Early in 1938 a Pocatello chamber of commerce committee was trying to find water for the Michaud Flat, the dry country north of Arbon Valley between Pocatello and American Falls. Two Arbon Valley men took part. Joe Arbon told the committee that a well already supplied the water for 100 acres of his farm. Roy Lindley, chairman of the Power County commissioners, worked with the committee on plans for a test well, and in the spring of 1939 a well drilled on the flat found water. The Pocatello papers followed the plan from January 1938 to April 1939.
A well on the Arbon ranch
The Michaud Flat plan came before the board of the Pocatello chamber of commerce on Monday, January 31, 1938, when the chamber's reclamation committee sat down with the directors. Its chairman was F. M. Bistline, a Pocatello lawyer. Lindley came, and so did Joe Arbon, whom the Pocatello Tribune called a "prominent Arbon valley farmer." The Tribune reported the meeting the same day in a short front-page item. In that account, Arbon said that pumping water had worked well on his valley farm. The Sunday Tribune-Journal put a number on it six days later: the well on Arbon's place, he had told the committee the week before, was watering 100 acres.
The Arbons had watered land in the valley long before that. By the family's account, George Arbon and his son Joe helped dig the first irrigation ditch out of Knox Canyon in the 1890s, and by the land records the 320 acres Joe entered under the desert-land law in 1902 became the irrigated core of the ranch. A well was a different kind of source, water lifted from underground rather than led out of a canyon. The papers say nothing more about it: not where on the ranch the well was, how deep it went, what drove the pump, when it was dug, or what grew on the 100 acres.
Nor do they say which Joe it was. Joseph N. Arbon, the Arbon Ward's longtime bishop, was 62 in 1938. His son, Joseph G. Arbon, was 30, and by the family's account had farmed the ranch alongside his father and shared the house with his parents since his marriage in 1929. "Prominent" fits the father better, but either could have spoken for the farm.
The test well
The Michaud Flat took in about 20,000 acres of sagebrush. The Sunday Tribune-Journal counted roughly 9,000 of them as former Indian land. White buyers had taken that ground in the belief that the Fort Hall irrigation project would water it, but the project ran short and the water never came. Donations were to pay for a deep test well, and the paper named Arbon and Lindley as partners of the Pocatello men in the effort.
The papers call him only Roy Lindley of Power County, but he was almost certainly Roy D. Lindley, who had homesteaded south-east of Arbon and received his patent in 1914; this site has found no other Roy Lindley in the county. This site's account of his letter about golden eagles in 1937 gives his time on the county commission as probably 1929 to 1935. The Tribune still called him a Power County commissioner in February 1936, though, when a man on an Arbon Valley road crew was hurt and Lindley got him out six miles by sleigh, then borrowed a mail truck to carry him on to Pocatello. By January 1938 he was chairman of the board.
Water in 1939
The Tribune had the news on its front page on April 7, 1939. According to Bistline, the new well was yielding 600 gallons every minute, which he reckoned would water 60 to 65 acres. Over the previous twelve months, the paper said, the driving force behind the project had been Bistline, Lindley, and Paul Evans of American Falls. Nothing ties this Paul Evans to the Evans family of Arbon. The men behind it hinted that they hoped to drill others like it, and the paper repeated an estimate that 2,500 families might someday live off the flat.
Lindley explained why the men had expected to find water there, and his explanation brought the story back to Arbon Valley. The men had gone ahead, Lindley said, because government reports they had studied closely showed water collecting underground beneath the flat. That water, as he described it, came off Arbon Valley and Bannock Creek, both lying to its south. He set the amount that drained from those two watersheds against how much American Falls reservoir had risen, and found that little of it ever got as far as the Snake River; the rest, he reasoned, must be held under the flat. In 1939 the land could carry nothing but livestock, yet Lindley thought that with full development it might one day bring as much as $500 an acre.
What is not known
The papers read for this post do not say exactly where the 1939 well was drilled or how deep it went, or whether it was the test well planned in 1938, though that seems likely. Whether Lindley was still living at Arbon in 1939 is also unclear, since the April report can be read as putting him at American Falls. What became of the Michaud Flat plan after that spring is beyond these articles.
On this site: the Arbon family, with the accounts of Joseph N. Arbon and Joseph G. Arbon; the first irrigation ditch; and the Arbon area.
The story as reported
Sunday Tribune-Journal, February 6, 1938, page 5. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
POCATELLO — Landowners on the Michaud Flat who sat on a Pocatello chamber of commerce committee were collecting money for a test well there, hoping to learn whether the ground held enough water to make farms of the sagebrush.
The work was in the hands of the chamber of commerce reclamation committee, led by F. M. Bistline, a Pocatello attorney. The paper listed six other members and said each owned property on the flat: Postmaster Ambrose McGuire, Judge I. E. McDougall, Nicholas Ifft, Elmer Smith, Ben Davis and L. A. "Dutch" Lehrbas. Power County had two men working with them, Joe Arbon of Arbon Valley and Roy Lindley, who chaired the county commission. When the committee met the week before, Arbon had described a well on his place that watered 100 acres.
The flat covered something like 20,000 acres. White buyers had bought about 9,000 of them, once Indian land, on the strength of the Fort Hall project, and when the project ran out of water they were, in the paper's words, "left holding the bag." The committee was looking to those owners for money, since water would raise what their land was worth. Bistline offered the country north of Pocatello as proof: its farms had been bare sagebrush until irrigation came.
The government had drilled four of the eight wells already on the flat. The shallowest, at 80 feet, was at the municipal airport, and the deepest, at 128 feet, at the Bannock Creek siding. Bistline said water stood no more than 43 feet below ground in each. The committee meant to drill a 20-inch well to roughly 125 feet, then sink a six-inch test hole from its floor to between 400 and 500 feet.
The committee figured the test well would cost $750 at the least and $2,000 at the most, and it was counting on donations to pay for it, from flat landowners and from anyone else, person or company, who cared to give. Watering an acre for a year, Bistline said, would run about $2.50 at the low end and about $5 at the high end. He did not oversell the plan. To him it was "a big speculation," and if the well failed, he said, the committee hoped nobody would lose by it.