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.
> hell we don't even have native locusts anymore
Not unique to the American West