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I'm still working through the required reading on Webb; however, after class on Tuesday, I feel I have a pretty good notion of what the main thrust of the text is about. One thing I'm going to be interested in finding out is how he reconciles his notion of "man being forced to adapt to environment" to the facts of the bison slaughter of the 19th century; it is a classic example of man actually changing the environment in a major way (in that case, in order to make the prairie safe for both the railroad and farming; two things which would have been difficult if there were massive herds of bison milling about)
I also enjoyed learning more about Turner and his thesis of the frontier. As someone who is studying the Progressive Movement, I have seen the Turner argument pop up several times as it was used by the politicians of the day as an explanation of why reforms were needed; "The frontier is closed, there is no more safety valve; we need to reform our institutions right now to allow people to move up or we're going to end up with a major case of class conflict", pretty much. It also came back into vogue a bit during the midst of the Great Depression, used in much the same way.