The Frontier Mind

Kentucky, the first territory settled beyond the Appalachian Mountains, serves as Arthur K. Moore's case study for how early American culture took shape. He argues that the mentality of the frontier formed there first, and that the forces which later drove the settlement of the American West grew out of that place. Moore traces how the Kentucky frontiersman became a vivid, romanticized legend, a figure surrounded by myths that historians have struggled to strip away.

Moore disputes the widely held view that frontier people possessed unusual intellectual and moral strength. He challenges the flattering portraits offered by both the men's contemporaries and later writers, and he takes particular aim at Frederick Jackson Turner's influential argument that these largely unschooled settlers produced significant advances in government, schooling, religion, and literature. Moore asks how such people, rough and cut off from the main currents of Western civilization, could have generated the mental and spiritual resources needed to build a distinctive culture.

Instead of the generosity and reasonableness often attributed to people who lived close to nature, Moore finds frontier society marked by demagoguery, rigid sectarian feeling, materialism, and hostility toward learning. The book is written for readers interested in American history and in how the settlement of the West is understood, and it is meant to prompt them to reconsider long-held assumptions, even if they do not come away persuaded.