American frontier

When I was young, I was taught Columbus discovered America and, for many years, the West was the American frontier. I disagreed with both teachings. Native Americans had been living in America for many thousands of years before Columbus, and were already settled in the Great Plains and further West. The idea that the West was settled by Easterners seemed ridiculous or worse— It wrote off whole peoples as though they didn’t exist. I knew that the land became free land only by displacement, disenfranchisement, and deaths caused by European diseases.