By Paul Fees
In 1882, when I was twelve years old, my parents moved from Barbour [sic] County, Kansas, (in which state they had been among the earliest pioneers), to Yavapai County, Arizona. We started on the third day of November with two covered wagons drawn by four horses each. I rode a little Texas pony and drove a band of horses. We followed the old Santa Fe Trail nearly all the way. . . .
– Sharlot Mabridth Hall, 1924
Sharlot Mabridth Hall’s parents, James Knox Polk and Adeline Boblett Hall, were both 37 years old when they decided to bundle up the kids, 11-year-old Sharlot and her little brother, Ted, (7) and move south. It was late in the fall.
“Winter” drives the story of the Hall family’s migration from Barber County, Kansas to Yavapai County, Arizona. The killing winter of 1880-1881 was sandwiched between seasons of severe drought. When Adeline’s brother, John Boblett, wrote from Prescott in spring of 1881 suggesting a new home, James was quick to decide. He and his partner, Adeline’s and John’s younger brother, Sam, sold their farms, loaded the wagons, and headed northwest a hundred miles to catch the Santa Fe Trail at Fort Dodge.
It wasn’t hard to find. As a young man, James had hunted, trapped, and herded along the way. Besides, the Santa Fe Trail had been a thoroughfare to the Southwest for travelers and commerce since 1821, its track broad and obvious on the Kansas prairie. Sharlot remembered seeing the deep ruts of earlier wagon trains. Traffic on the trail was relatively slack for the Halls and Bobletts because the railroad had been built to Santa Fe in 1880 and would reach the coast by 1883.
Determined to start a horse ranch in Arizona, James bought a small herd. It was Sharlot’s job to drive them. Thinking it would make her job easier, her father outfitted her pony with a sidesaddle, an unfamiliar and probably uncomfortable seat for a girl who always rode bareback. She was thrown early in the journey, and her injured back would cause her pain for the rest of her life.
Heading west and south across the Colorado plains, they managed to cross rugged Raton Pass into New Mexico before winter storms would make the passage all but impossible. Days were cold but sunny; the nights were freezing. Sharlot would recall hearing the crunch of the grazing horses as she and her family bedded down close to the campfire.
After reaching Albuquerque (“a pleasant town – shady – and the people were friendly,” Sharlot recalled), the family turned west along the Beale Wagon Road. They fought increasingly heavy weather, spending Christmas Day, 1881, crossing the Continental Divide near the Arizona border. They were fortunate an army unit had broken a path through the snowy forests.
In February, 1882, following John Boblett’s directions to the Agua Fria River valley, they at last reached their destination on Lynx Creek. The ground was covered in snow, but the contrast with the wind-swept sub-zero plains of southern Kansas seemed like a balm to James and Adeline. For Sharlot the journey was complete when she made her first trip over the hill to the territorial capital, Prescott (pop.1836), and glimpsed the old “Governor’s Mansion” among the trees. It was just a log house, but, as she later wrote in a coda to her family’s epic journey, it was “grand enough to me who remembered the sod houses and ‘dug outs’ of the Great American Desert which we had just crossed.”
February 10th at 5pm, Sharlot Hall Museum Education Center presents “O, Prescott! O, Prescott!”—a Twilight Tales retelling Sharlot Hall’s family journey to Prescott. See details at sharlothallmuseum.org/event/twilight-tales-o-prescott-o-prescott-february-10-2026/
“Days Past” is a collaborative project of the Sharlot Hall Museum and the Prescott Corral of Westerners International (www.prescottcorral.org). This and other Days Past articles are also available at www.archives.sharlothallmuseum.org/articles/days-past-articles/1. The public is encouraged to submit proposed articles and inquiries to dayspast@sharlothallmuseum.org Please contact SHM Research Center reference desk at 928-277-2003, or via email at archivesrequest@sharlothallmuseum.org for information or assistance with photo requests.