Great Plains Studies, Center for
Date of this Version
1993
Abstract
There are almost 4500 entries in this Encyclopedia of Frontier Biography. Candidates were chosen by the editor for the "significance of their deeds" and for the intrinsic "interest" of their role in the frontier process (vii). They are mostly men, mainly Euro-American but also Native American, though clearly some effort has been made to include frontier women. Among them are explorers, scientists, outlaws, missionaries, settlers, and soldiers. T wentiethcentury frontier historians like Athearn and Billington are also included, as long as they, like all the other featured people, are deceased. Strangely, prospectors are excluded on the implausible grounds that the literature of the mining frontier is "too vast" to handle-but not the literature of the fur trade?
Comments
Published in Great Plains Quarterly 13:1 (Winter 1993). Copyright © 1993 Center for Great Plains Studies, University of Nebraska–Lincoln.