The American migration westward can of course be studied in various ways. It has been examined as social and political reality— the movement of population into new areas and the establishment of farms, towns and governments. And it has been studied as myth— how men thought and felt about the presence of a vast open space to the West and about the settlement of this space. In recent years this concern with the myth of the West has broadened to include the study of interpretations of the frontier by historians in order to discover what these interpretations can tell us about American beliefs and values at the moments these historians flourished. The assumption in this last endeavor is that except perhaps in their garrulousness historians are basically no different from other folk and that their ideas about the past can often tell us more about their own than about past times.

I would like to pursue this preoccupation with the mythic nature of historical interpretations of the West by concerning myself with the diffusion of professional historical notions about the frontier into the popular mind. An excellent opportunity for the study of this kind of transmission of ideas exists in Frank Norris's beliefs about the West. A Californian and one of the major young writers of the 1890s, Norris engaged himself with the subject of the West in his novel The Octopus, published in 190I, and in a series of essays written during 1901 and 1902, just before his death. Although Norris spent four years at a university, he nevertheless was a confirmed anti- intellectual. In most areas of thought of his time— religion, economics and politics, for example— he is more a guide to popular than “advanced” ideas. Norris's concept of the West therefore draws upon the theories of professional historians of his own time— sometimes directly and sometimes obliquely— yet is above all a popular concept. That is, his ideas reveal the tendency in popular belief to blend opposing streams of thought into a single powerful unity in which paradoxes are ignored because of the emotional attraction of the emergent synthesis. Indeed, so powerful and pervasive was this synthesis in Norris's case that his view of the frontier continues as the popular view into our own day.