In September 1843 John C. Fremont's exploring party came north out of the Great Salt Lake country and down a stream Fremont called the Pannack river, to Fort Hall on the Snake. That stream is Bannock Creek, which rises at the head of Arbon Valley and runs north through the valley and the Fort Hall Reservation. In 1945 and 1946 his ride down the creek became a small argument in the Pocatello Tribune.
The paper's "Buzz of the Burg" column was then running a serial history of Bannock County by Dr. Minnie F. Howard of Pocatello. Her installment of December 27, 1945, retold in our own words below, said Fremont had come through Garden Creek Gap and down Bannock Creek.
What Fremont wrote
Fremont's report, printed by the government in 1845, gives the days but few place names. After crossing a stream he called the Roseaux, his party climbed a long ravine to a pass "in the dividing ridge between the waters of Bear river and the Snake river." Below it they came into a broad valley four or five miles wide, on "one of the head-waters of the Pannack river, which here loses itself in swampy ground," and camped there at dark.
About noon on September 17 they reached what he called the main fork, with the Pannack before them in a valley a mile and a half wide, and followed it down. His observation that night put the camp at latitude 42° 44′ 40″. If his reckoning was close, that was on the lower creek, well north of where Arbon and Pauline now stand. The next morning's entry reads:
After traveling seven or eight miles, we emerged on the plains of the Columbia, in sight of the famous "Three Buttes," a well-known landmark in the country, distant about 45 miles. ... we were agreeably surprised, on reaching the Portneuf river, to see a beautiful green valley with scattered timber spread out beneath us, on which, about four miles distant, were glistening the white walls of the fort.
On September 19, in falling snow, Fremont rode up to the fort and bought horses and five oxen from Mr. Grant, the officer in charge.
The argument in the paper
Howard went further than Fremont. Her installment of December 17, 1945, said the Hudson's Bay men at Fort Hall wanted the Americans' wagons headed for California rather than Oregon, and named the roads they pushed: Raft River in 1843, then Bannock Creek in 1844 and 1845. On December 28, without giving a year, she sketched the way she said California-bound wagons soon followed out of the fort. In her telling they forded the Portneuf at the dugway below W. P. Havenor's ranch, climbed Bannock Creek, cut over a corner of Utah, picked up the Humboldt in Nevada, and ended their trip beyond the Sierras at Sutter's Fort. She gave no source, and nothing else we have read puts wagons on Bannock Creek in 1844 or 1845.
On January 9, 1946, the column carried W. P. Havenor, the Bannock County surveyor, on where Old Fort Hall had stood. He read Fremont's seven or eight miles as miles down Bannock Creek, and put Fremont's first view of the fort on the bluff west of the Portneuf, "on the trail from Bannock Creek." With Howard Stansbury's view from about the same point, which Havenor dated September 22, 1850, he ruled out the old stage station, printed as "The Dobles," as the fort's site.
A reader disagreed. In a letter printed June 25, 1946, N. S. Coffin of Lava Hot Springs, whose parents had settled in Marsh Valley in 1871, wrote mainly to say that Howard's great roads through the county left out the Sublette road. Along the way he noted that Garden Creek Gap carried no traffic before 1912, and that until then local talk held the gap was closed even to a crow. By "all available evidence," he wrote, Fremont had crossed the divide into Hawkins Basin, a little south of the gap. He also passed on the recollection of Albert (Dock) Boyce, a freighter born in 1854, that the Sublette road, the old emigrant road, used the same basin. Boyce traced it up Hawkins Basin to the divide, down onto Rattlesnake Creek in the Crystal country, across to Bannock Creek, and west through Moonshine to Raft River. And he added that Mormon pioneers bound for Fort Lemhi, and coming home from it, had used the Malad and Bannock valleys in the years 1855 to 1858.
Bannock Creek did carry a road later. As the Tribune told it in 1944 and 1946, freighters and stages between Utah and the Montana mines came through Malad and down the creek toward Fort Hall, until William H. Murphy's toll road through the Portneuf canyon offered a shorter, lower way in the middle 1860s.
What is not known
Fremont's journal does not name his pass, and it could fit more than one way into the Bannock Creek country. Howard's gap and Coffin's divide were both claims made a century later, and the valley's own tradition differs again. The Arbon area history on this site, drawn from Laurie Jean Ward Call's book Bannock Valley, says Fremont camped at the spring just north of Andersen Lane, and it dates his visit to 1846. His published report places his ride down the Pannack in September 1843. Whether any of these is right, the papers do not settle.
On this site: the Arbon area history; the Crystal area, where Rattlesnake Creek runs; the Summit area, where the site places the Hudspeth Cutoff; and the names of Bannock Creek.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, December 27, 1945, page 4. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Dr. Minnie F. Howard's history of Bannock County reached John C. Fremont in its fifty-fifth installment, printed in the Tribune's "Buzz of the Burg" column on December 27, 1945.
Howard opened with the people she counted most important to the story of Old Fort Hall. Her Americans were Bonneville, Nathaniel Wyeth, Jason Lee, Marcus Whitman, John Sutter and Fremont, and her Hudson's Bay men were Francis Ermatinger and Captain James (Johnnie) Grant. Grant's years, as she dated them, ran from 1843 to 1846, and she treated the end of his tenure as the end of an era. Up to that point, in her view, neither the United States nor Britain governed the Fort Hall country; what authority there was belonged to the Hudson's Bay Company, by its charter.
The trip that brought Fremont by Fort Hall in September 1843 was the second of three he led to the Pacific; he was a Georgian, born at Savannah in 1813. In Howard's telling, his party trailed that summer's big emigration as its rear guard until Bear Lake, where it broke away for a look at the Great Salt Lake. She named Swanson's ranch as the place he forded the Portneuf on the last stretch to the fort, after following Bannock Creek down from Garden Creek Gap; he had come from the south by way of Cache Valley, she said, and never used the Portneuf canyon. Because he wrote of the fort's white walls shining in the sunlight, she reasoned that he got there before midday. President Tyler, she said, had sent him out to find the most practical ways to Oregon and to California, which still belonged to Mexico. Kit Carson rode with him as guide.
She quoted his journal on buying horses and five oxen from Grant, under the date September 18; the printed report has it on the 19th. Eleven of the party turned back from the fort, Howard wrote, because Fremont doubted they could stand the winter ahead. The rest forded the Portneuf in a rainstorm with the water at the axles. Those axles, she pointed out, were on the howitzer the expedition was hauling west, a cannon Fremont would later abandon in the snow in country she placed in northern California; there was no wagon.
Her closing point was about wheels. None had yet rolled on from Fort Hall to California, she wrote, and the only ones the fort had ever seen came with the emigration Whitman traveled with, a month ahead of Fremont.
Sources
- Pocatello Tribune, December 27, 1945, page 4
- Pocatello Tribune, December 17, 1945, page 4
- Pocatello Tribune, December 28, 1945, page 4
- Pocatello Tribune, January 9, 1946, page 4
- Pocatello Tribune, June 25, 1946, page 4
- Pocatello Tribune, June 6, 1944, page 4
- Pocatello Tribune, July 1, 1946, page 4
- John C. Fremont, Report of the Exploring Expedition to the Rocky Mountains, Oregon and North California, 1845, journal for September 1843