Born in Warrenton, Mississippi, and raised in Charleston, Illinois, Horace Mark “Hod” Hall (1854-1945) was the son of dentist Dr. Jesse C. Hall and brother of Bill, Clarence, and Sylvia Hall. In 1871, with his friend Will Denman, Hod Hall moved to Abilene, Kansas, where they met the town marshal, Wild Bill Hickock. Samuel Johnson, a cattle dealer from Blanco County, Texas, and later grandfather of President Lyndon B. Johnson, hired the two men for a cattle drive to Johnson’s ranch in what is now Johnson City, Texas. After several months working as ranch hands for Johnson, Denman left to study medicine in Illinois. Hall stayed behind, urging his father and brother Bill to join him. Unfortunately, he eventually contracted a fever, possibly typhoid, and his mother came to care for him and took him back to Charleston. After recovering he taught school for several years, before earning an M.D. from Chicago’s Northwester University College of Medicine in 1883. He had two sons, Jesse M. and Joseph S. Hall and practiced medicine all over the United States, including Seattle, Washington, Butte, Montana, and Los Angeles, California, where he died.
Source:
Hall, Joseph S.
Correspondence, a literary production, reminiscences, notes, a map, and photographs comprise the Horace Mark Hall Papers, 1871-1957. The collection concerns Hall’s experiences as a cowboy and on cattle drives in Texas and the southwest, crops and land use, living conditions, map of the Johnson ranches, and a literary effort of Hall on money.
The collection is open for research.
Horace Mark Hall Papers, 1871-1957, Dolph Briscoe Center for American History, The University of Texas at Austin.
Basic processing and cataloging of this collection was supported with funds from the National Historical Publications and Records Commission (NHPRC) for the Briscoe Center’s “History Revealed: Bringing Collections to Light project,” 2009-2011.