Can poetry change the world? Sharlot Hall showed us it can. In 1905, President Theodore Roosevelt recommended Congress accept New Mexico and Arizona into the United States… but combined as one new state. This idea appalled Sharlot Hall, an Arizona woman. She had many poems and articles published in magazines and periodicals like the Atlantic Monthly and the Ladies’ Home Journal. When she heard the news about the proposed combining of her beloved Arizona with its neighbor, she put her way with words to an even better use.
Sharlot Hall loved Arizona, but wasn’t a native. Born in Kansas in 1870, she lived there until age eleven. Tired of trying to make a living on the Kansas prairie, with its grass fires, locust swarms, and wolf raids, her parents moved to Arizona Territory. They took the iconic Santa Fe Trail to get there. Along the way, Sharlot was thrown from a horse and suffered injuries to her back and leg that left her with chronic pain for the rest of her life.
The Hall family settled along Lynx Creek near what is now Prescott Valley. They built a home and named it Orchard Ranch. Sharlot and her brother Ted helped their parents raise horses, pigs, and cows, and cultivated apple and pear trees and a vegetable garden. The family also did gold prospecting.
The children attended school periodically at a one-room log-and-adobe school four miles from the ranch. Eventually, Sharlot boarded in the town of Prescott for a year and received her schooling there. She loved writing poetry and stories, and delighted in trying to capture the beauties of her own world to set down on paper. An avid reader, Sharlot learned enough from her parents and her reading to fill in the gaps in her formal education and attended a private junior college in California.
In her early twenties, Sharlot sold her first story to the children’s magazine Wide Awake. By age 22, she was earning money by contributing articles and poetry to a popular California magazine called Land of Sunshine (later Out West), which brought her national attention. In 1906, she became the associate editor. During her lifetime, she wrote ten books and published over 500 articles, stories, and poems.
In 1905, Sharlot Hall wrote an epic poem titled “Arizona” that lovingly paid tribute to the natural beauties of the state, its rich history, and its unique culture. It appeared in multiple publications, and advocates for Arizona statehood made sure every Congressman received a copy. Thanks to Sharlot’s literary efforts, Congress decided Arizona and New Mexico should both be admitted to the Union as individual states. A poet had impacted the history of the state she loved.
She continued to affect Arizona’s history even after it became a state. All her life, the history of the American west fascinated Sharlot. While attending school in Prescott, she befriended an older gentleman named Henry Fleury, who had come to Arizona as secretary to the territory’s first governor. When Sharlot met him, Fleury lived in the old governor’s mansion and delighted in telling her about the territory’s colorful history. Sharlot wrote it all down, trying to save as much as she could of Arizona’s history from the generation of fading pioneers. She also collected physical artifacts, things left by early white settlers and local Native Americans. By 1907, she needed a museum to house her collection.
In 1909, Sharlot became the official historian for Arizona Territory, and the first woman to hold a salaried public office in the state. Eventually, she accomplished her dream of having a museum in the old governor’s mansion. She continued to record the historical recollections of Native Americans, pioneer women and men, miners, ranchers, and anyone else connected with the early history of the territory.
When Arizona attained statehood in 1912, Sharlot’s job as official historian ended. Her mother died, and Sharlot moved to Orchard Ranch to care for her father. After he passed, she returned to Prescott and dedicated the rest of her life to building up and maintaining the museum she had started. At her death in 1943, it was renamed the Sharlot Hall Museum in her honor. You can visit it still today, a testament not only to the history of Arizona but to the love one woman bore for her adopted home state, which might not even be a state today if it weren’t for her literary efforts. ♦
