of a settled system of commerce, any market town like Cooperstown would face considerable competition from nearby towns. Indeed, Cooperstown was one town among many imbedded in a regional network of towns centered at Albany and then at Schenectady, both of which would grow dramatically after the construction and opening of the Erie Canal in the 1825.16
Farther west, in what would become Galena, Illinois, local lead deposits motivated the first trade with St. Louis as early as the late eighteenth century. In 1816, George Davenport set up a temporary post at Galena to trade with the Indians, and over the next several years at least ten other traders clustered around the site. But it was the arrival of Moses Meeker, a Cincinnati merchant who brought a full load of goods and maintained commercial connections back home, who established himself as the first permanent merchant, establishing Galena’s wider ties.17
By 1825, two steamboats regularly plied the waters of the Upper Mississippi between St. Louis and Galena. By the time the city was platted and named in 1827, it was a classic frontier urban outpost, whose merchants traded goods across a wide area of northern Illinois, southern and central Wisconsin, and along the Upper Mississippi river valley. The next advantage came at a midpoint, when Antoine Le Claire, a mixed-race interpreter and river trader, established a town plat on the west bank of the Mississippi river in 1832. Within a few years his success in establishing a ferry at that point, gaining the county seat, and opening up direct trade with St. Louis enabled the town—Davenport—to become a commercial depot along the river. Davenport served both as the midpoint of the St. Louis and Galena system, and depot of eastern Iowa.18
Though Leclaire’s initial advantage allowed him to gain a near-monopoly control of local trade, he was shrewd enough to recognize that competition and diversity, as well as reinvestment in the fledging city, would grow the place and enhance his wealth. So while he invested in a hotel, built a new wharf, and platted off more land, he sold land to newcomers on liberal terms and supported and encouraged their efforts. As Davenport merchants extended their efforts farther west to develop connections with newly established interior towns, such as Iowa City, Ottumwa, and Des Moines, and began to act more and more as specialized wholesale merchants, they ushered in a postfrontier stage of development in which boosters were less concerned with the town’s access to the frontier than its place within the burgeoning regional urban system.19
So it continued, in Nebraska City, in Denver, in Leadville, as railroad depots and mineral strikes determined the paths of settlement and market structure.20 Within months of the silver rush, Leadville—with the help of investors in St. Louis, Chicago, Davenport, Iowa, and New York—became a classic frontier city, complete with industrial-scale smelters to process the silver. Soon, however, economies of scale and transport cost efficiencies drew the smelters down to Denver, diversifying and sustaining that city’s economy for decades.21
Despite being the classic image of a frontier city, as a “commercial outpost,” this stage was relatively short-lived for most locales. As mercantile competition increased amid a building volume of trade and further improvements in transportation, the merchandising sector consolidated, turning profits which could be reinvested in expansion. By shortening the time it took to communicate with, ship something to, or receive something from a frontier city, the cause and effect feedback between the core and frontier city accelerated. This allowed quicker, cheaper, larger-scale, and less risky economic activity. More importantly, such accelerated feedback triggered specialization, division of labor, and a drive to achieve economies of scale. Each of these increased returns and triggered further development, as Elliot West has shown in regard to San Francisco and Matt Klingle in regard to Seattle in other essays in this volume.
Town merchants, desirous of developing trade, extended credit to farmers and then were often compelled, given the lack of specie, to accept produce for payment. In some ways, merchants had no choice, as they needed something in remittance for the credit extended that they could use to settle their rising debts back East. In an era of slow communication and shipping, orders for goods for a coming season from frontier merchants had to be out several months to a year ahead and shipped weeks or months ahead to arrive at the beginning of the season. Thus almost all a merchant’s capital went into his stock of goods, the returns on which were at most a guess, based on previous activity. If, as they did in the interior East and later in the early West, merchants went on “buying trips” to New York or Philadelphia, they could be gone for months, leaving the business at home unattended.
From the other direction, entrepôt wholesale merchants sought ways to get goods in their customers’ stores more quickly. Increasingly frustrated by the wait for news or buyers from a frontier outpost, they began to ship ahead of the orders—gambling, of course, on the hope that all their goods would be sold. As the volume of shipping increased, merchants sought to achieve economies of scale that would reduce per-unit costs and garner a larger market share. If they miscalculated, of course, an excess of goods could flood a frontier market and badly destabilize it. This occurred a number of times in San Francisco in the years after the Gold Rush. One merchant charged in December 1853 that eastern merchants, three months away by the quickest route, hedged their bets by shipping as many goods as possible without regard to anticipated demand. As a result, they had “crushed us with goods against fearfully ruinous prices, against a slowly increasing population, against good judgement and a constantly failing market.” He pleaded with them to “cease shipments, not partially but altogether for four months.” The risk of delay or, worse, the destruction of an entire shipment by some mishap would threaten a merchant with ruin, so he paid high insurance rates.22 Among many notable examples of such disasters, for example, the steamboat Bertrand, which sank in the Missouri River above Omaha on April 1, 1865, was carrying 250 tons of dry goods for several merchants in Virginia City and Missoula, Montana, to be shipped via Fort Benton. The goods that sunk with the ship constituted the full annual stock of one merchant and large portions of the annual stock of others.23
Thus many merchants became produce shippers as well as wholesalers or retailers of commercial goods as a matter of expediency, to try to reduce their debt through the sale of raw materials or investment in processing manufacturing. By creating a steady market for agricultural goods, such merchants established their town or city as a central place, and drew more settlers to the immediate hinterland and more people to town. As they shifted their attention away from supplying the receding frontier to trying to achieve a specific regional economic function as an entrepôt within the regional urban system, the “frontier town” or “frontier city” quality of the place declined.
The railroad, of course, changed all this. As Lewis Atherton notes, “no longer did the [Western] merchant buy the bulk of his supplies for the year at one time; no longer was it necessary for him to visit the seaboard; no longer did he risk the loss of his goods. The railroad brought the goods he now could order as he needed; it brought traveling salesman to him, so it was possible for him to spend his time at home attending to his business; and the greater safety of the railroad relieved him of the worries he had faced in the days of river transportation.”24
Increasingly, with these efficiencies and savings, more capital accumulated, so the advantages of the entrepôt could be translated to distant outposts, and to “warehousing cities,” serving both ends of the spectrum.25 Skipping entire stages of development, these “instant cities” seemingly appeared out of nothing, turning access to goods into city-boosting capital.26 However, these arrangements placed frontier urban economies under a heavy debt burden to the entrepôt and made them more prone to volatile boom and bust cycles.
Thus the key transition that undermined the “frontier” element of the frontier town was a deepening interaction with a “prospective hinterland,” where settlers or producers began to provide a viable exportable product that merchants could exchange for goods and then sell into the national market.27 Carl Abbott, for example, notes that the “urban history as frontier history deals with . . . the evolution of raw outposts into permanent communities with diversified economies—in short the full incorporation of” a region “into the system of modern capitalism.”28 Early in its development, the frontier city lacked any system of towns and cities across its hinterland through which it could deal with the frontier itself. Its merchants were primarily general retailers who helped assemble shipments to the frontier. The appearance of specialized wholesale merchants clearly indicated an increasing effort to achieve efficiencies through larger scale operations in order to sell goods across the hinterland. Thus the evolution of an organized trading system—which could be defined as the beginnings of a distinctive region—marked the waning of the town’s classic frontier stage.
In most cases, as Eugene Moehring notes, western frontier cities, “forged growth by promoting the growth of urban networks” and establishing a relationship with its hinterland.29 One way to define the frontier city is a city that was surrounded by a contested zone of encounter, or tentative catchment area, rather than an organized hinterland. Settled and established towns and cities have hinterlands, frontier cities and towns do not: by filling in this area with an urban system of trade and exchange consisting of secondary central places and supply depots that traded with and were dependent on the city, merchants transformed this contested realm into an urban hinterland. As they did, these secondary towns and cities—all closer to the frontier—began to act as supply depots for those heading to the frontier, co-opting frontier city merchants and eroding the city’s frontier identity.
Cities could still retain some of that identity by keeping open some channels of interaction with the frontier. Often they did this by undertaking or investing in large-scale, heavily funded ventures into the frontier that smaller places could not support. If such commercial contacts with the frontier endured, its frontier function—or at least a remnant of it—could linger on as a niche within the local and regional economy for some time, even while the interactions with the hinterland developing between the city and the frontier deepened. Thus it could retain some frontier qualities long after the physical proximity of the frontier has passed.
San Francisco, for example, quickly scaled the ranks to become an economic powerhouse for the entire region. Within a few years, places like Benecia, Sacramento, Marysville, and Stockton became distribution outposts to San Francisco’s emerging transshipment center. And within a year or two of the Gold Rush, Sacramento merchants shifted their trade from selling to miners passing through town to selling more and more wholesale merchandise to city-based businesses and mining-camp entrepreneurs. By supplying merchants in smaller towns or mining camps across the mining hinterland, they established Sacramento as a regional wholesaling entrepôt for an emergent hinterland. San Francisco merchants also connected with merchants at Portland to draw Oregon in as a hinterland that supplied wheat and lumber, which was then shipped into the interior via Sacramento.30
As William Cronon notes, Chicago likewise had a fairly brief frontier period, serving as a jumping-off point and supply depot for settlers moving into northern and central Illinois and southern Wisconsin through the early 1840s. The completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal, the establishment of a fleet of boats that traded up and down Lake Michigan, the rapid construction of railroads to the northwest, west, and south, and the development of efficiencies in handling and shipping produce and processing lumber and hogs in the late 1840s and 1850s drew vast amounts of wheat, lumber, and livestock from an ever-growing hinterland into Chicago. In return, local merchants across a vast region shifted their connections from St. Louis or Cincinnati, drawn into Chicago’s trading orbit.31
Meanwhile, Chicago’s manufacturing base, at least in the early years, developed directly out of the vast resource base that its trading advantage gained them access to. The capital accrued from trade was invested in the processing of flour, livestock, and lumber. The easy access to raw materials provided by a focus on transportation allowed for economies of scale to kick in and for entrepôt producers to out-produce those in the hinterland. This intense centralization then triggered further clustering effects, or external economies, that continued to draw manufacturing, and thus population, from ever farther away, toward the entrepôt. Such intense centralization—that brought in wheat from as far away as the Dakotas, livestock from Texas, and lumber from the northwest and upper peninsula of Michigan—was rather quickly undermined by the basic economic reality that it is cheaper to process goods closer to their point of production or their location.32 Thus as competitors in gateway cities, portals, depots, or entrepôts to the west and north drew processing toward them, Chicago took advantage of its proximity to domestic markets, workers, and capital and shifted to heavy manufacturing and service industries. Thus, in some ways, Chicago was never much of a “frontier city.” Its hinterland developed and expanded and became the basis of its growth and development too quickly to enable it to maintain close contacts with any frontier. Even so, as late as the 1870s, its merchants were active in the Rocky Mountain west, across the north country and the Montana frontier.
St. Louis demonstrates the lingering power of a once-successful frontier city across a vast trading area of the Plains. Though outflanked by Chicago railroad interests, St. Louis remained a considerable economic force throughout the century, competing head-to-head with Chicago and New York interests. Some of its merchants continued to directly supply frontier outposts in the Upper Missouri River valley and the Rockies into the late 1870s and early 1880s.33 St. Louis capitalists invested deeply in Leadville, Colorado, and for a while the St. Louis and Chicago boosters fought it out on Harrison Avenue (its Main Street named after a St. Louis investor) during the 1878–1885 boom. Eventually, investors from Iowa and Chicago drew smelting operations down to Denver and east to Omaha, and they were in turn supplanted by New Yorkers such as the Guggenheims and the Dows after 1900.34 Even so, St. Louis entrepreneurs maintained niche connections across Nebraska, Colorado, and the Dakotas long after Chicago had taken control of both. For example, even though Lincoln, Nebraska, was, by the 1890s, a secondary regional wholesaling satellite of Chicago, a number of entrepreneurs maintained direct St. Louis connections via railroads built southeast, into Missouri. Thus St. Louis’s “frontier” identity lingered well into the 1880s since it retained a key role in steamboating to the northern Great Plains and continued to trade by railroad with towns across the Rockies and in the Southwest.35
Likewise, Seattle emerged in the 1890s as the terminus of the Great Northern Railway and thus an extension of capital and trade from Chicago and Minneapolis. It also took much of the northward ocean traffic from San Francisco to Portland. The Klondike gold rush of 1897–1898, the Nome gold rush in 1899–1900, and the establishment of Anchorage in 1915 transformed Seattle into the gateway to Alaska. As such it maintained elements of its “frontier city” ethos well into the twentieth century, with elements remaining today, as Matthew Klingle has explained elsewhere in this volume.
Each of these frontier cites varied dramatically in its experiences and history, according to its geographical location, access to natural resources, the presence of competing towns or cities, and especially the resources and technology of communication and transportation available to them. As Carl Abbott has noted, “more than anything else, cities are vast devices for exchanging information, and changing technologies of transportation and communication have keyed the differences among different urban areas.”36 Over time and space, frontier cities that emerged as termini or entrepôts in North America became more quickly integrated into the contemporary urban and economic system and thus were much more dynamic and volatile.
Elements of the frontier milieu lingered in each place for years after the city had technically ceased being a frontier city. The cities maintained aggressive transshipping sectors and many warehouses, focused on extractive manufacturing, and invested broadly in their hinterlands, with a lot of speculation and exaggeration still in the air. This speculative environment brought young men, very diverse ethnically and racially. Their demographic was united more in their avarice, and their quests as speculators, investors, confidence men, dreamers, and entrepreneurs.
Investors relied on the other groups of newcomers: miners, sailors, fishermen, cowboys, steamboatmen, longshoremen, hunters, trappers, and cattlemen, as well as cutthroats, gamblers, card sharks, blackguards, ruffians, desperadoes, vigilantes, sporting men, and dudes. Frontier cites were quite masculine spaces where men competed, jostled, and jousted to establish a position, a reputation, and defend their honor. Gamblers, saloon keepers, and prostitutes openly flouted the law. This floating population would differ from subsequent streams of immigrants who came to more developed frontier cities by their association with the “frontier ethos” and their desire to be part of the ragged edge, politically, economically, and socially. Their presence becomes an essential marker of frontier status because these folks knew what they sought and where to find it—and how to quickly abandon one place for another as the currents of development shifted. Through their own networks of information, they seemed to show up at just the right time hoping to strike it rich.
This was the experience in Jamestown, Virginia, in the 1610s, in Cincinnati in the 1800s, in Keokuk in the 1830s and 1840s, in Dodge City and Leadville in the 1870s, in Seattle in the 1880s, in Anchorage in the 1910s and 1920s, and various interior frontier places throughout the twentieth century.37 As late as the 1970s and 1980s, in Gillette, Wyoming, Alexandra Fuller notes, that “the inconvenient biology of human bodies creating logistical and law enforcement problems for the communities that host the oil-field workers—food and porta-potties, beds and trailers, drugs and sex”—in yet another boomtown.38
Eventually, as prospects declined, the boosters of these frontier cities would move on, as would the majority of workers, vagrants, and adventurers. The “bachelor community” aspect of such places would be balanced by an increased number of women.39 So too, the skewed class structure would even out with a small elite, a midsized middle class, and, in many places (especially in the West), a large working-class presence. In time, manufacturing, which at first was extractive, either atrophied or shifted toward the production of capital goods. Steadily, the frontier milieu declined and disappeared—though not completely, allowing remaining boosters to cash in on its last “frontier asset”40 or two, cultivating a public culture of museums, historic sites, annual festivals, parades, amusement parks, and companies that sustained the images and myths of the city’s “Frontier Days.”
Such festivals are held in numerous western towns and cities, including Prescott, Arizona; Cheyenne, Wyoming, Virginia City, Nevada; and Calgary, Alberta. Ironically, the brevity of these annual events, and the mobility of their participants who pass through town—often traveling on a festival circuit like merchants, miners, and workers have done throughout the city’s history—evoke the fleeting and volatile nature of the original frontier city they commemorate. Yet the recurrence of these events year after year as long-standing traditions in the city’s booster ethos, also reminds one, that the classic frontier city was less an urban “spearhead” on the frontier than a city behind the frontier that maintained connections to it, even after it had established regular systemic interactions with other towns and cities across its hinterland and the national urban system.
By nature, the frontier city is a volatile, unstable, and thus, to some, it seems a paradoxical urban place. Lacking sufficient systemic support, it could exist one moment and literally be gone the next. Most frontier cities have been moving targets, either developing into more mature urban places before one can grasp their character, or stagnating, or even disappearing. As a result, the frontier city remains, in many if not most cases, elusive. And yet, the impact of the presence or proximity of a frontier—defined generally as a zone of encounter across which intercultural and international relations remained in flux—often marked itself so deeply on the early economic, social, political, and cultural character of frontier urban places that developed into a regional entrepôts, that they could continue as frontier cites so long as they maintained some direct contact with the moving frontier.