Retracing lines that helped define America

From James Fenimore Cooper's Natty Bumppo to Owen Wister's "Virginian," to all of John Wayne's big-sky heroes, it has been the space they filled, the frontier, which remains an American self-image.

But however fixed the image of "frontier" may be in the national imagination, Andro Linklater, a British writer on American subjects, argues in "The Fabric of America" that it is "border" that really matters in defining America.

And he has a whipping boy: the iconic historian of the America West, Frederick Jackson Turner.

Turner, who grew up in a Wisconsin frontier town , had argued in a paper at the 1893 meeting of the American Historical Association that "the existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance of American settlement westward, explain American development" -- political, social, and economic. (The paper is available in a collection of his essays, "The Frontier in American History," from the University of Arizona Press . )

Not so, argues Linklater. Taking issue with Turner's suggestion that "the frontier is productive of individualism," Linklater writes that "this image of libertarian self-expression bears no relation to reality. What made the settlement of the West such an iconic American experience was precisely that it took place under the umbrella of the U.S. government."

Linklater builds his argument around the career of Andrew Ellicott , who between 1784 and 1817 set down boundary lines through the unmapped wilderness. Even without the political implications of the boundaries he defined, the account of the work itself is a stirring one.

"Climbing through steep hillsides covered in pine and oak forests," writes Linklater, "past gigantic slabs of fallen rock, they had run their lines, random and true, due west across every obstacle." And since the lines depended on precise astronomical observations, every 20 miles Ellicott's team would "[carry] the tent serving as an observatory to the top of the highest summit together with the zenith sector, the clocks, and the compasses so that sun- and star-sights could be made."

Those surveying expeditions were lengthy affairs, one of which kept him away from his home and growing family for more than three years .

But what they produced were Pennsylvania's southern border with Virginia and its northern one with New York giving it access to Lake Erie; the national borders along the Mississippi River -- just three years before the Louisiana Purchase made them moot -- and the 45th parallel between Canada and the United States; as well as the borders of the District of Columbia.

Where "the boundary-makers' lines ran," Linklater writes, "they introduced government, law, and taxes to areas where little or none had existed before." And even Turner's frontier individualists, he writes, made certain to register their lands with the appropriate government agency. "The tax-gatherer might not have been liked, but payment of taxes then as now has the compensating benefit of guaranteeing legal possession."

Ellicott's various boundary-makings brought him into the thicket of several conspiracies in the western borderlands.

The most notorious of them, in 1805, involved General James Wilkinson and former vice president Aaron Burr -- whose actual role was questioned in Nancy Isenberg's recent biography, "Fallen Founder" -- in a plot to create a western empire.

The significance of the conspiracy, writes Linklater, "lies precisely in its failure." With access to the Mississippi River having been secured though one of Ellicott's early boundary-makings, "whatever their previous inclinations," Linklater writes, "the settlers had become unmistakably Americanized."

Boundaries were crucial elements in the arguments over the extension of slavery into the western territories, and Linklater provides a useful account from the perspective of political geography.

He also carries the story into the present, noting that "in the era of terrorism and mass immigration . . . the older meaning of frontier [now] draws public attention, the line that delineates an area of sovereignty" -- a defensive wall to crouch behind, not the expansive, onward-looking frontier of Frederick Jackson Turner.

Michael Kenney is a freelance writer who lives in Cambridge.