So true. Hence the Democratic Farmer Labor Party in MN. I remember reading years ago (when What’s the Matter with Kansas? was much in the news?) about Nebraska (as I recall) farmers who were part of collective that owned farm equipment (those massive harvesters and the like) which none of them could afford to purchase on their own. At the same time, they railed against “socialism” and “communism” (which they couldn’t distinguish from one another). One of the sites I just visited to learn more about Norwegian Americans, which reported on a recent book, made a big deal of Norwegian “volunteerism” and “community spirit” and included a photograph of a barn-raising either here or in Norway – as if rural folks everywhere, if they are fortunate enough to own or lease their own small farms, don’t participate together in things like barn-raising.
I observed something when I was researching my MA-to-RI-to-WI-to-MN family line (about whom I knew almost nothing). I found, online, local histories from the late 19th century, and articles from newspapers like The Mower County News, that celebrated “the pioneers” of Whitewater and Milwaukee (Wauwatosa, actually) and Mower County. These accounts were written as if Richard had gone to WI from RI in 1838 all by himself, joined a year later by his “pioneer” wife, Lydia, and their two toddlers (one born while Richard had gone ahead to WI). Turned out, I kept finding more and more of Richard’s brothers and sisters-mit-husbands (he had 10 siblings/half-siblings) coming at the same time (one brother) or within a year or two (all but one sister, who stayed with her husband and children in Providence). Also joining the clan in WI a year or two later: Richard’s father and stepmother. In 1859 Richard did go to MN with just his wife and 10 children (the eldest of whom would die a few years later in the CW, from disease), but a son of one of his sisters who had ended up back east soon moved to Minneapolis… Anyway, Richard was a “pioneer,” but hardly on his own.
His MA and RI ancestors would have called this “planting,” not “pioneering,” and they always settled on frontiers with family and other fellows. But in the late 1800’s a Colonial historian wrote a book, The Pioneers of Western Massacusettes. The myth of rugged individualism was being applied to the late 1600’s.