Please elaborate. 160 acres was chosen as it was seen as a self-sustaining number (and evenly fit into the T&R PLSS), but interestingly, /that/ wasn't enough land to support a single family in the arid and high-elevation west until mass irrigation came along. Given five years to make proof that their land could be self-sustaining, many families failed even with 160 acres to cultivate. Maybe those are the fools you are talking about?
> Maybe those are the fools you are talking about?
Well yes, its a number picked and agreed upon to serve the goal of conquering the western United States. It was self-sustaining in a sense because the west was conquered, hell we don't even have native locusts anymore. But at the individual family level it was not self-sustaining in some cases, and in others it was quite more than enough which was what I was addressing for OP.
That is an interesting behind-the-doors kind of theory, that settlers were just being sent out as fodder in the name of conquest. I'm cynical, but I'm about an order of magnitude less cynical than that. I don't deny there was probably some moustache twirling somewhere, but most of the participants in enabling early homesteaders - the settlers, surveyors, assessors, state and federal officials - were just trying to help people pursuit happiness in their own flawed way.
Man you are not nearly cynical enough. This was following an American civil war. And, many decades later wave after wave were thrown into meat grinder after meat grinder of foreign war, these American conquest years were relatively much less brutal.
