I honestly think it is as simple as the elite white class of easterners wanted desperately in some way to be like mindfuckingly rich european elites and so why the hell would they go west when their parents already in their minds went farther west then they the children wanted to and were now having to commit genocide and other attrocities to drag a fabrication of that fantasy into reality here in the US?
You have to look at the cowboy trope and interpret it quite literally as the US collective psyche, racism, stereotypes of westerns and all because it really does explain the behavior of the US right now.
The west was not built by blonde hair blue eyed european descent cowboys taming the savage wilds, it was built despite them trying to kill the very soul of the landscape and despite the fact that retroactively cowboy imagery was violently whitewashed and plastered over a vibrant if brutal tapestry of history in order to simplify problematic questions about the “american project” into easy answers.
EditJohn Company the board game explains this exhaustively in that the game is meant to express a similar process that went on with the Colonial elite of India under occupation by the British empire.
I honestly think it is as simple as the elite white class of easterners wanted desperately in some way to be like mindfuckingly rich european elites and so why the hell would they go west when their parents already in their minds went farther west then they the children wanted to and were now having to commit genocide and other attrocities to drag a fabrication of that fantasy into reality here in the US?
You have to look at the cowboy trope and interpret it quite literally as the US collective psyche, racism, stereotypes of westerns and all because it really does explain the behavior of the US right now.
The west was not built by blonde hair blue eyed european descent cowboys taming the savage wilds, it was built despite them trying to kill the very soul of the landscape and despite the fact that retroactively cowboy imagery was violently whitewashed and plastered over a vibrant if brutal tapestry of history in order to simplify problematic questions about the “american project” into easy answers.
Edit John Company the board game explains this exhaustively in that the game is meant to express a similar process that went on with the Colonial elite of India under occupation by the British empire.
https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/332686/john-company-second-edition