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guaranteed access to sources of water.
"If
these lands are to
be
reserved for actual settlers," he wrote, "the people should not
be
hampered with the present arbitrary system of dividing the lands in–
to rectangular tracts"; actual topographical conditions must be
observed and land laid out in irregular patterns if settlers were to live
and prosper in the region . Though he campaigned tirelessly for this
cause, urging corrective legislative action, Powell's radical designs
were rejected. This is certainly due, in some measure, to the political
realities of the day, but it is tempting to attribute the failure to a
more fundamental fact: that at some point, possibly, this scientist/vi–
sionary forgot that he was at work on a
canvas,
forgot that his vision
must conform to that canvas and not to actual conditions. Had he
been born in Jefferson's era, Powell might well have been the one to
draw the first tentative lines on the blank sheet; by the mid–
nineteenth century, however, it was simply too late.
Every day a new picture is painted and framed, held up for half
an hour.
- Henry David Thoreau
In 1893 the historian Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed
that the American frontier had disappeared, its continuous recession
ended finally with the lack of further free land . In a literal sense, of
course, Turner was correct; by the end of the nineteenth century the
continental United States had been fully explored and settled.
If
the
frontier as a physical entity had vanished, however, the very power–
ful impulses it had served to channel were in time to find other
means of satisfaction. Today, the thirst for novelty, the expectations
inherent in the fresh start, the sensation of mobility itself are epito–
mized in the annihilation of time and space constituted by
television.
If,
as some have suggested , technology is our new nature, then
television is its showpiece, its one grand vista that dissolves and con–
stitutes itself anew every half hour.
.. . the least change in our point of view gives the whole world a
pictorial air.
A
man who seldom rides, needs only to get into a
coach and traverse his own town, to turn the street into a puppet–
show.
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
