Definitely one of those "it depends" situations. For instance, you could be illiterate middle school drop-out and pretty easily make very close if not six figures if you worked near minimum wage canning work all year in Alaska or something by working the season of every available catch (16 hours a day lots of OT). And you'd bank all your post-tax earnings as they provide the housing/food normally too.
You may work yourself to the bone but pretty much anybody in the US can make a killing.
when I did it they paid for my flight, my housing, and my food... qualifications were homeless off the streets of seattle and I-9 (but lol, e-verify is not mandatory in alaska so as you can imagine such requirement was easily bypassed by anyone who wished). There is no real 'moving' process other than getting on the plane, everything is there.
when you're working 16 hours a day 7 days a week you don't really notice much outside of the factory floor anyway. Whether it was remote or in Manhattan you wouldn't feel the difference as you do nothing but work. I was working ~112 hours a week when I was in Alaska.
It was also a big, dangerous wilderness when Europeans first arrived. It wasn't a place you could just go travel to, get a nice cushy job, buy a nice house, and live a comfortable life.
And in pre-industrial times, when 70% of the population were farmers, land was a direct, and immediate proxy for wealth. Wealth that stayed with you and your family. You were the owner, instead of some shitty sharecropper for a landlord.
From the European point-of-view, the presence of the natives was yet another big danger and obstacle, in addition to the harsh weather (the winters in the northeast where the first colonies were established are much worse than in most of Europe), lack of infrastructure, etc.
As for land being a proxy for wealth that stayed with you, that worked out OK as long as there was lots of land for people to grab up and claim as their own (or take from some natives who don't have the weapons technology to fight back well). And it's the reason people colonized North America: because all the land in Europe had been claimed by some shitty landlord. These days, that's all gone: now you're stuck living with a shitty landlord again, and there's no new continents left to colonize, so we need to come up with a better economic system.
Knowing a few plumbers, I'm sure it can be, but it can be a very feast or famine trade. And most that make that own their own business, so still blue collar, but not exactly an everyman kind of job.
