Major American beliefs about the pre-American environment were all created successively as myths after settlement in each ecological zone. Taken together, these beliefs constitute the grand tradition of the pristine wilderness-a wild American nature, far tougher to conquer than it ever was in reality. To exaggerate the conquering American achievement further, the role of native Americans in transforming the pre-American environment was denied, as was their humanity and cultural adaptability. The conquering heroes were superhuman, self-glorifying Americans: pioneers who transformed the pristine wilderness into a Jeffersonian garden of American yeomen following a Turnerian frontier conflict that left Americans deeply scarred by, and hostile to, the environment but also fashioned by it into a people of unique national character and institutions. The main period of American mythmaking was the middle and late nineteenth century in which the entire body of traditions was either invented or refashioned. Four types of invented traditions are recognized: instant traditions invented by political and religious leaders; deliberate but informal inventions by literary and artistic elites which led through myth creation to invention; images formed by the elite which were incorporated as fact into people's reminiscences and rediscovered and universalized; and, finally, ideas in the air for generations given form and substance by great men who invented grand metaphors for the nation. © 1992.
