On Friday, April 23, 1948, a young road worker named Harold Grant Moss was killed in Arbon Valley. He was on an Oneida County road crew. With the bed of one of its dump trucks tipped up, he had crawled underneath to grease the truck, and the lift failed and let the bed fall on him. The Associated Press carried the news from Malad, and it ran on the front page of the Ogden Standard-Examiner the next day and of the Pocatello Tribune the day after that.
Nothing in the reports ties Moss to a valley family. According to the papers, he belonged to the Latter-day Saint congregation at Malad; Pocatello had been his home until about three years earlier, when his father died. He left a wife, La Rue Camp Moss, and a daughter, Marilyn, 18 months old. Moss's mother, Amelia Thomas Moss, worked in the railroad offices in Pocatello. Daniel R. Thomas, his grandfather, was the fourth relative the papers named.
Where it happened
The papers place the accident no more exactly than Arbon Valley, 35 miles west of Malad. Why an Oneida County crew was working there is explained by the county line. When Power County was created in 1913, Arbon went with it, but the south end of the valley stayed in Oneida County. The Buist area history begins by placing Buist in Oneida County, at the valley's south end, and the Summit history tells how Oneida County hired a Summit homesteader in 1910 to build a road that would help farmers get their crops to market in Malad. The Idaho death index, which gives Moss's birth date as May 21, 1924, records his death at Arbon in Oneida County. It is likely, then, that the crew was working somewhere at the Oneida County end of the valley, but no report says exactly where, or what job the crew had in hand. The story of how the valley came to be divided is told in How Arbon voted to join Power County.
Roads at that end of the valley were changing that year. In August 1948 the state called for bids to give State Highway 37 between Holbrook summit and Buist a bituminous surface, as the entry on the first oiled road describes. Nothing in the April reports ties the county crew's work to that project.
What the papers leave out
The reports rest on what the crew said. By their account Moss was by himself when the bed fell, and a fellow crew member, Darrell Chivers, found him that evening; the Ogden paper gives the time as five o'clock and spells the name Darrel. Neither paper says what time the accident itself happened. No inquest or later report has turned up. The papers give his age as 24, but by the birth date in the death index he was four weeks short of his twenty-fourth birthday.
His funeral was set for Monday afternoon, April 26, in the Malad Third Ward, with burial in the Malad City Cemetery, where his grave is recorded with the same dates as the death index.
On this site: the Buist and Summit area histories, the first oiled road, and another death on the valley road, Twayne Austin's in 1952.
The story as reported
Pocatello Tribune, April 25, 1948, page 1. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
A road worker was killed in Arbon Valley on Friday, April 23, 1948, when the raised bed of a dump truck came down on him. The Associated Press report, sent from Malad, named him as Harold Grant Moss and gave his age as 24.
The accident happened about 35 miles west of Malad, where a road crew from Oneida County, Moss among them, had been working. The other men on the crew said nobody had been with him. His job was greasing the truck, which put him underneath the bed while it was tipped up; the lift failed and the bed fell on him. It was Friday evening before anyone came upon him, and the one who did was Darrell Chivers, a member of the same crew.
Pocatello had been his home, the report said, up to his father's death roughly three years earlier; he was a member of the LDS church in Malad. Four relatives were named as survivors: La Rue Camp Moss, his wife; Marilyn, their 18-month-old daughter; Amelia Thomas Moss, his mother; and Daniel R. Thomas, his grandfather.
The Third Ward of the LDS church at Malad was arranging a funeral for two o'clock Monday afternoon, to be followed by burial in the Malad cemetery.
The Tribune added a paragraph of its own about his mother. Mrs. Moss, who made her home in Pocatello and worked for the railroad in its offices, was told on Friday that her son had died, and that evening she went to Malad.