Bannock Creek rises at the head of Arbon Valley and runs north past Arbon and Pauline, then on through the Fort Hall Reservation, where the district along its lower course also takes the creek's name. In the spring of 1960 a small party reached a skeleton lying in a cave in that reservation district. On Wednesday, May 4, a short item at the top of the Idaho State Journal's front page raised a question: had the bones belonged to Old Yank, a trapper whose home had been in that country about a hundred years earlier? Verla Ranstrom's full story ran on page 14.
The find went back to the summer of 1959. Wilson Jack, a member of the tribes, came across the remains by chance on a rabbit hunt and left them unexamined. He kept it to himself until that winter, when he brought it up with his friend LaSalle Pocatello, who also belonged to the tribes. Pocatello in turn told Willis Pankey, whose job at Fort Hall was special agent for the Interior Department. Deep snow defeated the first effort to get there. The next trip succeeded on Friday, April 29, 1960, when three men, with reservation policeman John Moss along, reached the place. The paper does not name the three, but they were most likely Jack, Pocatello and Pankey. What sheltered the bones was one big boulder lying across other rocks, leaving a natural hollow beneath it.
Two guns turned up beside the bones: an old long rifle and, a short distance off, a rusted lever-action repeater. The rest of the haul was small: a powder horn, a few glass beads, two big steel fish hooks with barbs, and shreds of leather and rough fabric. On the repeater, the lever still cycled and the brass receiver had held its shine.
Harold E. Anderson of Pocatello was the one who connected the find with Old Yank. The trapper figures often in Trails of Early Idaho, which Anderson's uncle, Ambrose C. Anderson, wrote down as George W. Goodhart dictated his memories. In the Journal's summary of the book, Old Yank was a onetime Hudson's Bay Company trapper who made his solitary home up Bannock Creek for many years, "by a big spring in a big grassy flat." Every so often his neighbors lent him a hand. His real name they never learned; asked for it, he answered, "Old Yank suits me fine." The name itself, the story went, came from the way he talked: he was taken to be a Maine man, with the speech of the Northeast.
By Goodhart's final visit the trapper was old and in poor health. Goodhart pressed him to come along back to the fort, and Old Yank refused. That country was where he intended to die, he said, and his burial place was to be the hillside near where he lived, where a grave was ready and waiting at the foot of a large tree. Anderson's reasoning drew on other details of the book's portrait. It shows a weak old man who at times could not shoot enough game to feed himself, and who lived so much on his own that months might go by without a visitor. Such a man, Anderson thought, might have sensed the end coming and gone into the cave to wait for it.
That is where the record stops. No later report has been found saying whether the bones were examined, identified or buried again, and the article itself gives only Anderson's guess. It does not say where in the Bannock Creek district the cave was, how far up the creek Old Yank's spring and flat lay, or which fort Goodhart meant. It also leaves its own puzzle: by the book's account, Old Yank had chosen a grave on a hillside, not a cave. Trails of Early Idaho has not been checked for this post, so everything here about Old Yank comes to us second-hand, through the 1960 article.
The valley's own histories have trappers and mountain men passing through Bannock Valley before the homesteaders, as the Buist account tells. If Goodhart remembered rightly, Old Yank was one who stayed, somewhere along the creek that shares the valley's old name, though whether in the valley itself or lower down on the reservation is not known.
The two tribal members in the story probably appear in other papers too. A Wilson Jack spoke at a Christmas party at the Bannock Creek school in 1948, and in February 1963, reporting floodwater over the Arbon road near Fort Hall, the Journal listed the Wilson Jack place among those flooded. A LaSalle Pocatello was chairman of the tribal council in 1948. Same names and the same district make it likely these are the same men, though no report says so.
On this site: the creek and its tribal names are in Pasakwa Huude and other names on Bannock Creek; the reservation lands along lower Bannock Creek in When the Bannock Creek lands were allotted, 1911–1922 and The reservation next door; and early travelers in the valley in Brigham Young's company crosses Bannock Valley, 1857.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, May 4, 1960, page 14. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
A Pocatello man has put forward a name for a skeleton discovered in a cave in the Bannock Creek district of the Fort Hall Indian Reservation: Old Yank, a trapper who made his home in that area close to a hundred years ago.
John Moss of the reservation police went with three other men to the spot on Friday, April 29. Their destination was a natural shelter where one large boulder sits on top of other rocks. The party reported two firearms. The long rifle, an old one, was lying with the bones, and the rusted lever-action repeater a little apart from them. They also turned up a powder horn, empty but still stoppered at the tip, along with some glass beads, two big barbed steel fish hooks, and bits of leather and rough cloth. Worms had gotten into the wood of one gunstock, and some of it was gone. The repeater, by contrast, still had a working lever and a receiver of shiny brass.
The first person to see the remains was Wilson Jack, a tribal member, who came on them by accident the summer before during a rabbit hunt. He gave them no close look and kept quiet about them until winter. Then he told his friend LaSalle Pocatello, a fellow tribal member, and Pocatello took the matter to Willis Pankey, who represents the Department of the Interior at Fort Hall as a special agent. Heavy snow stopped the first attempt to reach the cave.
Harold E. Anderson's theory comes from a book his uncle, Ambrose C. Anderson, put together from what George W. Goodhart dictated to him: Trails of Early Idaho. In its pages Old Yank, once a Hudson's Bay Company trapper, spends years alone beside a spring up Bannock Creek. The book's final mention of him describes Goodhart's last call. The trapper, now very old and sick, could not be talked into returning to the fort. He would stay where he was, he said, and he had already picked his resting place, a grave readied beneath a big tree on the hillside near where he lived.
Anderson also pointed to how isolated Old Yank was, alone in that area and sometimes without a visitor for months, and to his weakness, which at times kept him from getting enough meat. Such a man, he reasoned, might have known he was dying and gone to the cave for his last hours. Old Yank had friends among his neighbors, the book says, and they would help him out when they could. They never got his real name from him. His northeastern accent gave him the nickname, and it was thought he came from Maine.
The article did not say whether the remains would be examined or identified.