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.1

Thorley'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...

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