Earl & Eliza Halls

The next year, between working in Monticello in the blacksmith shop and farming, trying to get money to fence and live, we raised a better crop of wheat and corn for our horses. We raised a pig or two, rented a cow, and the cottontails came free. Along with a few chickens, we lived. Lucky for Lyle, he lived on milk.

(Eliza) From our little two-by-two window I could look east across the flat country and see the peaks of the Colorado mountains and west across the country to the Blue Mountains beyond Monticello, where finally I located “the horse’s head,” made up of a white rock nose and surrounding trees. Over the years I enjoyed the views of the mountains so much. The happiest time of my life was the years spent on the homestead. We built a cellar first, a chicken coop, a barn, a corral, a pig pen, and a shop which never got a roof. All were made of logs from our homestead. Earl also fenced a garden and the east field. It was a brush fence between the yard and the canyon. He worked from early morning till late at night. The days were long in summer. The sun came up over the Colorado flat lands and set behind the Blue Mountains. I loved that big country.

In 1917, while living at the homestead, Eliza wrote a poem. She had possibly had mail from Huntsville that told of changes in her hometown and that could have set her to reminiscing. It’s helpful to picture her setting at this time – far away from anyone, even neighbors; in a one-room cabin with a bedroom tent attached; on a high plateau desert near a red sandstone, southern Utah canyon at an elevation of 7000 feet. Where was Earl that night? Perhaps away doing one of the tasks that his stories tell took him away from home occasionally. Here’s Eliza’s poem: