Seeking federal aid for Arbon's wheat road, 1930–1933

In the winter of 1930–31 Pocatello's chamber of commerce took up the cause of Arbon Valley's wheat road: the road that ran north down Bannock Creek and across the Fort Hall Indian Reservation toward the railroad. For three years the Pocatello Tribune followed the chamber and Power County officials as they asked Washington, Boise and the Indian Service to pay for it.

A road with no taxpayers along it

The Tribune of December 24, 1930, reported that the chamber hoped to win part of an emergency federal highway appropriation under the Colton-Oddie bill. That money could pay the whole cost of federal highways through Indian reservations and public lands that paid no taxes. Paul V. Nash, the chamber's secretary, explained the valley's case:

According to Mr Nash 300,000 bushels of wheat are hauled out of the Arbon valley on this farm to market road each year and that last year the farmers of that section created a highway district bonding themselves for $50,000 which they spent in an effort to improve this road as no other funds were available. It is difficult, he states, for Power county commissioners to keep the road up as there are no taxable lands on the route.

"Last year" is wrong, or loosely put. The valley's Highway District No. 3 was voted in on June 12, 1918, and its $50,000 in bonds were approved that fall, as the 1921 road-money post tells from the American Falls Press.

A week later, on December 31, a dispatch from Washington reported that Senator Thomas and Congressman Addison T. Smith had urged the director of public roads to set aside part of the three million dollars available under the Colton-Oddie law for the Arbon valley road across the Indian lands. The bureau answered that it was waiting for a recommendation from Idaho's commissioner of public works in Boise.

To Boise, January 1931

On January 14, 1931, delegations from Arbon and American Falls came to the chamber's forum luncheon at the Bannock hotel in Pocatello. The meeting that followed is the article retold below. Roy Lindley of Arbon, chairman of the Power County commissioners, was there with Irvin Allred, the county surveyor. That night Nash and Lindley left for Boise to press the highway department. According to the Tribune of January 15, some 20 miles of the road lay inside the reservation, where Indian and white farmers alike relied on it, and the chamber counted it just as important to the wheat growers of Arbon Valley.

In Boise they met Governor C. Ben Ross and Alvin Harbour, commissioner of public works, with Allred and Power County's state senator, L. L. Evans. (The report calls him only "of Power county"; he was probably Lorenzo L. Evans of American Falls (1857–1934), who was already called Senator L. L. Evans in 1918, of the American Falls Evans family and not the Arbon one.) The news there was poor: Idaho had spent all of its Colton-Oddie share. Their fallback was to get the Bannock Creek road into the state highway system; once there, it would qualify for the next round of Colton-Oddie appropriations. In March the chamber put the road before the governor again at a breakfast meeting, and was told that a pending amendment to the Colton-Oddie law might cover roads like Arbon's. The chamber's good-will tour of May 1931 was planned to end with a supper meeting at Arbon on May 8. No report of that stop was found.

The tribal council, 1932

Nash and members of the chamber's road committee went to the Fort Hall agency on Friday afternoon, April 22, 1932, and sat down in Superintendent Fred Gross's office with the tribal council and people from Arbon Valley. By then the Tribune put the valley's crop at three-quarters of a million bushels a year, carried 25 miles across the reservation. Power County's highway districts one and three, the paper understood, had already put about $100,000 into building and keeping up the road. As the paper also understood it, the Interior Department had made it a county road back in 1918. The plan aimed at three sources of help: Colton-Oddie funds, an allotment from the Indian department, and a place in the state highway system for the stretch between Michaud and the reservation line. The report does not give the council's views.

That August, with heavy crops about to move, the chamber asked the governor to act on the road. Late in July 1933 Pocatello learned that the state was asking for real money: $150,000 to repair and resurface the highway across the reservation to Arbon Valley. J. H. Stemmer, Idaho's director of highways, had put the request to the Interior Department, to be paid out of the public works fund for Indian reservation roads. In November 1933 the chamber's road committee was still planning to ask for money for it.

The papers read here show none of this money spent on the road by the end of 1933. Arbon's wheat road across the reservation, 1934–1939 picks up the story with the governor's inspection in 1934. When the Indian Bureau turned the farmers down in 1936, the cost of the work seems to have been put at $150,000, the same sum asked for in 1933.

On this site: a new road in a dry year tells how the valley's highway district began work on the Bannock Creek road in 1919, the Arbon road controversy tells how a new county road was laid across the reservation in 1915, the first state highway records the earlier highway designation, and Roy Lindley and the golden eagle tells more about Roy Lindley.

The story as reported

Pocatello Tribune, January 14, 1931, page 1. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

POCATELLO — Business and county leaders meeting in Pocatello on the afternoon of January 14 named a committee to carry their case for a better Bannock Creek road to the state highway department in Boise.

The paper expected the Boise trip to fall to three men: county surveyor Irvin Allred, Power County commission chairman Roy Lindley, and the Pocatello chamber's secretary, Paul V. Nash. Requests for the work had already gone to the highway department, and the committee was to keep after them.

Those at the table came from the American Falls and Pocatello chambers and from Arbon Valley itself, and all wanted federal money put into the Bannock Creek road to Arbon. They met in the Pocatello chamber's office.

Grain was the road's heavy traffic: each harvest, Arbon Valley growers hauled a great deal of it into Pocatello to be shipped. Where the route crossed the reservation, it served Indian farmers too. By the committee's account, the road was in bad shape. The group's hope was to win enough of the federal aid now held by the state highway department to put the road right.