THE FRONTIER WASN'T CLOSED IN 1893.

Never mind what the eminent historian might have said.  The latest "Looking Back" from the final MidWeek of November included a reference to frontier justice.

According to report received today, chicken thieves are operating regularly at farms near Shabbona, and unless the thievery ceases, there is likely to be a posse formed and someone given an extra dose of buckshot or rock sale. Reports were received at the office yesterday that the people committing the petty crimes are known, and there is to be a concentrated effort put forth to see that it is stopped.

That Digital History excerpt made much about people from the federal government being there to help, all that talk about rugged individualism notwithstanding.

Turner argued that the conquest of the western frontier as the nation's formative experience, which had shaped the nation's character and values. Western expansion accounted for Americans' optimism, their rugged independence, and their stress on adaptability, ingenuity, and self reliance.

In actuality, however, the settlement of the West had depended, to a surprising degree, on intervention by the federal government. The federal government had dispatched explorers to survey the region and cavalry units to confine Native Americans on reservations. It also provided land grants that funded railroad building, and, in the 20th century, support for dams and other waterworks.

But not, apparently, for bringing chicken thieves to book, although by 1923 the idea that chicken farming was interstate commerce had the force of law.