Native Claims and Settlement Act (ANCSA;

P.L. 92-203). Under the first four acts, public lands were distributed to the private sector and states to advance westward expansion and development of the land; ANCSA distributed public lands to Alaskan Natives as a land set-tlement. Many inholdings in wilderness areas are quite large. Under the 1872 Mining Law, parcels were claimed in units of 20 acres (8 ha), and 160 acres (64 ha) were turned over to individuals under the Homestead Act. While these four acts distributed land to private indi-viduals, the Land Grant acts distributed land to states in 640-acre (259-ha) parcels. ANCSA awarded a total land grant of 44 million acres (18 million ha) to Alaskan Natives for renouncing all claims to the rest of the state (Zaslowsky 1986). The result on the land-scape was a patchwork of private and state-owned land scattered across public lands. In contrast, much of the land in the east-ern United States was privately owned before public lands were established by the federal government. When the government decided to establish public lands in the East, it was dif-ficult to do so without some private or state-owned lands being contained within them. Thus, wilderness throughout the United States often contains inholdings; it would have severely limited the National Wilderness Preservation System (NWPS) to have exclud-ed such areas. Table 1 lists the acres of private and state land inholdings contained within designated wilderness administered by th