An omnibus section in the 1890 Census, ‘Progress of the Nation’, analyzed the course of US settlement since the first Census in 1790. The essay concluded that the American frontier was fast diminishing as the post-Civil War settlement of the West expanded; and that the frontier was thus no longer worth measuring. Frederick Jackson Turner made the document the starting point for his famous 1893 essay on the significance of the frontier. Turner invoked ‘Progress of the Nation’ to declare that the frontier was gone. Researchers have neglected ‘Progress of the Nation’ as a primary source, exploring it mostly as it influenced Turner. Yet its main approach — tracking the distribution of population densities at decade intervals — yields a precise method for understanding low-density frontier settlement. We use the 1890 Census's density-based method to chart the frontier's historical and contemporary evolution. We show that a vast frontier endures. The frontier never closed; instead it changed. After spending nearly the entire 19th century shifting quickly west, the frontier gradually moved east, to the point where large stretches of the Great Plains have now reverted to frontier. We also demonstrate that the modern-day West owes its distinctive form to land-use and urbanization patterns that appeared as early as the 1840s and were evident in ‘Progress of the Nation’. The region, with its big cities enveloped by a huge frontier, embodies its own 150-year-old settlement tradition.