Bannock Creek gathers its water in the hills of Arbon Valley and runs north past Pauline onto the Fort Hall Reservation, where families of the Bannock Creek district farmed along its lower course. The same water served both ends of the creek, and in the hot summer of 1935 it did not stretch far enough. On August 1, 1935, the Pocatello Tribune reported from Fort Hall that the agency had ordered the white settlers upstream to stop using the Indians' share of the creek.
The dispute was not new. Early in the century the United States went to court on behalf of the Tribes against the upstream ranchers, and the decree of April 9, 1907, in United States v. Daniels kept the Tribes' earliest priority and fixed the shares of the settlers' ditches. The 1935 report does not mention the decree, but the prior rights it spoke of were very probably the ones the decree set out.
The spring of 1935
The year began with planning. On Sunday, March 31, 1935, water users of Bannock Creek met at the home of Frank Fisher and formed what the Tribune called the Bannack Creek Waterusers' Association. District farm agent C. S. De Armond helped them organize. They chose Mike Pocatello as president, Pierce Yupe as vice president and Jack Ramsay as secretary, and planned to meet again on April 12 to draw up a schedule for taking turns with the water. Taking turns mattered because nothing held water back on the reservation's stretch of the creek. With no reservoir, those farms lived on the natural flow, and the flow came from snow melting in the hills where Bannock Creek begins. The winter of 1934–35 was said to have left about an ordinary amount of snow up there, so if the water was shared out with care, the irrigators hoped it would last the season. The report does not say who Frank Fisher was. A Frank Fisher was among the new settlers of Arbon in 1912, but nothing connects the two.
On Wednesday, May 15, Superintendent F. A. Gross of the Fort Hall agency spent the morning touring the Bannock Creek district on irrigation business with T. C. Guyn, the engineer in charge of the irrigation project, Charley Peterson, chairman of the tribal council, Ralph Dixey of the advisory committee and others. Afterward Gross was reported as expecting the Bannock Creek farms to have water enough that year, and good crops.
August
By midsummer the hopes of May had come to nothing. Superintendent Gross's office sent its orders to the upstream settlers on August 1, and the Tribune's Fort Hall correspondent sent in the news the same day. The agency's extension director, H. A. Ireland, gave the reason. Along the creek, he said, there were fields that had not been watered once all season, while others had been given so little that their crops were lost. Between the heat and the want of water, the grain in the district was close to a total loss. The paper passed on one more figure as a report: the settlers at the head of the creek were said to have been using two-thirds of the creek's water.
The paper named none of the settlers. Under the 1907 decree the settler rights lay with valley families on upper Bannock and Rattlesnake creeks, among them the Daniels, Lusk and Bolingbroke families of the West Fork and Pauline end, but which farmers were drawing water in 1935 is not recorded in the reports found. Nor do they say how the upstream users answered, whether water was turned down the creek after August 1, or what the Bannock Creek harvest finally came to. The figure of two-thirds is given only as something that was reported; the paper does not say who measured it.
The next spring brought repair work on the reservation's ditches. On March 12, 1936, the Tribune reported that Emergency Conservation Work crews at Fort Hall, working with the Indian irrigation service, would put four small irrigation systems on the reservation back in order before the season began, Bannock Creek among them, cleaning the ditches and repairing the headgates.
The 1907 decree, the site's Stories entry notes, still governs the creek.
On this site: United States v. Daniels, the 1907 decree; when the Bannock Creek lands were allotted; Arbon's wheat road across the reservation in the same years; the 1898 cession; Pauline and West Fork; and the valley's first irrigation ditch.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, August 1, 1935, page 3. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
White settlers at the head of Bannock Creek were told on August 1, 1935, to leave the Indians' share of the creek alone. Superintendent F. A. Gross's office at the Fort Hall agency sent the orders out that Thursday, and a short dispatch from Fort Hall put the news in that day's Pocatello Tribune.
The agency's ground was priority. The Indians along the creek held the older water rights, and whatever part of their share the upstream users had been taking was to be given up.
The damage on those farms was described by H. A. Ireland, the agency's extension director. By his account, part of the land had gone the whole season without a single watering. Other fields had been watered too little, and their crops were lost. The paper added that heat and too little irrigation water had all but destroyed the grain in that district.
Its last line passed along an unattributed report that put the upstream settlers' take at two-thirds of the creek's supply.
No settler was named, and the article gave no count of the farms on either end of the creek. It did not say how the orders would be enforced or what would follow if they were ignored.