In November 1949 the Standard Oil Company of California's interest in Arbon Valley became public. On Monday, November 21, the Salt Lake Telegram reported that the company had applied to lease state land west of Arbon, in Power County, Idaho. By January 1950 it held state leases in the valley. Nearly thirty years had passed since the valley's first oil test.
The earlier wells
Arbon Valley had seen oil hopes before. In June 1921 the Idaho Research and Development Co. of Pocatello set up a derrick on Thomas S. Toyn's ranch, six miles south and one mile east of the Pauline store, and had already leased several thousand acres around it. That was the valley's first oil well. In December 1923 another company, the Gem State Petroleum Co., unloaded at Pocatello "what is said to be the largest oil drilling rig unloaded in the state of Idaho," to be shipped at once to Arbon Valley. Its members included Pocatello and American Falls men and, from the valley, L. B. Evans, E. C. England, Edward H. Davis, T. H. Hill and William Allard.
The Gem State well went down slowly for years. In June 1927 the Telegram passed on a report that it was drilling at around 2,300 feet, with a flow of natural gas. In November 1928 the Salt Lake Tribune wrote:
In the Arbon valley the test is said to be down around 3000 feet, the deepest well in Idaho. Drilling is very slow. This test is said by many oil geologists to be close to the farthest western boundary where marine fossils have been identified.
In February 1929 the company was still drilling, with snow more than eight feet deep and supplies carried about eight miles of the way on sleds. The papers searched for this post say nothing more of the well after that, and, as the site's firsts entry notes, no producing well is recorded.
Standard's lease play
The November 1949 report ran in "Up and Down the Street," the Telegram's business column, under the headline "Standard Oil of California Asks Idaho Lands Lease." According to the column, records of the state land board at Boise showed that the company had applied to lease state lands in a block of townships. The land lay west of the community of Arbon, "in an agricultural valley," north of the Utah line. The acreage, most of the township and range numbers, and the distance from the Utah line cannot be read with certainty in the digitized text.
The column called the play "purportedly a seismic one." A seismic survey maps rock layers deep underground by sending sound waves into the earth and timing their echoes, and the column said a geophysical crew was to re-examine the area soon. The company had also "acquired patented farm and private land" there. Patented land was land whose title had passed from the government to private owners, as the valley's homesteads had when they were proved up. In a lease play this probably meant oil and gas leases on privately owned farms, but the item does not say so.
The writer set Standard's move beside other Idaho prospects. A company that was probably the Sun Oil Co. (the name is garbled in the digitized text) was drilling a wildcat, or test well in unproven ground, in the Elk Mountain region of the Caribou National Forest to the east. The Utah-Southern Oil Co. had just announced a joint wildcat with Phillips Petroleum on the Juniper structure in Oneida County, to the south. The only other record of oil and gas activity, the column said, was a "1400-foot dry hole drilled some years ago" south of Rockland, in the next valley west. It did not mention the Arbon wells of the 1920s.
Leases in hand
On January 18, 1950, the Telegram reported that Standard Oil Company of California was opening a new exploration division with headquarters in Salt Lake City. It would cover the country from the Sierra Nevada to the Wasatch Range, apparently including Nevada, the west half of Utah and Idaho. The company would send geological parties into the Great Basin that summer, and it stressed that it had no plans to drill there. The report ended by noting that Standard had "recently acquired state leases in Arbon valley Idaho."
That is where the record found so far ends. Neither report names a valley landowner. No later report has turned up to say what the leases paid, whether the geophysical crew came back, or whether Standard ever drilled in the valley.
The story as reported
Salt Lake Telegram, November 21, 1949, page 22. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
ARBON VALLEY — Standard Oil Company of California's search for oil and gas leases in Arbon Valley, in Idaho's Power County, was made public on Monday, November 21, 1949.
Filings with the Idaho state land board at Boise brought the plans to light. According to those records, the company's application covered a large block of state-owned land across several townships.
That block sat north of the Utah state line and west of the Arbon community, in a valley given over to farming.
Standard's interest went beyond the state tracts. The company had picked up patented farm land, along with other private holdings, in the same district.
Reports described the undertaking as a seismic venture. Geophysical workers were due back before long to look the ground over a second time.
Earlier oil and gas work near the valley had left almost no record. A dry hole south of Rockland, put down to 1,400 feet some years earlier, was the only other one listed.
Standard's leasing drew fresh attention to the chance that oil or gas would be found in Idaho. East of the valley, in the Caribou National Forest, a company that appears to have been Sun Oil Co. had a wildcat well going down in the Elk Mountain country. South of it, in Oneida County, Utah-Southern Oil Co. said on Saturday, November 19, that it and Phillips Petroleum Co. would together drill a wildcat on the Juniper structure.
On this site: the first oil well among the valley's firsts; the Arbon area history, whose timeline includes the Arbon oil tests of the 1920s; and the Evans family, on whose land the Gem State well was probably drilled.
Sources
- Salt Lake Telegram, November 21, 1949, page 22
- Salt Lake Telegram, January 18, 1950, page 21
- American Falls Press, June 17, 1921, page 1
- American Falls Press, December 6, 1923, page 1
- Salt Lake Telegram, June 3, 1927, page 25
- Salt Lake Tribune, November 14, 1928, page 16
- Utah Statesman, February 28, 1929, page 3