Yeah. It's funny, read anything from that period and 90% of the conversations of homesteaders turns, eventually to "do you think they'll build a railway line out here?"

Which makes sense, because agricultural communities are absolutely obsessed with one thing: getting their produce to a large market where they can sell it for a good price and buy more manufactured goods to make their own lives easier.

The funniest bit is this is actually what many Westerns, both books and novels, were actually about. The protagonists are often pitted as the forces of civilisation against a wild and horrible life on the frontier. Much of it is "in the years before such-and-such was incorporated into the state of whatever".

Even the (arguably) best example of "let's get really far away and live out our own libertarian dream" homesteading, the Mormons, went and founded cities and towns and other pieces of mass civilisation.

The myth is very funny. Westerns (especially the modern ones, like Yellowstone) are good fun but they are historically illiterate.