Jackson Turner delivered an address destined to revolutionize American historiography.1 In the frontier West, he asserted, there arose a race of men who were independent, aggressive, and eminently practical; their character was self-reliant, vigorous, and independent in spirit; yet, paradoxically, democracy and co-operation flourished on the frontier. The Turner thesis has not gone unchallenged. The West, some now claim, did not alone produce democracy; in fact, most democratic movements appeared first in the East.2 Recent scholarship has also traced the belief in the virtuous agrarian, honest and free, as a recurrent theme in American literature., Americans have conceived of the frontiersman as the Hero of Nature even after the age of the pioneer had long since passed. A variation of this theory holds that the American farmer has capitalized on an agrarian myth in times of trouble.4 In prosperous years the farmer has gloried in the name of independent; in poor seasons he has begged for government aid. Clearly implied, often stated, is his belief that the government owes him a remedy because he is the truly symbolic figure of America, the personification of our national heritage and the instrument of our civilization in its march from sea to shining sea. Few today dispute the fact that the West has shaped the American character to greater or lesser degree. Turner, Smith, and Hofstadter all believe that national ideals reflected what the frontier was or what people thought it was. They all hold that the western experience was of durable significance in our intellectual history. Yet there is no agreement as to whether the westerner was individualist or dependent, whether he felt he was fighting his own or his country's battles in his new environment, and whether or not he relied heavily upon the government in his hegira. This paper attempts a partial answer to these problems by an examination of the governors' messages to the legislatures of two geographically and culturally different western territories and states. Arizona and Oregon both were frontier states in the sense that they were settled by pioneers who had crossed long stretches of our continent. Geographically, both are far distant from the national capital. Their environment is dissimilar. It is hoped that the legislative messages of the governor, the official responsible for the