Good find, Mr Rogers.
The above piece of your post is the heart of this issue. It is clear that the federal government believes it is the owner of the land in the same way as you and I are property owners. At issue in my mind is whether they are owners or simply caretakers of lands belonging to the public. In that case, and based on the history of the USA, those public lands should be able to be purchased.
In fact, the first national park didn't come into existence until very late in the 19th century....Yellowstone.
My position is that the federal government is not enjoined by the US Constitution to become a huge property owner. At no point does the Constitution indicate that the government would need ownership of anything other than government buildings and military installations.
Too many things in our history indicates that the Fed was caretaker of lands within the borders established for the USA.
The land was owned by the federal government because it was a settlement from a war. The government did what it could to encourage settlement and gave land away for many years. The land it couldn’t give away became much of our current federal land.
Since the 1930s, the US Congress, in a series of laws, gave up trying to give the land away and started managing it.
“The Taylor Grazing Act of 1934 was enacted to remedy the deterioration of the range on the remaining public lands. This was the first direct authority for federal management of these lands, and implicitly began the shift toward ending disposals and retaining lands in federal ownership.”
http://www.law.umaryland.edu/marshall/crsreports/crsdocuments/RL34267_12032007.pdf
It is currently managed IAW US law passed by Congress, as Congress has authority to do. I may not agree with all Congress does, but I do not pretend they lack the right to manage public lands. From the Constitution:
“The Congress shall have power to dispose of and make all needful Rules and Regulations respecting the Territory or other Property belonging to the United States; “
According to court documents, Bundy and his family first started using the land for grazing in 1954. The sections in dispute include new land he started grazing on after the 1998 court case.