By 1900, eighty-million acres of public land in the West had passed into private ownership through the 1862 Homestead Act, and New Mexico attracted hundreds of settlers who built homes and farmed 160-acre allotments in pursuit of a better life. Mollie Klapp was among them. Born in Illinois, she was widowed in Oklahoma with seven children by 1900 when she decided to move to Moriarty, known as a pinto bean capital of the world. The Estancia Valley was well suited to dryland farming and helped New Mexico become the nation's fourth largest pinto bean producer by 1916, when 2.5 million pounds were harvested. Mollie farmed, taught school, and remarried, but her hard life led to institutionalization at the state mental health hospital in Las Vegas, where she worked as a seamstress and housekeeper and died from "exhaustion."