By the 1890's, the status of Indian people seemed to validate Frederick Jackson Turner's claim that "the frontier has gone, and with its going has closed the first period of American history." Natives ceased to threaten the Republic military, and the process of educating and Christianizing reservation residents was well begun. No longer, wrote one Indian policy reformer, would Native Americans be driven from their reservations "again and again - tossed westward, ever westward, like the driftwood and wreckage before the incoming tide. "The last twenty-five years of the nineteenth century, in some respects, began a new era.