"For generations, their story was told as a high romance, intrepid pioneers "winning" civilization from an empty, harsh land, persevering through self-reliance, ingenuity and dogged determination."

Ok, maybe somebody told that story, but that's not the one I got in either my 1960s/70s K-12 history classes, or movies, television, books, or even songs concerning that time and place, which all, showed an unequivocally brutal and unjust existence in the old west: innocents are hanged, the unsuspecting shot, women beaten and raped, ranches burned, banks robbed, and cattle rustled. Romantic? Really? Hobbes' "solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short" quotation about life outside society covers it well, so of course many went back east to society.

It's possible that what we have here are is a straw man argument, but then we might also have a large number of gullible who are only now realizing what the rest of us have long understood.