Tucked away within the National Parks Service’s website, on a page devoted to a semi-obscure national monument in Nebraska, lies a little window into the life of a fascinating Alaskan.

In 1974, Kenneth Deardorff, a Vietnam War vet from California headed across the Alaska Range to country in the Stony River Valley to stake a claim. Even with a ten-year extension for Alaska, the Homestead Act was coming to an end. Deardorff was one of the last to stake his claim—80 acres—and would wind up being the very last to receive title to a property as a homesteader, in 1988.

Deardorff had access to all kinds of tools the Homestead Act’s first beneficiaries in 1862 could only have dreamed about: power equipment, gasoline-powered outboard motors, charter-able aircraft. Things like that blunt the connection to the past—or the past as we imagine it; after all, people are still carving homes or getaways out of little plots of wilderness today, in much the same way Deardorff did a few decades ago. Yet the fascination remains.

Part of it is simply inextricably bound up in who we are: some evolutionary imperative that speaks to us on the animal level, telling us to pick up and move to the next valley, and set up a new home in fresh territory.

“Real estate is more or less the male biological clock. There is some hardwired imperative that kicks in at a certain point, the way caribou migrate and birds sing,” war correspondent and outdoor journalist Patrick Symmes wrote in Outside Magazine a year ago. “Around the start of their fifth decade, men suddenly discover gardening. They plant trees. They lay down fence lines. They construct and hold. Like a spoiled child, we say, This is mine. Mine, mine, mine. Building a cabin in the wilderness is a nearly universal dream. Honestly, if you haven’t had it at some point, there’s something wrong with you.”

Strip the doctrine of Manifest Destiny of the jingoism of its time, and the racist, thievish way that that supposed destiny manifested itself, and at its bottom you’ll find a simple common hunger—the appetite of a creature for its habitat. Even the indigenous peoples of the western hemisphere who were eventually displaced by Europeans must’ve felt this. According to some widely accepted accounts by scientists who study such things, humans spreading out from Alaska after the continental glaciers of the ice age receded reached Tierra del Fuego— a distance of 10,000 miles from here—in as little as 1,000 years.

What Deardorff shares with the Nebraskans of 1862 who filed the first claims and those Beringians heading south into the planet’s last true Terra Incognito is the fact that the land he claimed was free.

It’s true that if you look a little deeper, all sorts of differences begin to emerge. Besides the technology, there’s the fact that Deardorff’s land had once been purchased from Russia, or that it had once been tribal territory for Alaska Natives.

Still, there’s something in the mind that latches onto the free-ness of the land. That manipulates the animal desire to light out for the territory.

And that must’ve been at least part of what motivated 44 people to line up—some camping out in 25-degree-below cold—for a shot to claim 26 1.3-acre lots the Interior town of Anderson was giving away in 2007. For free.

This week, two and a half years later, comes word that the town is foreclosing on 18 of those 26 lots. Darla Coghill, Anderson’s city clerk, told the Associated Press that many of the people who filed a claim simply dropped off the map; they never came back or even responded to communications from the municipal government.

“They had this dream, ‘Oh my God, I’m getting free land,’” The town’s mayor, Keith Fetzer told the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner. Dreams, apparently, didn’t match up well with reality.

There are success stories, of course. Three houses have been built (though one is apparently being abandoned after not meeting the building requirements of its builder’s lenders). Another three lot-owners have asked for an extension, believing they can still satisfy their requirement to build a 1,000-square foot house (the deadline was two years). And a bed and breakfast is being constructed, which may eventually expand onto some of the foreclosed lots.

On the other hand, jobs are no more plentiful than they were three years ago; except for the bed and breakfast owners, the entrepreneurs the town hoped to attract failed to show. And the value of existing property has stagnated. When the News-Miner reporter asked residents about the program’s success, the answers she gets are ambiguous.

“Obviously, it was not successful,” Karen Southwood, a city councilwoman says, a minute later adding that the bed and breakfast succeeding could make the whole thing worth it. Mayor Fetzer told the AP the success rate might wind up as high as 25 percent.

The original Homestead Act, according to one National Parks historian, had a failure rate of 60 percent. And of course, no records were kept, but one can guess that at least part of what drove the first Americans across two continents in a single millennium was, not failure exactly, but some dissatisfaction with this camp or those hunting grounds. When things don’t work out it’s easy to move on down the trail—even if you have to blaze it yourself.

To witness this on a humbler, more contemporary level, do a search for cabins under the real estate section of the Alaska Craigslist. The half-finished, half-furnished structures on an acre—or two or ten—offer another glimpse into stories of Alaskans for whom the dream didn’t match reality. Who lit out for other territories.

We may be among the last generations for whom those dreams have even a remote possibility of becoming a reality. Recently, thanks mainly to the explosion of shantytown slums in the developing world, the planet crossed what seems a remarkable threshold: more humans now live in cities than rural areas.

And even as the first homesteaders were planting stakes in the Nebraska soil a century and a half ago, Easterners were noticing the slums their own cities had become and the wilderness they’d destroyed in the process. They were planting the seeds of the conservation movement that would eventually halt homesteading and attempt to preserve what was left as wilderness. Despite isolated gimmicks like Anderson’s, the era of free land is over.

And what of Deardorff —“one of America’s last true pioneers,” according to the NPS? He no longer lives at his Stony River homestead.

krestia.degeorge@anchoragepress.com