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Notes -
This may be a cultural difference. I'm from the American West and what I wrote describes pretty much every one of my ancestors from the 17th century through my great grandparents, and used to be a very common family story based on others I've talked to with similar backgrounds.
17th to 19th century American West was very much an outlier. I won't say similar things never happened elsewhere but they were a rarity. Even in the rest of America that was an exception as there wasn't a sizable body of people who expanded the frontier by conquest for an expanded length of time and then replaced the original people more than culturally. Ultimately the amount of wealth that can be gathered by that route for ordinary men is limited (almost as a tautology - where would masses of men they get such wealth from?)
It was fairly often the norm for the man to gather enough wealth to support himself and his family before getting married (although even that depended very much on the time and place) but that involved traditional boring stuff like working as a farm hand etc.
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