America's Frontier Culture: Three Essays

"Ray A. Billington has often been called the "dean" of Western historians. In America's Frontier Culture: Three Essays, he studies the three-century-long process of westering that forged the American characteristics of resourcefulness, individualism and democracy, and upward social mobility." "The American Frontiersman" looks at the mountain men of the fur trade who succumbed to the wilderness world in which they found themselves and were forced to begin the climb upward to civilization once more. In "The Frontier and American Culture" the author suggests that although many backwoodsmen seceded from civilization, others made a heroic effort to perpetuate their culture. And in "Cowboys, Indians, and the Land of Promise" Billington reviews the world-wide myths of the American West - its violence and lawlessness on the one hand and its ripe abundance on the other.

RAY A. BILLINGTON served as the first president of the Western History Association and was a teacher of history for many years. He was the author of a number of other works, including Frederick Jackson Turner, Allan Nevins on History, America’s Frontier Story, and Westward Expansion.