1890 CHANGED EVERYTHING!

Did you ever wake up in the morning and feel there was everything in the world to do, and you had all the time in the world to do it....?

Chances are you have. But it was some time and place ago. It was summer...you were young....you had neither boss nor mortgage crowding your style that day. And, if you were like me, you had several huckleberry friends who were there to share this delicious summer-fat day with you.

Think of America that way when it too was young and restless, and it too had all the time in the world to do things. Despite generations of growing pains which included the trauma of our Civil War, most days in America were very much like that until 1890.

That was the year America's endless breathless frontier slammed shut forever.

Not literally, but demographically, for that was the year the US Census Bureau reported there was "no longer a contiguous line of demarcation between settled lands to the East and unsettled lands to the West." Throughout our history -- from the day the first Europeans settled along the Eastern coastline -- there had always been "somewhere out West to go." Historians like to call this our Garden Myth.

It was this powerful reassuring belief that no matter how bad life turned against you where you were, there was always "somewhere out West to go." To start all over again. Journalists like Horace Greeley preached it; dreamers like Mark Twain practiced it. Even if you didn't actually grab a horse or wagon train heading for the vast open spaces of the frontier, at least you could hug this private faith. There's always another chance waiting for me. [The reason Draw Poker was the frontier's most popular game was the way it too meant there was always another chance!]

Not after 1890.

Oh sure there were and still are open spaces to be found in Nevada, New Mexico and the Great Northwest. But never again in the same way a Kit Carson, a George Custer, or a gold-crazed pack of Forty-Niners could find it. In the years following 1890, it was like that inevitable morning you and your huckleberry friends woke up to realize the sweet freedoms and spaces of your summer were over. They would now have to give way to growing up and making do pretty much with what you had where you were.

In his 1960 presidential campaign, John F Kennedy spoke of America's New Frontier. No longer a geographic one, but a creative one. One that we would carve out our tomorrows not only from the land, but from our imagination and innovation. The Moon Landing in 1969 may have been his signature achievement in reaching a new frontier.

The best of us are still reaching...