One of the roads out of Arbon Valley ran north down Bannock Creek, through the Fort Hall Reservation, to U.S. Highway 30. This site already tells how floods cut the valley off at the end of March 1962. The Pocatello papers show two earlier floods that winter, in January and February, and they show the creek running down the Arbon Valley road in 1957 and over the Arbon road again in 1963.
February 1957
In February 1957 Bannock Creek flooded on the reservation below the valley. A basement full of water had shut the Bannock Creek Elementary school on February 14, and when the Idaho State Journal reported from Fort Hall on February 27 the doors had not reopened. North of the school, beside the Zimmerli farm, the creek water was following the Arbon Valley road; that was the word from Frell M. Owl, who ran the reservation. State highway men from American Falls and agency crews had spent two days hauling gravel to the road in about a dozen trucks, and a fresh surge that Saturday carried all of it off. When Owl went out on Monday he found the water "running straight down the middle of the road." The older pupils who rode a bus to the American Falls schools were kept home as well.
January 1962
In the second week of January 1962 a warm wind, close to a chinook, came through and the snow went fast. By the Journal's account nearly the whole length of the valley emptied its melt into the creek, from the Arbon settlement past Pauline and on down Bannock Creek. Some high water was normal each spring. Even so, the Arbon Valley mail carrier, W. M. Hatch, who lived on the Batise road and had known that country for twenty years, called this the highest he had seen when he spoke to the paper on Friday, January 12. He expected the bridges on several side roads to need heavy repair.
In Hatch's telling, the Nancy Jack place took the worst of it, its farm buildings ringed with ice and water. Nancy Jack was about 90, and the big family under her roof included several young orphans. Ice made even a trip for firewood a chore, and floodwater might have gotten into the well. Hatch thought the trouble could have been avoided. Since the new highway went in, he said, its culvert had been too small for all the runoff from the hills, which ended up on the Jack farm; he wanted a dike built.
February 1962
The second flood came a month later, on the weekend of February 10 and 11, when high water spread over much of southeastern Idaho. On Monday, February 12, the Journal reported all the American Falls schools open; Wesley Frazier, the superintendent, expected to keep them open as long as the water stayed away from town. Children from Arbon would be without their bus for something like a week to ten days. Along Bannock Creek, according to Power County commissioner LeRoy Lindley, the flood had done serious harm to county roads. Several bridges were thought to be gone, and so was the oiled road put down in 1955.
The Journal of February 14, retold below, found the road broken in two places. On Sunday, February 18, the Idaho Sunday Journal looked over flood damage across Power County and judged that no road there had likely fared worse than the one up Bannock Creek, which tied Highway 30N to Arbon, Pauline and Crystal. Water had taken out its bridges and left the road itself in bad shape. All that week the Arbon bus had not run, and nobody could say when it would. Elsewhere in the county the Rockland–Malad stretch of Highway 37 was shut, and no one could yet get over the county roads near Arbon.
About six weeks after the February flood the creeks rose a third time. At the end of March, as told in Floods cut off Arbon Valley, March 1962, the Salt Lake Tribune reported the road to American Falls along Bannock Creek washed out in several places, along with fills put into the Mink Creek road after the February floods, and the Deseret News said that bridges there had washed away for a third time that year and crews were at work on them.
February 1963
Charles Spencer, then superintendent of the Fort Hall Indian reservation, made an inspection trip on Friday, February 1, 1963. He came back to report the Arbon highway under a current roughly two feet deep. At Rooster Rock the road was covered, and no one could get past it. Water had reached the homes of Wilson Jack and Charley Divinney; neither family wanted to leave, so supplies of food and clean water were going out to them. Rooster Rock was already a place name in 1924. In the Pauline school news printed by the American Falls Press on April 3, 1924, a pupil reported that "Park Lusk and Joe Doman went down by Rooster Rock to grade the road."
What the papers leave out
None of these reports says when the road was opened again in 1957 or 1962, when the Arbon bus went back to running, or what Commissioner Lindley planned to do; his remarks went on to a page not available for this post. Nor do they locate the Zimmerli farm, the Nancy Jack place, the bridge near Pauline or Rooster Rock exactly.
On this site: the Stories entry on the 1962 flood; the flood of 1911 and the Bannock Creek bridges; when the Bannock Creek lands were allotted; Pauline and West Fork and Crystal; the Lusk family, whose 1924 road work names Rooster Rock; and the valley's first school bus.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, February 14, 1962, page 9. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
By mid-February 1962 the families along Bannock Creek were shut in, with the oiled highway up the creek broken at two points. In about a month they had been through two floods, both of them severe.
One break lay about six miles south of U.S. Highway 30, where the water had torn a gap some 50 feet wide across the pavement. The other was farther south, near Pauline, where a bridge was gone. Cars caught on the 10 to 15 miles of road between the two breaks could not get out either way. With the side roads in no better shape, anyone who had to go somewhere walked, rode a horse or took a tractor.
Two photographs ran with the story. One showed the 50-foot gap. The second showed a makeshift barrier in the foreground, with nothing else to tell drivers that the weekend water had cut the highway there; far off, rain was still falling on Arbon Valley on top of the melting snow. The thaw had done more than wreck the road. Fields lay under water, and the ground along the road had gone soft.
On the Fort Hall reservation, the Michaud reclamation project had nearly stopped. Every heavy machine on the job had been hauled up to high ground during the January flood. Some had come back, and then the bitter cold that arrived on January 20 halted almost all of the work. By mid-February, according to project engineer John Brooks, drilling wells was the one job still going, and the drill crews could get to the site only on foot or aboard a heavy tractor. The Boise firm Merrill Construction Co. had its equipment parked up high, all except a compressor and some heaters that sat in water about eight feet deep.
No one could drive the road again until it was fixed, and the reclamation crews were waiting on the weather; the article put no date on either.
Sources
- Idaho State Journal, February 14, 1962, page 9
- Idaho State Journal, February 27, 1957, page 1
- Idaho State Journal, January 12, 1962, page 9
- Idaho State Journal, February 12, 1962, page 1
- Idaho Sunday Journal, February 18, 1962, page 3
- Deseret News, March 28, 1962, page 7
- Salt Lake Tribune, March 29, 1962, page 10
- Idaho State Journal, February 1, 1963, page 2
- American Falls Press, April 3, 1924, page 4