The Contested Frontier and the Cowboy Myth

The frontier: a space of endless opportunity, where rugged individuals tamed the wilderness and built a true democracy. This is how historian Frederick Jackson Turner pictured the westward movement across the North American continent in “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” a seminal speech he delivered before the American Historical Association in 1893. The text not only had a major impact on academia, but also on U.S. society in general. Politicians and artists picked up on the term. President John F. Kennedy called his program the New Frontier, while the creators of the science fiction series Star Trek designated outer space as the final frontier. When Star Trek aired for the first time in 1966, the frontier had already been immortalized (and romanticized) in various formats, first in dime novels and Wild West shows, later in television series and movies starring famous actors like Ronald Reagan and John Wayne. In these popular culture artefacts, the hero is often a cowboy whose survival skills in the western wilderness demonstrate his individualism and independence. Westerns thus popularized Turner’s frontier thesis and ingrained its central tenets in the collective memory of the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. As a celebration of temporary country life, Zuidas Cowboy’s sojourn in Zomerpark incorporated some of these themes. At the same time, however, the performance challenged our Turneresque ideas about the frontier as the great wide-open land of opportunity, most notably through its location: in the heart of Amsterdam’s business district