The Concept of the Wageworkers' Frontier: A Framework for Future Research

Abstract

Historians have long accorded unskilled and semiskilled laborers a significant role in the early industrial development of the American West. Loggers, miners, migratory harvest hands and construction workers, and even wage-earning cowboys appear in numerous books and articles on such traditional themes as the forest, mining, and ranching frontiers. They figure prominently in histories of radical labor and industrial violence in Rocky Mountain mining camps, California's factories in the field, and North Pacific timber towns.' But few historians have systematically studied this class of western labor as a distinct group, explored the range of experiences that cut across occupational and national boundaries, or asked whether such workers possessed attitudes and outlooks significantly different from their counterparts in the East or