The first woman Arizona ever paid to hold public office was hired to do one thing. Save the territory’s history before it was gone. Her name was Sharlot Hall. She was born in Kansas in 1870, and her family came west on the Santa Fe Trail, settling near what is now Prescott Valley in 1882. On the way, she was thrown from a horse and hurt her back, and the pain stayed with her the rest of her life. She grew up on a ranch, read everything she could get, and spent her time listening to the old timers who had been in Arizona since the beginning. By the early 1900s those people were dying, their stories and belongings were disappearing with them, and ancient sites across the territory were being looted to sell to buyers back east. When Congress pushed to bring Arizona and New Mexico into the Union as a single state, Hall wrote a poem called Arizona making the case against it, and a copy landed on the desk of every member of Congress. The merger failed, and she is often credited as part of...