About two thousand acres in Arbon Valley became federal property in 1935, bought as an addition to the Fort Hall Reservation, according to a November report in the Pocatello Tribune. The tracts bordered the reservation on its south side, where the boundary crosses the north end of the valley, in Power County. The report was only a paragraph in a column of state news, but it names the people who sold. The family pages on this site already tell of the federal land purchases of the later 1930s and name the Price, Fink and Lusk tracts as probably among them, but no list of sellers printed at the time had turned up before this one.
What the paper said
On Tuesday, November 12, the column "Here We Have Idaho," signed by The Consul, gave the price as $10 to $40 an acre and the total paid as $16,834.56. Further purchases for the reservation were under discussion in Bannock and Bingham counties, the column added. The columnist's only comment was a one-line question about why the reservation needed to be larger. A day later the paper's lead editorial complained that the county would lose the taxes the land had paid. Both pieces are reported below.
The sellers, as the paper printed them, were:
- Asael P. Condit
- Alfred Bollingbroke
- Ephraim Gooch
- John Bischoff
- Thos. D. Price
- J. N. Ireland & Co.
- Amelia D. Lewis
Who the sellers were
Several of the names belong to the north end of the valley. "Alfred Bollingbroke" is very probably Alfred Bolingbroke, a son of Charles and Maggie Bolingbroke. Charles homesteaded on Bannock Creek just north of the Pauline school, and Alfred, with his brothers Edward and Guy, farmed the family place. He was "Alford Bolingbroke, Pauline" on the 1917 draft list, and his mother's obituary in 1943 still named him among her sons at Arbon. Which land he sold in 1935 is not known, and the Bolingbrokes went on farming in the valley for decades; see the Bolingbroke family.
John Bischoff had been at Pauline since about 1908. He was one of the assistants in the Latter-day Saint Sunday school organized there in 1910, as told in Pauline and the Meadow Ward, and in 1913 he received the patent for a quarter section near Pauline. That homestead lies outside today's reservation, so what he sold in 1935 may have been another tract, or land beside the reservation rather than inside it. The paper does not say.
Thos. D. Price is probably the Thomas D. Price who patented land on the West Fork side in 1913, 1914 and 1924, in the Big Meadows country where Jennett Daniels Price and her Daniels brothers had homesteaded; he was probably her son. Asael P. Condit is probably the man who received a 643-acre stock-raising homestead west of Pauline in 1940. Where his 1935 land lay is not known.
No Ephraim Gooch turns up in the valley records read for this site. A Gooch family moved onto a homestead near Dry Canyon in 1917, and Belton Gooch and H. Edmund Gooch patented homesteads in the survey township around Pauline, T10S R33E, in 1919 and 1922, but whether Ephraim belonged to that family is not known. J. N. Ireland & Co. was a bank: Power County court notices of 1924 and 1925 name "J. N. Ireland Company, Bankers, a corporation." Why a bank had land to sell is not stated. Amelia D. Lewis has not been identified.
What the report leaves unclear
The figures do not quite agree. Two thousand acres at no less than $10 an acre would have come to at least $20,000, more than the $16,834.56 the paper gave. Either the acreage was smaller than reported, some land sold for less than $10, or the numbers were rounded.
The timing is also uncertain. The paper said the land had been bought. But as the Lusk family page sets out, the federal project to buy land in and beside the reservation was approved by July 1935, and owners' options were being closed and paid from November 1936. The sales reported in 1935 may have been options or agreements that had not yet closed. Exactly where the tracts lay, and which of them are inside today's boundary, is not known. Perry Lusk is not on the 1935 list. His West Fork ranch went to the United States later, in spring 1939 by the family's account.
On this site: the Pauline and West Fork area page; how the 1898 agreement drew the reservation line in The reservation next door; When the Bannock Creek lands were allotted; and Arbon's wheat road across the reservation, on the road dispute of the same years.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, November 12, 1935, page 4. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
On November 12, 1935, Pocatello Tribune readers learned that about 2,000 acres in Arbon Valley were now owned by the United States, purchased as an addition to the Fort Hall Reservation. The news appeared in "Here We Have Idaho," a column of short state items, each followed by a brief comment, written under the name The Consul.
The column placed the tracts in Power County, on the reservation's southern edge. Prices ran from $10 to $40 an acre, and the owners received $16,834.56 in all. Seven sellers were listed: Asael P. Condit, Alfred Bollingbroke, Ephraim Gooch, John Bischoff, Thos. D. Price, the firm of J. N. Ireland & Co., and Amelia D. Lewis.
All of it was to go into the reservation. Similar deals were being worked out in Bannock and Bingham counties, the column said. The item gave no reason for the purchases, and The Consul's comment simply asked what the point of a larger reservation was.
The paper returned to the subject the next day in its lead editorial, headed "Tax Exempt Government Schemes." The editorial rounded the price to about $17,000 and noted that the government was after more land on the reservation's edges. The writer did not know why the government wanted the land and objected on other grounds. The trouble, as the editorial saw it, was revenue: Washington paid no local taxes, so every local taxing body, from the state down to the school district, would lose whatever the tracts had supplied.
The editorial treated the Arbon Valley sale as one case of a national problem under the New Deal. It pointed to taxable land flooded by the Tennessee Valley Authority, a plan to move 700 New Jersey families into a new tax-free town, and federal housing and resettlement projects. The writer argued that the cost of all this landed on the people still paying taxes, who had reached their limit, while county and town governments grew weaker. It closed by challenging readers to decide whether they would act or keep putting up with it.
Sources
- Pocatello Tribune, November 12, 1935, page 4
- Pocatello Tribune, November 13, 1935, page 4
- American Falls Press, March 29, 1917, page 7
- American Falls Press, June 5, 1917, page 2
- American Falls Press, July 10, 1917, page 8
- American Falls Press, March 6, 1924, page 5
- American Falls Press, August 6, 1925, page 3
- Deseret News, January 27, 1943, page 14
- Homestead patent to Charles E. Bolingbroke, October 19, 1908 (IDIDAA 005117)
- Homestead patent to John Bishoff, May 8, 1913 (IDBL 0004472)
- Cash patent to Thomas D. Price, June 11, 1913 (IDBL 0013563)
- Homestead patent to Thomas D. Price, October 31, 1914 (IDBL 0005795)
- Homestead patent to Thomas D. Price, April 25, 1924 (IDBL 0032345)
- Homestead patent to Belton Gooch, June 30, 1919 (IDBL 0024072)
- Homestead patent to H. Edmund Gooch, June 10, 1922 (IDBL 0030458)
- Stock-raising homestead patent to Asael P. Condit, January 12, 1940 (IDBL 0045381)