On Sunday, October 11, 1953, the Idaho State Journal printed a short obituary for John H. Meyers, an Arbon Valley rancher whose death at home had come two days earlier. The paper counted him among Idaho's pioneers and a rancher and stockman whose name many people knew, and it dated his arrival at Arbon to 1900 and his homestead there to 1911. The obituary names the valley only as Arbon, but the records of his earlier years place the Meyers family on the Crystal side, in the high basin fed by Midnight and Rattlesnake creeks.
From Providence to the valley
Jacob Joseph and Sophia Meyers were his parents, and Providence, Utah, was his birthplace; the date was July 26, 1890. The family came to Idaho when he was a small child. Their first stop was Dempsey, the place now called Lava Hot Springs. Arimo came after that, and it remained his home up to 1900. The obituary does not say whether his parents came on to the valley with him that year, when he was nine or ten, or where in the valley he lived before Crystal.
By 1917 he was at Crystal. In July of that year the American Falls Press printed the numbered list of every Power County man who had registered for the draft in June, and number 607 was "John H. Meyers, Crystal." Earlier that spring, on a date the obituary gives as April 16, 1917, he married Mabel Butterfield at Pocatello. A marriage index consulted for the site's family research gives the date as April 25. Mabel was very probably a daughter of C. R. Butterfield, the Crystal road overseer remembered among the valley's firsts. Alma A. Butterfield of Crystal, probably her brother (C. R. Butterfield had a son named Alma), stands fourteen places above John on the 1917 draft list.
In April 1918 the Crystal column of the Press reported that "Mrs. John Myers returned home the first of the week after spending the winter in Pocatello." That was presumably Mabel, since no other John Myers household is known at Crystal. The site's research notes, drawn from a church cemetery list and the state death index, record a daughter, Lena June Meyers, born March 31, 1918. She died at Pocatello in December 1920, aged two, and was buried in the small Crystal Ward cemetery. When that cemetery was cleared in 1977 her grave was moved to Mountain View in Pocatello.
Elk, a school board and a party
In December 1927 the Salt Lake Tribune reported that the state game warden had lately received a formal complaint from a Crystal rancher about the elk the state had planted in the valley some years before. His name was printed as "John K. Myers." He wrote that bull elk tore down his fences "faster than I can build them up" and ran wild around his haystacks. That episode is told in the story of the state elk at Crystal. No other John Myers or Meyers is known at Crystal, so the complainant was very likely John H. Meyers, and the K a slip. No paper says so outright.
In March 1932 Mr. and Mrs. J. H. Meyers and their children were among the crowd at a surprise party at Ralph Whiting's home at Crystal. That May the Pocatello Tribune reported that John Meyers, Len Whiting and Floyd Denning had been replaced on the Central school board by newly elected members. The county agent's reports of the 1930s and early 1940s, as summarized in the site's research notes, list J. H. Meyers on Crystal farm-program committees and on the joint Arbon and Crystal community committee. They also name him as a certified alfalfa grower in 1941, and as one of the ranchers the agent helped buy registered Hereford bulls in 1940.
The obituary adds that he belonged to the Cattlemen's association and the Farm Bureau, and to the Latter-day Saint church. It does not name his ranch or say where his 1911 homestead lay, and no land entry under his name has turned up in the site's Crystal records. It lists one brother and three sisters but names only two of the sisters.
On this site: Crystal, where the Meyers family lived; the state elk at Crystal, 1927 to 1928.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, October 11, 1953, page 12. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
A heart attack on the evening of Friday, October 9, 1953, took the life of John H. Meyers, a longtime Arbon Valley rancher, at home in the valley. He was 63. For some years before that, he had not been well.
Arbon had been his country since 1900, and the homestead he claimed there came in 1911. To the Journal he was one of the state's pioneers, and a rancher and stockman known to a great many people. He took an active part in the Cattlemen's association and the national Farm Bureau, and his church was the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
He was a native of Providence, Utah, born July 26, 1890. His parents were Jacob Joseph Meyers and Sophia Beri Meyers. In 1893 the family moved to Dempsey, the town later renamed Lava Hot Springs. Arimo followed, and that town was where he lived up to 1900.
His wedding to Mabel Butterfield took place on April 16, 1917, at Pocatello.
His widow survived him, as did his son, Merle Meyers of Arbon, and his daughter, Mrs. Willard Higdon of Pocatello. The notice also listed a brother, Luther Meyers of Pocatello; two sisters by name, Mrs. Cyril Loveland of Pocatello and Miss Lena Meyers of Long Beach, California, though it counted three sisters in all; and five grandchildren.
Plans for the funeral were still tentative. A Tuesday-afternoon service was being arranged at the Downard Chapel, with Mountainview cemetery chosen for the burial, and friends could stop at the chapel any time before the service began.