English Script Request

Americans like to think that these were rugged individualists who conquered the West on their own, but that's not the case at all. There was a lot of deception involved; they did it with the assistance of the federal government, so this myth of the rugged individual is just that-- it's a myth.
This idea of the free frontiersman has a real grip on the American imagination. This was always more fantasy than it was reality; there were very few independent frontiersmen.
People on the frontier very often followed the extension of American territory by the US government. So new land was acquired by the government, and the settlers would go out there.
The culture of the frontier emphasized this individualism, even as it depended on the collectivism that acquired these Western lands.
I think that the largest misconception that Americans have about the frontier is that it was a wilderness. Nothing of the American territory west of the Appalachians was wild. They were coming into landscapes that already had a very significant and deep human presence.
When you look at maps of North America from the 19th century, there were vastly powerful tribes like the Comanche and Apache that controlled huge swaths of land. It wasn't until those tribes were subdued that that land officially became American.
When the frontier was officially closed in the 1890's, a historian by the name of Frederick Jackson Turner suggested that it was the battle to settle the frontier that gave Americans the independent, searching character which made us a great nation. Even though Frederick Jackson Turner's views have been largely discredited, that idea of frontiersmen lives with us.
It remains a big part of our idea of who we are. If you head West, you're reminded of individuals who were involved in this gigantic story of assembling this continent-wide country piece-by-piece.