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The fedgov never intended to own the land forever: they were interested in getting it settled and occupied. Thus the Oklahoma land rush and various homesteader settlement plans.

What we have now is vast areas of the West designated by Easterners as their own version of Disneyland, a giant amusement park reserved to the young bike-riders and hikers, and off-limits to motorized transportation.

I agree. What happened in the late 19th century, however, is that settlement moved into semi-arid and arid regions unsuited for yeoman agriculture. The feds were selling land at a song for vast cattle ranches, and in many places the primary value was timber and mining. The legacy policy of selling land cheaply (or granting it, via the Homestead Act) to small farmers in a Jeffersonian frontier democracy no longer seemed relevant to the facts on the ground.

The western states are indeed abused by an absentee federal landlord heavily oriented towards urban constituencies. People who live in the megalopolis and fiercely resent spending the majority of their non-work waking hours stuck in traffic are easy marks for environmental radicalism. They view open space as a vacation destination and have no glimmer of the issues facing rural people trying to make a living. The East needs more parkland close to major cities. The pent up demand of Manhattanites gets displaced onto Montana and Idaho. Maybe we should designate the entire Meadowlands as the Great American Swamp Park and set about restoring it to its natural state. Let urbanites fight some of these battles on their own turf.