In early June 1951 a Power County posse spent two days searching the hills along the Bannock Creek road for a couple and their small daughter, and on the second day Arbon Valley ranchers joined it. The Idaho State Journal of Pocatello told the whole story on its front page on Wednesday, June 6, under the byline of its roving reporter, Bill Francois, writing from American Falls.
The trouble started at a house on Bannock Creek, on the south side of Highway 30 N, where Sam Paniogue and his wife made their home. The paper says no more than that, but it probably puts their place on the lower creek, where it runs north through Fort Hall Reservation lands toward the Snake River, below the farms of Pauline; the site has told how those lower creek lands were allotted and leased earlier in the century. The paper does not give the day, but the posse's first day of tracking was Monday, June 4, so the theft was probably that day. Mrs. Paniogue had gone out to mail a letter, and when she got back there was a stranger inside. He was Elgin Mull, from Michigan, and his wife, Imogene, and their three-year-old daughter were waiting for him in a car outside.
What followed was a chase on foot and by car. Mull got away in the car with Sam Paniogue after him, left it at the Ray Barnard ranch five miles east of American Falls, and went into the brush carrying the child. Mrs. Mull was still with the car when Paniogue caught up, and he pocketed its keys and went off to telephone for the law. She did not wait for it. By the time the sheriff got there she was gone, on foot, to rejoin her husband somewhere in the hills.
Sheriff Bill Hoehnen got a posse together, with John Evans, sheriff of neighboring Oneida County, lending a hand, and its trackers stayed on the couple's footprints until an empty Indian school building on the Bannock Creek road, where the prints gave out. Rain fell before the hunt picked up again Tuesday afternoon, and the second day's searchers included Arbon Valley ranchers and riders from the Damsite riding club. The paper names none of the ranchers.
The posse never caught up with them. Walking the whole way, the three made it over the mountains to Inkom, a trip of better than 30 miles, and there they boarded a bus bound for Montana. Word reached Sheriff Hoehnen by radio at seven on Tuesday evening that a red-haired man and a red-haired woman had left Inkom by bus. The driver, uneasy about his two passengers, had alerted police in Pocatello, and when the bus pulled into Blackfoot that night officers were waiting for the family. A deputy brought the three back to American Falls.
The story is a small one, and the valley's part in it is a single line, but it shows a riding club and the valley's ranchers helping a Power County sheriff's posse in 1951 when someone fled into the hills of the Bannock Creek country. Three years later Arbon Valley ranchers would organize a winter patrol of their own.
Much is unknown. The paper does not say which school building the trail led to, which way the family went over the mountains, or how the larceny case ended in district court, and no later report has been found. Nothing connects the Mulls with any valley family, and the Oneida County sheriff John Evans is not known to be related to the Evans family of Arbon.
On this site: earlier chases on the valley's roads are told in Hy Secrist and the wheat thieves at Pauline, 1917 and St. Patrick's Day near Pauline, 1921.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, June 6, 1951, page 1. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
A Michigan man accused of stealing from a Bannock Creek home was arraigned at the Power County courthouse in American Falls on Wednesday morning, after he, his wife and their three-year-old daughter had walked more than 30 miles through the mountains to Inkom ahead of a sheriff's posse.
Elgin Mull, his wife, Imogene, and the girl were in custody by Tuesday night, picked up when their bus stopped at the depot in Blackfoot. According to Prosecuting Attorney Gregg Potvin, Mull confessed to the theft: $70 in cash, two wrist watches and an alarm clock, all belonging to Sam Paniogue and his wife, whose home was on Bannock Creek on the south side of U.S. 30 N. Potvin planned a larceny charge, and the case was to go on to the district court.
Officers gave this account of the chase. Mrs. Paniogue had stepped out to mail a letter, and on her return Mull was inside. Letting go of two rifles he was holding, he ran out to the car, where his wife and the little girl were waiting. Sam Paniogue went after them. Thinking the road he had chosen was a dead end, Mull quit the car at the Ray Barnard ranch, five miles east of American Falls; Paniogue came up just as he vanished into the brush with his daughter in his arms. Paniogue caught Mrs. Mull, pocketed the keys and left to phone the sheriff's office. When the sheriff showed up, the car was empty; she had set out on foot to find her husband in the hills.
Oneida County's sheriff, John Evans, helped Power County officers put a posse together. Six hours of tracking on Monday led the men to an empty Indian school building on the Bannock Creek road, and there the footprints ran out. By Tuesday afternoon, when the hunt began again, rain had soaked the hills, and Arbon Valley ranchers and Damsite riding club members had added themselves to the search.
Sheriff Bill Hoehnen got his answer at 7 p.m. Tuesday by radio from Inkom: a man and a woman with red hair had taken a Montana-bound bus out of that town. The driver, suspicious of them, had passed word to Pocatello police, who relayed it by radio up the line to Blackfoot; officers there removed the family from the bus. Carlos Lounsbury, a deputy sheriff, drove them back to American Falls.
Once he was jailed, Mull said the money was meant to feed his daughter. Work had been impossible to find, he said, and he had already pawned his own watch and the car's heater and radio for cash. Wednesday morning in Sheriff Hoehnen's office, worn out by the trek over the mountains, he could give officers little in the way of clear answers.