“In the same era when people were buying personal computers and watching The Cosby Show, the United States was still completing the transfer of free frontier land to a man who had cleared it with a tractor hauled in by dog sled.

In 1974, Kenneth Deardorff went to Alaska looking for a job.

Instead, he found something almost impossible to imagine today: free land from the United States government.

Deardorff, a Vietnam veteran from Southern California, filed a homestead claim on remote land along Alaska’s Stony River. The deal was simple in theory. Live there. Improve the land. Meet the government’s requirements. If you succeeded, the land became yours according to the Homestead Act of 1862.

There were no roads to his property.

If Deardorff wanted to go somewhere, he had to travel by boat, charter a plane, or walk. Mail might arrive once a month. He built a cabin, hunted and trapped, and opened a small general store for people traveling the river.

He struggled through life in Alaska, including hauling in a tractor piece by piece by way of dog sled, and Deardorff completed the legal requirements in 1979.

Then he waited.

And in May 1988, nearly 14 years after he first claimed the land, the federal government issued his title. When it finally arrived, Kenneth Deardorff became the last person in American history to receive ownership of land under the Homestead Act.

Think about that.

In the same era when people were buying personal computers and watching The Cosby Show, the United States was still completing the transfer of free frontier land to a man who had cleared it with a tractor hauled in by dog sled.

That is the kind of history hidden inside land records.

A title search may look like a collection of deeds, maps, names, and dates. But follow those records far enough back, and occasionally you find a story like this one: a piece of federal wilderness, a man willing to live on it, and the document that finally turned it into private property.

That, to me, is what makes title history so fascinating.

Angela Sharp

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