Sharlot Hall was the mother of all tough Ariz. women

This column was originally published May 12, 2002:

Two of my colleagues believe that since this is Mother’s Day I should write about the phrase “the mother of all ... . ”

Their thought, if you could call it that, is that ever since Saddam Hussein coined the phrase “mother of all wars” it became a measure of things negative: mother of all head colds, mother of all traffic jams, and so on and so forth. They think it is a shame that bad stuff and mothers are so associated.

This is one of the lamest ideas I’ve heard, so we are going to consider instead Sharlot Hall, not because it’s Mother’s Day, but because she was an interesting woman and someone you should know about if you’re going to live in Arizona.

Sharlot Hall, who founded the museum in Prescott that carries her name, was an author, poet, historian and one tough broad.

She was born in Kansas in 1870 and came to Arizona with her family in 1882. The Halls settled near Dewey and ranched, mined for gold and tried the orchard business for a while, all with varying degrees of success. Sharlot was educated in a small rural school and boarded in Prescott for a year to go to school there.

A prolific writer, she had poems, historical pieces and essays published in Ladies Home Journal, Atlantic and Current Literature, among others.

In 1909 she became territorial historian, the first woman to hold office in the Arizona Territory. She went on to be a lobbyist in Congress and a presidential elector.

She wasn’t exactly a wuss. When her father died and she couldn’t get a fair price for their ranch, she got a butcher’s license, butchered all the stock, sold the meat and moved to Prescott.

In 1927, she moved her collection of artifacts and papers into the old Governors Mansion and opened it as a museum. She died in 1943.

If you have never been to the Sharlot Hall Museum you should go. It is the mother of all Arizona museums.