In his book Lila, author Robert M. Pirsig (Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance) notes that if you make a list of all the things Europeans say about white Americans, you'll find that its the same thing that white Americans say about the people indigenous to the Americas.

Many Europeans think of white Americans as sloppy, untidy people.  Europeans often think of white Americans as being too direct and plain-spoken, bad-mannered and sort of insolent in the way they do things.   

In World War II, Europeans noted that American troops drank too much and when they got drunk they made a lot of trouble.  But on the other hand, European military commanders rated the stability of American troops under fire as high, and admitted that they made good fighters.  

To this day, Americans are mistakenly characterized by Europeans as "like children," naive, immature, and tending toward violence because they don't know how to control themselves.  

White Americans often say much the same things about the native Indians.  It's almost as if the white American settlers took on the characteristics of the indigenous in the eyes of the Old World powers.

The reverse is also true - things the Indians said about the white American settlers and very similar to the things the white American settlers said about Europeans - too stuffy, insincere, decadent, and untrustworthy.

When traits and attitudes are borrowed from a hostile culture, that culture isn't given the credit.  If you tell a white from Alabama that his Southern accent is derived from the speech of black slaves, he is likely to resent and deny it, although the geographic proximity of the Southern accent to areas with large black populations makes it pretty obvious.

If you tell a white from Montana living near a reservation that he resembles an Indian he may take it as an insult.

But even though the Indians were never given credit for their contribution to American frontier personality values, it's certain that those values couldn't have come from anywhere else.  One often hears "frontier values" spoken of as though they came from the rocks, the rivers, or the trees of the frontier, But trees, rocks and rivers do not instill values.  They've  got trees, rocks, and rivers in Europe, too.

It was the people living among those trees, rocks, and rivers who are the real source of the white American frontier values.