In the spring of 1963 a correspondent for the Idaho State Journal, Lena Anken Sexton, stopped at the store near the Pauline crossroads, where the road from Arbon to American Falls meets the Mink Creek road to Pocatello. Until that day, she admitted, the name Pauline had meant nothing to her. What she found was a store of the old kind, kept by Jean Daniels Evans, and she also heard from Jean's father, T. C. Daniels, about how the store had been in the hard years of the 1930s. Her piece ran on page 6 of the Journal on May 10, 1963.
Jean and her husband, Waldo Evans, owned the store. Waldo and the four boys, Robert, David, Monte and Jerre Lee, had the family's 1,000-acre wheat ranch to work, so most days it was Jean behind the counter. The family pages on this site fill in who they were. Jean was born at Rupert in 1923, a daughter of Thomas Calvin and Irene Condit Daniels and a granddaughter of John M. "Donum" Daniels, one of the early Daniels settlers on the West Fork. Waldo, born in 1910, was a son of David Bowen Evans and Hannah Williams Evans of Arbon. Jean and Waldo married in 1947. Jean's obituary in the Deseret News in 1975 names her parents as Thomas Calvin and Irene Condit Daniels, so the T. C. Daniels of the 1963 article is the Thomas Calvin Daniels of the site's Daniels family pages.
Storekeeping at Pauline was older than T. C. Daniels's store. John Noble opened the first store at Pauline about 1911, and the American Falls Press reported in May 1918 that Theo Daniels had opened a general store at Pauline; in October 1919 the paper reported that he had sold it to Joe T. Thomas. The 1918 and 1919 items do not say how Theo was related to T. C.; the site's Daniels page lists him as Theodore, a son of Thomas D. Daniels Jr.
Most of the 1963 article is T. C. Daniels's memory of the store in the early 1930s, when, he said, it sold everything "from toothbrushes to threshing machines." He remembered what things cost, how farmers traded their produce for groceries, the ice he hauled from Pocatello, and the lamps and lanterns that lit the store. Back then, by his account, each quarter section had its own household, and between poor roads and deep snow a trip to town was rare. What gave him the most trouble, he said, was moonshine, along with customers buying on credit. When he advertised for hired help at $10 a month, a mother and daughter from Virginia made the trip on foot overnight, determined to be first in line for the job. The article does not say which Virginia. Walking distance suggests the small settlement of that name in Bannock County rather than the state, but that is a guess.
Mrs. Daniels's own first trip into the valley, as she told it, meant climbing over snowdrifts on foot from one sleigh to the next. The article gives no first name. T. C.'s first wife, Irene, died in 1930, and he married Ora Curtis in 1933, so the Mrs. Daniels of 1963 was probably Ora.
The records do not quite agree on when T. C. Daniels kept the store. The article puts him there in the 1930s, and the photograph shows Jean at the adding machine he had used thirty years before; the Waldo Evans account, drawn from Bannock Valley, likewise says he ran it from about 1930. The census-based notes on the Daniels page instead show him owning a wheat farm at Pauline in 1930 and his family coming back to the valley to keep the store in the early 1940s, with Ora managing it in 1950. He may have kept it at both times, with a break between. The family's memory of the original log store burning, when the puppies were thrown out of the window first, also belongs to Jean's girlhood.
By the family account, T. C. Daniels sold the store to Jean and Waldo in 1960. They kept it until 1975, and Jean's half-sister LaRue Gunter ran it from 1975 to 1978. Waldo died in 1971 and Jean in 1975. The name the article gave the place, Commercial Merc., has not been found anywhere else.
On this site: Waldo Evans, John M. "Donum" Daniels, Pauline and West Fork, Isabelle Noble and the Noble children of Pauline, and the Stories entries on electricity and the first oiled road.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, May 10, 1963, page 6. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
A country store at the Pauline crossroads in Arbon Valley was still doing business in 1963, run by Jean Daniels Evans, whose father had kept the same store in the 1930s. Correspondent Lena Anken Sexton put its location on the Arbon–American Falls road, close to where the Mink Creek road branches off toward Pocatello, and gave its name at the time as Commercial Merc.
Its customers came from 15 miles around or farther, by her account, and tourist traffic had grown to the point that one day's visitors in 1963 outnumbered the store's total for all of 1930. Ownership was shared by Jean and Waldo Evans. Waldo and the boys, Robert, 16, David, 15, Monte, 12, and Jerre Lee, 9, were mostly busy with 1,000 acres of wheat, which left much of the storekeeping to Jean.
Her guiding principle in business, Jean told the writer, was "Do as you want to be done by." A shopper chimed in that Jean was also generous with second chances. Asked about the risk of robbery, she laughed; it was something she had never considered. What bothered her most turned out to be noise. A sign at the door asked customers to ring a bell, and because some forgot, she had to go and check on every sound she heard.
Jean's father, T. C. Daniels, made his home in 1963 at Black Rock, north of Inkom. Where the name Pauline came from he could not say, even after living in the area since 1898. His shelves in the early 1930s held a little of everything. Two neighbor women supplied him with headcheese, and he never had trouble moving every bit of it. Trading wheat to the mill for flour let him sell 50 pounds at $1, two cents over the Pocatello price. A bushel of wheat brought 25 to 30 cents and fat steers and hogs 3 cents a pound, while homemade butter went for 20 to 25 cents; farmers could settle their grocery bills with grain, meat, milk, butter or eggs. Ice bought in Pocatello at $5 a ton and packed in sawdust in an ice house kept perishables through the summer. Lighting meant gas lamps, coal-oil lamps and lanterns, with nothing else to be had.
Ranches of 1,500 to 2,000 acres had by 1963 replaced the old pattern of one family to each quarter section, he said. With roads poor and the valley often snowbound, trips to Pocatello or American Falls were rare, and he could count on selling whatever he freighted in. Credit troubled him most, along with bootleg liquor that reached the valley from Wyoming and from Mackay. He had never been held up. Still, he took precautions: a pistol and a tear-gas gun stayed close at hand, and customers stayed on their own side of the counter. The $10-a-month store job he once advertised drew a mother and daughter who walked overnight from Virginia hoping to beat everyone else; this was during the Depression, when needy valley families were getting Red Cross flour.
He and his wife both said they preferred the old days. Mrs. Daniels's first trip into Arbon Valley took a relay. The mail carrier brought her as far as the road was open, and where drifts closed it she went over them on foot to meet a waiting sleigh, then repeated the crossing to reach a second sleigh and a third. The writer noted that the store now had electricity and oiled roads. The store did not sell coffee, but when the visitors asked for some, Jean offered to climb the stairs and make them a cup herself.