Welcome to the History Extra podcast, fascinating historical conversations from the makers of BBC History Magazine.

What was life like on the frontier in 19th century America? What perils awaited those who

travelled on wagon trains across plains

and mountains to forge new lives? What did these waves of migration mean for the people who

already lived in those places? And how lawless were the new towns that sprung up? Well, in this

episode, Karen Jones, Professor of Environmental and Cultural

History at the University of Kent, introduces us to Live on the Frontier. She was speaking to

Ellen Evans. Karen, thank you so much for your time and joining us on today's History Extra podcast.

Oh, thanks very much for inviting me. It's really good to have a chat about the West. Always

happy to talk about the frontier. It seems like such a time in history where people seem to have

really vivid images in mind to draw on. And I, you know, grew up watching reruns of Little

House on the Prairie and other people draw on so many different images and representations of this

place.

So we're going to be going into a lot of the mythology around this and what life was really

like. But to start off our conversation, can you give our listeners a sense of what exactly

we're talking about here? What sort of time period are we looking at? And what does life on the

frontier? What does that turn mean?

Okay. That's a good place to start because the frontier as a place and as an idea really exemplifies

the West, the Wild West, the West that was won and lost in the 19th century. And I think it's helpful to unpick the frontier as a sort of a conceptual onion

so we can get into it and figure out where it starts, where it finishes,

what its essential attributes are.

So when we're talking about the frontier, which is often the word that's a stand in for

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