In 1893, when Frederick Jackson Turner delivered his famous essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” the United States had recently achieved the goal of Manifest Destiny by completing the conquest of the West. Westward expansion had been an integral aspect of America's identity, and its citizens wondered what would continue to propel the United States into the future. At the same time, people were also looking back and trying to decide how exactly the frontier had shaped American life. The common belief was that the United States' conquest of the West was glorious and peaceful, and Turner's essay is a perfect example of this line of thinking. For Turner and his ilk, the West was an open-access wilderness. By taking this land, settlers created the American identity – an identity that represented strong individualism and strength. While the West certainly helped shape America, this view often overlooked the brutal nature of America's march toward the West. Turner's influential essay only helped cement the myth of benevolent Western settlement in American history. In his second paragraph, Turner makes an important statement that is the guiding idea throughout the rest of the essay. He states that as “the nation expanded, it encountered other growing peoples that it conquered. But in the case of the United States we have a different phenomenon." When other nations conquer people and places, the conquerors are forced to assimilate those new places into their existing society. The American tradition, however, is different, because the United States did not have to conquer anything. The West was empty, which allowed Americans to colonize the territory without…half of paper…about westward expansion, so it's not very appealing to realize that westward expansion meant the brutal conquest of the native population. To address this reality, Native Americans were expelled from the consciousness of Americans. Westward expansion is much more palpable if the West is seen as a free and open land, ripe for the taking, as described in Turner's thesis. When Americans were finally confronted with the fact that Native Americans had occupied the land, the natives were portrayed as brutes who were unable to properly care for the land. Over time, however, historians have been able to modify Turner's thesis into a more balanced argument. Turner's thesis, however, remains important because it is a very clear representation of American attitudes toward the frontier and westward expansion at the turn of the century..