Orphaned and Broke, She Claimed an Abandoned Ranch for FREE—What Was Sealed Inside Changed Everythin

Chapter 2

The recorder’s office sat one floor above the freight depot, reached by an outside stair that sang with every step. Inside was a coal stove, a long counter, and a wall of ledgers bound in brown canvas, and behind the counter a thin man of perhaps fifty with ink on his cuffs and reading spectacles pushed up onto his forehead. Cora set her carpet bag down and asked, straight out, whether the county had land that had gone unclaimed long enough to be taken under the tax forfeit statute.

The clerk looked at her a long moment. Then he said there were three such parcels currently open, and he turned a ledger around on the counter so she could read it herself. One was a sliver of creek bottom too narrow to run a plow through. One was a homestead half-buried in a shale slide. And one — one was a hundred and sixty acres northwest of town, up on a bench above Whipoorwill Creek, with a house, a barn, a corral, and outbuildings. It had stood abandoned for thirty years, forfeited by the estate of a man who had died without heirs and without paying his taxes, and nobody had touched it since, because every person who had walked out to look at it had walked back and said no.

“Is there a filing fee?” Cora asked.

The statute, the clerk said, waived the fee for any claimant who intended to occupy within thirty days.

“I intend to occupy this afternoon,” she said.