Ed Hooker dug through the snow to pitch his tent at Arbon

In late July 1914 a homesteader named M. E. Hooker stopped in Pocatello on his way back to his ranch in Arbon Valley, and the Pocatello Tribune gave him a short paragraph among its local items on July 24. He had come from Dayton, Washington, and meant to spend two or three months on the place. He also recalled his arrival: he had moved into the valley in winter and had to dig several feet through snow and ice to find a place to pitch his tent.

Who he was

The paper's M. E. Hooker was Marcus Edwin Hooker, who went by Ed. His obituaries of January 1941 give both names, and the notice of January 6 says that he and his wife, Ella, homesteaded in Arbon Valley in 1910. The American Falls Press, which carried a column of Arbon news from at least 1911, used both forms: M. E. Hooker in its county-seat news and Ed or Edd Hooker in its South Arbon column. No item in the Press puts the two names together, but the homestead, the dates and the obituaries make it all but certain they are the same man.

He seems to be a different man from the H. E. Hooker who advertised as a contractor and builder at American Falls, probably the "Contractor Hooker" who was building a schoolhouse in Arbon Valley in 1912, told in District 46 and Arbon's Central School. Nothing read for this post connects the two families.

The homestead

The 1910 census of the Arbon precinct, taken that spring, lists Marcus E. Hooker, 54, and Ella, 48, in the household next to Henry and Anna Shandrew. So the hard winter of the tent was probably 1909–10, although the 1914 paragraph does not give the year and says only that he had come "about six years ago." In 1917 the Press described his place as a homestead of 160 acres, filed on in 1910, four miles south of the Arbon post office. Federal land records show a patent to Marcus E. Hooker for 160 acres, by cash entry, on March 4, 1912.

In September 1911 the Arbon column reported that "Henry Shandrew Sr has leased the Hooker ranch for two years." That fits the 1914 paragraph, in which Hooker came back from Washington to farm his land himself; the Shandrew story is in Henry Shandrew's clean wheat. Dayton, a wheat town near Walla Walla, sent a whole group of settlers to the south end of the valley from 1909 on, as told in The Washington people's three-day picnic. The papers do not say whether Hooker came with them or on his own.

Back on the land

The South Arbon column shows him at work in 1915. In June two men, probably Ed Hooker and Gus Brahmstadt (the digitized text garbles both names), were logging in Bull Canyon to get their building done before harvest (Logs at the mill). On September 9 the column reported that he and Roy Smith had each taken a load of grain over the mountain to Malad (Over the mountain to Malad), and that he had lost a fine cow. A week later it printed a note that says much about harvest in the valley (The Arbon harvest of 1915):

Mr. Edd Hooker butchered a two year old steer the first of last week but had no trouble in disposing of it around in the neighborhood as most every family has a crew of men to cook for.

In July 1916 the Press named Benjamin D. Lindley, M. E. Hooker and John Payne as "prominent farmers from Arbon Valley" visiting the county seat. Hooker was on his way to Washington to look after "his farming interests in that state." The same month the Arbon column noted that he and Ellis Logan had lost valuable mares.

Leaving the valley

On July 10, 1917, the Press reported that M. V. Talion, the man this site reads as Marsden Tallon, had bought the M. E. Hooker homestead, "which has on it over 100 acres of fine grain." Tallon's own farming is told in Old Jim Hill.

The Hookers moved to Tyhee, north of Pocatello, and farmed there for the rest of his life. He died at home late on December 31, 1940, at 84. The Pocatello Tribune gave his birth as March 5, 1856, on a farm near Albion, New York; a later notice printed 1865, but his age and the 1910 census agree with 1856. The January 2 obituary puts his marriage to Ella Rosenberg in 1909, with his arrival in Idaho soon after. At Tyhee, it said, the couple owned and worked more than one farm over the last twenty years of his life. It added that he voted in every election of his adult life and was known among his many friends for holding to the "Golden Rule." He left his widow, a daughter in New York, five grandchildren and five great-grandchildren. The funeral was held on Sunday, January 5, 1941, at the McHan funeral home in Pocatello, with burial in Mountain View cemetery.

One 1941 notice puts the move north of the city five years after the homestead and another says only several years later, but the Arbon reports place him in the valley through the summer of 1916 and show the homestead sold in 1917. What the papers do not tell is just where the tent stood, how long he lived in it, whether Ella was with him that first winter, or what Hooker meant in 1914 by the "five or six years" he had been "absent."

The article as printed

Pocatello Tribune, July 24, 1914, page 5. Transcribed from the page scan. The Semi-Weekly Pocatello Tribune reprinted it on July 29.

Back to Stay—M. E. Hooker of Dayton, Wash., is a Gate City business visitor today and in a few days will leave for his ranch in Arbon valley, where he will remain for two or three months. Mr. Hooker made his home in Pocatello and Bannock valley about six years ago. He moved to Arbon valley in the winter time and was compelled to dig several feet through snow and ice to find a place to pitch his tent. "The winter was a very hard one," says Mr. Hooker, but he further says "I have some very good land and my purpose here is to get grain onto it and yield the same or better than in former years. I like Pocatello, and in the past five or six years which I have been absent I can see that Pocatello is growing at the rate of one thousand inhabitants per year. I have made the route of the city and in doing so, I see many new buildings, both close in and out in the suburbs, and Pocatello is destined to be the largest city in the state in very few years.