Turner’s thesis not only erased the multiculturalism and the mechanics of trading in the regions where cultures met, it also erased everyone but white men. In Turner’s telling, much like in the vision of Young America in the 1840s, slavery was “an incident,” and not a terribly important one at that. There were no people of color in Turner’s version of the country. Enslaved African Americans lived on the fringes, and there were no free blacks. Neither were there Chinese or Mexicans. The immigrants who became Americans on Turner’s frontier were Germans and Scotch-Irish. And there were no women.
