The story of the settling of the American West is perhaps our most powerful national legend. Westward expansion beyond the Atlantic Coast into a wild and dangerous frontier embodied the American ideal of the rugged and free individual. Liberated from the shackles of the Old World, Americans were in command of their own destiny, no longer living by another's leave. Every man was free to pursue happiness as he saw fit, including out west — if he could survive.
These days the settling of the West comes in for opprobrium and scorn from woke progressives, for whom it is above all a story of genocide and slavery, like most of American history. And yet the iconic images of the West — the covered wagon on a vast prairie, the cowboy driving a herd on the high plains — are seared into our national consciousness. We can no more escape them than we can escape our complicated racial history by removing statues and renaming schools.
Not long ago, the westward expansion of America, along with the names of the great pioneers, such as Daniel Boone, was taught to schoolchildren — not as history for which to apologize but as something to celebrate and revere, a source of national pride. That was for good reason: What the early pioneers accomplished was remarkable, especially considering that many of them were late arrivals to the American scene, Scotch-Irish who came in the mid 18th century and found the lands of the Atlantic seaboard already full, or too expensive, and so pushed west into the mountains.
These were poor folk who lived hard lives that often ended violently. They spread their Presbyterian churches and log cabins over the Alleghenies into western Pennsylvania and West Virginia, then down through the Shenandoah Valley and the Blue Ridge Mountains and into the wilds of Tennessee and Kentucky. They forged out ahead of the fledgling federal government, expanding the new republic by their mere presence, eventually stumbling upon the Great Plains, settling Texas, and wresting it from Mexico. From this stock and their exploits sprang our national myth of the frontiersman-patriot. John Crockett, for example, was one of the Overmountain Men from west of the Appalachians who fought in the American Revolution, lost siblings to Cherokee war parties, and barely scratched out a living in northeast Tennessee. His son David would die more than a thousand miles away, at the Alamo.
