That's not how it happened. In the early federal period, the original 13 states ceded their western land claims, inherited from old British land grants, to the federal government. At a stroke, everything west of the crest of the Appalachians became federal land. Then came the Louisiana Purchase, the purchase of Florida from Spain, the seizure of the Southwest after the Mexican War, and the purchase of Alaska. All of this was originally federal estate. The exceptions to the pattern were Texas and Hawaii, both independent republics before entering the Union. (This is why Ted Cruz is able to boast about how little of Texas is federally owned. I expect the Gadsden Purchase is the exception in Texas.)
Until the latter part of the 19th century, land privatization was an explicit policy objective. Most of it was sold off to accommodate yeoman agriculture. By the latter part of the 19th century, however, as settlement moved into the semi-aird, arid, and mountainous parts of the West, the land was unsuited for small scale farming. Grazing, timber, and mining rights were much more important, and the scale was much larger. Privatizing land for 160 acre farms under the Homestead Act was one thing. Granting (or selling for a song) hundreds of thousands of acres to cattle barons and mining companies was another. I am not an expert in the period, but I do not get the impression that Congress in the 1880's was intent on creating a permanent federal estate in the West. It was just that Congress balked at giving away huge tracts to well-connected private interests. Think of it as an anti-crony capitalism, anti-corruption response.
Since that time, until fairly recently, these federal lands in the West, outside of the National Parks, have been managed mostly for sustainable yield and multiple use purposes. What has happened in the last 20 years or so, of course, is that the environmentalist radicals have turned against multiple use and are demanding ever-more exclusionary management. This is causing BLM and the Forest Service to constrict or withdraw entirely from the longstanding partnerships they have had with ranchers and the mining and timber industries in the western states. This is what is causing the current heartburn.
The fact that we had huge tracts of federal land in the west in the late 19th and early 20th centuries allowed us to create a number of magnificent national parks, unrivaled anywhere in the world. This is all to the good. But apart from the national parks, I agree that the feds own too much land in the west, and that a significant percentage should be transferred to the states or privatized. But at the same time, the eastern states urgently need expanded parks and wildlife refuges, especially since we are apparently determined to continue doubling the population every 50 years. I would propose using the proceeds from western land privatization to fund eastern park expansion.
Eastern and western parks are very different in character. The east is already relatively densely settled, and land is inherently more valuable. There is no prospect of assembling anything like Yellowstone or Yosemite in the east. There is enormous opportunity and need, however, if we start with historic sites and historic landscapes, and think in terms of greenbelts, buffer zones, and agricultural and forest preserves to limit the sprawl of the eastern megalopolis. National parks are just one part of the puzzle, but they are locally important. It is insane, for example, to pave over another Civil War battlefield to build yet another set of suburbs, office parks, and malls indistinguishable from the band of suburbs, office parks, and malls stretching for 300 miles north and south.
Apart from the historic sites, floodplains, wetlands, and barrier islands are targets of opportunity. I don't care whether the feds, the states, or private interests own the barrier islands, for example, but I do think we should stop paying to rebuild them after each big hurricane. We can start turning the screws harder on floodplains as well. The Ninth Ward in New Orleans isn't the only neighborhood that should have been reclaimed by nature years ago.
The National Park Service has an institutional bias towards the big western parks. The NPS attracts a lot of very fine people who want to work in the big outdoors out west. (It also attracts very fine historians who want to work the cannonball circuit, but they are badly outnumbered in the NPS.) The NPS also finds it easier to manage a smaller number of big parks than a larger number of small, scattered holdings. And I am happy to agree that the NPS may not necessarily be the best entity to manage many of these sites. There is ample room for federal cooperation with states, local governments, and private groups to preserve key sites. I don't really care who owns it, as long as historically significant land is preserved, and there is reasonable public access.
Washington, of course, is an outlier in terms of the abundance of history and pre-existing federal presence, but sites such as these exist in many places around the country. Instead of the feds acquiring more land out west to add buffer zones to buffer zones to buffer zones, I'd like to see the NPS refocus on smaller, local sites in the east. Whether the site is managed in the long run by the NPS or a local government or private entity is secondary.
As a political matter, I think conservatives need to balance the push for western land preservation with a positive emphasis on local and community parks.