By people with enough resources to move to an area without infrastructure and set it up. That takes money, not necessarily crazy money but far more than a the average homeless person has.

PS: The first US colonies actually took a crazy amount of capital to set up. The west was largely settled by people in covered wagons which for the time period also represented a lot of capital ~50,000+$ in 2018 USD.

The common theme with pre-civil war settlement in the US is that people would rather risk financial ruin and/or starvation than live their life (and raise their kids) according to the whims of a city/town ruled by people they do not agree with.

For example, basically all of New England that isn't on the coast was settled by people who got so fed up with the puritanical authoritarians in Boston that upending their lives and moving a few days ride west (and risking starvation/financial run in the first few years) was the better option.

That view is more propaganda than reality. Most US migration had to do with economics more than politics.

The underground railroad gets a lot of coverage, but it's peak never reached 1,000 slaves per year where 23,191,876 slaves where part of the 1850 sensuous. So, people are talking about a migration of ~0.004% per year.

What you say is true for long distance relocation, not short ones. Being a farmer is not made easier by moving a couple hundred more miles west. What moving a couple hundred miles will do is put you in a substantially more rural area where a bunch of people you don't like have a lot less, if any, power over your day to day life. The people who were relocating to California to chase some dream of riches were not motivated by politics. The people moving from somewhere outside NYC to somewhere outside of Buffalo were doing it for politics.

> Being a farmer is not made easier by moving a couple hundred more miles west.

Cheaper land makes being a farmer vastly easier. The same capital allows for more either more farm land or better farm land. Remember, farms are just like any business you can extract more money when the output stays the same but your costs drop.

A lot of the Anglo emigration occured during the Gold Rush period and some later to Central California during the Dust Bowl.

But the west was first colonized by the Spanish.

One of the first Anglos to reach Alta California was the Bartleson-Bitwell party https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Josiah_Belden

Sure. And no one left their home country to come to the US with meager resources. They were all wealthy.

Settled means something different from just immigration. Lot's of poor people showed up after their was infrastructure. Without that infrastructure most people would have starved and or frozen to death etc.

Also, saying significant wealth is required to setup a colony is very different from individuals having that wealth. Consider the wealth required to build a 80 story high rise generally vastly outstrips the wealth of people living in it.

PS: That said, looking at modern immigration even illigal immigrants to the US tend to be better educated than the average peopulaion of their origin countries. Likely becase immigration is a lot of effort, weeding out the less motivated and capable.