Jewell Horton, Pauline homesteader and Arbon justice, dies in 1946

On Monday, September 9, 1946, the Pocatello Tribune printed a short obituary for Jewell Horton, a 66-year-old man living on a rural route north of Pocatello. His valley years got only a date there, 1902, given as the year he came to Arbon Valley. The American Falls Press of his time says more. Its columns and legal notices, with the land records, show a homesteader south-east of Pauline who clerked a valley meeting, served as justice of the peace, took in his neighbors' wheat as a grain agent, left the valley for a while, and came back.

A claim near Pauline

By the obituary's account, Horton was an Illinois native, born in 1880, whose family brought him to Preston, Idaho; it dates both his Logan wedding to Elvira Smith and his move to the valley to 1902. The land records gathered for the Horton family record tell a slightly later story. Jewel Horton "of Preston" entered Lots 1 to 4 of Section 19, township 10 south, range 34 east, on October 3, 1904, and received the patent in December 1911. His sons were born at Preston and Riverdale until 1908, so the family may have lived on the claim full time only from about then.

The "Jule Horton" who drove one of sixteen wagons of Arbon wheat to the Michaud switch in November 1908 was probably he (the caravan is told here). In May 1910 he filed a contest against the entry James Berry had made in 1904 on lot 1 of Section 30, ground just south of his own. His affidavit said Berry had died about two years before at Deweyville, Utah, without ever living on the land or improving it. The land office's ruling has not been found, but the patent he received in December 1911 took in lot 1 of Section 30 along with his own four lots, so the ground probably came to him (contests and proofs are told here). By then his parents, Elias and Elizabeth Horton, were living at Pauline too, and father and son both witnessed neighbors' proofs: Nephi Jenson's in 1911 and David T. Lusk's in 1913.

Clerk and justice

On the stormy night of Saturday, December 31, 1910, at the Arbon schoolhouse meeting that voted on joining a proposed new county, Horton seconded the motion that the vote be final and was chosen clerk to receive the ballots (that meeting is told here). On August 7, 1913, the Press noted:

Jewell Horton, Justice of the peace at Arbon, was doing business here Saturday, and reports all conditions fine and dandy in his neck of the woods.

In September 1914 he went onto the Republican county central committee for Arbon precinct, and that November his name and John Payne's stood on the ballot for justice of the peace in Arbon precinct. The returns as they survive cannot be read.

Moreland and back

On May 6 or 7, 1915, Horton moved his family to Moreland, near Blackfoot. The next day his mother died suddenly at home. The Arbon column listed her survivors as her husband and two sons, Ed Horton of Dempsey and "Mr. Jewell Horton, formerly of Arbon, but who had moved his family to Mooreland, Idaho, the day before his mother's death." "Grandma" Horton was buried in the new cemetery near the Pauline post office, among its first burials. That September Elias Horton came back from Moreland, where his son lived, and they had visited the fair at Mackay.

The family did not stay away. In March 1917 the Blackfoot Idaho Republican reported that Mr. and Mrs. Jewell Horton had left for their farm in Bannock valley to live there through the crop season. That August the Press printed a summons in his suit to quiet title to land in Sections 17 and 20, where his mother had held her own homestead, naming her unknown heirs and devisees as defendants; the summons ran again in the spring of 1918, and the outcome was not reported in the papers read for this post. In November 1917 he was the agent at the Equity platform at Pauline, which had taken in 903,795 pounds of wheat that fall, more than half of it (485,497 pounds) still waiting when bad roads stopped the trucks to Michaud (the Equity's story).

He registered for the draft as a Pauline man in September 1918, had a claim before the county for registering voters in 1920, and was an election judge at Pauline in 1922 with Clarence England and John Noble. The Pauline school news of 1923 and 1924 has him going to Pocatello with his son Hyrum and to a sale at Tyhee with John Kowallis. In September 1925 Mrs. Horton went with the Peterson family to Pocatello after their small daughter was struck by a grain truck.

Ward clerk and later years

Among his church callings the Tribune listed a clerkship in the "Medrow ward," a name no valley ward is known to have carried. Pauline's ward was the Meadow Ward, and that is probably what was meant, but when he was its clerk has not been found.

His son Raymond's 1961 obituary says the family moved to Pauline and later to Arbon Valley and farmed there for many years. Raymond married Margaret Bullock, a daughter of the Arbon Bullock family, in 1929. Between 1936 and 1944 Raymond, Vernal and probably Jewell Jr. received patents to stock-raising homesteads east of Pauline, and the elder Horton's own claim became part of the Lusk ranch. Elvira Horton died on June 6, 1935. When Jewell Horton left the valley for the Tyhee country north of Pocatello is not known.

The story as reported

Pocatello Tribune, September 9, 1946, page 2. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

Death came for Jewell Horton on the morning of Monday, September 9, 1946, in a Pocatello hospital; he was 66, lived on Route 2 north of the city, and had been sick for only a brief time. Arrangements were in the hands of the Hall mortuary. Mourners were to gather Wednesday afternoon at two in the Seventh Ward's Latter-day Saint chapel at Tyhee, where Bishop George J. Davis would conduct the service.

Left behind were eight grandchildren and four sons living in Pocatello: Jewell Jr., Raymond, Hyrum and Vernal. Elvira Smith, whom he had wed at Logan in 1902, had preceded him in death on June 6, 1935.

The paper sketched his life briefly. His parents were Elias Horton and Elizabeth Alice Jones Horton, and he was born at Norris City, Illinois, on July 16, 1880. Preston was the family's first Idaho home; the obituary put their arrival there 57 years back, or about 1889. It gave 1902, the year of his marriage, as the year he went to Arbon Valley. Pocatello was his last home, and the paper did not say when he settled there.

The paper called him an active Latter-day Saint and a high priest, and said he had once kept the records as clerk of a ward whose name it set in type as Medrow.