Roy Lindley, Arbon settler of 1911, dies in a hunting accident, 1954

A bobcat hunt on Bannock Creek on the afternoon of Sunday, December 12, 1954, ended with Roy D. Lindley dead of a gunshot wound. He was 67. He had come to Arbon Valley in 1911 and had served it for years on the Power County board. The next day the Idaho State Journal put the news on its front page with his photograph and a full obituary. That report is retold below. This post also gathers what the older papers say about him and his family.

From Missouri to the east side of the valley

The obituary gives his beginnings. Benjamin D. Lindley and his wife, the former Rose Epley, had their son Roy Delbert in Vernon County, Missouri, on July 28, 1887. Roy and Bertha Mae McCabe were wed at Dayton, Washington, on Christmas Day 1910, and 1911 found the family in Arbon Valley. The American Falls Press agrees on the year. In September 1911 its Arbon news reported that B. D. Lindley, Roy's father, was running the separator on the Dawson brothers' steam threshing outfit.

By 1917 Roy and his father were farming about 1,200 acres in the foothills on the east side of the valley. That year the Press's travelling columnist ate an elk dinner at Roy's ranch home, five miles southeast of the Arbon post office. That visit and Roy's life as a hunter are told in Roy Lindley of Arbon and Idaho's war on the golden eagle. A sheriff's notice in February 1921 put "the ranch of Roy Lindley" seven miles southeast of Arbon. That October the Arbon column reported that Mrs. Lindley and the children had moved to American Falls for the winter so that their young daughter Marjorie could go to school there. In January 1924 the Press listed a LeRoy Lindley, very probably Roy's son, among the pupils of the Valley View school.

A county commissioner

In November 1922 Roy was one of the three commissioners of Arbon Valley's Highway District No. 3, the valley's own road district, with J. E. Keeler and G. M. Houk. That fall he stood for re-election against Dave Lusk and L. B. Evans. The site's list of the valley's county commissioners gives him the Power County seat "probably" from 1929 to 1935 (see the Evans family page). The Pocatello papers show that he served longer. The Pocatello Tribune named him chairman of the Power County commissioners in January 1931, when he was working with the Pocatello chamber of commerce for state and federal help on the Bannock Creek road to the valley. He was still a commissioner in February 1936, when he took an injured road worker six miles by sleigh on the way to a Pocatello hospital. In February 1938 he was chairman again, and in February 1939 the paper still called him a Power County commissioner. Whether he served without a break through those years is not known.

He kept his ties to the valley after he left it. In March 1949 about 200 present and former residents met in Pocatello for what the Tribune called the second annual Arbon Valley reunion. Lindley was the group's president, and he and Mrs. J. N. Arbon, its secretary-treasurer, made the arrangements. The evening's chief attraction was the Lindleys' own photographs from a bear-hunting trip to Alaska they had made not long before.

A wedding and a loss

On June 30, 1931, as the Tribune printed the date, Marjorie Lindley of Arbon Valley married Ray O. Burge. The ceremony was held at the Burge family home on North Harrison Avenue in Pocatello. The two families and a small group of the couple's friends looked on as the Rev. Charles G. Stout of the Christian church married them, and afterward there was a wedding dinner. The paper called it a Thursday afternoon, but June 30 fell on a Tuesday that year, so either the date or the day is a misprint.

The young couple lived in Arbon Valley. On the morning of March 2, 1932, their infant son died in a Pocatello hospital. The Tribune's short notice gave the mother's maiden name as Margery Lindley, said she had gone to high school in Pocatello, and added that funeral plans had not been made. The child's name and place of burial are not given. Ray Burge stayed active in valley affairs and sat on the Arbon–Crystal program planning board in 1940. The site's family research identifies him as a son of B. A. Burge, who had a ranch near Pauline in the early 1920s.

December 1954

The obituary dates the family's move to a farm west of Pocatello to 1931, though the papers still placed Roy at Arbon as late as 1937. It sat between Pocatello's old airport and its new one. His son LeRoy stayed at Arbon and in 1954 was chairman of the Power County commission, the board his father had led. In his later years he was a leader in rodeo. Pocatello's Frontier Rodeo association had kept him at its head for nine terms in a row, and the Idaho State Fair and Rodeo association had lately added him to its officers.

The papers read for this post do not say whether the sheriff held an inquest, how the funeral went, or where Roy Lindley was buried.

On this site: the Lindleys and the Burges are among the families found in land records on the Arbon area history.

The story as reported

Idaho State Journal, December 13, 1954, page 1. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

POCATELLO — A shot fired by a hunting companion killed Roy Delbert Lindley, a 67-year-old Power County rancher, along Bannock Creek on Sunday, December 12. The men had gone out after bobcats, and Lindley was hit at about 1:30 that afternoon. He lived only moments.

Sheriff Rulon Neal of Power County ruled it an accident. Ted Loy fired the shot. He was 24, a student at Idaho State College and Lindley's hired man, and he had lived in the Lindley household for the past four years.

Neal said there were four hunters: Lindley; Russell, his son; Loy; and a neighbor, David Ogle. The car let Lindley and Loy off at the Bannock bridge, and the other two went on along the creek in it.

Loy gave the sheriff his version. The two had agreed that Loy would hold still on the bank and wait, while Lindley worked his way through the willow thicket to flush a cat out toward him. Several times Lindley's voice came from the brush, warning that a cat was on its way. Then Loy saw something stir among the willows, and he shot at it. When he got there, it was Lindley who had been hit. The wounded man could tell he had been shot, Loy said, but not where. Loy ran back for Russell Lindley and Ogle, and Pocatello was telephoned for a doctor and an ambulance.

Neal planned to enter the cause as "shooting without seeing the mark"; there would be an inquest only if the family wanted one.

His parents, Benjamin D. and Rose Epley Lindley, were living in Vernon County, Missouri, when he arrived on July 28, 1887. Bertha Mae McCabe became his wife at Dayton, Washington, on Christmas Day 1910. Arbon Valley was the family's home from 1911, and the farm west of Pocatello from 1931.

Rodeo took up much of his later life. Members of the Pocatello Frontier Rodeo association had chosen him as their president nine times in succession. His work in the state's rodeo organization went back twelve years, and only a short time before, the Idaho State Fair and Rodeo association had named him second vice president. Idaho's rodeos had picked him to speak for them in Denver, where the National Rodeo Cowboys association was to meet January 12–14. Few hunters from around Pocatello had flown to Alaska for Kodiak bear before he did. Portneuf Grange 229 counted him a member, and his church was the First Church of Christ, Scientist.

Besides his wife, he left five grandchildren, a daughter in American Falls, Mrs. Ray (Marjorie) Burge, and two sons: Russell, of Pocatello, and LeRoy, of Arbon, then chairman of the Power County commission. His brother Homer lived in Santa Ana, California, and his sister, Mrs. Edna Sullivan, in Santa Rosa, California. The McHan Funeral Home planned a Wednesday funeral, though the date was not yet final.