[QUOTE=chowder]
I suppose I’m really asking not about the frontiersmen but about the early settlers
300 years of history? I doubt that, maybe 100-150
[/QUOTE]
No, your chronology and time line are both off.
As I said, the Spanish were the first Europeans to systematically explore the U.S., and this started in the early 1500s. These were military expeditions, funded by the government, and map making was a specific part of their mission. The major ones were de Soto’s expedition in Florida starting in 1539 and Coronado’s trek up from Mexico in 1540. Coronado explored along the Colorado River, which was the main feature on the Gastaldi map of 1546.
Although Cartier visited Canada at around the same time, the real exploration was due to Chaplain, who established a settlement in 1608. Again, he moved along river basins, exploring first the St. Lawrence and then later, with the help of the Hurons, who became French allies, he mapped the Mississippi River basin.
The Dutch founded their New Amsterdam colony in 1624, with a fur trading outpost up the Hudson River at Albany. The local Indians did extensive trading with the Dutch all along the Hudson Valley and westward along the Mohawk. Similar trading helped the Swedish colony along the Susquehanna that everybody forgets about.
The English did have a few colonies in the 17th century, but these were mostly coastal. It was not until well into the 18th century that British settlers moved even 100 miles inland.
The time of the American frontiersman, as we know it today, was in the 19th century, after the Lewis and Clark expedition, which was primarily a mapping expedition that moved along rivers going from one Indian village to the next and using the knowledge of the locals to get along. The push westward by any number of settlers started after the California gold rush in 1848.
So, yes, we are talking 300 years of history.
Every single group that came over, whether Spanish, French, Dutch, or English, whether traders or trappers or soldiers or settlers, utterly relied on the local knowledge of the Indians. Every one of them traded with the Indians in a variety of ways. The land was normally purchased legally as well, even if the terms were not well understood by the Indians or were what we would call fair today.
There were always backwoodsmen of various descriptions. We in the U.S. make too much of the latecomers like Daniel Boone, and know too little of the courreurs des bois, the French “bush rangers” who developed the fur trade. They went into nowhere, but didn’t do it totally blindly. They worked and lived with the Indians. Étienne Brûlé, e.g., who was the first European to view Niagara Falls, was sent by Champlain to live with the Hurons to learn as much of their knowledge as possible. However, there was never much in the way of a French settlement much west of the St. Lawrence.
The latecomers like a certain George Washington, went west methodically and systematically as well. Washington was a surveyor, which was the occupation that bright technical young men went into in the mid-18th century, just as people go into computing today. He surveyed the land in western Virginia (and Pennsylvania, IIRC) to create maps and grids for future settlers. This allowed him to pick out the best land for himself after the Revolutionary War when the government made land grants available.
The notion of frontiersmen pushing blindly into the unknown is myth. People followed routes as safe as they could make them, usually along rivers and with the help and knowledge of the locals. Getting off these main routes were for a few prospectors and hunters, but they went from known bases and tried not to get too far away from safety. Many of those who did, died. Since people died even on the known safe routes, only a few antisocial idiots took too many chances.
Settlers for the entire history of the United States - 1789 on - settled on areas that had already been surveyed and laid on on precise gridworks. They had to. That was how they knew where the boundaries of the lands they had paid for were.
Nobody went off blindly. The Simpson’s Springfield was founded on a gridwork laid out in Washington, D.C. No matter what state it is in. 
It’s a wonder he lived to tell his tale and the natives must have laughed their butts off over this gullible fool. That is, until he killed them, enslaved them or passed along a plauge to them. 
