The Closing of the Interior: The Shared History of Expansion and Environmental Management

• In Event: The Nature of American Foreign Relations: Taking Foreign Relations History and Environmental History Together

Abstract

When Frederick Jackson Turner heralded the close of the frontier in 1893, he was unknowingly intoning the life’s work of the U.S. Department of the Interior. The Interior Department, known today for managing natural resources, was in reality born of and for an American expansionism, emerging in the mid-nineteenth century conquest of the West. Although lawmakers explicitly aimed to create in the department the first federal arm to oversee domestic affairs, its central errand was insistently outward: incorporating an outlying terrain the nation incompletely owned. It parceled the land, contained the indigenous populations, mapped the natural resources, and even superintended the 1890 census that, taken together, signaled for Turner the end of the frontier. Turner’s elegy could just as well have been one of the Interior Department. Only Interior did not disappear.

How did an institution whose fate was so closely tied to continental expansion survive beyond its apparent end? This paper will argue that Interior endured because it applied its repertoire honed in expansion to the management of nature in ever-widening contexts. Interior had forged a natural resource bureaucracy through bending landscapes to the will of expansion, one that would become distributed across many specialized and separate bureaus devoted to reclamation, grazing, and other conservationist platforms. The fact that this varied know-how was conditioned by and supportive of expansion would become almost entirely overwritten after the close of the frontier.

Interior allows us to see that expansion and the environment were inextricably linked. This insight illuminates deep interconnections between the history of American foreign relations and environmental history, two fields that share a profound concern for the “world” while often failing to speak to each other. Institutions, however, stand as vital bridge-builders between them.

Author

• Megan Black, Harvard University