William Halls Jr.
Incidents from the life of
William Halls Jr.
As related by his eldest son, Earl Halls, as of March 27, 1956
William Halls Jr. was born in Huntsville, Weber County, Utah, September 6, 1863, on a Co-op farm in the southeast corner of Ogden valley. His father owned a large farm there and the family ran dairy and beef cattle. Father and Uncle Mosiah were the oldest boys and naturally got in on the working end. Times were very hard and very little money to go on. I remember my grandmother telling me how she and little Willie, as she called my father, used to glean grain from field corners and ditch banks in order to get more grain for food. They would thresh it out by hand with a flail. A flail is made by hinging two pieces of wood together with a piece of rawhide; then, by holding to one end you could strike the grain with the other and knock the grain out of the straw. In father’s younger days, he and his brothers must have been mischievous, as the older Danish people called them the “damn bad Hall boys.”
Father has often told of the dances they had in those days. They were operated by the church, and with strict rules, there were no waltzes allowed because the boys would have to put their arm around his partner and that would be terrible. Quadrilles and such were the only type of dances then. Father, and some of his friends, were expelled from the dances at one time for drinking something besides water and were not permitted to attend the dances of the valley unless they had a recommend from the Bishop, and his name being William Halls, the same as fathers, it made it perfectly legitimate for father to make recommends for himself and his friends. Therefore, by using these perfectly good recommends, they attended the dances in Eden and Liberty, and somehow got by without getting their church cut off.
When father was 21 years for age, grandfather, along with Bishop Hammond, was called on a mission to help settle the San Juan Country in Southeastern Utah and Southwestern Colorado, the idea being to start a new Mormon settlement. Grandfather took his second wife and family, also Uncle Thomas and father. Father related an incident of the trip. It seems one morning they were late finding their horses which they had to turn loose to feed at night. Breakfast was ready when they came in, and Hammond called on his oldest son, Sammy, to ask the blessing. Sammy gave a long drawn out blessing which aroused the old man’s ire. Hammond said: “Sammy, you don’t have to bless the plains of Abraham, the Israelites, and all. Don’t you know we are in a hurry? Besides, we covered all of that in our family prayers.”
When they reached the Colorado river, they put the wagons on a small ferry, but they had to force the stock to swim. They had a fine mule drown. Father said, “the whole trip was bad enough, but when you lose your ass, that’s worse.”
After reaching Mancos, Colorado, all of the men folks took up desert entry claims, and there had to be a six mile ditch dug from the Mancos river to their claims. Mostly hand work, no bulldozers, no digging machines, and their horses were poor. Father worked in logging camps and coal mines, or wherever he could get work. He and the two Butt boys, Parley and Dick, were the first white men the Indians would allow on the Elk mountain with cattle in San Juan County. This story was related to me by Parley Butt in 1915: He said the Indians rode into their camp and one of them was riding Dick’s horse, and when he claimed the horse, the Indians laid back over their horses and pointed their rifles at the three of them. Parley said he and Dick were scared to death, but dad was sitting on a log reading a yellow back novel. He just looked up and grinned and went on reading. When I asked dad about it later, he said, “Well, if you are going to die, you might just as well grin.”
My grandmother on my mother’s side had five daughters and she was the first school teacher in the Mormon settlement. Father married one of the daughters, Ellen Melissa Barker. Of course, that was a great mistake, as eight ornery kids were the result of it, everyone of which are mighty proud to have been his kid.
After the marriage, they built on father’s desert entry claim close to Uncle Tom’s. Uncle Thomas married one of Hammond’s daughters, Lowella.
Father worked in the coal mines and lumber camps. He was exposed to smallpox and took sick. On going home, he exposed mother, and they both came nearly dying from the disease, mother, being in the family-way, her first baby was born dead.
Some years later, father, with three other men, made a trip to Salt Lake City, a distance of three hundred miles, after a threshing machine. They had to take four teams with them. Two for the thresher, one for the horse power, and one for the chuck wagon. On the way back with the machine, they had many sideling places where they had to put poles over the top of the machine and hang rocks on them to keep the machine from tipping over.
In 1900 we moved to Huntsville. My sister Maud was left deaf from meningitis, and was now old enough to go to the deaf and blind school in Ogden. Father and Peter Frandsen, a brother of grandfather’s second wife, made the trip with a wagon and four horses. Mother and the kids came by train later.
On this trip with the wagon, they also had a saddle horse that later threw my Uncle George on his head into a service-berry bush and about broke his neck. I have been told they tied his neck together and he was all right thereafter.
After returning to Huntsville to live, father worked for his brothers who owned the Halls brothers ranches, one in Huntsville, and one in Raymond, Idaho. Later he bought a home and a small farm on Spring Creek on the north of Huntsville. There he raised fish, I know, because I mixed all the cement with a shovel on a mixing board to build the cement ponds. The fish business went on for several years until fish sold for twelve cents a pound, and the electric railroad was built, the road chose to go right through the ponds and that ended the fish.
Father was a great sportsman. He loved baseball, and in his early days, pitched for the Mancos team. He would kill rabbits and sage hens by throwing rocks at them. He was a very accurate horseshoe pitcher. No son of his could hold a candle to him. David O. McKay would often stop, and he and dad would play a few games. On one occasion, David O. asked why dad never came to Salt Lake to conference, and dad said, “Well, it’s like this, I can sit at home and listen to the radio, and when I get tired, I can turn it off, and if I were down there I would just have to sit and listen.”
Twenty odd years before father’s death, he joined a club composed mostly of Ogden businessmen, doctors, lawyers, etc., Uncle Christian Wansgard being the only other member from Huntsville. For many years they held club every Wednesday afternoon in their club house on Joe Read’s farm on Spring Creek. After the dam was built, the clubhouse was moved to father’s grove. Hodson, the architect of Ogden’s million dollar high school, and Joe Read, were two of dad’s best friends. Mother never liked the club. She knew they played cards there, and she feared he would lose money.
Confidentially, dad let me see his little book shortly before his death, and it showed several hundred dollars to the good. On a Wednesday afternoon in May, 1939, club met again. Games were played as usual, and they had their evening meal, as was always their custom. It was dad’s turn to help with the dishes. He took some leftovers to the door to empty them in the garbage can just as Joe Read was coming in. Dad had a heart attack, and Joe caught him, put him in a chair, but he was gone. That is what comes from living right. David O. McKay and Joe Read were the speakers at the funeral. A poem recited by McKay was “When you get to know a fellow” by Edgar A. Guest. At the cemetery, Mosiah, dad’s brother, came to me and said: “Earl, a few years ago your father bet me five dollars he would live to tromp the dirt on my grave. I called his bet. Now there lies Willie. How in hell am I going to collect the five dollars?”
And such is the Halls brothers’ wit…