Early in 1898 a group of men from the young settlement of Arbon were in Malad City. The Malad Enterprise noted their visit and used it to describe the place they came from, and on February 23 the Pocatello Tribune reprinted the item in its column of Idaho news. It is the earliest newspaper description of Arbon by that name that this site has found.
The valley was then called Bannock Valley and lay in Oneida County; Power County was created in 1913. Settlement was only a few years old. By one early account Joe Arbon and his father George wintered in a dug-out in 1895 and 1896, and the families who stayed through the next winter had a hard one.
What the Malad paper said
The Enterprise called Arbon "a new town," about seven miles south of the Indian reservation, a flourishing place of about 100 people. It said the settlement would soon be the principal place of business of the Bannock Irrigation Company and was working to get a mail route from Malad. The paper listed the stops the route would make: St. John, then Bakeville, Metcalfburg, Millville, Thomastown, Jonesborough and Bannock, ending at Arbon. Hundreds of people would be served, it said, and everyone should back it.
The delegates are not named. When D. J. Bowen told the American Falls Press's farm writer in 1917 how Arbon began, he named the settlers living near it in 1898 as himself, E. H. Davis, George Arbon, J. R. Bailey, L. H. Evans (so printed), the Ward brothers and the Anderson brothers. The delegation probably came from among these families, but no source says who went.
The post office behind the visit
The visit came while the settlers' request for a post office was in hand. In the National Archives records behind the site's first post office entry, a Post Office Department location paper of January 8, 1898, proposed an office at "Mountain Side," to be called Arbon, serving about seventy people by special supply from Malad City, 35 miles away. Bowen signed it as the proposed postmaster on February 16, a week before the Tribune reprinted the item. The date of the Enterprise issue, and so of the visit, is not known, nor whether the two were connected or whether Bowen was one of the delegates. The office was named for George Arbon, the oldest of the settlers. Bowen was appointed on June 21, and the office opened that August in his log cabin.
In Mrs. E. A. Logan's history of the valley, printed in the American Falls Press in 1917, the settlers' mail "came by chance from Samaria"; she says this just after telling how the settlers named their "little township" for George Arbon, and does not say when. After the office opened, Bowen recalled, the government gave no mail contract for six months, and the patrons had to take turns bringing the mail from Malad themselves. The first carrier the settlers hired was Fred Paine (Payne in Logan's history), then a young lad, who by Logan's account carried it for three months; when winter came on, the settlers carried it in turns. The two accounts may describe the same months. The government let the first contract in the spring of 1899 (see the first mail carriers).
The route and the company
Apart from Malad and St. John, the route's place names have not turned up in any other paper read for this site. The 1900 census of St. John Precinct lists several Thomas and Jones households and a Frank Metcalf, so some of the names may have been neighborhoods called after families who lived there. That is only a guess. Nor do the papers say whether the 1899 contract route followed this line. Later accounts have the mail coming from Malad over Rocky Ridge.
The "Bannock Irrigation Company" was very probably the Bannock Valley Irrigation Company, the valley's first organization. Its first meeting was in 1893, and it was formally filed in Samaria in 1895. Bowen recalled that he and a Davis had surveyed the canal with a common spirit level. No later source says whether the company's business moved to Arbon.
The reservation the Enterprise measured from was changing too. In that same month of February 1898, the Shoshone and Bannock people made the agreement that gave up the reservation's southeastern part, the Crystal basin among it. It was ratified in 1900 and the land opened to homesteaders in 1902, as another post in this series tells.
On this site: D. J. Bowen's own account of the early years is retold in D. J. Bowen tells the Pilgrim how Arbon began, and the post office's first quarter century in Who kept the Arbon post office, 1898–1922.
The article as printed
Pocatello Tribune, February 23, 1898, page 7. Transcribed from the page scan. The item, credited to the Malad Enterprise, is one of many in the column "Idaho State News Notes"; it begins at the foot of the first column and continues at the head of the second. Only the Arbon item is given here.
IDAHO STATE NEWS NOTES
Items of Interest and Important Happenings From Every Section of the State.
The Malad Enterprise says: A delegation of gentlemen from Arbon were in town this week. Arbon is a new town located about seven miles south of the Indian reservation in Bannock valley. Arbon is a flourishing place of about 100 population. Will soon be principal place of business of the Bannock Irrigation Company and is working for the establishment of a mail route from Malad. If the proposed route should be established it would run through the town of St. John and on through Bakeville, Metcalfburg, Millville, Thomastown, Jonesborough, Bannock and terminate at Arbon. Hundreds of people would be accommodated by this route and all should unite in pushing its establishment.