“We gained access, but lost some of our uniqueness,” Mr. Fischer said.

Economic contraction is part of the new ethos, too. Alaska is now in its second year of recession as an economy tied to oil has sputtered with declining production and prices. More jobs have been lost than in any downturn in three decades, according to state figures, and the unemployment rate is now the highest in the nation at 7 percent.

Charles Wohlforth, an author and columnist who has written about the state for decades, said the old oil economy propped up the sense by many Alaskans that life was inherently different here, through the blue-collar jobs it created by the thousands and the taxes that oil companies paid. The State Legislature has now been considering new taxes to replace lost revenue from the oil decline, and those taxes look a lot like the ones that people pay in the rest of the country.

“We’re going to be kind of a regular place,” Mr. Wohlforth said. And it won’t, he said, look like the hip, thriving cities of the East and West Coasts. “We’re actually going to look like the middle of the country, which is kind of a declining blue-collar area that has lost its main economic reason to exist and bounces along with whatever we can manage.”

Victor Fischer, who came here in 1950 and helped lead the drive for Alaskan statehood in 1959, says the gloomy talk of lost distinctions and decline is wrong. The next chapter of Alaska will be unquestionably different, said Mr. Fischer, who is 93. With fewer oil jobs, there might even be something like a return to the old smaller, tougher state where great jobs didn’t grow on trees, he said. But young people looking for a place with fewer boundaries will still come, he said, and in that there is hope.