In the spring of 1857 Brigham Young led a large company north from Salt Lake City to the Latter-day Saint mission at Fort Limhi (now spelled Lemhi), on the Salmon River. On the way it crossed Bannock Valley, the valley now called Arbon Valley. Two accounts of the trip were printed that year, one by a member of the party and one in Young's own words. They are the earliest printed descriptions of the valley found so far, written decades before anyone settled there.
The company and the road
The account by a member of the party, who is not named, appeared in the Deseret News of June 10, 1857. The copy read for this post is the reprint in Andrew Jenson's history "The Bannock Stake of Zion," in the Deseret Weekly of March 28, 1891. The digitized text of that page is rough, so this retelling keeps to what can be read with confidence.
Jenson says Young went north with "a strong escort." Young, Heber C. Kimball, Daniel H. Wells, Orson Hyde, Franklin D. Richards and several others left Salt Lake City on a Friday in April, and Lorenzo Snow joined them at Brigham City. They meant to visit the Salmon River settlement and "to examine the intermediate country." At the Bear River ferry they organized. Besides the men, whose number cannot be read in the digitized copy, the company counted 22 women and 5 boys, with 54 wagons and carriages and two light boats with decking planks for ferrying. Idaho did not yet exist. Jenson speaks of a visit to the Saints "in Oregon," and the table of distances printed with the account marks the "Utah and Oregon line" on the way north.
From Bear River the company went up Malad Valley to the place where the Hudspeth Cutoff of the California road crossed it. There it took the new track the Salmon River missionaries had made on their way to Limhi. That track climbed gently northwest for about six miles to the summit of the northern rim of the Great Basin, the divide between the waters that drain to the Great Salt Lake and those that reach the Snake River. Beyond the summit the descent was "rather rapid," down the crest of a narrow spur ridge into Bannock Valley.
Bannock Valley in 1857
The writer said the valley ran a little west of north and "averages about four miles wide." It was "tolerably well grassed" and "very sparsely timbered," though the digitized text does not show whether the writer's qualifier "in some portions" belongs to the grass or to the timber. To the north it opened onto the plain the travelers named Shanghi Plain, "the greatest desert region surrounding the Three Buttes." The Basin rim and its spurs bounded the valley on the east, and a rugged range on the west.
The writer called Bannock Creek "a small stream with a sluggish current," fringed with a few small willows, birch and alder. Lower down another fork joined it, and it crossed the plain in a banked channel to the Snake, some three miles below the mouth of the Portneuf. Beyond the mouth of the valley the road crossed the plain, met the emigrant road to Oregon about six miles from Fort Hall, and followed it over the Portneuf toward the company's ferry on the Snake.
The company reached Fort Limhi on a Friday evening in early May, stayed four and a half days, and was gone from home 33 days in all. The writer judged Malad Valley "much the best locality for settlement" on the route beyond Bear River. The writer found the road generally good. Among the few hard places the account lists the northern slope of the Basin rim, which was the way down into Bannock Valley. Of all the country beyond Malad Valley, as far as the company saw it, the account says it was "of but little worth save to answer the purpose of connecting territory which might otherwise be separated by a great gulf."
In Brigham Young's words
On Sunday, May 31, 1857, a few days after the company came home, Young spoke about the journey in the Bowery in Great Salt Lake City. His remarks come to us not from a newspaper but from the Journal of Discourses, the published collection of church sermons. He said the company had set out on the morning of April 24 and been gone "one month and two days," travelling 763 miles. Describing the country, the printed text of his remarks spells the valley's name Bannack:
Malad Valley, north of Bear River, has been considered a pretty desolate, cold, hard, sterile valley; it was so looked upon by us, as we passed through it on our way North. ... But after we had travelled over the Basin rim into Bannack Valley, descending a mountain, beside which the one we call the Big Mountain is a mole hill, down through the little Bannack Valley on to Shanghi Plain ...
The Big Mountain was the high summit on the pioneer road east of Salt Lake City. Young said the company had named the plain itself: "It is a vast, desert plain, and we called it Shanghi Plain." Coming home, when they "returned again to Malad Valley," he said, "It looked to us like one of the most beautiful valleys that any person had ever beheld."
The Arbon area history on this site tells of Young's change of mind about Malad Valley as hearsay, beginning "Rumor has it." Young's printed remarks bear it out.
What the accounts do not say
Neither account says where in Bannock Valley the company camped. The table of distances at the end of the 1857 account names the summit of the Basin, a first crossing of the Bannock, a camp, the right fork of the Bannock and the Bannock bench, but its figures cannot be read in the digitized copy. The Arbon area history places Young's camp at the springs north of Andersen Lane, below the old trail called Rocky Ridge. The printed accounts neither confirm nor rule that out. Nor do they show whether the missionaries' track of 1857 was the same trail as Rocky Ridge, which the site counts as the valley's first road.
The mission itself lasted less than a year longer. In March 1858, after word came to give up Fort Limhi, a small party riding south was fired on from ambush on Bannock Creek and Bailey Lake was killed, as told in the Stories.
On this site: the area histories of Arbon and Pauline and West Fork tell more of the valley before homesteading.