The Effect of the Frontier on American Capitalism

Suppose you were a lumberman, and you had a well-defined and delimited parcel of forest land which contained trees sufficient to occupy your lumbering facilities for 15 years, and assume trees took 13 years to grow from germination to a stage ready to be harvested.  How would you go about harvesting your trees, figuring that you would live another 50 years or so from now, and wanted to work and provide for your family throughout that time?

How would you go about it if, when you had cleared as many trees as you could, you had merely to move on another ten miles to confront another virgin forest ready to be harvested, and the cost of shipping was low, most lumber being sent down the many rivers to the sawmill?

When Jackson became president, he wished to move the indigenous Indian populations west of the Mississippi, where they would inhabit the fair plains between the river and the Rocky Mountains. The Frontier was so immense on both sides of the Mississippi that he did not foresee the day when the Indians needs be displaced from the plains and constrained into Reservations.
Unlimited chances, unlimited resources create one set of circumstances. Limited resources create another. We have entered the Age of Limitations. It only seems so frightening to us because we have been so used to scenarios of endless resources, endless power, and limitless wealth. We shall adjust.

However, the story of the poor boy making his fortune in the New World also comes in for revision. As the resources become limited, and wealth concentrates in the hands of the few, it becomes harder and harder for the Horatio Alger story to come true. Go West, young man! was a formula for success when the Frontier was still being pushed westwards; now that California has a multi-billion dollar deficit, the rules of the game have changed.