The Backwash of the Frontier: The Impact 
of the Indian on American Culture’ 
By A. Irving HALLOWELL 
Department of Anthropology, University of Pennsylvania 
[With 8 plates] 
AurnoucH Frederick Jackson Turner and his disciples have made 
little point of the influence of the American Indian upon our civiliza- 
tion, it is the Indian’s continuing presence throughout our whole 
colonial and national history that has given many aspects of our cul- 
ture aspecial coloring. In this respect, our national experience differs 
from that of any western European nation, though our culture is 
continuous with that of Europe. Recently, Bernard De Voto has 
stressed the manifold nature of this unique historical situation and its 
neglect by historians ?: 
Most American history has been written as if history were a function solely of 
white culture—in spite of the fact that till well into the nineteenth century the 
Indians were one of the principal determinants of historical events. ‘Those 
of us who work in frontier history—which begins at the tidal beaches and when 
the sixteenth century begins—are repeatedly nonplused to discover how little 
has been done for us in regard to the one force bearing on our field that was 
active everywhere. Disregarding Parkman’s great example, American his- 
torians have made shockingly little effort to understand the life, the societies, 
the cultures, the thinking, and the feeling of the Indians, and disastrously little 
effort to understand how all these affected white men and their societies. 
It is discernible Indian influences of this sort that have formed 
what I have called “the backwash of the frontier,” fertile silt carried 
on the currents and eddies left by the turmoil on the borderlands. 
Many other factors besides frontier conditions were involved in the 
further development of these influences—factors too complex to 
analyze here. And the problem is complicated by the extreme di- 
versity of America’s reactions to the Indian and his cultures; by the 
manner in which Indian influences have been mediated, the varying 
1 Reprinted, by permission of the copyright owners, the Regents of the University of 
Wisconsin, from The Frontier in Perspective (Walker D, Wyman and Clifton B. Kroeber, 
editors), 1957, the University of Wisconsin Press. 
2 Joseph K. Howard, “Strange Empire,” p. 8. New York. 1952. 
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