“Manifest Destiny” was a phrase used by leaders and politicians in the second half of the 19th century to explain the westward expansion by the United States. American settlers were destined to conquer the west.

Washington is not a place to live in. The rents are high, the food is bad, the dust is disgusting and the morals are deplorable. Go West, young man, go West and grow up with the country.

Our most basic common link is that we all inhabit this small planet. We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future. And we are all mortal.

The idea of a “frontier”, of a place that is an edge between the known and the unknown, the settled and the wild, has a prominent place in American history. Sometimes it is a particular territory, such as the North American continent west of the Missouri River. It can be the idea of a place, something more ambiguous: a frontier is a place where you are on your own, where the rules are not yet made. The frontier can be a mental realm of new ideas, ideas about space and time and the origins of the world.
For many Americans, what was “the frontier” is, geographically, that land west of the Missouri River that is characterized as dry, perhaps even arid, where crops grow with a struggle and where cattle range freely, searching for water and feed.