Configure an index pattern

Hello,

So I've been doing some research on how to inject a dummy entry into ES in order to enable the configuration automatically for the kibana application. Is there any way I can do this through a curl command, I have tried the following this far:

curl -XPUT "http://[HOST]:9200/logstash-*/" -d 'index: number_of_replicas:2'

this creates the index successfully, however:
also, is there a clean way to enable asterisk as * instead of the entity code into the curl command?
lastly, after running the curl command above, the Time-field name list box is empty and I cannot select an option (i.e. @timestamp)

Any help would be great.

What's the use case here?