<P> Following the eleventh U.S. Census taken in 1890 the superintendent announced that there was no longer a clear line of advancing settlement, and hence no longer a frontier in the continental United States . Historian Frederick Jackson Turner seized upon the statistic to announce the end of the era in which the frontier process shaped the American character . </P> <P> Fresh farmland was increasingly hard to find after 1890--although the railroads advertised some in eastern Montana . Bicha shows that nearly 600,000 American farmers sought cheap land by moving to the Prairie frontier of the Canadian West from 1897 to 1914 . However, about two - thirds of them grew disillusioned and returned to the U.S. The admission of Oklahoma as a state in 1907 upon the combination of the Oklahoma Territory and the last remaining Indian Territory, and the Arizona and New Mexico territories as states in 1912, did not end the frontier . These contained plenty of unoccupied land, as did the territory of Alaska . Nevertheless, the ethos and storyline of the "American frontier" had passed . </P> <P> Scores of Turner students became professors in history departments in the western states, and taught courses on the frontier . Scholars have debunked many of the myths of the frontier, but they nevertheless live on in community traditions, folklore and fiction . In the 1970s a historiographical range war broke out between the traditional frontier studies, which stress the influence of the frontier on all of American history and culture, and the "New Western History" which narrows the geographical and time framework to concentrate on the trans - Mississippi West after 1850 . It avoids the word "frontier" and stresses cultural interaction between white culture and groups such as Indians and Hispanics . History professor William Weeks of the University of San Diego argues that in this "New Western History" approach: </P> <P> It is easy to tell who the bad guys are--they are almost invariably white, male, and middle - class or better, while the good guys are almost invariably non-white, non-male, or non-middle class...Anglo - American civilization...is represented as patriarchal, racist, genocidal, and destructive of the environment, in addition to hypocritically betrayed the ideals on which it supposedly is built . </P>

Americas goal to establish land coast to coast also known as manifest destiny