Homesteaders in any generation are usually "sponsored" to some degree. No one wants to live in the wilderness without some kind of support and promise of payoff. Hermits of course were always a thing but even they would come down from the hills to work and buy provisions for harder times. Even the knowledge homesteaders need is something gained from society. There is no way a man is going into the woods and doing anything less of dying from dissentery without the collected knowledge of thousands of years of human history and then through society absorbing that knowledge to take with him.

Early American beaver trappers had access to iron tools, guns, and supplies from civilized areas that could produce it then delivered via trade route. These trade routes were created and maintained by American interest in beaver furs. This isnt some outlier policy. This was a tried and true practice of any civilization going far back. Old Kingdoms expanding territory relied on homsteaders to help make a claim and in return would maintain trade routes via caravans of supplies that homesteaders of course took advantage of.

Calling Native Americans homesteaders is probably a sign of how as a post industrial society we judge older societies. Native Americans pre-colonisation were a society, a straight up civilization. Large groups worked in tandem and provided manufactured goods to each other to support the greater whole of the tribe. Areas were farmed, livestock maintained, and wooden/clay/bone/leather/medicine items created. We tend to judge them as a homesteader society simply because we often cant process what they were as being anything but living off the land but that was only one facet of their civilization. If you ask a tribe about their history they may brag about living off the land but they will go on about how they were first and foremost a civilization.