PIONEER

noun

1. One who ventures into unknown or unclaimed territory to settle.
2. One who opens up new areas of thought, research, or development.
3. A soldier who performs construction and demolition work in the field to facilitate troop movements.

Pioneer - Wikipedia

Pioneer commonly refers to a settler who migrates to previously uninhabited or sparsely inhabited land.

In the United States pioneer commonly refers to an American pioneer, a person in American history who migrated westward to settle in what is now the Western and Midwestern United States.

In the English language, the term independently evolved a sense of being an innovator or trailblazer.

As early as 1664, Englishman John Evelyn used the term with a self-effacing "workman" meaning when he wrote in his treatise on planting,

Sylva, or A Discourse of Forest-Trees*: "I speak now in relation to the Royal Society, not my self, who am but a Servant of it only and a Pioneer in the Works".

Various figures in American folklore and literature typify the pioneer. James Fenimore Cooper's The Deerslayer (1841) became the most successful of his early series, the Leatherstocking Tales, about pioneer life in the Province of New York. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House on the Prairie series, published a century later in 1932–1943 but set in the 1870s and 1880s, typified later depictions of pioneer families. Daniel Boone (1734–1820) and Davy Crockett (1786–1836) became two real-life icons of pioneer history.