’Freedom of the Hills’: The Tenth Mountain Division and the Opening of the Vertical Frontier

When Frederick Jackson Turner proclaimed that the American “frontier has gone” in 1893, he did more than impose an ethnocentric history on land that had never been “open” in the first place. He also forgot to look up. In the century following Robert P. Porter’s 1890 Census Bulletin and Turner’s seminal musings, middle- and upper-class Euro-Americans increasingly turned to vertical landscapes in response to the socioeconomic and cultural shifts of modernity, thereby claiming new frontier space for their discovery. This paper situates the U.S. Army’s Tenth Mountain Division at the center of that story, arguing that the narrative of America’s “ski troopers” captures the enduring potency of the frontier for modern Americans. By writing their pioneering narrative into the peaks they trained and fought in, the Tenth helped establish the mountains as purportedly open space into which Americans could expand and in which they could reimagine their freedom.