Judge Hall gained eminence in the early Middle West at both law and letters. His law studies in Philadelphia, where he was born, were interrupted by the war of 1812. After soldiering along the Niagara he went sailoring with Decatur in the Mediterranean (1815). Then completing his studies at Pittsburgh, he emigrated to Shawneetown, where he became public prosecutor. The office of state treasurer bringing him to Vandalia, he edited there, with Robert Blackwell, the Illinois Intelligencer. The Western Souvenir, projected, edited, and largely written by him, was published at Cincinnati in 1829; the Illinois Magazine, at Vandalia, 1829–1831, then successively at Cincinnati, St. Louis, and again at Cincinnati. Following himself its last remove, Hall continued it there, 1833–1835, as the Western Monthly Magazine. Letters from the West, which appeared first, 1821–1824, in the Portfolio, were printed collectively in London, 1828. His scattered observations were brought into more consistent form: Sketches of the West, Philadelphia, 1835; Notes on the Western States, Philadelphia, 1838. A collection of his tales, entitled The Wilderness and the War Path, appeared in Wiley and Putnam’s “Library of American Books,” 1846. A uniform edition of his works was published in four volumes, 1853–1856 (a list is given in the American Cyclopedia). Some details of his life not compiled in the cyclopedias were published by Hiram W. Beckwith of Danville, in the fifth of the papers entitled “The Land of the Illini,” Chicago Tribune, 8th September, 1895.

A writer of tolerable verse and historically valuable descriptive sketches of the frontier, Hall gave much of his leisure also to embodying the history, legend, and local color of the Mississippi valley and the prairies beyond in tales. These are often removed from our present taste by the magniloquence then considered literary; but they keep the interest of close observation and have their flashes of enduring human import. The local truth of Hall’s tales is commended in the Western Monthly Review for November, 1828 (volume ii, page 367). Unless the reference be to some of the early Letters from the West, the tale printed below may have appeared earlier than the date of its incorporation in the Western Souvenir. (See also pages 5, 9 and 12 of the Introduction.)