Elk Preserve or Summer Pasture? The Mink Creek Divide, 1913

In June 1913 the Pocatello forest reserve, the national forest on the Mink Creek divide between Pocatello and the upper end of Bannock Valley, had been opened to sheep, and the homesteaders on the valley side of the divide wanted its summer range for their own cattle and horses. Someone also proposed making the reserve a game preserve. On June 28 the Pocatello Tribune printed a letter against the idea, signed T. B. Smith, that set out what the reserve's grass meant to the new farms around it.

Sheep on the divide

On the night of June 5 a petition came before the Pocatello city council asking it to join in having "the stock lease of the Pocatello reserve draining into Bannock creek abrogated." It was argued that the range had always been used by sheep, but the council sided with the petition and handed the matter to the city attorney to draw up a protest "against the monopoly" for the forestry department.

On June 16 the Tribune explained what the settlers wanted. One hundred and twenty settlers and homesteaders "residing just over the Mink creek divide in Oneida county" had written to the district forester at Ogden and asked the city council and the Commercial Club to back them. Their protests to Supervisor Bruins of the reserve had done no good. Sheep had first been allowed on a fork of Mink Creek that lay below the Pocatello water company's intake (the article calls it the west fork, then the east), so the city's water was not at risk and the settlers' objections carried little weight. Then came permits for the south slope of the divide, the settlers' own side:

Until recently that district has been waste land, but during the last few years many homesteaders have filed on land, just outside the reserve, and built homes. Their protests against the grazing of sheep on the reserve are based on their own need for a free range for cattle and horses and on the assertion that their water supply would be polluted.

The reserve, the paper added, existed mainly to protect Pocatello's water, and the water company was said to oppose sheep anywhere on it.

The article named no settlement. The valley side of the divide drains toward Bannock Creek, and the settlers there probably included the young Crystal settlement on Rattlesnake Creek, where most homestead entries date from 1909 on. The paper still wrote "Oneida county," though Power County had been formed from that part of Oneida earlier the same year.

A game preserve

Late in June, at a special Commercial Club meeting that took up a proposed Trail Creek road to the Arbon, Crystal and Pauline settlements, Fletcher R. Burrus protested against making the forest reserve "a national big game preserve or refuge and prohibiting homestead entries and grazing thereon." The club took no formal action. The Tribune article that first announced the plan has not been found, and who was behind it is not known.

The valley side was already closed to some hunting. In November 1911 Deputy Game Warden L. A. Lehrbas had warned that deer, antelope, mountain sheep, mountain goat and ibex could not be hunted for five years in Oneida County, whose line ran along the divide, so that every stream flowing into Bannock Creek lay in what he called "this game preserve." Elk were not on his list.

T. B. Smith's letter

Smith doubted that the farmers on the borders of the reserve had been consulted, though nearly all of them had counted on its pasture when they chose to try the dry farms of the Bannock Creek, Rattlesnake and Mink Creek districts. Few had milch cows enough for their own butter and milk, and fewer had horses enough to work their land; they hoped to raise both from the stock they had, and could not without summer pasture off their farms. As a preserve, its fifty thousand acres would be idle, untaxed land, when much of it might grow wheat within ten years. A yearling heifer, he wrote, "looks very much better to many of us than a whole band of elk."

Claiming forty-two years' acquaintance with elk, he doubted they would stay without a ten-foot woven fence; the first blasting on the settlers' road to Pocatello would drive them off. The paper gave no address for him, and he cannot be identified from these pages.

The summer road

On July 2 the semi-weekly Tribune reported that Supervisor Bruins wanted the Mink Creek road repaired and its old route along the valley reopened, where early homesteaders had fenced it off and pushed the grade up a steep hillside. The Forest Service stood ready to spend several hundred dollars inside the reserve and thought the county should do something outside it. Rattlesnake Creek farmers were much interested:

Farmers along Rattlesnake and Bannock creek valleys use the Mink creek road as their summer highway to Pocatello and bring a large and growing trade to the Gate City.

What is not known

The pages read here do not say whether the sheep permits were withdrawn, what the forester at Ogden replied, or whether the game preserve plan went further that year. In 1920 Arbon farmers formed an association to keep the sheep out of their canyons, and by 1930 elk and deer from what a Crystal farmer called the Pocatello game preserve were eating grain at Crystal, as told in The State's Elk at Crystal and the Hired Elk Puncher. How that preserve began is not told here.

On this site: Crystal, the hidden settlement up Rattlesnake Creek, Mail, grain and the Mink Creek road to Pocatello, and When Bannock Valley was cattle range.

The article as printed

Pocatello Tribune, June 28, 1913, page 4. Transcribed from the page scan. The misprints "product," "priducing" and "thuosand" are as printed; the period after "ten years" is faint in the scan and is taken from the paper's reprint of July 2.

FORUM.
Editor of the Tribune:—I have read your article announcing the intention of someone to ask the government to create a game preserve out of the Pocatello forest reserve. I hardly think the matter has been given due consideration, or that those who are most vitally interested have been consulted, namely the farmers and others making their homes on and near the borders of the reserve, nearly all of whom took into consideration the advantage of the pasture offered for the raising of livestock before deciding to attempt to build homes on the dry farms of Bannock creek, Rattlesnake and the Mink creek districts. Few of these settlers have milch cows sufficient to product butter and milk and fewer of them horse power enough to cultivate their farms, all of which they hope to raise from the stock they now own, which they cannot hope to do with no summer pasture outside of their farms.
Then to what advantage would it be to the people of Pocatello to have a band of elk that not one out of every hundred of the people would see once a year, fifty-thousand acres of non-productive, non-taxpaying land lying right in our midst. In comparison to a judicious use of these lands by the people, many acres of which, under the present laws will be priducing wheat within the next ten years.
Then as to elk, a nice sleek yearling heifer that will make a good cow next year looks very much better to many of us than a whole band of elk. Any old-timer or one familiar with the habits of elk will admit that nothing less than a woven fence ten feet high will hold elk so close to civilization, the noises of civilization drive them away. The first blast of powder removing the rocks from the road we are making such an effort to build, that the settlers around the reserve may come to Pocatello, and the elk would be seen no more on the reserve. In my judgement, and I have been familiar with elk for the past forty-two years, you could not hold them without a fence, within fifty miles of Pocatello.
Then again, if this magnificent fifty-thuosand acres of pasture land passes from the control of the people it will be generations before its uses will be again restored to them. I believe that the people of Bannock county, after giving this matter consideration, will view this measure as I do and be very much opposed to it, and that it may be brought to their attention is my excuse for attempting to write for publication.
Yours truly,
T. B. SMITH.