Some time before October 6, 1938, two farmers at Arbon learned that they were winners. The news came from a salesman in a car from Washington state: a drawing had picked their names, he said, and land and an income for life came with the prize. There was one condition. Each man first had to hand him $88.50. The Pocatello Tribune reported the story on Friday, October 7, the day after Pocatello police arrested the salesman. The Sunday Tribune-Journal followed it up on October 9, and the Tribune did again on October 11.
The offer
The salesman was E. H. King, and he did not travel alone. By the Friday paper's account, he opened at Ben Lusk's Arbon home with a modest piece of luck: Lusk's name had been drawn at the Blackfoot district fair, and a mattress was his. Then came the real prize. According to King, Lusk was one of only five people in Idaho to be so lucky, and the bigger prize was worth far more than bedding: a tract somewhere in the southeast of the state, plus a $35 check every month for as long as Lusk lived. The catch was the land itself. Before it could pass to Lusk, King said, someone had to clear its title, and that would take $88.50, paid in cash. Lusk paid.
Another Arbon man had been lucky too. Talking it over afterward, he discovered that a neighbor had heard the identical pitch from King. The neighbor was out $88.50 as well, though he had written a check where Lusk had paid cash. The Friday paper printed the neighbor's name as "Jonney Bodenbrook." The Sunday paper called him John Bolingbroke, also of Arbon.
Arrest and release
Power County had a complaint against King: he had sold land in Idaho though Idaho had never licensed him as a broker. The Pocatello police were the ones who caught up with him, on Thursday, October 6, and the county took him from there. His companion went free.
Lusk had his $88.50 back by Sunday. That came from Chief of Detectives Guy Nelson in the Sunday Tribune-Journal, and on Tuesday the Tribune reported that the second farmer's check had been stopped. Power County let King go. The papers do not say why, or whether the charge was ever pressed. His car was still in Pocatello, and he came back for it.
A telegram from Seattle's police chief arrived after King had already gone free. It said King and a man named R. E. Hagglund were both mixed up in selling real estate at the Island Lake Park Country club outside Seattle, and that the chief had heard Spokane wanted King as well. According to Nelson, King and Hagglund had been working the Pocatello area for a while and lodging at one of its hotels. Hagglund, questioned by Pocatello police, described himself as head of the firm promoting the land and King as his employee.
A third winner at Lava
On October 11 the Tribune reported that the Arbon farmers had not been the only winners. J. A. Roswell of Lava Hot Springs went to Detective Nelson with an account of his own visit from King. As King told it, Roswell was one of five Idaho winners, chosen in a contest held not long before, and he left Roswell to assume that the names had been drawn at the Eastern Idaho district fair. Roswell had not gone to the Blackfoot fair at all, and he said so. King had no answer for that, beyond saying his Seattle office had put Roswell's name on the list it sent him. Roswell's account took the offer further than anything reported from Arbon. The last installment on the property, he told Nelson, was set at $295. The deal was then to be closed in Seattle, which Roswell would have to travel to, and there he could choose between $600 in cash and the $35 monthly income for life. This report named the firm as the Island Lake Park Development company of Seattle and the salesman as E. L. King.
What became of King, and of the report from Spokane, is not known. No later story has turned up in the pages read for this site.
The neighbors
The papers give Ben Lusk no more than his name and his home at Arbon. He was probably Benjamin Wilkes "Ben" Lusk, born at Malad in 1904, the oldest son of Perry and Blanch Lusk, whose ranch lay on the West Fork at the north end of the valley. Ben was on the Pauline school's perfect-attendance list in 1916, and in March 1922 the American Falls Press reported that he and Eph Bolingbroke had gone back to school in Malad after a few days with their folks at Pauline. He is the only Ben Lusk in the valley records this site holds, but the identification rests on that and not on anything the 1938 papers say. The family accounts on this site differ on when Perry's family left the West Fork ranch for Bonanza Bar on the Snake River, about 1935 or not until the reservation purchase of 1939.
The neighbor belonged to the Bolingbroke family, whose home ranch also lay at the north end, and the two families were related by marriage: Henry M. Bolingbroke's wife, Mary Elizabeth, was a Lusk, probably Perry Lusk's sister. Two John Bolingbrokes lived in the valley in 1938, John Henry, then 63 and still ranching at Pauline, and his son John Jr., then in his early twenties. The papers do not say which of them King visited.
On this site: the Lusk and Bolingbroke family pages, Perry Lusk's county service in Perry Lusk and T. B. Evans on the Power County board, and Pauline and West Fork.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, October 7, 1938, page 5. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Power County officers were looking for a man who had been selling land with no Idaho broker's license, and on Thursday, October 6, Pocatello police found him and gave him up to them. The paper noted that his car carried Washington plates.
The paper named him as E. H. King. Its account centered on Ben Lusk of Arbon, who was said to have paid King $88.50 in cash. The money, King had told him, was the cost of clearing title to land in southeastern Idaho that Lusk had supposedly won.
That land was the last item on a longer list of winnings. The first prize King mentioned was a mattress, supposedly from a drawing at the Blackfoot district fair; he had a companion with him when he made the call. The bigger news followed. The state as a whole had five grand-prize winners, King said, Lusk among them, and the grand prize paid $35 every month for the winner's lifetime, with the land thrown in.
Lusk turned out not to be the only one. Some time afterward he talked with a neighbor, whose name the paper set in type as Jonney Bodenbrook, and found that King had given him the very same pitch. That man had also paid $88.50, though with a check instead of cash.
The man traveling with King was let go.
The item ran without a headline of its own among the short local notices of the paper's "Around Town" column.