by Michael Burke

Created on: May 15, 2008

The lure of the frontier in American Literature

There remains yet today an aura of mystery and romance regarding the frontier days in American literature. Simply the mention of the frontier days stimulates our minds to wonder how things must have been for the pioneers as they traversed and settled this great nation that we call home. The hardships that they faced in their travels and daily survival routine are impossible for us to imagine yet I think that all of us struggle to understand just how the pioneers overcame the obstacle that lay in their path every step along the way. Many of us, myself included, visualize how we may have been able to face the odds and conquer the challenges that our ancestors faced daily. If we are honest with ourselves we question our mental and physical toughness and realize that we may never have survived the frontier.

Literature about life on the frontier causes us to look deep inside of our very souls and allows us to somehow travel back in time. Magically, we put ourselves in the shoes of the very people that the great authors of days on the frontier create for us in their works. When we slip into those shoes we transform ourselves into the very beings that the author is describing. We are no longer the people that we know as ourselves to truly be living our sedentary lives boxed up in office cubicles and traveling to and from the same destination day after day in our air-conditioned hybrid vehicles.

As we slip back in time we become people riding in covered wagons or on horseback. We don't travel the same path day after day. Instead we travel down a path that few if any others have ever traveled trying to cross a river without a bridge in our attempt to reach a mountain visible far on the horizon anxious to learn what lays on the other side. As we descend down the far side of the mountain into the valley below we are encouraged knowing that our future awaits us and if it is not in that valley it must surely lay in the next valley beyond the next mountain. Wrapped in our frontier persona we don't dread the next days travel as we do the daily commute to work the next day. Instead, we look forward to the journey ahead hopeful that the lives that we dream of and a future of hope are just a few more miles down the unbeaten path.

With each word that we read from the novels of the frontier we gain more confidence in our own ability to overcome the challenges that we know the characters are going to face. We see ourselves clearing

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