Bannock Creek hunters take a mountain lion near Bannock Peak, 1963

Sheep losses on the range around the Rudeen ranch near Bannock Peak, the 8,256-foot summit at the edge of the Fort Hall Reservation, had been laid to a mountain lion, and on Saturday, January 26, 1963, four Bannock Creek men put an end to her. The next morning the Idaho Sunday Journal gave the story four short paragraphs on its second page.

Merle Meyers made up the party with his two sons, Jerry and Jay, and with Kenneth Pevoe. The dogs that did the hard work belonged to Meyers, pups only ten months old, and they held the cat at bay up on a rocky shelf. Meyers furnished the numbers: a big female, 7 feet 10 inches from end to end and about 130 pounds.

The Meyers family of Bannock Creek

Merle Meyers was already known to Journal readers. In September 1957 the paper printed his account, with his own photographs, of the fall roundup on the reservation range along Bannock Creek. According to the editor's note above it, Meyers had spent his boyhood at Crystal and now made his living selling real estate in Pocatello. He and Dorothy, his wife, were raising Jerry, Jay and a daughter, Judy, on Bannock Creek inside the reservation, in a rented house where an Indian extension agent had once lived. All five of them rode, and the place kept seven horses.

He was very probably the son of John H. Meyers, an Arbon Valley rancher and stockman who died in October 1953 and who was listed at Crystal as early as 1917; that obituary named among the survivors "a son and daughter, Merle Meyers of Arbon" and Mrs. Willard Higdon of Pocatello. The 1963 story does not say so, but the name and a boyhood at Crystal both point to him.

Jerry turns up again a little over two months after the hunt. On April 3, 1963, the Idaho State Journal reported that the American Legion had picked him, "son of Mr. and Mrs. Merle Meyers, Bannock Creek," and two classmates at American Falls High School to go to Boys State in Boise that June. By the paper's account he headed the Fourth District High School Rodeo Association, had put in seven years in 4-H, and was a varsity wrestler.

The Rudeen ranch

The 1963 story says only "the Rudeen ranch." The name was not new to this country. Carl Rudeen was farming wheat on a large scale in the valley by 1931. Talking with the Pocatello Tribune that January, he put his Arbon Valley holdings at about 3,500 acres and said he had settled terms for taking over a sheep outfit. Several thousand acres of range beside his dry farms went with it, part to be purchased and part leased. His remedy for the wheat grower's troubles, as he told it, was crop rotation and running livestock alongside the grain. In 1938 he held the lease on the range between Arbon and Rockland that was sown with grass from an airplane, and in 1948 the Tribune said he kept both wheat land and livestock in Power County. Whether the ranch near Bannock Peak in 1963 was his, or his family's, no source read for this post says.

Lions in the valley

Lions had been taken here before. The American Falls Press of November 2, 1922, carried one line from Arbon:

A mountain lion was killed a week ago in Bull canyon, south of Arbon, by a sheepherder.

W. G. Ward, a sheepman, accounted for three cougars in late August 1933, one a day on August 25, 26 and 27, in the grazing country that lay between Elk Meadows and Midnight Creek, probably the Midnight Creek of the Crystal basin. According to the Pocatello Tribune, no other cougar kills in that part of Idaho had come to the chief deputy game warden's notice that year. All three ran longer than six feet, nose to tail. Killing one earned a bounty then, the paper noted, since the animals did so much harm to wild game, sheep and cattle. Lions were still in the valley news decades later, in the papers of 1997 and 2000.

The 1963 item leaves a good deal unsaid. It does not say which of the four killed the lion, how long the dogs followed her, where on the mountain the ledge was, what became of the hide, or whether a bounty was paid. No later report of the hunt has turned up.

On this site: the 1922 lion in Bull Canyon is also noted in Keeping the sheep out of the canyons.

The story as reported

Idaho Sunday Journal, January 27, 1963, page 2. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

Four Bannock Creek hunters got a female mountain lion near Bannock Peak on Saturday, January 26, 1963: Merle Meyers, the two Meyers boys, Jerry and Jay, and Kenneth Pevoe. Sheep had been lost in the country around the Rudeen ranch, and this lion was held responsible.

Before the men killed her, a set of ten-month-old pups belonging to Meyers had kept her pinned on a rocky shelf.

By Meyers's figures she was 7 feet 10 inches long and weighed about 130 pounds. The paper put her age at three or four years without saying who judged it.

The item ran under the headline "Bannock Hunters Kill Big Lion." It did not say which member of the party shot the animal, how long the hunt took, or where on the mountain the ledge lay, and it made no mention of the hide or of any bounty. The paper spelled the family name both Myers and Meyers in the same short report.