On Tuesday, September 14, 1937, the Pocatello Tribune gave part of its Buzz of the Burg column to a reader's letter. William J. Mullen of Pocatello had written it two days before, while the state was preparing an elk hunt that was being called a thinning. Most of the letter is about Pocatello's watershed and its elk. But it opens on the high ground above Arbon Valley, at the head of Midnight Creek, and it gives one of the few pictures this site has found of that country as one man remembered it before sheep grazed there.
Midnight Creek is one of the two creeks, with Rattlesnake Creek, that are fed by the springs of the high basin at Crystal and run down to Bannock Creek, which flows north through the Fort Hall Reservation. Its head lies against the divide between the valley and the Gibson Jack and Mink Creek country behind Pocatello. In 1915 the American Falls Press noted that R. O. Stewart taught a school "on Midnight creek, in the Crystal district."
What he remembered
By his count the first visit came thirty-three years before the letter, about 1904; if he was the Bill Mullen described below, born in 1888, he was about sixteen. He was on horseback, coming down to where Midnight Creek begins, when he saw four Indians a little way downstream digging camas in a small meadow, and one of them called "good hunting" to him.
He kept returning to that country for years afterward. The picture he kept of it was one of aspen and grass and clean water. By his account, deer that spent the winter on lower ground came back each spring by way of Midnight Creek, bound for the basin that Gibson Jack and Mink creeks drain. As he recalled it, neither sheep nor woodcutters had been there yet.
He gives no year for it, but when he finally went back to the meadow where the camas had been dug, he found it reduced to "a dust bed." He put that down to sheep. The whole range had been grazed too hard, by his description: ferns and grass trampled away, aspen roots left bare, and the ruffed grouse gone.
The elk hunt
The letter was an argument against the hunt. On August 16 the Tribune had reported that the state game warden planned emergency hunts where winter range looked short, among them one in October for 100 elk in the Cache National Forest in Bannock, Franklin, Bear Lake and Oneida counties. The forest around Pocatello was then a district of the Cache. Mullen's letter speaks of the same number, 100 elk, so this was very probably the hunt he meant, though the letter does not name the ground. What came of the October hunt is not in the pages read for this post.
Mullen wanted to know how long sheep had been using that range. The papers give part of an answer. In June 1913 the Tribune reported that 120 settlers and homesteaders "just over the Mink creek divide in Oneida county," on the valley side, had written to the district forester at Ogden in protest after sheep were allowed to graze on the West Fork of Mink Creek and then on the south slope of the divide. They wanted the range for their own cattle and horses and feared for their water. That same month Pocatello's city council heard a petition against the stock lease on the part of the reserve draining into Bannock Creek, and was told that the range there "had always been used by sheep." That does not square with Mullen's memory of untouched country, though the two may describe different ground. By 1933 the Tribune spoke of a sheep range between Elk Meadows and Midnight Creek, where a sheepman killed three cougars that August.
The elk had their own history on the divide. The Pocatello herd began with elk brought from Yellowstone Park in 1916 and 1917, and by 1933 its game preserve took in the heads of Crystal, Midnight, Gibson Jack and City creeks. Valley farmers knew the elk well; see the state's elk at Crystal. The sheep, too, were an old quarrel on the Arbon side, where farmers kept bands out of their canyons in 1920.
The writer
The letter-writer was almost certainly William Joseph "Bill" Mullen, whom the Idaho State Journal profiled in 1965; in 1925 the Tribune had named a William J. Mullen among the sons of Mrs. J. B. Mullen. Born in Pocatello on February 17, 1888, the son of John B. and Katherine English Mullen, he went to work for the railroad as a brakeman in 1908 and stayed 49 years. According to the profile, he helped L. A. "Dutch" Lehrbas plant what it calls the first elk near Pocatello in 1917 (the 1933 Tribune puts the first shipment in April 1916 and a second in April 1917). As a young man he was also one of a group of friends who put up a cabin on Midnight Creek and kept it supplied, and he was still going up to it in later years. So, by the profile's account, the man who objected to killing 100 elk in 1937 had helped plant the herd twenty years before. The profile does not mention the letter.
What remains unknown is the exact year of that first ride, where the camas meadow lay, who the four diggers were, and when Mullen found the meadow ruined.
On this site: Crystal in the winter of 1923–24 and the mail road over Mink Creek.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, September 14, 1937, page 5. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
POCATELLO — A Pocatello man used the Tribune's Buzz of the Burg column on Tuesday to protest the state's coming elk hunt and the grazing he blamed for it.
William J. Mullen, writing to the columnist Ing on Sunday, September 12, opened with a memory from thirty-three years earlier. That day he had ridden to the top of Midnight Creek, and a little below he came on four Indians digging camas in a meadow. He wrote that one of them wished him a successful hunt.
He made many trips back there in later years, he said. In those days, as he told it, it was a place of aspens, grass and clean streams that deer crossed every spring, with no sheep on it and no trees cut. On a visit many years later he found the camas meadow worn down to dust. Sheep were the cause, he said; the grouse had left, the undergrowth had been tramped out and the aspens' roots were bare.
He traced the Pocatello Forest Reserve to a protest meeting held on Gibson Jack Creek when he was a small boy, after word spread that sheep were on the watershed that supplied the town's water. The point of the reserve, he said, was to keep livestock out of the town's water.
Mullen did not dispute that feed might be short. What he objected to was a range so small being grazed so hard that it could no longer feed a modest elk herd through the winter, and he asked how long sheep had been running there. He proposed closing to public grazing everything between Midnight, Mink and Michaud creeks, down to the Portneuf River, and argued that sheepmen could absorb the loss. He objected as well to cutting a road up every canyon, and said he had weighed the need for fire protection before saying so.
He argued that Pocatello people were heirs to wild land lying barely an hour from Center Street, and that sheep, hunters and woodcutters had no business wrecking it. He closed by questioning the need to kill 100 elk and wondering where 100 hunters willing to do it would come from.
Sources
- Pocatello Tribune, September 14, 1937, page 5
- Pocatello Tribune, August 16, 1937, page 1
- American Falls Press, December 23, 1915, page 6
- Pocatello Tribune, June 6, 1913, page 4
- Semi-Weekly Pocatello Tribune, June 18, 1913, page 4
- Pocatello Tribune, August 15, 1933, page 5
- Pocatello Tribune, September 6, 1933, page 8
- Pocatello Tribune, September 2, 1925, page 6
- Idaho State Journal, May 16, 1965, page 13
- Idaho State Journal, June 14, 1968, page 18