The Fourth of July, 1963, brought a death to Arbon Valley: a girl of eleven, in from Sacramento, California, to stay with her grandparents, died after an accident on their farm. The Idaho State Journal reported her death on its front page the next day, a short item under an Arbon dateline. It is the only report of the accident this site has found.
Her name was Lynne Wisecarver. She had been born at Sacramento on November 5, 1951, the daughter of Mr. and Mrs. James J. Wisecarver, and she had three sisters, Dawn, Jan and Robynn. Her grandparents in the valley were Mr. and Mrs. Walt Frederick.
The officers who looked into it told the paper what happened at noon that Thursday. Lynne and a cousin were out with a horse team and an iron-wheeled farm wagon, bringing in a load of rock. The team spooked. Lynne, thrown from the wagon, was caught by one of its wheels, which crossed her head. She was alive when the trip to the Oneida County Hospital began and died along the way. The paper does not name the officers, the cousin or the part of the farm where it happened.
The Benson Funeral Home at Malad took charge of returning her to Sacramento. Besides her parents and sisters, the paper listed her other grandparents, Mr. and Mrs. Floyd Wisecarver of Sacramento, and a great-grandmother, Mrs. Cora E. Larson.
The paper does not say where in the valley the Frederick farm lay. Only one Walt Frederick is known in Arbon Valley at the time: Walter S. Fredrich of the Mountainview Ranch in Bull Canyon, toward the south end of the valley, in the Summit country, whose name the papers and his land patents often wrote Fredrick, and a neighbor's memoir of the 1948–49 winter wrote Frederick. He had homesteaded there from 1913 or 1914 and still made his home in the valley when he died in 1970, and from that end of the valley the hospital and funeral home at Malad were the nearest. He is very probably Lynne's grandfather, though no other record found names him with her.
How she was his granddaughter is less clear. Walter's wife, Rachel Fryer Fredrich, had died in December 1957, so if there was a Mrs. Walt Frederick in 1963, as the paper says, she was a later wife, and the article does not name her. Walter's 1970 death notice, as far as its jumbled digitized text can be read, names two daughters, Betty Tubbs of Malad and Frances Mitchell of Baltimore, and no Mrs. Wisecarver. Whether Lynne's mother was one of his daughters, or Lynne was related to him through a later marriage, the records found do not say. Who Mrs. Cora E. Larson was is also unknown; nothing found ties her to any of the valley's Larson or Larsen families.
On this site: the story of Walter Fredrich's Bull Canyon homestead and the teacher he married, the hard winter of 1948–49, when a rider carried mail on horseback to the foot of Bull Canyon for "Walt Frederick, who lived on up the canyon," and the valley's tragedies.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, July 5, 1963, page 1. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Under an Arbon dateline the next day, the Journal reported that Lynne Wisecarver, 11, of Sacramento, Calif., had died on Thursday, July 4, when a farm wagon rolled over her during a stay with her grandparents in Arbon Valley.
The place was Mr. and Mrs. Walt Frederick's farm and the time was noon; the paper named the Fredericks as the grandparents she was staying with.
The paper's account of the accident came from the officers who investigated, none of whom it named. By their telling, Lynne and a cousin, also unnamed, were using a horse-drawn farm wagon with iron wheels to haul rock. The team spooked; Lynne went off the wagon, and one wheel rolled across her head.
She lived long enough to be started for the Oneida County Hospital, but she died on the way.
Arrangements to send her body back to Sacramento were in the hands of the Benson Funeral Home at Malad.
Lynne had been born in Sacramento on November 5, 1951. Her parents, Mr. and Mrs. James J. Wisecarver, lived there, as did her three sisters, Dawn, Jan and Robynn. The paper listed two sets of grandparents among her survivors: the Fredericks of Arbon Valley and Mr. and Mrs. Floyd Wisecarver of Sacramento. The list closed with Mrs. Cora E. Larson, a great-grandmother, whose town the paper left out.