On December 17, 1897, Annie Alldridge Thorley raced to the Iron County courthouse in Parowan, Utah, to file a homestead claim for 160 acres at the base of Miner's Peak on the Markagunt Plateau in southwest Utah. Her son later described it as a neck-and-neck wagon and buggy race between Annie and members of the Henrietta and Lehi Jones family, who were interested in claiming the same property where the Thorley and Jones families had jointly operated a dairy for at least two decades. Annie won the race and claimed the land, which she had lived on since her childhood.1Thorley's name appears in federal land records alongside those of hundreds of other Utah women. Specifically, tract entry books provide the names of women who participated in homesteading, the process of becoming landowners through use of legislation that offered public land to citizens for free, or at a low cost, in return for their efforts and labor in improving the lands they claimed.2 Homesteading typically entailed three steps. First, an entrant identified land they wanted to claim, then filed an application and paid a filing fee at the District Land Office. Second, the claimant fulfilled the requirements of improving the land as outlined in the array of public land laws. This part of the process depended on which land act the entrant had used to file his or her claim. In some cases, claimants had the option of buying the land outright. The third step was “proving-up.” This was done by providing affidavits to show that one had acted in good faith and fulfilled the requirements. The land office then reviewed the claim and issued a patent that transferred land from the federal or state government to individuals.In many respects, adventurous, twenty-five years old, and unmarried, Annie Thorley was the embodiment of what is often considered to be typical of thousands of women who homesteaded throughout the western United States. It is estimated that women filed 15 to 20 percent of public land claims in the United States.3 A survey of General Land Office (GLO) tract entry books for twenty-four townships in diverse areas of Utah—southwestern, southeastern, and northern—shows that, at the least, women made 14 to 15 percent of the public land claims.4 The rates of women's participation in homesteading in Utah are relatively consistent from 1869, when federal land laws became applicable in Utah, through 1934, when federal lands were withdrawn from public claims.5The paper trail left by homesteaders in federal and state land records provides valuable information about individuals who filed claims, such as the improvements they made to the land and the value of those improvements. The details gleaned from land records, combined with sources such as journals, memoirs, censuses, and genealogical records, expand the understanding of women's lives and experiences during Utah's territorial and early statehood periods. Utah's female land claimants were in diverse life circumstances and of all marital statuses. They were widows, monogamously married, divorced, plurally married, separated, single, and unmarried. They were immigrants, religious converts, governesses and teachers, farmers, postmistresses, housekeepers, milliners, dressmakers, public officials, businesswomen, nurses, and midwives—often carrying out several vocations at the same time. They ran boarding houses, operated dairies and farms, dug ditches, and more.Consideration of the lives of women who filed public land claims in Utah shows that they did so in order to support themselves and their families and to build intergenerational wealth. The land that women came to own through homesteading in Utah had direct and immediate impacts for them.6 In short, land acquired through public land legislation gave women a resource that enabled them to gain an economic foothold to build personal and family wealth.The Homestead Act of 1862 launched the United States on a course of distribution of public land to private citizens, a course that was followed for the next seven decades. The act offered free land to citizens and immigrants who declared their intent to become citizens if they lived on and developed 160 acres for five years. As the historian Paul W. Gates writes, “Homestead was the great measure that offered something to every element of the population.”7 It helped classes of people who rarely benefitted in a direct manner from federal legislation, people such as the poor, the undercapitalized, immigrants, and women. Before the gender-neutral language of the 1862 Homestead Act included women as eligible applicants, few women could hope to become landowners.The legal status of married women had a major impact on a woman's ability to own land. Much of United States law is based on principles of common law inherited from England. Of particular relevance for women was the concept of coverture. Coverture is a legal construct that treated a husband and wife as if they were one person: that person being the husband. This meant, essentially, that when a woman married, she ceased to exist legally. This significantly impacted a woman's civil rights. She gave them up in exchange for the right to be fed, housed, and clothed and to receive a one-third interest in her husband's real estate or income to support herself in the event that she survived her husband. For most women the impact of coverture was that they were not able to sue or be sued in their own name, nor were they able to manage and control their own personal and real property, to make contracts or wills, convey property, keep the wages they earned, or act as independent guardians of their own children. In practice it was possible to ameliorate the impact of coverture through prenuptial or trust agreements. Also, the principle of feme sole allowed women who were widowed or abandoned by their husbands to act as if they were single women. Additionally, women who ran mercantile businesses could act independently with respect to their own businesses. Regardless, coverture had far-reaching consequences for most women.8The limitations on women's legal status began to change in 1839 when Mississippi passed a bill entitled “An act for the protection and preservation of the rights and property of Married Women.” Other states soon followed. By the end of the Civil War, twenty-nine of thirty-four states had adopted married women's property laws. Capitalistic forces, rather than an interest in promoting the legal rights of married women, fueled the passage of these laws. The Panic of 1837, which lasted for seven years, left hundreds of thousands of people trying to protect their property against aggressive creditors. Married women's property laws provided a way for husbands who had made unfortunate business decisions to protect some of their own, or their families’, property against creditors. As these laws were interpreted through the last half of the nineteenth-century, common law principles began to erode and gradually resulted in married women gaining a legal identity and rights to hold, oversee, and manage their own property.9 They worked in concert with homestead laws to bring about fundamental changes in women's legal and political rights; they helped advance the financial status of women by making it feasible for women to become landowners through public land acts.Utah women filed claims under an array of public land acts. They most commonly used the 1862 Homestead Act, the 1877 Desert Land Entry, the Enlarged Homestead Act of 1909, and the 1916 Stock-Raising Homestead Act; less frequently used were the Timber Culture and Pre-emption acts. All of these laws were modifications or amendments to the basic system of offering land to private citizens but differed in their requirements and terms. For instance, the Enlarged Homestead Act doubled the acreage for each claim to 320 acres and decreased the residency requirement from five years to three years. The Desert Land Act allowed 640 acres and required a payment of $1.25 cents per acre, with 25 cents per acre due upon filing. Rather than residency, proof of irrigation was required. The terms of desert entries were altered in 1891 to decrease allowed acreage to 320 acres.Before anyone could file land claims in Utah, the federal land system needed to be extended to the territory. This did not happen until 1869, two decades after American settlers first arrived in the area. Congress withheld the federal land system from Utah as an initial tool in its decades-long struggle to mold Utah society, government, and culture into a form that nineteenth-century America considered to be acceptable. Many Americans viewed the practice of plural marriage in the territory with distaste, and in 1862 Congress passed the Morrill Anti-Bigamy Act to end it. Enforcement was minimal through the 1860s while the United States focused on the Civil War. In the late 1870s legislation and enforcement efforts intensified and continued through the 1880s, until 1890 when the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints publicly renounced polygamy. Finally, in 1896, almost fifty years after Euro-American settlers arrived in the Salt Lake Valley, Congress granted statehood to Utah.Upon arrival in 1847, Latter-day Saints established their own system of surveying, distributing, and recording land ownership, which differed from the Township and Range grid survey system used by the federal government. When the federal land system was applied to Utah in 1869, adjustments were necessary.10 During this period, Utahns were conscious of the vulnerability of title to lands that they had occupied for decades. Latter-day Saint settlers were admonished in church meetings and newspapers to gain legal ownership of their lands as soon as possible. Attorneys who specialized in and processed land claims, such as William Clayton, Charles W. Stayner, and T. C. Bailey, provided another layer of protection.11Before a claim could be filed under the federal land system, Utah's lands had to be surveyed by government-sanctioned surveyors. The survey of townsites and lands near existing communities occurred relatively soon thereafter, in the 1870s. However, outlying lands took longer and settlers continued to occupy those lands by squatter's rights, sometimes for decades. This was the case for Annie Thorley's homestead. She stated in her final claim papers that she had lived on and used this land, “long prior to the survey of the same by the United States.”12The practice of plural marriage also impacted the experience of women who homesteaded in Utah. Its influence was not always negative. Territorial legislators passed inheritance laws, instituted women's suffrage, ended the dower, and added an incompatibility clause as grounds for divorce. They created a dual system of civil and probate courts that gave Mormon-controlled probate courts authority comparable to civil courts. These actions facilitated and protected the practice of polygamy but also advanced the rights of Utah women. However, American society did not agree. Instead, these changes were often seen as attempts to tighten Mormon control in the territory and achieve even greater oppression of women by Utah's patriarchal religious authority. Few believed that women voluntarily participated in the practice of plural marriage.Contrary to common perceptions of the time, divorces in territorial Utah were relatively easy to obtain when compared to the rest of the country. Marriage was considered to be a covenant between individuals bound by mutual affection and harmony and that the marriage bond was broken by the alienation of affection or the loss of religious faith of one of the partners. Latter-day Saints, in other words, saw marriage as a religious concern rather than a civil one. This standard of judgment, combined with Utah's Mormon-controlled probate courts, resulted in an atmosphere where it was relatively easy to obtain divorces, particularly so for women. This atmosphere for divorce was recognized nationally and, for a three-year period, locales such as Beaver, Utah, became a destination for Americans seeking easy divorces.13From settlement through 1874, when the US Congress passed the Poland Act or Anti-Bigamy Prosecution Act, Utah had no civil system to register marriages. Ecclesiastical authorities recorded marriages, which had the advantage of keeping plural marriages out of the public record. The majority Latter-day Saint population generally avoided the civil courts and settled disputes within the framework of ecclesiastical judgment or the probate courts. Part of the reason for the relative ease of obtaining a divorce in territorial Utah was the idea that participation in plural marriage was voluntary.14 Additionally, in the context of frontier life and the time, divorce was something much different than it is today—often an informal process, achieved, perhaps, by simply leaving town.15A woman's ability to acquire public lands was contingent upon her marital status—something that few men needed to consider. Whether a woman was unmarried, monogamously married, widowed, plurally married, separated, or divorced, directly impacted her ability to file a land claim and affected the type of land claim she submitted. This is seen in a survey of tract entry books for nine townships in southwestern Utah where seventy-seven women land claimants were identified. Their marital status was determined through use of census, genealogical, and land records. Of the 77 women, 27 were unmarried; 31 were monogamously married; 8 were widows or female heads of household; and 7 had been plurally married. The marital status of the remaining 4 land claimants could not be determined. Further examination of the lives of women within marital groupings highlights issues central to the lives of Utah women and builds an understanding of what the promise of landownership meant for them. It also brings to light some fascinating stories.The language of the 1862 Homestead Act included women as eligible applicants, allowing “any person who is the head of a family, or who has arrived at the age of twenty-one years.”16 Thus, women homesteaders have commonly been defined as unmarried women over age twenty-one. This image describes one-third of the women land claimants in southwestern Utah. The twenty-seven women who were unmarried when they filed land claims were young, (their average age was twenty-three-and-a-half years old) and, as expected, the majority of them, twenty-two, used the homestead entry to file their land claims versus only five who used the Desert Entry. Biographical profiles of these women indicate that they were personally ambitious, resourceful, adventurous, and entrepreneurial.The majority of the single women homesteaders in the southwestern Utah cohort filed their claims after 1900. Initially, this trend appears to be in line with studies of women homesteaders on other frontiers, which have observed that the participation of women in the homesteading process increased dramatically after 1900.17 However, the rates of participation over time come into clearer focus when claims made by Utah women of all marital statuses are considered. In southwestern Utah, 61 percent of claims filed by all groups of women were made before 1900, and 39 percent were filed after 1900. Rather than increased participation due to changing social forces, such as loosening gender roles, the relatively early and consistent participation of Utah's women in homesteading appears to be more related to the impact of differences in Utah's settlement and land use patterns when compared to other frontiers. Settlers of European and American descent came to Utah beginning in 1847 and continued arriving regularly through the 1880s. These settlers were drawn mainly by religious affiliation rather than economic or agricultural developments. They soon dispersed throughout the territory, mainly along the Wasatch Front, and settled where land was most suitable and had sufficient water access. By the time the second generation of these settlers matured, the effects of overpopulation began to manifest. The second and third generations of European and American settlers had to look farther from their parents’ homes to establish their own homes and farms. The timing of completed federal surveys, which opened lands in Utah for dispersal at different periods, further influenced the rates at which Utah women were able to file public land claims.18Single women homesteaders were relatively successful in obtaining title to their claims. In southwestern Utah, fourteen single women, or just over half, received titles. Compared to women of other marital statuses, this makes them somewhat more successful than other women land entrants in the area and throughout the state. In the townships surveyed for northern, southwestern, and southeastern Utah, women were almost as successful or slightly more successful than men in attaining title to their claims.Marital status was a core consideration in filing and patenting land claims. If a single woman married before she patented her land, there was a risk of rendering her claim invalid. Whether a woman was separated, divorced, or plurally married also affected her ability to homestead. Rulings by the General Land Office (GLO) had a quasi-legal status and had the power to invalidate a woman's claim. Interpretation of GLO regulations often shifted according to the administrators, who determined whether or not an applicant was meeting requirements. One important area of eligibility was that of residency. Many GLO rulings pivoted on where the marital household was actually located. Cohabitation was considered a crucial indication of a true marriage relationship. Yet in Utah, with the added complication of plural marriage, relatively few contested claims involving women were brought before GLO authorities. This may have been due to a cooperative community attitude among the majority Latter-day Saint settlers, who did not want to endanger their land titles. Between 1881 and 1920 the General Land Office published only fifteen decisions involving Utah women compared to Colorado, where seventy-one cases were published, and Wyoming, where twenty-six cases were published.19 While it is likely that the generally cooperative nature of Latter-day Saint society led to less contested cases, it may also be evidence of a more sympathetic attitude toward widows, polygamous wives, and other women struggling to earn a livelihood for themselves and their children.For single women entrants, getting married before patenting their claims had the potential to cause problems. In 1867, GLO administrators determined that anyone who met the prerequisites when she filed was eligible to make final proof. The GLO followed this practice until 1886, when reasoning abruptly changed, stating that a woman who married before completing her homestead claim forfeited her right to “acquire title to the land.” This interpretation did not persist long. However, marital status continued to be an issue when women claimants married men who also held unperfected claims. Getting married before proving up their claims appears not to have been an issue for at least two single women entrants in southwestern Utah. As noted in the tract entry books, patents were issued to “Mary E. Sandin, formerly Mary E. Mackelprang,” and to “Betsey A. Hunter, formerly Walker.” In her final claim affidavit Mary reported that following her marriage on September 25, 1901, her husband had been in continuous residence with her on her land, and prior to that, her father had lived with her on her claim.20The largest group of claims made by female homesteaders in southwestern Utah are those claims filed by women who identified as monogamously married at the time of their filing. The language of the 1862 Act extended eligibility to women who were single and over age twenty-one. As a result, it has generally been interpreted that a monogamously married woman could not file a homestead claim except in cases where, effectively, she was the head of a household. Exceptions were applied when a husband was disabled, a drunkard, imprisoned, or otherwise unable to support his family.21Land records for southwestern Utah townships indicate several instances where a monogamously married woman functioned as the head of a household. One of these was Kate Lublin Alexander. She was a Danish immigrant of Jewish heritage who had converted to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints and who came to the United States with her parents at a young age. In 1894, she filed a 160-acre homestead claim in her married name near Panguitch, Utah, in an area known as Sand Wash (T34S R5W). Ownership of public land helped Alexander to achieve economic independence, which became necessary when her husband and older son went to Colorado to work cutting ties for the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad. Her husband did not return for fifteen years.During those years, Alexander established a farm on her claim that supported herself and her children. In the five years that it took to prove up, Kate, her sons, and her neighbors built seven miles of ditch, cleared and cultivated land, built up a small herd of cattle, and secured water rights for forty acres. Kate received the patent to her land November 1, 1899. Her children said they lived well and “never went in debt one penny.” When her husband did return to the area, her son said that his parents “did not live as man and wife,” and that, “when father visited from time to time he was made welcome and given every respect but our hearts were with our mother.”22Technically, Anna Maria Bayles (Sawtell) was divorced when she filed an enlarged homestead claim for land in southeastern Utah near the Utah–Colorado border on July 7, 1915. She filed her claim under her unmarried name. Throughout her life Anna demonstrated business acuity and was described as financially successful. Bayles did not have children of her own but maintained close relationships to her nieces and nephews, whom she helped raise. Wherever she lived she had an eye open to business opportunities. Anna moved to Bluff in 1888 to help her brother, Ole Hansen Bayles, after his wife died in childbirth. It is reported that she immediately became involved in running and managing the Bluff Cooperative. When a gold boom developed in southeastern Utah in the 1890s, she and her brother and sister established a boarding house that housed and fed gold seekers who flooded into the area.Anna probably first met William Cantelor Sawtell in Bluff. Sawtell had a notorious reputation. He was employed by a prominent local rancher, Al Scorup, who married Anna's sister Emma. Scorup related an incident where a group of Texas cowboys had rounded up his cattle and refused to give them back. However, when they saw “Billy Sawtell, an outlaw of whom they were mortally afraid,” they quickly returned the cattle. At age sixteen Sawtell was imprisoned in the Colorado penitentiary for larceny. He received a pardon from Governor Cooper three years later and was set free. His name came to be connected with gambling, gun fights, and killings in at least two western states and one in Mexico. Despite his reputation, Anna and the much younger Sawtell developed a close friendship.Anna returned to Parowan in 1897. There she came to own a herd of sheep, invested in real estate, and owned stock in and served as a director on the boards of the Parowan Coop and the local bank. She bought a two-story building with twelve rooms that she turned into the Bayles Hotel and served in local youth and women's church organizations.Nearly ten years later, Sawtell and Bayles became reacquainted when he was traveling through Parowan—reportedly on his way to the safety of the Hole-in-the-Wall in Wyoming. They married on April 9, 1907, and went on an extended honeymoon trip through Wyoming and Nevada, where she met some of Billy's associates. Soon after the beginning of 1909 Anna returned to Parowan, reportedly without her husband. Family histories are written as if he died after two years of marriage. Regardless, on March 24, 1910, Anna initiated divorce proceedings stating that Billy had not provided any financial support, had deserted her, and was probably in Wyoming. However, the 1910 census (conducted on April 26, 1910) identifies William Sawtell as the head of a household in Parowan, living with his wife Anna Sawtell. William was listed as the owner of a saloon while no occupation is recorded for Anna. Less than six years after she divorced him, William Cantelor Sawtell was killed in a gunfight in Ely, Nevada.Anna's marriage appears atypical for a successful business woman who demonstrated responsibility and good judgment. In 1915, when Anna filed her land claim she was again in Bluff helping her sister, who was experiencing a difficult pregnancy. The patent to her enlarged homestead claim was issued May 26, 1920. A year-and-a-half later, on October 1, 1921, a warranty deed for her tract was granted to her brother H. D. Bayles, evidently demonstrating one more way in which Anna contributed to the welfare of her family members.23The large number of married women land claimants in southwestern Utah cannot be explained by exceptions allowed under the 1862 Homestead Act. At best, the cases of separation or divorce that qualified women as legal land applicants under the 1862 act explain only eight of the thirty-one claims filed by monogamously married claimants in this cohort. The explanation for the large number of monogamously married women land applicants, rather, lies in the type of claim they used when they filed. Most of these women used the 1877 Desert Land Act. Unlike the 1862 act, the Desert Land Act recognized married women as eligible applicants. Of the thirty-one women determined to be monogamously married, twenty-three used the Desert Entry Act; seven the Homestead Act; and one the Timber Culture Act.24The life stories of women land entrants in southwestern Utah pointedly illustrate that women's use of federal land claims provided a much-needed safety net, as well as a means by which they could support themselves and their children and develop a degree of personal and family wealth. This was particularly so for widows.Caroline Keturah Arthur Jones, called Keturah, was widowed when she was thirty-four. She was left with six young children to support. Her oldest child was crippled with rheumatism and required constant care. Six months after her husband's death in October 1895, Keturah turned to public land claims to help support her family. On March 26, 1896, she filed a Desert Entry claim for 160 acres of valley land near Cedar City. In a period of five days, at least thirty-seven other women also filed desert claims for valley land adjacent to Cedar City. However, a year-and-a-half later, the GLO canceled Jones's claim, along with those of the other entrants who filed within the same five day period. The reason for these cancellations is unknown.25 Yet three months later, in December 1897, Jones continued her pursuit of land ownership and filed a homestead claim for 160 acres on Cedar Mountain (T38S R10W). Her claim shared a border with that of Annie Thorley. At the time, scores of small dairies, operated and managed by local women, created a thriving dairy industry that sold butter and cheese to mines and communities in Nevada and southern Utah. Such a landholding would have generated a dependable income for Jones. Two years later, November 4, 1899, she received the title to this claim. Then in 1904, only four years later, she died at age forty-three.26Keturah Jones's story is remarkably similar to that of her mother-in-law, Sage Treharne Jones. Sage was also widowed at a young age, thirty years, and also had six young children to raise—all under age eight, the youngest of them six-month-old twins. Sage and her children made their living farming, helping with lambing, hauling wood, and running the Pony Express route from Cedar City to mining camps in Nevada. Sage, a Welsh immigrant, was later appointed as Cedar City's postmistress. Though she could not read or write English, she fulfilled her duties with the help of her children. Later in life, she learned to write English so she could write to her son, who had moved to southeastern Utah.Sage lived a life of hard work, adaptation, and innovation. The welfare and education of her children was often on her mind. In 1895, her only daughter, Sarah Ann Jones Higbee who, like her father, had suffered for years with crippling arthritis, died leaving five children behind. Sage, who was sixty-two at the time, took one of them, a granddaughter, into her home. Later that same year, after thirty-two years of a self-sufficient lifestyle, she filed a homestead claim for 160 acres on Cedar Mountain in (T 37S R 10W) near where her daughter-in-law, Keturah, would file a land claim two years later. For years, Sage and her family had held the land by squatter's rights and operated a dairy there. Two years after she filed her claim, Sage died. The land title was awarded to her heirs in December 1902. Although the dairy industry that she and her family worked in faded by the first decade of the twentieth century, these lands became an important grazing area for local sheep ranchers. Jones's claim, although made late in her life, was a valuable asset that she passed on to her children.27Land claims were also an important asset for plurally married women. Of the seventy-seven women land claimants identified in southwestern Utah, at least seven were involved in plural marriages at some point in their lives. Two were first wives and five were second or third wives. The practice of plural marriage was complex and had wide-reaching cultural, political, and legal consequences. Women who participated in the practice faced precarious economic and legal situations. Legisl