Opening the Mink Creek road over the divide, 1906–1910

By late June 1906 a road had been graded up Mink Creek from Pocatello and opened as far as Bannock Creek, in Bannock Valley, as Arbon Valley was then often called. In 1910 settlers beyond the divide asked for a better route, and by July a new road, built partly with their own labor, was drawing praise from Arbon. The Pocatello Tribune followed it in a handful of short items.

Graded in 1906

On Monday, June 25, 1906, the Tribune reported that W. C. Snyder, "formerly chief of police of this city," who now owned and ran a ranch on Rattlesnake Creek, was in Pocatello. He had just finished grading and opening the Mink Creek road, toward which the Commercial Club had put some money a short time before. The road was open as far as Bannock Creek, he said, except for a couple of bridges that would be built right away. The paper did not say how much the club, most likely Pocatello's, gave, who worked with Snyder or exactly where the road ran. The full item appears at the end of this post.

Snyder was almost certainly William Clinton Snyder, who took up one of the first homesteads at Crystal, on Rattlesnake Creek, in October 1902, and whom the American Falls Press later called the first settler in Crystal. The name, the creek and the Pocatello connection all match, though the 1906 item does not name Crystal, and no other source read here mentions his police service.

A petition in 1910

On Friday evening, April 8, 1910, the Bannock County Good Roads Association met to hear its road committees. The start of the Tribune's report, on its front page, was not available for this post; the part continued on page 8 opens in the middle of a committee report, evidently the Mink Creek committee's. It said that above some point, named in the missing start, the road was "a dugway all the way to the divide" (a road cut into the hillside), and that "material changes in the route" were needed to make a passable highway. The committee would go over the road and report in writing to the county commissioners. Then came word from beyond the divide:

A petition, signed by T. L. Reddy and 22 other residents and settlers along Rattlesnake creek, over the Mink creek divide, was submitted to the association, asking that efforts be made to bring about a change in route and grade to the end that the highway might be made passable. The petition was referred to the Mink creek committee.

A "Mr. Reddy" had good fields at Crystal in 1911, but no source read says whether he was the petitioner. The association also learned that the county road and bridge fund held nearly $7,000, and arranged to meet the commissioners the next week.

The new road

On July 15, 1910, the Tribune ran a front-page piece on Arbon, which it placed 27 miles southwest of Pocatello. J. C. Cairns, an Arbon rancher in the city on business, said the town was connected with Pocatello "by one of the finest mountain roads I ever traveled." Further on, the paper said:

Mr. Cairns paid a high compliment to Road Supervisor Tom Reynolds, under whose supervision the new road up Mink creek and over the Rattlesnake creek divide was recently built. "This is one of the best pieces of road building I ever saw," says Mr. Cairns.
The settlers along Rattlesnake creek and in Bannock valley volunteered their services in building this road, and thereby exhibited an enterprising and boosting spirit that augurs well for the progress of that community.

The mountain road was the shorter way, not the easier one for freight. John Payne, the Arbon merchant, was in town too, having come by way of Michaud and Swanson's ranch, about six miles longer but "better adapted to heavy loads," and he went home with a big wagonload of groceries.

On Tuesday, August 16, Mr. and Mrs. T. B. Evans came in from Arbon "over the fine, new Bannock county road built over the Mink Creek divide," as the next day's paper put it. They were almost certainly Thomas Bowen Evans and his wife Susannah, for a time Arbon's postmistress. Arbon lay in Oneida County, governed from Malad, while the road over the divide was Bannock County's. On September 30 Cairns, in Pocatello again, said the valley had raised fully 75,000 bushels of wheat. The new road, he said, was a credit to any county, and if Oneida County would do as well as Bannock County had done, "the farmers would have no kick coming."

What the papers leave out

None of these reports says whether the 1910 road took the route the settlers asked for, how much of the 1906 grade it used, what it cost or when the work was done. In 1912, when American Falls was competing for the valley's wheat, the Tribune, as reprinted in the American Falls Press, credited Pocatello's hold on that trade to "a splendid road over the Mink creek divide" built by the county a few years before (see American Falls and Pocatello court the Arbon wheat trade, 1912).

On this site: the Crystal area page and Crystal, the hidden settlement up Rattlesnake Creek tell of the Rattlesnake Creek settlement, and Mail, grain and the Mink Creek road to Pocatello, 1924–1929 follows the road in the 1920s.

The article as printed

Pocatello Tribune, June 25, 1906, page 4. Transcribed from the page scan.

The Road Finished.
W C Snyder, formerly chief of police of this city, who now owns and operates a ranch on Rattlesnake creek, is in town today. He says he has just completed grading and opening up the Mink creek road, for the construction of which the Commercial club appropriated some money a short time ago. He says the road is now open as far as Bannock creek—with the exception of the building of a couple of bridges, which will be put in right away.