In the winter of 1934–35 the farmers of Crystal, the homestead settlement in a high basin of springs and creeks, had a garage they owned together, a place to leave their cars when the roads to their farms could not be driven. On January 4, 1935, someone broke into it and carried off its tires. The Pocatello Tribune followed the case in its "Around Town" column that month, and in March a short dispatch from American Falls in the Salt Lake Telegram reported the verdict.
A garage for the winter
The Tribune gives the only description of the building that has been found. It belonged jointly to Crystal families and served as their winter parking. When storms made the last stretch to their homesteads impossible for a car, a farmer could still drive as far as an open road and shut the car up there. The paper does not say where the garage stood, which road it served, who built it or when, or how the farmers made the rest of the trip.
Other reports on this site show why such a building was useful. In December 1923 Crystal's schoolchildren wrote that the settlement would be almost deserted that winter, and in February 1949 a Rattlesnake rancher skied nine miles toward McCammon and telephoned from Garden Creek Gap that his neighbors were short of supplies. The 1935 garage shows one way Crystal families coped with winter once they had cars to keep.
The theft and the arrests
The Tribune listed the loss as two truck wheels, a pair of car wheels with tires already mounted, and ten more tires along with their inner tubes. The investigation had begun the day of the break-in. Three agencies shared the arrests: the Pocatello police, the Bannock County sheriff's office, and Power County's sheriff, "Buck" Davis, in whose county Crystal lay.
By January 24 three men were in custody: Floyd Sandusky; William Cutshalts, 22; and Sammy McDowell, 23. The paper said Sandusky and McDowell lived in Pocatello. The burglary charge was filed against Sandusky and Cutshalts. McDowell's count was accessory, which the next day's paper described as storing the stolen goods. By the officers' account, McDowell had most of the haul and was looking for a way to unload it. A wheel and a tire were the only pieces still unaccounted for.
One of the three was arrested in Arbon Valley itself, but the two reports disagree on which. The January 24 paper says McDowell was taken into custody in the valley; the January 25 paper says it was Cutshalts. Which is right is not known.
The Tribune's follow-up on January 25 put Sandusky's bond at $3,000; Pocatello officers had arrested him on the 24th, and Power County now had him in its charge. McDowell was out on $500, set in W. W. Howard's probate court in Power County. The paper had no word on Cutshalts's case. It also set right an earlier item: a man accused of stealing a watch, whom officers had first tied to the tire case, had his charge dismissed, and officers now said he had no part in the theft.
The verdict
Sandusky was tried in the district court at American Falls. A jury there convicted him of burglary in the first degree over the Arbon Valley tire theft, according to a March 8, 1935, dispatch in the Salt Lake Telegram. Another defendant in the case, a William, had already admitted his part with a guilty plea. His surname is lost in the machine-read text of the dispatch, but he was almost certainly William Cutshalts, the only William named in the case. Neither man had yet been sentenced by Judge Isaac McDougall.
The sentences have not been found, nor whether the missing wheel and tire were ever recovered. None of the three men is known to have had any tie to the valley, and the papers do not name the Crystal farmers whose tires were taken.
On this site: Crystal's story is told on the Crystal page. Nineteen years later, in 1954, Arbon and Crystal ranchers organized under the Power County sheriff to guard their places against winter thieving.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, January 24, 1935, page 7. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Officers had recovered nearly all the tires and wheels stolen from a Crystal community garage, and three men were under arrest, the Pocatello Tribune reported on Thursday, January 24, 1935.
Police named the three as Floyd Sandusky, William Cutshalts, 22, and Sammy McDowell, 23. Two of them, Sandusky and McDowell, lived in Pocatello. Sandusky and Cutshalts were accused of the break-in itself, with McDowell named as an accessory. According to the paper, McDowell had been arrested in Arbon Valley.
January 4 was the date given for the alleged burglary, and officers had been on the case from that day on. Crystal-area residents owned the garage together. They had put it up for stormy spells, so that a farmer who could not motor all the way home could at least reach an open road and leave the car there under a roof.
The thieves had made off with ten tires and their tubes, plus four wheels: two from cars, with tires on, and two from trucks. Just one wheel and one tire remained missing. McDowell, officers said, had been holding most of the goods and looking for a way to be rid of them.
Two of the men were being held in the Power County jail at American Falls. The arrests were a joint effort, with Pocatello's police and the Bannock County sheriff's office teaming up with Power County Sheriff "Buck" Davis.
A shorter item in the same column said officers suspected a fourth man, who had just pleaded guilty to petit larceny in a justice court, of a part in the tire case. (The next day's Tribune reported that his charge had been dismissed and that officers no longer linked him to the theft.)