The north end of Arbon Valley, then called Bannock Valley and part of Oneida County, bordered the Fort Hall Reservation. Under an agreement signed in 1898 and ratified in 1900, the Shoshone and Bannock people gave up the reservation's southeastern part, and in 1902 that land, the Crystal basin among it, opened to homesteaders. Two Salt Lake Tribune items, from 1900 and 1904, show how the region's white press wrote about the reservation.
The Pocatello land bill
On January 23, 1900, the Tribune reported that the Senate had passed, the Friday before, Senator Shoup's bill to ratify the agreement made with the Bannock and Shoshone Indians in February 1898. Twice before, the paper said, the bill had passed the Senate only to be killed in the House, where eastern representatives saw in it "an attempt to rob the Indian of his heritage." Its long article, printed with a map of the proposed cession, set out to show otherwise.
By the paper's account, the agreement ceded nearly a third of the lands set aside for the Tribes by the Fort Bridger treaty of 1868, and the acting agent had certified that its signers were a majority of the reservation's adult men. Of the money, $75,000 was to go to a modern school at Ross Fork and the rest to the Tribes in yearly payments; the article puts the total at $600,000 in one place and $500,000 in another. Tribal members living on the ceded land could keep the land they had settled, or take land inside the smaller reservation and remove or sell their improvements.
The writer described the ceded land as mostly mountain and lava, with perhaps 50,000 acres fit to farm. In a passage too damaged in the scan to quote, he described the valley of Bannock Creek, which the Tribes would keep and where many Bannocks were farming with implements the government had given them.
He was arguing for the bill, and his account of the Tribes' lands and lives is his own, written in the condescending manner of the day. His conclusion, that the Indians "obtained decidedly the best of it," led to the passage that names the valley:
They receive a handsome sum for the lands that are useless to them, the arid hills and plains where their forefathers hunted the jack rabbit and the lava stretches where they carved the obsidian arrow heads and spear points. And they retain for their own the rich and picturesque bottom lands of the Snake, the fertile Bannock valley, the rich stretches lying south of the Blackfoot...
The "Bannock valley" the Tribes kept was probably the reservation's part of it, the lower course of Bannock Creek downstream of the settlers' farms. The writer ended with a joke, told in mock dialect, about a Bannock man and a settler's lost horse, which is not repeated here.
The land opens
Congress approved the agreement on June 6, 1900. Proclamation 472, dated May 7, 1902, opened the ceded land to settlement at noon on June 17, 1902. Settlers could take up to 160 acres each under the homestead, townsite, stone and timber and mining laws, and paid by the acre as well: $2.50 for farming land and $1.25 for grazing land, a fifth at entry and the rest at final proof, when a settler proved up by showing he had met the law's terms. The proclamation noted that allotments had already been made to each Indian living on the ceded land who wanted one.
The ceded tract began at the southwest corner of township 9 south, range 34 east, on the reservation's south boundary, and ran north from there. That corner of the cession takes in the Crystal basin, where, as the first Crystal homesteads entry tells, the first entries were made on October 2, 1902. West of the cession's line, the lower Bannock Creek country probably stayed in the reservation.
A borrowed wagon
On January 26, 1904, the Tribune's "Intermountain Nuggets" column reprinted a paragraph from the American Falls Advertiser, saying it showed the "brotherly spirit" between white men and Indians near American Falls:
Bishop Bowen of Arbon was down Wednesday with butter. There is a heavy fall of snow in the mountains, and the bishop came as far as the reservation in a sleigh. The sleighing gave out there and he had to borrow a wagon from an Indian farmer in order to complete the trip.
"Down" probably meant down to American Falls, the Advertiser's town. The bishop was probably D. J. Bowen, who had presided over the Arbon Branch of the Latter-day Saint church since its organization in 1900, as the first congregation entry tells; Arbon had no bishop in the strict sense until it became a ward in 1908, as the first bishop entry tells. The item does not name the farmer or say where he lived. The original Advertiser has not been found, so the date of that Wednesday, probably in January 1904, is not known.
The Tribes' account
The papers of 1900 and 1904 speak from the settlers' side. The Sho-Ban News, which covers the reservation, has given the Tribes' side in recent reports on a land case. In September 2025 tribal attorney Bill Bacon told the paper that in 1898 federal officials came to the Tribes to discuss ceding land back to the United States, and the agreement the Tribes signed became the 1900 Act. The Act allowed the ceded land to be disposed of in three ways: under the homestead, townsite and mining laws, one person limited to 160 acres, or by public auction. A 2024 report put the cession at 416,000 acres.
The Act still matters to the Tribes. In 2023 a federal district court ruled that a proposed land exchange between the Bureau of Land Management and the J. R. Simplot Company near Pocatello violated the 1900 Act and the government's trust responsibility to the Tribes in the ceded lands, and in August 2025 a Ninth Circuit panel affirmed the ruling. After the appeals court heard the case in November 2024, Fort Hall Business Council Chairman Lee Juan Tendoy said, "The ceded lands are still a part of our Treaty language," and that the Tribes would protect them.
The article as printed
Salt Lake Tribune, January 23, 1900, page 3. Transcribed from the library's OCR text of the page; the page scan was not available here, so the punctuation and paragraph breaks are supplied, and the map printed with the article is left out.
THE POCATELLO LAND BILL
Provisions of the Measure that Senator Shoup Has Succeeded in Having the Senate Pass.
The passage by the United States Senate on Friday last of Senator Shoup's bill to ratify the treaty with the Bannock and Shoshone Indians, concluded February [illegible], 1898, does not, as may be supposed by many of the uninformed, comprehend the restoration to the public domain of the entire Fort Hall Indian reservation. Nor does the courteous treatment by the Senate of the extremely modest measure indicate anything as to the action of the House, for twice previously has the bill, practically in its present form, passed the higher legislative body only to be killed in the House. Each time it has come up for debate it has been strangled by the sickly sentimentality of the far East, whose Representatives saw in it an attempt to rob the Indian of his heritage, though of the two parties to the treaty the Indians get decidedly the best of the bargain, as will be shown by its analysis and its contemplated [illegible] is the hope of the Indians as well as of a few white men that the bill will pass the House during the present term, but the treatment it has previously received does not augur too favorably for a warm reception now.
Under the act of June [illegible] the Secretary of the Interior appointed as United States Indian Commissioners Benjamin F. Barge, John H. McNeely and Charles G. Hoyt, and under this act the commissioners were authorized to negotiate with the Bannock and Shoshone Indians for cession to the United States of part of their surplus lands. Under this authority the treaty of cession of nearly one-third of the lands given to the Indians by the Fort Bridger treaty of July 3, 1868, was concluded, Jim [illegible], better known as Maj. Jim Pocatello, Tom [illegible] Johnson and [illegible] other male Indians over 18 years of age and representing both tribes signing the agreement. At that time F. G. Irwin Jr., of the army and acting as Indian agent, certified that 227 constituted a majority of the male adult Indians of the reserve, so that the acceptance by 250 selected to act for the two tribes constituted a clear majority. The lands so ceded embrace about 300,000 acres, and of the least desirable portion of the reservation, as will be shown, and as consideration the Indians are to receive $600,000, $75,000 of which is to be expended in the erection of a modern school plant at Ross Fork and for educational [illegible], the remainder to be paid in eight annual payments of $50,000 each and one of [illegible]. In addition the deferred payments are to bear interest at [illegible] per cent, and the entire sum is to be exempted from payment of any claims for depredations, etc. Further, the Indians will have the privilege of retaining any lands they have settled upon within the limits of the proposed cession, or, choosing to select other lands within the reduced reservation, may remove or sell their improvements on the lands they vacate.
Of the proposed cession it is doubtful if there are altogether 50,000 acres of arable land. The bulk of it is mountain and lava fields, and a study of the above map shows that the Portneuf is the only waterway within its limits. This, while a considerable stream, flows for the most part through narrow canyons and making but narrow strips along its banks that might be cultivated. All of the unsurveyed lands shown on the map in the proposed cession are mountains, as are also fully two-thirds of the surveyed portion. The most considerable area of land capable of cultivation within the proposed cession is in townships 5 and 6, range [illegible] east, where the valley of the Portneuf widens out from Pocatello to the north. Here approximately 22,000 acres of gently sloping bench land, covered with a luxuriant growth of sagebrush, is capable of being brought under a state of high cultivation, and sufficient water for the entire area can be brought from Ross Fork creek, shown to the north on the map.
But even here the enterprising settler will be conscious of the irony of the situation and of the absurdity of the expressed fears that the Indians are being robbed. He will stand at the angle of the northwest boundary of the cession, which happens also to be the northwest boundary of the sage covered desert, and will look down with hungered eyes on the magnificent bottom lands of the Portneuf, Ross Fork creek and twenty other great tributaries of the great Snake river. To the north and west he will gaze on [illegible] hundreds of square miles of fertile grassy plains and meadows, enriched with the depositions of ages from the many rivers. Lands that under the beneficent dominion of the white man would become a domain fit to rival the valleys of the Nile in productiveness. But these are not for him or his race. They are to be retained for the Indians, who also receive $500,000 for the giving up of some lava stretches which they do not want. Here is a new version of the white man's burden. He must reclaim the desert and make glad the waste places, but where nature has [illegible] moods, here must a home be reserved for the Indian, and the Government will give him [illegible] mowing [illegible] to cut the hay to sell to the Government. A condition equally happy for the Indians exists to the [illegible] of the Bannock Range, where the [illegible] broad and fertile valley of Bannock creek is [illegible] to them. Many of the Bannocks are here engaged in the cultivation of [illegible] their implements being gifts, and they are becoming good [illegible] well as in the accepted meaning of the [illegible].
It may be stated here, too, that since the establishment of the railroad town of Pocatello in the center of the reservation there has been a marked improvement among the Indians, which must be attributed to their association with the whites.
Of the lands within the proposed cession, aside from the possible 50,000 acres of arable land, the mountains and low rolling hills will afford excellent and extensive cattle ranges. There are also extensive forests of cedar which have attained a good growth, and in the higher parts of the range there is an unimportant growth of the pines. Of the mineral possibilities of the area comparatively little is known, the jealousy with which the Indians have guarded against anything like an intelligent prospecting of the region having discouraged all but the most surreptitious efforts in that direction. One strong copper ledge, however, too prominent to be left unnoticed, crops out in the mountains east of Pocatello and has been traced on the surface for five miles, and in this section some remarkably handsome specimens of azurite have been picked up. Gold and silver are also in evidence, but to what extent they may be found cannot be guessed at until prospectors may work without molestation. Perhaps the mineral industry that will be the earliest [illegible] upon will be the quarrying of a very superior building stone. There are some reefs of red sandstone to be found, but the prized article is a white sandstone, which is found in extensive beds and is hardly yet metamorphosed, being somewhat soft and easy to work but hardening with exposure. Under special permission from the Indians enough of this stone to construct several handsome business blocks in Pocatello has been quarried, and its dressing and exportation is expected to develop into a considerable industry after the treaty is ratified.
From the above it will be seen that in the treaty made two years ago the Indians obtained decidedly the best of it. They receive a handsome sum for the lands that are useless to them, the arid hills and plains where their forefathers hunted the jack rabbit and the lava stretches where they carved the obsidian arrow heads and spear points. And they retain for their own the rich and picturesque bottom lands of the Snake, the fertile Bannock valley, the rich stretches lying south of the Blackfoot and, perhaps dearest of all to the Indian heart, the great mountain masses that are piled against and around the lofty Mount Putnam, where the bear, the moose, the elk and the deer abound, a total area of 900,000 acres of as choice a region as the sun ever shone on.
Trust these Bannocks and Shoshones to make a good bargain for themselves in any kind of a transaction, as the following will show:
A settler at Warm Creek had lost one of his horses and surmised that it had strayed to the reservation. Meeting a Bannock Indian on horseback, the following conversation took place:
"You seen my horse, Jim?"
"Yes, me see um. Got white face?"
"Yes."
"Yes, me see um. Got tree white foot?"
"Yes, yes."
"Yes, me see um. Got roached mane?"
"Yes."
"Yes, me see um. Got glass eye?"
"Yes, yes. Where is he, Jim?"
"Yes, me no see um."
"Hold on here!" the settler cried, as the Indian started to ride away. "Here, here's half a dollar."
"Ugh! Half dollah, me no see um; ketch tree dollah, um me see um; five dollah, me [illegible]
On this site: Crystal follows the community that grew up on the ceded land, Pauline and West Fork tells how the line moved again when the government bought the West Fork farms in the later 1930s, and United States v. Daniels tells how the 1907 decree divided Bannock Creek's water between the Tribes downstream and the settlers upstream.