Rebuilding the Arbon Valley highway, 1946–1954

After the Second World War, Arbon Valley people and the officials of their counties kept going to Pocatello, Boise and county boards about the roads out of the valley. From 1946 to 1954 the Pocatello papers followed a delegation about the Mink Creek road, a senator's letter, some thirty-five farmers before a state commissioner, contract bids on the south end, a push for a federal farm-to-market rating and, at last, plans for a new hard surface on the road north to Highway 30.

Three roads, three counties

The valley's roads ran out in three directions. To the northeast the road climbed over the Mink Creek summit to Pocatello; the state road reports of 1946 and 1950 that list a "State Route 38, Arbon Valley" very probably mean this road, though they do not trace its course. To the north the road followed Bannock Creek across the Fort Hall Reservation to Highway 30 and the railroad, the road the valley's farmers had long hauled their wheat over. At the south end, around Buist, the valley lay in Oneida County, and its road ran on toward Holbrook.

Mink Creek, 1946–1947

On December 30, 1946, the district highway engineer, Conrad Kelly, rated Route 38 fair as far as the summit and poor beyond it. A week later, on January 6, 1947, a delegation of valley residents met the county commissioners and Kelly to ask for work on the Mink Creek road. The board's chairman, W. H. Jensen, told them it was a state road, not a county one. Kelly said it was on the list of state secondary road projects and that he expected some grading and straightening of the road during 1947.

"Little more than trails," 1949

In 1949 William Hess of American Falls, a member of the state road commission, asked Senator Glen Taylor whether federal money could be had for the roads around Arbon. Arbon farmers wanted them improved, Hess said, so that they could drive cars there; the roads were "little more than trails," and most of them lay on the reservation. Taylor's answer, printed on October 13, 1949, was no. According to the Bureau of Indian Affairs, which Taylor had asked, nothing was planned near Arbon for the coming year or after. Congress had given the Indian Service less than $300,000 for road building everywhere, which would not even pay for bridges that had fallen in. Upkeep would take almost all of the 1950 money.

The south end, 1948–1950

Oneida County crews were working at the valley's south end. One of their men died on the job there. On April 23, 1948, Harold Grant Moss, 24, was working alone, greasing a dump truck from underneath, when the lift failed and the bed fell on him.

In May 1950 an Oneida County delegation of county commissioners and about 35 farmers went to Boise to ask the state public works commissioner, John R. McKinney, to help build and maintain seven miles of county road on the Arbon Valley highway. On May 10 McKinney took the request under advisement. That December, eleven contractors bid on 7.481 miles of what the paper called the Bannock highway, between Holbrook junction and Arbon in Oneida County. The low bid, $63,662.50, came from Parson & Fife Construction of Brigham City, Utah, and every bid came in under the estimated cost of $95,799. The two reports are very probably about the same stretch, though neither says so.

A farm-to-market rating, 1951–1952

In December 1951 Power County took its turn, asking the state to put the Arbon Valley road on the federal secondary system, as told below. One of the delegates, LeRoy Lindley, was probably the LeRoy Lindley of Arbon who had been a candidate for the new soil conservation district's board in 1948. The Mink Creek road stayed hard going. During a storm on January 16, 1952, a snowplow was at work trying to open it to Arbon Valley, and that April a Journal columnist wrote that the stretch in Bannock County, from just past the East Fork turnoff up to the summit, badly needed work, and that a good deal of snow still lay on top.

A new surface, 1954

In February 1954 the Power County commissioners, with Lindley now their chairman, applied formally to the Department of Indian Affairs, as the paper called it, to have eight miles of the Arbon road improved. The plan for that year's work was eight miles of new bituminous surface heading toward Arbon, starting at the highway district boundary some nine miles out from Highway 30. Federal money was to cover about 80 per cent of the cost and the county the other 20. In April, Commissioner C. C. Thornhill told the American Falls Chamber of Commerce that starting work on the Arbon road was among the county's plans for the year.

What the papers leave out

The pages read for this post do not say whether McKinney granted the Oneida County request, whether Parson & Fife built the south-end road, whether the Arbon Valley road ever received its federal secondary rating, or whether the Department of Indian Affairs approved the 1954 application and the surfacing was finished that year. They do not say what the Shoshone and Bannock people of Fort Hall thought of a highway across their reservation. A Buist history remembers the gravel road being oiled from Holbrook up the valley about 1959.

On this site: Arbon's wheat road across the reservation tells the earlier struggle over the north road, mail, grain and the Mink Creek road follows the road to Pocatello in the 1920s, the first oiled road weighs the claims for when paving came, and the Buist history and the Pauline and West Fork history describe the two ends of the valley.

The story as reported

Idaho Sunday Journal, December 23, 1951, page 9. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

AMERICAN FALLS — Delegates from Power County went before the Idaho highway commission with one main request: add the Arbon Valley road to the federal secondary road system. A secondary rating would mark it as a farm-to-market road and could open the way to federal money for building it. Under that arrangement the state would only advise.

Besides the highway commission, the Power County people sat down with E. V. Miller, the state highway engineer, his assistant C. W. Short, and other officials.

Power County was represented by C. C. Thornhill, LeRoy Lindley, H. Irvin Moss, State Senator Ray Alexander, State Representative E. G. Commons and Vard W. Meadows. Two Boise men sat in as well: H. C. Allen, who had once lived in American Falls and now worked for the Public Utilities Commission, and Edward Woozley, the state land commissioner.

Of the road's length, 25 miles crossed the Indian reservation. Those at the meeting settled that the Indian department should take on the building of that part.

A separate delegation came from Oneida County with a road of its own in mind: it wanted State Highway 27 carried from Roy over the pass to meet what the paper called Highway 30 south. That link, the paper said, had been wanted for years in Power County, above all around Rockland, but the international situation had held up the work.