from an American Farmer, he spoke for one kind of American popular awareness during the period. We are people of cultivators, declared Crevecoeur. He went on suggest the terrors that lurked in the American forest when farmers bade farewell the plough. Here men were no better than carnivorous animals of superior rank, living on the flesh of wild animals when they can catch them. Their new manners produced, Crevecoeur argued, a strange sort of lawless profligacy; eating of wild meat tended to alter their temper. ' Crevecoeur's language suggested an occult connection between the wildness of the hunter's existence on the frontier and an answering wildness in the American spirit. The frontier evoked the possibilities of human existence which life in civility had carefully contained. The frontier, with its wild condition, beckoned humans let go the barriers that centuries of civilization had erected and approach the limits of inner and outer identity as human beings. In short, the frontier held out an invitation the ecstasy of being out of control. By the early-to-mid years of the nineteenth century, Crevecoeur' s analysis was still persuasive, and, if anything, popular consciousness of the era had grown more intense in its fascination with the dark mysteries of the wilderness. The frontier had become symbol for Americans in both the East and the West, and, as symbol, it stood for what actually happened western people in the wilderness and what was imagined have happened these people by both easterners and westerners. It had become fantasy which revealed these Americans hidden aspects of