Hal's guns, animal traps, duck decoys, and life style appalled his no-nonsense aunt and uncle.
That summer Hal took off with another friend to follow the harvest north to the Dakotas, working 18 hour days on threshing and haying crews until winter set in and he returned to the Arkansas River to hunt and trap.
[4] During the next three years, Hal said he was a "gypsy around the country" traveling on foot, sometimes with team and wagon, but always with "gun, blanket, a pot and frying pan, a little bacon, salt and flour and baking soda, with a fishline wound round my hat.
Young Hal's knowledge of history, of the land, flora and fauna, and his natural storytelling abilities made him a favorite with the tourists.
His mother's new husband, Leander Bigger, gave him a job maintaining a large estate he owned on the flanks of Pike's Peak in Colorado.
The trip rekindled Hal's love of the mountains and when they returned to Hutchinson he sold the store and retired from city life at age 26.
After patching up the house and building pens for his animals, he went to back to Hutchinson in early 1915 for the birth of his son, officially named Hal, then packed his family up for the trip to their new home in Wapiti.
Sylvia had to haul water in buckets from the creek in order to boil huge pots of cornmeal mush laced with elk liver on the wood stove.
Stricken with boredom during the harsh winter, he read and re-read western short-stories and history in magazines a friend had left in the cabin.
Shortly after the Spring thaw began in 1917, Hal's sister's husband, Ted Fox, visited Wapiti during his travels as an insurance salesman.
About that time, he received word that the person he hired back in Wyoming to kill, skin, and preserve the pelts of all his skunks and foxes did not properly secured their storage.
Less than two weeks after learning of the disaster that befell his venture in Wyoming and wondering how he was going to support his wife and son, a letter from the literary agent arrived saying that two of his stories had sold to magazines for a total of $150, less the 10% commission and $7 reading fee of course.
Inspired, Hal dashed off another story entitled "What Next" and sent it to the agent who sold it to Country Gentleman, a magazine in the Curtis Publishing Company family.
Headed by George Lorimer, Curtis was the premier magazine publisher at the time with other well-known periodicals, or "Big Slicks," such as the Saturday Evening Post.
Hal had quickly joined the likes of Joseph Conrad, O. Henry, Rudyard Kipling, Ring Lardner, Jack London, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Edith Wharton, and Owen Wister whose stories were read in the Post by millions each week.
As filming began, he and Sylvia headed to Canada's Northwest Territories and the Mackenzie River, a long trip that he detailed in a two-part story called "End of Steel" published in the Saturday Evening Post.
In 1930, Hal's book The Shaggy Legion was under film studio development with a $2 million budget,[10] one of the largest since The Birth of a Nation in 1915.
Many public and personal tributes were received similar to the following:"Hal G. Evarts ranks with Ambrose Bierce, Joaquin Miller, John Muir, and Henry David Thoreau.
- Jim Kjelgaard, author of Big Red[3] "Evarts's writing career was a logical extension of his occupational pre-occupation with the out-of-doors West and the wildlife it held.
[13]Source:[3] From 1919 through 1935, in addition to those listed above, Hal had nearly 100 other stories or articles appear in magazines such as The Red Book, Collier's, Saturday Evening Post, Country Gentleman, and Outdoor Life.