Range fires around Arbon Valley in the papers, 1948–1978

Between 1948 and 1978 the papers reported a string of range fires in and around Arbon Valley. Most got a few lines; a lightning fire near Crystal in July 1958 was followed in three reports. Several reports came from the fire lookout on the peak above Pocatello that the papers called Chink's Peak, an ethnic slur; it was renamed Chinese Peak in 2001. A companion post picks up the story with the fires of 1988–2016.

Vernal Bailey's land, 1948

Someone spotted the fire around 1:30 p.m. on Monday, August 16, 1948, roughly half a mile east of Arbon, and by the time it was under control late that evening more than 750 acres of brush and grazing land had burned. According to Boyd Robbins, the lookout who called it in, the land was not public range but Vernal Bailey's own.

He was probably Vernal Facer Bailey, Lorenzo and Chloa Bailey's son, who with his wife Blanche ranched in the valley until 1974 (see the Bailey family). His homestead lay in the west foothills, so the burned land may have been another holding; the paper does not say, nor how the fire started.

The east side of the valley, 1957

On Thursday, September 26, 1957, a fire in grass and brush on the valley's east side sent a dense haze of smoke drifting over the hills west of Pocatello. The next day's Salt Lake Tribune put the burn at 1,300 to 2,000 acres; John Parker, the Caribou National Forest supervisor, said it was under control and that only range land had burned. We have read the item only as scrambled machine-read text, and this is our best reading of it.

The Crystal fire, 1958

The biggest of these fires whose size the papers gave was the work of lightning, which caught the brush near Crystal around 3 p.m. on Wednesday, July 16, 1958. Crews of the Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Indian Service believed they had it stopped that same day, until hard gusts later in the afternoon pushed the flames uphill once more; by Friday morning the estimate stood at about 2,000 acres.

The Indian Service, as the Bureau of Indian Affairs was often called, sent about 25 of its men, by the count of the reservation superintendent, Frell Owl, and backed them with bulldozers and two pumpers. On Friday morning a fire warden named Dixon arrived with a crew of 35. No crops had burned. It took a thirteen-hour shift that Friday, lasting until 6:30 in the evening, to stop the fire for good; by then about 3,000 acres of sagebrush and juniper had burned. Nobody was injured, and besides some fencing the fire did no reported harm to property.

The reports place the fire both "near Crystal" and on the reservation in Arbon Valley. Crystal's creeks run north toward Bannock Creek and the reservation (see Crystal), but no report says how far the fire ran. Two Dixons appear: Mrs. Cecil Dixon, the lookout, and Cecil Dixon, named as a BLM firewatcher in 1958 and as the BLM's fire warden in 1960. Which is meant in each line is not always clear.

A burn without a permit, 1960

On Monday, October 3, 1960, 20 acres of aspen and sagebrush went up near Arbon, some 20 miles west of Arimo, in a fire that lasted twelve hours. Two crews were on it from 2 p.m. until 2 o'clock the next morning: the lookout's own, and a second dispatched from the BLM office in Burley. Cecil Dixon blamed a man who had lit a burn with no permit and no fire guards around it, and he said the man now faced legal steps. That year, he added, permits were needed until the fire season closed on November 1, not October 1 as before. Who set the fire and what came of the case are not reported.

Near the Pauline store, 1964

Called in at 11 a.m. on Thursday, September 10, 1964, this fire ran through 175 acres of sagebrush and juniper, reaching a point half a mile north of the Pauline store. Stopping it took six hours, with thirty men, three Caterpillar tractors and tankers from Burley, Idaho Falls, Fort Hall and Pocatello on the ground and six loads of bentonite, a clay used against fire, coming down from airplanes. The cause was still being investigated the next day.

North of Pauline, 1978

On Monday, August 28, 1978, a fire broke out on the Fort Hall Reservation north of Pauline, and a crew of six men with a tanker was sent to it. The crew had it held to 20 acres by 12:40 the next morning; it had begun at 7:40 p.m. next to a road, and it was thought to have been set by human hands. The same report says the crew was sent out on Monday afternoon, which does not fit the 7:40 p.m. start.

A fire remembered

A 1968 Idaho State Journal history of the Caribou National Forest by a forest ranger, Tom Farr, recalled an older fire. Seedlings from a tree nursery that Pete Wrensted ran on Mink Creek from 1908 were set out along the creek in the years after. Within about ten years, by the history's account, a blaze that began among Arbon Valley farms reached almost to Inkom. No year is given, and no report of it has been found.

None of these reports names anyone from the valley who fought the fires; they speak only of lookouts, wardens and agency crews.

On this site: earlier fires in A sagebrush fire takes the Mathews cabin and The first airplane over the valley, a forest fire west of Arbon in 1929; the range fire started by a crop-duster crash in 1962; and the places, Arbon and Pauline and West Fork.

The story as reported

Idaho State Journal, July 17, 1958, page 2. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

POCATELLO — Lightning had started a fire in Arbon Valley, close to Crystal, and on Wednesday, July 16, 1958, crews of the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the Indian Service stopped its spread. On Thursday it was burning again.

It had begun in brush in the middle of Wednesday afternoon, at about 3 p.m. Wind brought the fire back, according to Mrs. Cecil Dixon, who kept watch from the fire lookout on the peak above Pocatello, and on Thursday she described it as "going strong."

The same story told of a second fire set by lightning, high on Pocatello Creek near the Caribou ski lift. That one began in a dead fir snag that lightning struck, and from there it reached neighboring trees in the thick timber. To put it out, a Dixon, the item did not say which, had to hike a mile in.

The item did not say how many acres had burned near Crystal by Thursday or how many men were on the line.