[aBioGuy]

No has mentioned that the initial assertion is incorrect? The US Government sent troops to remove native inhabitants. Then they gave the land away. Having an army clear the land ahead of time makes a lot of homesteading possible.

[alwa]

And for that matter, the clearance job wasn’t always exactly complete: part of the price of admission to your “free homestead” was fending off the occasional raid by its armed and rightfully furious former occupants.

I suppose a similar sense of menace applies to some of the options on the linked inventory, but my first interpretation of the task was to think of places sufficiently remote/economically-irrelevant as to be uncontested.

[tsss]

Rightfully? What right do they have to the fruit of the earth more than any other person? They only have the right to take it by force, if they can, as they did before from other people and animals.

[jlmorton]

I agree the assertion with regard to America is incorrect. However, there were several truly inhabitable-yet-uninhabited territories discovered during the Age of Discovery.

http://www.radicalcartography.net/discoveries.png

[s1artibartfast]

I dont think that is a historical take. I think the vast majority expansion was homesteading first, which troops and militias coming in only later and as needed when inevatible resource conflicts arose.

This is is closer to the cycle that expansion has always taken. Groups first expand, develop economic interests, and then fight over those economic interests.

[velcrovan]

For real, the entire “lawless, free, wild west” cultural image we have was a federally subsidized endeavor from beginning to end. It needs to be re-understood as a giant welfare project for white Americans

[BurningFrog]

The Americas largely were empty land ready to be taken by colonists, because Europeans brought old world diseases that killed 90+% of the native people, often before they'd even seen a European.

[watwut]

The whole of westward expansion can not be explained with that alone at all. It took a lot of violence, multiple wars and like 400 years.