"The Undiscovered Country," Paul Andrew Hutton

 I found it instructive, after I had finished the book, to read Frederick Jackson Turner’s nine page essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History:” 

https://nationalhumanitiescenter.org/pds/gilded/empire/text1/turner.pdf. 

 

Sydney M. Williams

 

Burrowing into Books

The Undiscovered Country, Paul Andrew Hutton

September 27, 2025

 

“ ‘The existence of an area of free land, its continuous recession, and the advance

of American settlement westward, explain American development,’ he boldly declared.” 

                                                                                                Paul Andrew Hutton

                                                                                                The Undiscovered Country

                                                                                                Quoting Professor Frederick Jackson Turner 

 

Paul Andrew Hutton provides a sweeping history of the American story, as people moved east to west – from British General Edward Braddocks defeat in 1755 in the Battle of the Monongahela, in Pennsylvania, to the murder of Lakota Sioux Chief Sitting Bull and the subsequent Wounded Knee massacre on Porcupine Creek in South Dakota in 1890 when U.S. Army troops killed about 300 Lakota Indians.  

 

During those 135 years, the European population in what became the United States rose from roughly 1.4 million to 63 million. By the early-mid 18^th Century the Native American population had already been decimated by disease and battle, both brought by Europeans over the previous two hundred years. It is estimated that their populations had declined to about 3 million from over 10 million. 

 

The reader is introduced (or re-introduced to those of us who read stories of the west in our youth), to Indian Chiefs Red Eagle, Tecumseh, Mangas Colorados, his son-in-law Cochise, Geronimo and Sitting Bull, as well as to frontiersmen Daniel Boone, Davy Crockett, Kit Carson, John Frémont, Annie Oakley and William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. We read of the French and Indian War (1754-1763), the War for American Independence, the War of 1812, the Alamo in 1836, the annexation of Texas in 1845, the Mexican-American War of 1846-48, the American Civil War, and innumerable wars against American Indians. We travel to western Pennsylvania and Ohio, and into Kentucky on the Wilderness Road. We climb over the Cumberland Gap into Tennessee, and across the western reaches of the country on the Santa Fe and Oregon Trails, and we witness the completion of the transcontinental railroad at Promontory Summit, Utah in 1869. 

 

Hutton subtitles the book “Triumph, Tragedy and the Shaping of the American West.” The tragedy in the story is that these lands were “rightfully owned and still controlled by a host of Native nations.” However, the relentless emigration of Europeans kept pushing the frontier west. The results were thousands of individual tragedies, the enslavement, massacres and mutilation of Native Indians, as well as of the men, women and children who chose the open spaces – and assumed the risk – the frontier offered.

 

Mr. Hutton tempers those who revere western heroes and tones down those who condemn them. He writes of events, letting the reader draw his or her judgements. The history of mankind is one of war, of conquest and subjugation, of the rise and fall of civilizations. And there are no Queensbury Rules in war or battle, which is always brutal and unfair to the innocent. Certainly, there were none on the American frontier.

 

Professor Hutton is the heir to Frederick Jackson Turner (1861-1932), best known for his collection of essays, The Frontier in American History (1920), which includes the seminal essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” He argued it was the availability of an undeveloped frontier that shaped American democracy and character. Hutton’s story tells of how uncovering that “undiscovered country,” through triumph and tragedy, pushed the frontier west and helped establish a great nation.