Reflection about book O'Pioneers!

O Pioneers! is a novel that reflects an aspirational view of frontier life. This aspirational view is summed up in three passages. One passage is the poem that precedes the novel, "Prairie Spring," which Cather wrote. The other two are on the agenda: a summary of the "Frontier Thesis" by Frederick Jackson Turner and a portion of a Walt Whitman poem from which Cather took her novel title.

The first stage of the reflection is to synthesize these three to articulate an idea about how the Frontier shaped American character. What virtues are presumed to flow from settling on the frontier, establishing a farm, building a house and creating a community? When you revise this initial reflection, I will expect you to be able to describe how the virtue(s) you find in these three passages work out in the novel. 

Some background info:

The Frontier Thesis: Turner first detailed his own interpretation of American history in his justly famous paper, “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” delivered at a meeting of historians in Chicago in 1893 and published many times thereafter. Adams, his mentor at Johns Hopkins, had argued that all significant American institutions derived from German and English antecedents. Rebelling against this view, Turner argued instead that Europeans had been transformed by the process of settling the American continent and that what was unique about the United States was its frontier history. He traced the social evolution of frontier life as it continually developed across the continent from the primitive conditions experienced by the explorer, trapper, and trader, through maturing agricultural stages, finally reaching the complexity of city and factory. Turner held that the American character was decisively shaped by conditions on the frontier, in particular the abundance of free land, the settling of which engendered such traits as self-reliance, individualism, inventiveness, restless energy, mobility, materialism, and optimism.