Homesteads on Fort Richardson, Alaska - The USARAK Home Page ...

unsurveyed, a physical description of boundaries was given through relating theparcel to natural and permanent markers by metes and bounds. 64Finally, issuance of patent was accomplished by filing final proof or commutingthe land. Commuting allowed a person to purchase the claim for $1.25 an acre afterliving on the land for at least 14 months. Filing final proof required a person todemonstrate that they had met the residence and cultivation requirements. This wasaccomplished by appearing, with two witnesses, before the head of the district landoffice. Notice was then posted in the newspaper and on the homestead for nineweeks to allow adverse claims to be filed. If none came forth within 30 days, thepatent was issued. 65“It has been said that the Homestead Act was a wager in which the government beta man he could not live on the land for three to five years.” 66 In Alaska, it was a betthe government often won. Many homesteaders gave up their claims and movedback into urban areas or left Alaska all together.As more and more people arrived in the Anchorage area, homesteading venturesgrew correspondingly. There were only about 500 people in the Matanuska Valley,and 130 homesteaders in 1910. After 1915, when construction for the Alaska Railroadbegan, a veritable homesteading boom was set in motion. In 1917, there were400 people homesteading in Anchorage and the Matanuska Valley. The boom wastemporarily thwarted by W. W. I when many left to join the military. The number ofhomesteaders was cut in half, but increased slowly at the war’s end. 67Homesteading was a program set up specifically for farming purposes. In Alaska,the growing season is famously short, leaving at least six months of winter in whichno crops can be cultivated. Many homesteaders in Alaska did not make use offarming as a primary occupation or source of income. Most men had other jobs intown, worked for the railroad, or had some other seasonal type of work. In the earlydays, homesteading was limited “to gardening and potato growing by men wholooked upon their tracts as occasional residences between periods of employmentand mining, trapping, freighting and prospecting. Most of them were bachelors,accustomed to life in sparsely settled regions and familiar with the techniques necessaryfor living with that mixture of occupations.” 68A few crops grow in the long Alaskan summer daylight hours with great success.Homesteaders quickly discovered that farming here did not come without its goodshare of tribulations and basic hard work. Clearing the land was generally a laboriousand time-consuming process. Most of the homesteaders had land in heavilytimbered areas, and there was a decided lack of machinery to ease the clearingwork.Trees had to be felled and the logs skidded away. Stumps had to beremoved with grubbing hoe and ax, or sometimes with fire. Thelarger stumps might be pulled with chain and block and a team of64Ibid., pp.265, 266.65Ibid., pp.266, 267.66Ibid., p.262.67Carberry and Lane. Patterns of the Past, An Inventory of Anchorage’s Historic Resources. p. 185.68Miller. The Frontier in Alaska and the Matanuska Colony. p.24.<strong>Homesteads</strong> on Fort RichardsonAlaska21