The Bailey's Prairie Kid is an icon and a legend

“I was born and raised right here, and I just named myself after this little community,” Hall said.

The “Bailey’s Prairie Kid” was born Feb. 15, 1932 — the first boy in his family. As such, he spent a lot of time with his daddy.

Hall’s father was working for the Stanger Ranch in Brazoria when Hall was born, he said.

“He’d put me right on the horn of the saddle and ride all the way down there and all the way back, and my mama — I could hear, she’d be howling ‘Bring me my baby back in!’” Hall said. “He never looked back. He’d take and keep me all day long.”

Hall was so little his daddy carried a milk bottle — but he didn’t carry any milk, he said.

“He’d put one of them cows in the chute and milk the cow, and hand me that milk,” Hall said.

Hall’s father also took him along when he bottled other libations.

“My daddy used to make bootleg whiskey right back in the bayou and he’d take me out there with him,” Hall said. “When he’d came in to cook that whiskey, he’d take me off through the woods and make me a pallet … cause, see, if he’d kept me around there while he cooked that whiskey, it capable of blowing up.”

It could be 11 p.m. or midnight before Hall’s daddy would take him back to his mama, he said with a laugh.

Hall was put on a horse before he was big enough to guide it, and by the time he was 16, he participated in his first rodeo.

“Where Dixie Drive run into Oyster Creek, down behind the graveyard down there,” he said. “That was the first rodeo I made down there with Mr. Brad Beasley. Mr. Brad Beasley was raised in Oyster Creek, and I trained all his boys … they’re all gone on now, but they made good cowboys.”

Hall’s daughter Rhonda estimates her father participated in 400 rodeos over the years, all over the country.

“If we had to guess,” she said. “The way Daddy used to rodeo and be on the road and stuff like that. Maybe even more.”

Being the daughter of the Bailey’s Prairie Kid was just part of life, though she and her siblings did have a little bit of notoriety in school because everybody knew who he was, she said.

“Even now, people, when they find out that my dad is the Bailey’s Prairie Kid — ‘Your dad is the Bailey’s Prairie Kid!?’” she said.

They didn’t attend any of the rodeos that weren’t local, she said.

Hall made the choice to retire from rodeo when he was in his 50s — later than most cowboys, who usually have the choice made for them by their bodies, Rhonda Hall said.

Since his retirement, Hall has been inducted into the Texas Rodeo Cowboy Hall of Fame, the Cowboys of Color Hall of Fame at the National Multicultural Western Heritage Museum in Fort Worth, and the Bull Riders Hall of Fame in Dripping Springs near Austin, Rhonda Hall said.

“I just rodeoed because I liked it, but I never thought I would make a hall of fame,” Taylor Hall said.

Many of the cowboys who rodeoed with Hall didn’t know his given name — they only knew him as the Bailey’s Prairie Kid, he said.

It’s a name that’s tied not only to his community, but to the community’s legend of Bailey’s light — a ghost that Hall has never seen, he said.

“I wanted to pick that name up to keep it alive,” he said. “I went all over the country with that name.”

Family friend Barbara Clowe has traced the Halls’ family history back for generations.

“The Halls have been in this part of the county for years and years and years,” she said. “And (Taylor Hall’s) first name goes way back.”

When she visited the Clayton Library Center for Genealogical Research in Houston, they didn’t have Hall’s given name among their records — just “Bailey’s Prairie Kid,” she said.

Hall is a Bailey’s Prairie “icon,” Mayor Tammy Mutina said.

In February, the town named Hall its distinguished citizen of the year. When they decided to give recognition to one of their citizens, “it was a given” that he would be their first, she said.

“Everyone in Bailey’s Prairie knows Bailey’s Prairie Kid — has heard about him, read about him, knows of him, knows someone that knows him,” she said.

“He’s sort of a Bailey’s Prairie legend,” next-door neighbor Cheryl McBeth said.

Though he doesn’t rodeo anymore, Hall still ropes cattle and rides — at the age of 88.

“One thing he has taught me — he’s 88 years old, but guess what: he’s up in the morning, he’s out there,” McBeth said.

“When I feel like I might not have the energy or the strength to do what I need to do, he gives me inspiration,” she said. “That’s one true thing he’s taught me about hard work and just keep going.”