The Arbon Valley road in the war years, 1940–1944

On August 25, 1944, the Pocatello Tribune's "Around Town" column carried a short item: Idaho's commissioner of public works had come out in favor of putting the Arbon Valley road on the list of U.S. secondary highways. It was the last of a run of wartime reports about the roads that carried the valley's grain to market.

Roads out of the valley

Arbon Valley had no railroad, and by the late 1930s its wheat went out by truck. In July 1938 the Tribune named the choices: the Mink Creek road over the mountains to Pocatello, the Garden Creek Gap road, which crews had not yet finished, or some twenty unpaved miles south through the Fort Hall Indian Reservation to the Schiller siding, which sat on the Pocatello–American Falls highway. The fight over that reservation road from 1934 to 1939 is told in Arbon's wheat road across the reservation, and the siding itself in the 1923 buying war at Schiller.

One of the valley's roads was already a state route. In December 1940 the state highway bureau's weekly reports gave State Route 38, the Pocatello-Arbon-Roy route, a poor rating and noted construction on three miles of it between East Fork and the divide. East Fork was the Mink Creek side, so this was probably the mountain road rather than the one down Bannock Creek. The site's first state highway entry traces a Pocatello–Arbon state highway back to 1919.

American Falls takes it up, 1940–1941

In January 1940 the American Falls chamber of commerce turned its attention to a road that would link Arbon Valley with the state highway below Rockland. At one of its meetings Mr. Fox, project manager of the Civilian Conservation Corps camp in Rockland, told members how they might help get it built. The chamber's president, L. R. Scott, then named E. C. England and Robert Ewing, jr., as its go-betweens with the camp on the details.

A year later the road came up again. According to the Sunday Tribune-Journal of January 19, 1941, the chamber's main business at that meeting was a call for guarding the American Falls dam, but members also discussed improving the way into Arbon Valley; Power County's commissioners and its auditor, H. C. Allen, were to travel to Boise within the week and ask the state to take the road onto its highway system. Which road was meant is not said. A garbled column in the Ogden Standard-Examiner of January 2, 1941, appears to report another meeting in favor of finishing a road from State Highway 37 near Holbrook through Arbon Valley to the highway near American Falls. What came of the Boise trip has not been found.

Dust and ruts, 1943

In 1943 the push came from Pocatello and from the farmers. On June 28 the Pocatello chamber's highway and road committee held a noon session with C. L. Graves, the Fort Hall reservation's superintendent, and with delegates from the Arbon highway district; the aim was to find some means of getting the state and federal governments to improve the road. Reservation land was the complication: by the Tribune's count, some 23 miles of the route, from the valley to where it met the highway west of Pocatello, lay inside the reservation. The paper also gave the reason the road counted for so much. Trucks hauled Arbon's dry-land wheat over it to Pocatello, and few farm-to-market roads anywhere in Idaho bore more tonnage; the valley sent only a little of its grain the other way, south to market by way of Malad.

That August the harvest was on. On the evening of Saturday, August 14, 1943, Leslie E. Nelson, 39, of Arbon was killed when his crowded pickup met an empty wheat truck driven by Irvin Walz of Arbon, twelve miles east of American Falls. The Salt Lake Tribune reported that passengers said dust from a car ahead had made the gravel road hard to see. The accident is told in Stories: Leslie Nelson, 1943.

The Pocatello Tribune of August 20 reported that the state farm bureau federation would meet at the Bannock hotel the following day under J. N. Dayley of Burley, and that it meant to take state highway officials out over the Arbon–Schiller road, where a bumper crop had yet to be hauled out. The Power County farm bureau's president, Jess Keeler of Arbon, would be one of the party; he was probably Jess T. Keeler, the son of Ruth Evans Keeler, whose family is on the Evans family page. Alfred Cordon, the bureau's legal adviser, blamed dust and a rough surface for the trouble farmers were having in getting their wheat off the fields; the same article noted that Nelson had died in a crash on that road the previous Saturday. On August 24 the paper added that no date had yet been set for the state's inspection of the road, which farmers regarded as hazardous for its dust and ruts; one was to be announced sometime later in August. No account of that inspection has been found.

A food artery, 1944

The August 1944 item, reported below, put the road's traffic at more than 800,000 bushels of grain, with livestock and butterfat besides. It does not describe the route, but the chamber committee behind it had worked on the reservation road in 1943, so it was most likely the Bannock Creek road.

The papers read for this post do not say whether the designation came. In December 1946 the state still listed Route 38 in Arbon Valley as fair to the summit and poor beyond. When the valley's roads were finally hard-surfaced is followed in the first oiled road.

On this site: the Pauline and West Fork history describes the north end of the valley the reservation road ran through.

The story as reported

Pocatello Tribune, August 25, 1944, page 10. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

POCATELLO — Ed Dufford, who chaired the chamber of commerce highway committee, had heard from Joe Wood, Idaho's commissioner of public works: Wood was backing a plan to put the Arbon Valley road on the list of U.S. secondary highways.

The message came on the heels of a meeting in Pocatello at which Dufford's committee and a delegation from Arbon Valley had pushed for that step.

The case for the road was the war. The item called the road "an important artery in the matter of war food production" and backed the claim with numbers. By its count, the road carried more than 800,000 bushels of grain to market, along with 3,500 head of livestock and 95,000 pounds of butterfat. The item did not say over what period those loads were counted.

The news ran in the paper's "Around Town" column. Higher up in the same column was a forecast credited to the Power County Press of American Falls: Power County's wheat harvest, it said, should come to 2,000,000 bushels, and the elevators were already taking in the new crop.