On Saturday, October 24, 1931, the Pocatello Tribune printed a short dispatch from American Falls about the funeral of George Stahl Butler. Its account of his life ran only a few lines, but one of them reached back more than twenty years, to a homestead in Arbon Valley. Butler had been one of the Kansas settlers on upper Bannock Creek, and the old papers make it possible to follow him from that homestead to the end.
On Bannock Creek
George Stahl Butler was born at Americus, Kansas, on March 31, 1872, one of the Butler brothers whose cousin Frank Swim also took up land in the valley. Their story is told in the Swim family history. On November 21, 1908, the American Falls Press printed his homestead filing among the week's entries: "Geo. Stahl Butler, ne qr 26-10-33." That quarter lies on upper Bannock Creek, about three miles south of present-day Pauline. The obituary's date of 1909 probably marks the move onto the land rather than the filing; in 1912 the Press said he had located there about three years before.
In the Arbon years he was a busy neighbor. In January 1911 he was one of the men who called at every house in the valley to bring people to the meeting that voted 109 to 30 to join the proposed new county (Arbon votes for Power County). That spring, by a 1917 account, the valley's first Protestant Sunday school was organized in his home. In 1912 the Press told how his potatoes and vegetables had won over his doubting father from Kansas (Arbon potatoes and the Kansas father who changed his mind).
At American Falls
The obituary says he moved to American Falls in 1914. By the spring of 1917 the Arbon column of the Press was already speaking of him as a former neighbor:
News was received here the other day of the arrival of a fine big girl at the home of Mr. and Mrs. G. S. Butler, formerly of this place but now living at American Falls.
The baby was probably Florence, the first of the children named in 1931. Around American Falls he took part in the farm organizations. In January 1917 a G. S. Butler, very probably he, was listed under Cove among the members of the new Power County farm bureau's advisory council, and at the end of 1918 he signed, as secretary-treasurer, the notice calling the stockholders of the Dry Farm National Farm Loan Association to their annual meeting at the county court house. In March 1918 the Press reported that "Herbert Butler from Nevada" was visiting his brother. In December 1919 his son Stahl came home from Gooding College for a weekend with his father.
The family research behind this site adds two events that the 1931 dispatch does not mention. Butler's first wife, Margaret "Madge" Jaquith Butler, died at American Falls in May 1919, and in September 1920 he married Violet Black, a Power County rural teacher.
October 1931
Butler died on Monday, October 19, 1931, and his funeral was held at the Methodist church two days later. Violet, his widow, headed the dispatch's list of survivors, which went on to count eight children (six at American Falls, one in Georgia and one in California), three brothers, and three sisters who all lived in Kansas. "Jack" was very probably John W. Butler, who had filed beside his cousin Frank Swim in 1908. Herbert had homesteaded next to them, and Dale was living at Pauline by 1916.
Some of the details in the dispatch do not fit together, or do not fit other records. It says he had lived at American Falls for 21 years, though by its own dates he had been there seventeen. It places Jack at Arbon and Dale at Dunlap, Kansas. Other records point the other way: J. W. Butler had gone back to Kansas by 1919, and Dunlap, Kansas, was his wife's family's home, while Dale was counted in the Crystal precinct of Arbon Valley in 1930. The two places may have been switched in print.
Violet B. Butler stayed at American Falls with the younger children. By 1940 she was Power County's superintendent of schools.
On this site: the Swim family history follows the Swims, Butlers and Johnsons from Americus to Bannock Creek.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, October 24, 1931, page 6. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
George Stahl Butler, who had once homesteaded in Arbon Valley, died on Monday, October 19, 1931. Pneumonia was the cause, and he died in the Deaconess hospital. The Methodist church held his funeral on Wednesday afternoon, two days after he died. The Tribune carried the news in a special dispatch from American Falls, under a headline that called him a Power City man.
The dispatch gave his birth as March 31, 1872, at Americus, Kansas. It dated his Arbon Valley homestead to 1909 and his move to American Falls to 1914, yet elsewhere in the same few lines it counted him a resident of the town for 21 years.
Eight children outlived him, and so did his wife, Mrs. Violet Butler. American Falls was home to six of the children: Florence, Ruth, Mary, Betty, Peter and Margaret. A son, George, lived at Cave Springs, Georgia, and a daughter, Helen, at Pasadena, California.
Of his three brothers, Jack was given as living at Arbon, Herbert at Contact, Nevada, and Dale at Dunlap, Kansas. His three sisters, Mrs. Mabel Weaver, Mrs. Hazel Woodmansee and Mrs. Ethel Bell, were all in Kansas.
Sources
- Pocatello Tribune, October 24, 1931, page 6
- American Falls Press, November 21, 1908, page 1
- American Falls Press, January 21, 1911, page 1
- American Falls Press, November 21, 1912, page 1
- American Falls Press, January 11, 1917, page 1
- American Falls Press, April 26, 1917, page 3
- American Falls Press, March 5, 1918, page 4
- American Falls Press, January 31, 1919, page 4
- American Falls Press, December 12, 1919, page 7