Oh, OK. The other suggestion was in one of Fennimore Cooper’s “Prairie,” a character with an ax named Ishmael Bush, I believe. “The Prairie” follows Nattie Bumppo, who stars in “The Last of the Mohicans” and “The Deerslayer,” as he goes out west in his old age.
Here’s a brief comment on the character that I just googled: “Then there is the Squatter, Ishmael Bush, who is brutal, stupid, representing the border between nature and civilization, or the first step of civilization. He seems to be the most interesting character in the book, because he represents almost all phases in the book. He has left civilization, he lives an almost mythic life on the prairie, but at the end of the novel he returns to civilization.”
That is probably the reference. Deerslayer et al. were very popular at the time. The boundary between the wild and civilization was fairly sharp but kept moving west fairly rapidly. Ismail Bush and ax might have been a parallel to Danl Boone or Johnny Appleseed (Swedenborgian), who moved ahead of the boundary or with it. By 1886 there was no frontier, officially gone per US Census, so no more frontiersmen.