The frontier ideal and its test by reality

The frontier ideal and its test by reality organize the contrast between William Andrews’s hope of finding freedom in the wilderness and the material, social, and economic conditions he encounters there. The open West first appears to him as an answer to the limitations of settled life, even as the journey reveals that this imagined realm is neither empty nor exempt from human need, exploitation, and change.

The Wilderness as a Promise

William Andrews arrives at Butcher’s Crossing carrying an inward expectation rather than a settled practical aim. When J.D. McDonald warns him against associating with hunters, William Andrews struggles to explain what has brought him west. Looking beyond the village toward the prairie, he understands his desire as a search for freedom, beauty, hope, and strength: qualities he feels are missing from the intimate world he has left. The landscape seems to offer a source from which that world might be renewed, as prairie roots draw nourishment from dark, fertile earth. Yet even as he reaches for language to describe this desire, he recognizes that any name would be inadequate to the wilderness he seeks.

His imagination sets the western plain against Boston. In the midst of the prairie, he recalls crowded streets, smoke-stained buildings, and the Charles River carrying the city’s waste toward the bay. The contrast is not simply between country and city: the city represents a world that, in his view, has retreated from its own origins, while the prairie seems to renew itself from them. Before he can complete his explanation to J.D. McDonald, he realizes that words cannot resolve the distance between the ideal he feels and the particular land before him.

That longing has an earlier history. At Harvard University, William Andrews had sometimes left the voices of chapel and classroom for the meadows and woods beyond Cambridge. In solitude, he felt the college’s mediocrity and constraint dissolve; a passage from a reading of Ralph Waldo Emerson gave shape to an experience in which he seemed to disappear as an individual while perceiving everything around him. The prairies around Butcher’s Crossing become a larger setting for this hoped-for spiritual encounter. He wanders through them as if seeking a temple more fitting than either King’s Chapel or Jackson’s Saloon. The opening reflection on living things appearing fulfilled, alongside the attribution of Nature to Emerson, establishes a related expectation that nature may offer a form of serenity or insight. The journey will test what that expectation can bear.

Crossing the Imagined Boundary

The river near Butcher’s Crossing acquires symbolic force before William Andrews has properly seen it. In his mind it marks the division between the town and the freedom of the wilderness. Standing above its shallow, muddy run and deeper brown-green pools, he recognizes that the hunting expedition arranged with Miller is partly a pretext: business is not what truly draws him west. He imagines himself departing in freedom toward an apparently uninterrupted horizon, and believes that whatever towns he might encounter would not divert him from the movement away from the city.

That conviction does not make the frontier a stable destination. William Andrews watches the village from his hotel window, turning his gaze from its irregular, creature-like pulse toward the western horizon. The horizon recalls his childhood view across Massachusetts Bay, when the immensity of the Atlantic overwhelmed him. Now the prairie offers another immensity. In the heat, its line blurs into the sky; at night, the darkness seems to make the village contract, and he feels momentarily as though he might fall into space. A lantern, a match, or a lit doorway restores the small human world around him. The frontier’s attraction thus includes an unsettling loss of orientation, not only the promise of release.

The first days of travel also erode the romance through the body. William Andrews has never ridden for more than a few hours at a stretch; by midday his thighs are chafed, his backside numb against the saddle, and his head throbs in the heat. Later, lying in damp grass beside the river, he imagines that the plains still ahead hold mysteries beyond what he has seen. But the physical discomfort is already part of that encounter. The wilderness is not an image that can be contemplated without cost: it presses against the rider’s skin, exhausts him, and makes the distance between expectation and experience tangible.

Land, Labor, and the People Already There

J.D. McDonald offers a competing account of what the frontier is for. He describes Butcher’s Crossing as a village sustained by hides and populated largely by hunters, while presenting men with plans as the people who will make the country something more. He expects the railroad to change the value of the land. His outlook differs from William Andrews’s spiritual search, but both initially imagine the West through what it might become: a realm of renewal for one, an opportunity for development for the other.

The journey makes clear that the landscape is already inhabited and traversed. The party encounters a lone traveler with his family and an ailing mule, as well as five wary men bound for Colorado to claim an undeveloped mine. At a promontory where rough shelters have been dug into the slope, children play on the hard ground while several Indigenous people sit near the entrances. The children stop to watch the passing party; the adults do not return Miller’s greeting. Miller dismisses them as river Indians and speaks of them with contempt. The scene briefly brings into view people and ways of living that the hunters’ language of empty country and future opportunity leaves at the margins. The frontier is not simply open space awaiting the plans of newcomers.

The railroad gives this transformation a visible form. William Andrews sees its parallel lines crossing the plain and running toward the first hills. Miller recognizes the rails, dismounts, and traces the smooth steel with his fingers before looking toward the mountains. The moment connects the expedition’s remote route to an infrastructure extending across the country. Later, J.D. McDonald says the line will pass fifty miles north of his land. The railroad is therefore both a material change in the region and a test of his confidence that its arrival will make his property valuable.

Scarcity and the Limits of Control

The most immediate test of the frontier ideal comes not from a grand revelation but from the expedition’s failure to find water. After filling their containers, Miller warns the men not to eat too many dry biscuits because they will worsen their thirst. Fred Schneider asks whether Miller knows where the water is. Miller relies on a remembered pile of stones and predicts that they will reach a stream after another half day. Fred Schneider recognizes the possibility they are lost; Miller insists that continued travel in the direction of the setting sun will bring them to water. His confidence cannot make the landscape legible or guarantee its resources.

As the party continues through the night and into the next morning, the drought registers in the animals’ bodies. The oxen move slowly, their breathing grows labored, and their coats lose their sheen as their ribs and flanks become more pronounced. Fred Schneider warns that their tongues will swell until they cannot both pull and breathe. The men themselves are also weakened by thirst. When they work to moisten the oxen’s mouths, they lift each animal’s head while Miller wets its stretched skin and swollen tongue with a damp handkerchief. It takes nearly an hour to tend them all; the remaining water in the barrel amounts to only about an inch and a half. Survival depends on careful, exhausting improvisation, not on the freedom William Andrews once associated with leaving the settled world.

This scarcity also disrupts his inward attempt to master the landscape through perception. Resting beneath the wagon, he sees the uniform plain and the horizon seem to pitch toward him. He presses his body against the dry soil, separates the grass with an uncertain hand, and waits for the terror of the apparent abyss to subside. Even his thirst becomes something he tries to push from awareness. The scene does not turn the wilderness into a moral antagonist; rather, it shows how little human attention or will can command in a country whose scale and conditions exceed them.

The Frontier Ideal Reconsidered

J.D. McDonald’s later speech makes the conflict between aspiration and outcome explicit. He recalls William Andrews’s expectations of discovery and rejects the belief that life necessarily contains something waiting to be found. In his bleak account, people are raised on successive forms of deception and may only recognize, too late, that they have lost the chance to do what they imagined possible. William Andrews resists this judgment, but the details J.D. McDonald invokes are difficult to dismiss: the hunters killed three or four thousand bison, packed the hides, and left the animals’ bodies to rot; the hides are now spoiled, and the expedition’s wagon is destroyed. The surviving residue is labor, a few calluses, and the memory of a dead man.

The failure of the hide trade sharpens the irony. Hunters now sell bison meat to the railroad company while leaving the skins to decay where the animals were butchered. J.D. McDonald calculates that the discarded meat could have brought nearly five cents per pound. The expedition’s work, once organized around the market value of hides, has become waste even as a different commercial use for the animals emerges. The railroad does not fulfill the simple promise of progress that J.D. McDonald attached to it; it changes the terms of exploitation and exposes the cost of what the hunters left behind.

The frontier ideal is therefore neither simply affirmed nor erased. William Andrews’s longing is sincere, and the plains do give him experiences of immensity and estrangement unavailable in the town or college. But the journey refuses to let spiritual expectation stand apart from bodily need, existing communities, commercial hunting, and technological change. The land that seemed to promise a return to origins is crossed by tracks, claimed for mines, used for trade, and made dangerous by the scarcity of water. Its decisive test is the distance between imagining the wilderness as a source of freedom and encountering a place that cannot be reduced to that purpose.