In February 1937 deep snow blocked the roads of Arbon Valley. The Pocatello Tribune followed the winter in a few short reports: valley people carrying feed to starving wild ducks, a young road worker on a Fort Hall crew fatally hurt between two snowplows on the Pauline road, a broken power line the power company tried to reach by air, and drifts frozen so hard that the plows gave up and waited for a thaw.
The first word came from Arbon on Saturday, February 6. More wild ducks were spending the winter in the valley than anyone could remember, the Arbon correspondent wrote, and the latest cold snap had left them starving. Getting feed to the birds meant reaching the creeks, and the deep snow made that a struggle. Sportsmen in Power and Bannock counties, the item added, valued the effort. It named some of the volunteers, by place. At Rock Springs, on Bannock Creek north of Pauline, it was a Robert whose surname is blurred in the scan. He was probably Bob Swim, who rented a ranch on Bannock Creek at the reservation line in those years, but the name can't be read for certain. At Pauline the volunteers were Vern Munn and Alfred and J. H. Bolingbroke (printed "Bollingbrook"). J. H. was probably the John H. Bolingbroke who ranched at Pauline for four decades. For West Fork the item named Allen Roper, Mel Price and Earl Daniels, and for Arbon it named Marjorie Snider, Mike Murphy and Waldo Evans.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, February 9, a road crew whose foreman and two plow drivers the paper placed at Fort Hall was out on the Pauline road near Arbon with two snowplows. One plow, run by Tom Hugas, had stuck in a drift. Harry Lavatta was moving up with the crew's other plow to get it out. The foreman said Lavatta's clutch slipped and the machine kept coming, and Leo Wheeler Guardipee, a 24-year-old member of the crew, was pinned by it. An ambulance brought him into Pocatello, where the hospital took him in at seven that evening; he died at 9:30. The Tribune printed the report the next day, under a headline that called him simply an Indian. It also named the wife and three-month-old daughter he left behind. The report under "The story as reported" below gives the details.
The same page shows the roads were not blocked in the valley alone. On the Bannock County side the trouble was just as bad: its engineer said nearly the whole county road system was shut, and most of the county's snow equipment was in the shop.
On Sunday afternoon, February 14, the Idaho Power company's main line broke somewhere in Arbon Valley. This was the 130,000-volt line that carried power between American Falls and Utah. With the snow too deep to get to the break by road, the company sent for Ralph Knapp, a Pocatello pilot, on the morning of February 16, and he was to fly Glen Davis of Idaho Power to the spot. They hoped to land near the break so the two could judge on the spot what the repair would call for. The papers read for this post do not say whether they got down, or when the line was mended.
By February 23 the men in charge of the valley's roads had given up for the time being. Two plows had been at it, the one kept at Arbon and another sent out from Pocatello, an Arbon report said that day, but the drifts had frozen hard and would not give. The crews meant to try again after a thaw.
Clearing the valley's roads had hurt a man the winter before as well. On February 11, 1936, Willis Bullock, a WPA man clearing Arbon Valley roads, was run over by the heavy tractor he had been operating, and his left leg had to be amputated above the ankle. Roy Lindley, a Power County commissioner, got him out: six miles by sleigh, then on to a Pocatello hospital in a borrowed mail truck. In March 1938 a Power County jury decided against Bullock in his $50,000 suit against Independent Highway District No. 3 and two men.
Several things are not known. The papers read for this post do not say where on the Pauline road Leo Guardipee was hurt, who employed the Fort Hall crew, where he was buried, or whether there was an inquest. They also do not say when the valley roads finally opened that spring.
On this site: the Pauline and West Fork history describes the north end of the valley, Arbon's wheat road across the reservation follows the road north in the same years, and two earlier hard winters are told in the Pauline blizzard of 1922 and three feet of snow at Arbon, 1915–16.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, February 10, 1937, page 8. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
POCATELLO — Two snowplows working near Arbon trapped a young road worker between them on Tuesday, and he died that night in a Pocatello hospital, the Tribune reported Wednesday.
He was Leo Wheeler Guardipee, 24. The accident happened in the afternoon, while he was on the job with the plow crew on the Pauline road. An ambulance had him at the hospital by 7 p.m., and death came at 9:30.
W. C. Stewart of Fort Hall, the crew's road foreman, was the source for how it happened. Of the crew's two plows, the one Tom Hugas ran had stuck in deep snow, and Harry Lavatta was driving the second up to help get it out. Lavatta's clutch slipped, Stewart said, and with no way to stop it, Lavatta's plow pinned Guardipee. Both drivers, like Stewart, were from Fort Hall, and the paper described each of them as an Indian.
One of his legs was broken, and the paper said he may also have been hurt inside, perhaps fatally.
He left a wife, Helen Mae (her last name is garbled in the print), and a baby daughter, Joyce, three months old. Jerome Guardipee and his wife, the dead man's parents, were living, as were a brother, printed as Lawrence Steve, and a sister, Anna Rose. The paper placed his father and sister at Helena.
McHan's had charge of the body.