On November 12, 1947, the Pocatello Tribune gave space on its third page to a portrait of Arbon Valley by Melba Rae Barnett of Pocatello, a student in the University of Idaho's school of journalism. Rather than report a single event, it tries to describe the whole valley, and it caught the place at a turning point: electric lines coming in, a better road being laid out, and wheat selling well after the hard years.
What she saw
By Barnett's count about 250 people farmed the valley, early homesteaders alongside more recent arrivals. Getting there from Pocatello meant a mountain drive across Caribou National Forest, and in her telling the valley appears abruptly at the end of it. Looking over the farms, she compared them to a "patch-work quilt." Each field supplied its own color: wheat greening on the hillsides, pale stubble, turned earth on the valley floor and hay lying cut beside it, with white houses and red barns scattered through the pattern. She placed the valley 25 miles southeast of Pocatello; it lies to the southwest.
For the valley's past Barnett relied on one of its earliest settlers, the owner of the farm a visitor comes to first on the way in. To her, his place was the obvious stop for anyone after the story, though she never gave his name. He and the man across the fence both arrived in 1912. They set up their adjoining claims as a team, and more than one year of drought or frost failed to drive either of them off. The Depression finally separated them. The neighbor quit, taking $1,000 for 600 acres, and by the article's account he was far from the only one in the valley to sell. His old partner held on. By 1947 one of his fields, 160 acres, had produced a $9,000 grain crop in a single season, and a buyer wanted it for $8,000 in cash. That is roughly $1.67 an acre against $50.
The year around the article
The new things Barnett described on his place can be matched in the paper's news. In early September the Tribune reported that Idaho Power was building an 88-mile line over the Mink Creek divide to serve the Rattlesnake, Arbon and Crystal sections, with C and L Electric of Pocatello holding the contract and service hoped for late that fall. Barnett's farmer expected soon to have no more use for his Delco plant or his lamps. Together the two reports support 1947 as the year power reached this part of the valley; the site's Firsts notes that another account gives 1945.
The road markers she described are harder to pin down. In January 1947 a delegation from the valley had asked Bannock County to improve the Mink Creek road. The commissioners replied that the road was the state's responsibility, not theirs. Conrad Kelly, the district highway engineer, had told the group the state already counted it among its planned secondary roads, and he expected crews to regrade and straighten parts of it during 1947. Barnett does not say which road was being marked. The site's Firsts dates the first oiled road to August 1948, when bids were called to surface State Highway 37 at the Buist end, though other accounts there differ.
Her picture of the harvest needs a caution. In her account the 1947 crop was large and well paid, a run of good years she said went back five seasons. The Tribune's own crop reports that summer told a harder story for this valley: frost had hit Arbon and Crystal worse than any other part of Power County, with losses of 20 to 30 percent and much more on some farms, and some grain had been cut for hay. The county as a whole still raised a bumper crop.
The headline's claim that no district in the West raised more wheat for its acreage rests on no figures in the article and should be read as the writer's enthusiasm.
What is not known
Neither the 1912 farmer nor his neighbor can be identified from the article, and this post does not guess. The article does not say how many families sold out in the 1930s, or where they went, though three months after the feature, on February 14, 1948, present and former residents held a reunion in Pocatello with about 500 expected.
On this site: electric power reaches the valley, Drought and debt empty Crystal and Buist, Arbon Valley wheat farms in the want ads, 1946–1959, Frozen fog on the Arbon Valley power lines, 1954 and the 1967 reunion.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, November 12, 1947, page 3. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
A University of Idaho journalism student profiled Arbon Valley in a Tribune feature that ranked it first in the West for wheat raised in proportion to its size, though it gave no figures to back the claim.
The author was Melba Rae Barnett of Pocatello. By her count the valley held about 250 people, every one of them on a farm. She put it 25 miles from Pocatello, behind mountain roads through the national forest, and said its beauty and its wealth were known to few people beyond it. Its settlers, she wrote, were partly homesteaders from the early days and partly later arrivals.
A good share of her article was scenery as a newcomer would take it in, a valley divided among wheat, stubble, plowing and hay, its farmhouses white and its barns red.
Barnett's history came from an early settler, left unnamed, whose farm is the first one a visitor meets on entering the valley. He was proud of the year's improvements. With electric appliances now being installed, he expected before long to retire both his Delco generating plant and the lamps he had been fueling with gasoline and kerosene. She noted a second change as well. White markers now showed where an oiled highway would run, a road residents had wanted for a long time. Winters there bring about six feet of snow, and she expected the new road to keep the valley open in every season.
He and a neighbor homesteaded adjoining land in 1912 and pooled their labor to get established, and between them they rode out a string of droughts and frosts. The Depression broke that up. The neighbor let 600 acres go for $1,000, and Barnett said many other families in the valley had sold out the same way. The settler stayed. In 1947 one 160-acre field of his raised a $9,000 grain crop, and a would-be buyer offered him $8,000 in cash for it.
Barnett described 1947 as the sixth good year in a row: big yields, strong grain prices and healthy livestock added up to another profitable season. She credited the yields to farming methods the valley's growers had worked out over years of experiment with their own soil. Her closing judgment was that those who sold and left now regret it, while the ones who stayed had shown long before any prosperity arrived that they could "take it."
Sources
- Pocatello Tribune, November 12, 1947, page 3
- Pocatello Tribune, January 7, 1947, page 1
- Pocatello Tribune, July 10, 1947, page 1
- Pocatello Tribune, August 6, 1947, page 3
- Pocatello Tribune, September 3, 1947, page 1
- Pocatello Tribune, September 7, 1947, page 12
- Pocatello Tribune, February 8, 1948, page 18
- Pocatello Tribune, February 15, 1948, page 2