Politics & Power Quote by Peter Matthiessen

Matthiessen isn’t romanticizing the frontier; he’s repossessing it from the national myth-makers. The line opens with the bland, almost scholarly phrase "very interested", then pivots into a moral ledger sheet: capitalism’s "enormous fortunes" are not abstract accumulations but liabilities with human names. That contrast is the engine of the quote. It disarms you with curiosity and then insists on accountability.

The frontier here functions as America’s favorite alibi, the place where violence gets renamed as "growth", "settlement", "progress". Matthiessen drags the euphemisms back to the ground. By stacking "poor people, black people, Indian people", he refuses the polite separations that let readers compartmentalize harm. Poverty isn’t a side issue; it’s a racialized and dispossessing system. The repetition of "people" is a quiet rhetorical choice that matters: not categories, not obstacles, not labor inputs - people.

His subtext is also about narrative power. "More often than not" signals that he’s not arguing for a single bad actor or a few regrettable excesses; he’s pointing to a pattern, a business model. The closing phrase, "paid very dearly", borrows the language of markets to indict the market: cost and payment are flipped from profit to suffering.

Contextually, Matthiessen’s work repeatedly returns to American landscapes as crime scenes - places where beauty and brutality coexist, and where literature’s job is to keep the brutality from being edited out. This is frontier history told as an audit, not a legend.