The Frontier Bulletin
1891 · Population Density Mapping · Work 694 of 1,871
A large hand-coloured working map of 1891 pinned to a sloping drawing table in the drafting room of a government statistical office in Washington in spring, seen from the side at a flat angle along the table so that the sheet runs away from the lens, the sheet about one and a half metres wide, the land from the eastern ocean to the western ocean filled with flat washes of ink, the right-hand eastern third solid dark brown, the middle fading through umber, the left-hand western half bare cream paper with a few scattered small islands of pale ochre, a narrow margin of bare paper around the land, a plain wooden straightedge lying across the sheet, porcelain saucers of brown ink, a sable brush, brass dividers, a draughtsman seen from behind in shirtsleeves and waistcoat bending over the western half with the brush, even daylight from a skylight, plain plastered walls.
- What it was used for
- The bulletin was an advance release of the United States Census Office on the 1890 census: Extra Census Bulletin No. 2 of 20 April 1891. It published a letter from the Superintendent of the Census, Robert Percival Porter, to Interior Secretary John W. Noble, dated 10 April 1891. Such bulletins existed to issue single results long before the bound volumes were ready. The Census Bureau counted land with fewer than two inhabitants per square mile as unsettled; the census reports, Turner wrote, treated the frontier as the margin of settlement with a density of two or more to the square mile. Almost 63 million people lived in the United States in 1890.
- What was new
- What was new was not the calculation but what was missing from it: a line. Up to and including 1880, the letter said, the country had had a frontier of settlement; the unsettled area was now so broken into by isolated bodies of settlement that one could hardly speak of a frontier line. An administrative release thereby declared a category of its own statistics no longer representable. The barb: the historian Frederick Jackson Turner put that sentence at the head of his paper two years later, delivered on 12 July 1893 at the meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago during the World's Columbian Exposition, and turned a density figure into an interpretation of history. A line dropped from the census reports became a national narrative, precisely because the reports had dropped it.
What the sources leave open: The bulletin number and both dates come from a footnote by Calvin DeArmond Davis in the Indiana Magazine of History. The bulletin itself was not consulted; a Census Bureau page dates the statement simply to 1890 and does not name the publication. The wording of the sentence is paraphrased here, not quoted, because the versions in the sources consulted differ in spelling.