American pioneer

[8] As early as 1664, Englishman John Evelyn used the term with a self-effacing "workman" meaning when he wrote in his treatise on planting, Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees: "I speak now in relation to the Royal Society, not my self, who am but a Servant of it only and a Pioneer in the Works".

James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer (1841) became the most successful of his early series, the Leatherstocking Tales, about pioneer life in the Province of New York.

Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series, published a century later from 1932 to 1943 but set sixty years prior, typified later depictions of pioneer families.

After the United States was officially formed upon the ratification of the U.S. Constitution, federal coordination and legislation began to give settlement a more unified approach.

The Land Ordinance of 1785 was the first official action by the federal government in deciding how political organization of new territories would be handled.

Then in 1787 the Northwest Ordinance declared that states could not individually claim new lands, and that westward expansion would be handled by the federal government.

It provided not only mileage and stopping points during travel, but also gave advice about what to take on the journey, how to interact with Native Americans and also how to respond to threatening situations such as encounters with bears.