Reading Response week 5

Well, here I am back again.
This week I did something a little different and actually printed out all the readings thinking that it would be better for class discussion, but then I got sick and wasn't even there to show off all my paper.
Don't worry I used front and back as well as multiple sheets per page, yet I still had some issues doing it; I hate to waste paper when it is not needed.

Onto the meat of it...
From Maps to Myth: The Census, Turner, and the Idea of the Frontier, think that this article displays what a clever idea Turner had in tracking the western frontier population with the census. What is interesting to me is that this was used in a way to encourage growth in those regions where there was fewer people. Walker is credited with creating the "technical concepts of the frontier and the frontier line to track settlement" and how improvements in map making really helped to collect the data they were after- what an exciting time that must have been to be a part of the maps that came from new techniques and all this vast largely unsettled land of the frontier.
I think one of the more interesting bits of information that I gathered from this reading is that until the 1980 census, only taxpaying Indians coutned. Now, this is something that is really not that surprising when I think about the situation and how Indians were treated and viewed, but to not consider them as part of a population that is occupying the same land in which you are gathering information? It is as though their existance is not being recognized and by not counting them in the census implies that the land that they are settling is not really occupied and is up for grabs.
Okay, there were a few points in the readings that I cluttered up the margins and I have decided to put, for your veiwing and academic pleasure, them here for you to comment on and think about, some of what would be below, is already above (got it?):
"Americans believed that the widely dispersed Spanish missionaries, British fur traders, adn Indian hunter-gatherers were underexploiting the west" image that, if only we had actually seem the value in that then,
Richard Henry Dana describes Mexicans as "idle, thriftless people" who "make nothing for themselves...in the hands of an enterprising people, what a country this might be!"
Well I agree with him, we have made something grand out of the west and the entire United States, but we have also a lot of large negative statistics that make our enterprising mindset not exactly desirable, and if we had done things differently like incorporate the ways of the "underexploiting Indians" with the enterprising mentality what a beauty we might have been.

"Spanish and Indian lands became targets for expansion."
"The frontier seemed a national embarassement: the census felt challanged to make the United States look more advanced."
and this is my personal favorite...
"The century had witnessesd our development into a great and powerful nation; it has witnessed the spread of settlement across the continent until not less than 1,947, 280 square miles have been redeemed from the wilderness and brought into the service of man."
Woah! Isn't that special that we could save all that milage from wilderness!
I can't help but wonder what those same people would say about our current environmental issues and mans involvment, would their opinions and goals remain the same?