In the fall of 1933 the State of Idaho opened the Pocatello game preserve to a special elk hunt. For years farmers on the Arbon Valley side of the mountains had complained that elk from the preserve broke their fences and raided their haystacks. That summer, while a Midnight Creek rancher was reportedly spending his nights on guard over his wheat, the game department issued 150 permits for bull elk, good from September 25 through October 5. The Pocatello Tribune followed the plans through August and September.
The preserve and its herd
A column in the Tribune of August 15, 1933, sketched the preserve's limits only loosely. In its outline, Crystal, Midnight, Gibson Jack and City creeks all rose inside the preserve, which also held every mile of the West Fork of Mink Creek. Most of the preserve, a committee reported in 1930, lay within the Pocatello watershed. Midnight Creek, as the Crystal page explains, is one of the two creeks that drain the Crystal basin and feed Bannock Creek, so the preserve's high ground probably reached the head of a valley creek; the column does not say which Midnight Creek it meant. The Tribune later gave the hunted area as about five miles wide and eighteen miles long.
The same column traced the herd back to 1916. That year L. A. "Dutch" Lehrbas, chief deputy game warden at Pocatello, picked out the Mink Creek watershed as a likely home for elk. The stock came from Yellowstone Park, with Pocatello businessmen and sportsmen paying the freight. The first shipment, 27 head, arrived in April 1916 and rode in a van to the mouth of Gibson Jack Creek. Another 27 followed in April 1917; those were unloaded at the stockyards, and Lehrbas and a party of helpers herded them up White's canyon. Three died on the way, leaving 51. Lehrbas reckoned in 1933 that the herd now topped a thousand, counting about a thousand adults and another 300 or 400 calves born that year.
That figure is far above the count of three years earlier. A committee sent over the preserve in 1930, after what the Tribune then called repeated complaints from Arbon Valley farmers, had seen about 80 elk and estimated 250. The papers do not explain the difference. Nor do they say whether the elk that the state had set loose near Crystal years before, told in The State's Elk at Crystal and the Hired Elk Puncher, came from Lehrbas's Yellowstone elk or from some other planting.
Why the hunt was held
The front-page story of September 22 gave the department's reason. The paper described the season as an exception the game department made that year. Too many bulls had built up on the preserve, it said, and farmland was suffering as they massed in large bands. The August 30 report, retold below, added the one detail that probably points to the valley: the unnamed Midnight Creek rancher and his nightly vigil over his wheat.
Only old bulls were to be taken, one to a permit. To apply, a hunter sent $10 to the game department at Boise by September 15; names would be drawn on September 20, and the money returned to those who lost out. Lehrbas hoped to send the hunters in by turns, about 50 a day for the first three days. Everyone going in had to sign in at the mouth of the West Fork of Mink Creek and sign out again on leaving, and the department asked hunters to wear red, in a cap or a jacket. One animal was off limits whatever the permit: a white bull elk, believed to be among just three of its kind in Idaho.
Cougars at Midnight Creek
Over August 25, 26 and 27, W. G. Ward, who ran sheep, killed three cougars on the range between Elk Meadows and Midnight Creek, the Tribune reported on September 6. Reports to Lehrbas counted no others taken in that part of Idaho that year, and each of Ward's measured more than six feet from nose to tail. The state paid a bounty on cougars for the harm they did to wild game and to sheep and cattle, and the paper asked anyone who spotted one to tell Lehrbas, who kept a cougar dog. The paper does not say where Ward lived, and nothing read here connects him with any Ward family on this site.
What is not known
The papers read here do not tell how the hunt went: how many bulls were killed, whether the elk were first driven off the cattle range, whether any valley ranchers served as deputies, or whether any crippled elk went to Pocatello's needy. The list of permit holders printed on September 22 ran on to a page that was not read. The question came back four years later. In August 1937 the state game warden said a shortage of range feed might mean a hunt for 100 elk in the Cache National Forest that October.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, August 30, 1933, page 10. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Not everyone around Pocatello welcomed the September elk season, the Tribune reported. Several cattlemen whose herds grazed the Cache National Forest's Pocatello district had raised objections, and the district's game officer had an answer ready.
Their worry was stray shots: a hunter aiming at an elk might cripple a cow or steer instead. L. A. Lehrbas, chief deputy game warden at Pocatello, wanted the elk cleared away from the cattle first, so that no hunter fired until the herd was off all the grazing land used by livestock. Whether to do it was a question for him and Amos Eckert, Idaho's state game warden, and the two were discussing it.
Ranchers who had lost to the elk would have a hand in running the hunt, too: a number of them were to be named among the eight or ten special deputies working under the game officials. The paper gave one such grievance without naming the man, a Midnight Creek rancher who reportedly had to stay up night after night to keep the elk out of his wheat.
A second, shorter item in the same column looked ahead to the season's end, when Pocatello's needy might share in the meat. Not every shot would kill cleanly, so once the hunt was over the deputies and other officers meant to search the hunted ground for wounded elk. Those would be put down and butchered, and the meat kept in cold storage at Pocatello until it could be given out that winter. Officials thought the cripples would be few, with officers in the field alongside the hunters.