The next real step though is going to be land distribution. That will lead to all sorts of corruption and accusations of corruption, but this idea where the federal government remains as an owner with "private" rights on large chunks of western land is problematic. Matter of fact, I am not the biggest fan of those crony timber company deals that prevent people from settling in the forests either.

I first learned about government hostility to backwoods settlements when I transferred from the California National Guard to the Oregon National Guard and there was a series of wildfires in Oregon collectively called "the Biscuit fire". One of the particularly arrogant government officials in charge was very specific about allowing certain areas to burn out because they were full of "low grade backwoods people squatting in trailers on small parcels of land they bought".

The people had bought small parcels in close proximity to government land in order to have access to the land without owning it, which makes sense, but the way the government saw it, they were still basically a form of squatter. The punishment for that "lack of citizenship" (meaning they lived off grid or in limited grid access and probably paid little or no taxes) meant that while we were trained to fight the fires, our real mission was to become one of enforcing roadblocks to prevent people from entering the areas designated for burn-out, and then to provide security for the fire camps.

You can guess, that was one of the early deployments where I was invited not to go "for security reasons", meaning that I had questioned the ethics of burning those people out. Note, the government was not going to burn their houses intentionally with the backfires, just block off the areas and let them burn, based on a triage of sorts on the tax assessment of the properties in question.