The romantic myth of Western settlement omits the federal government's critical role in promoting and managing expansion and development. The image of an open wilderness, slowly peopled by rugged pioneers who built towns and communities and small businesses independent of the national government, is false. The understanding of “government” and public administration as late entries upon the stage, come to constrain and oppress the individualism and free spirit of the American pioneer, is similarly false. Nevertheless, understanding of the West remains obscure to almost all but historians of the West itself. As a result, the development of government administrative structures to plan and manage westward expansion remains largely hidden.

The North American continent was not open wilderness. The land supported and sustained hundreds of sovereign political communities with millions of people – farmers, traders, and hunters, husbands, wives, and children, living in houses, tepees, and pueblos, and living everywhere from New England to Florida, from the old states of the Southeast to the Ohio Valley, from the Mississippi Valley to Arizona, the Pacific Northwest, California, and along the Great Plains from the Dakotas to Texas. The fact of these communities, and the fact that they were, in many cases, politically and militarily sophisticated enough to threaten the very existence of the United States, is a truer starting point for understanding the development of the national government and its administrative structures.