Minnie Green of Cherry Creek, Crystal, turns 100, 1967

On Sunday, March 12, 1967, the Idaho Sunday Journal in Pocatello ran a long feature on Emma George Green, whom her admirers called Minnie, and who had turned 100 three days before. Most of the feature, by staff writer Ernie Stites, is about her Pocatello life as a medium and about the advice the paper said she gave C. Ben Ross, mayor of Pocatello and later governor of Idaho. A few paragraphs, though, go back to the years when she kept a ranch at Crystal, and the American Falls Press of the 1910s shows her there.

A family on Cherry Creek

The Journal dated her and her daughter Glorein's coming to Pocatello to 1904. It traced her Crystal holdings to her mother: Minnie bought the ranch her mother had homesteaded, and only afterward filed a homestead claim of her own. The older papers fill in the family. Her mother was Henrietta George, who entered a homestead in the Cherry Creek country east of Crystal on October 15, 1910, next to the claim of her son-in-law Jacob J. Meitzenheimer. When Henrietta's fourteen-months proof was advertised in February 1915, her four witnesses included "Emma Green and Ernest George, all of Crystal." That story is told in Women who proved up claims at Arbon and Crystal, which notes that the notices do not say whether Ernest George was related to the George women. The 1967 article says she had a living brother, Ernest R. George, 92, of Vista, California. A man with that name, a witness on Henrietta George's proof, homesteading in the same canyon, was very probably her brother, though no paper says so in as many words.

In October 1917 the Press columnist who signed himself "The Pilgrim" visited the Meitzenheimer ranch, three miles east of Crystal, and wrote that Lillie Meitzenheimer's aged mother, Mrs. Henrietta George, lived with "another daughter, Mrs. Emma Green, a quarter mile down the canyon of Cherry creek." A few days earlier he had described J. C. Davis's Triple J Ranch, which by then took in the old homestead of Ernest George further up the canyon, and explained how its acreage came to an odd 484:

The odd four acres are added to the round 480 by reason of the fact that Mr. and Mrs. Davis wished to make the lower ranch their home and a little flat of four acres formerly owned by Mrs. Emma Green presented the best building site.

The Crystal column shows her in the life of the settlement. In December 1917 she was to teach the schoolchildren to knit at the Saturday meeting of the Crystal Red Cross chapter (see the Red Cross in Arbon Valley). In April 1918 she killed a coyote caught in the brush, and a week later "moved on her homestead on lower Cherry creek." In January 1919 she had young people at her home for an evening. In February 1921 the sheriff advertised an estray heifer for sale "at the ranch of Mrs. Emma Green, 2¼ miles west of Crystal." That figure does not agree with the Cherry Creek places the Pilgrim put east of Crystal, and the papers read here do not explain the difference.

Among the guests at Crystal gatherings in 1918 and 1919 the Press listed a "Glorine Jellic" or "Jelik." The 1967 article says Minnie Green had married Jake Jehlik in the 1890s, so this was very probably her daughter Glorein, going by the Jehlik name; the article does not say who her father was.

The road over Gumbo Hill

Much of what the 1967 article said about Crystal concerned how hard it was to reach. The paper put the trouble down to roads, of which Crystal and Arbon had none worth the name. On the route toward Pocatello, about three miles east of Crystal, lay the stretch everyone called Gumbo Hill. Cars were scarce in the valley, by the article's account, and people got about with wagons and sleds. Carl Wright, an early settler, supplied the article's best road story. His car bogged down on Gumbo Hill; once he had it out, he dropped his mud-laden overshoes on the running board, and the gumbo held them fast all the way to Pocatello.

Ross and his wife, the article said, came out to her Crystal ranch often before he was first elected mayor. On one of those trips the party picnicked in a stand of aspens on her land, and before they left, Ross, Jim Davis and his son Ben, Ralph Jones and others pledged to take up the problem of the road, which the paper called nearly impassable. The article gives no year and does not say what came of the promise. Later, as governor, Ross took up the question of a road across the reservation for Arbon Valley's wheat, a story told in Arbon's wheat road across the reservation; no source read for this post connects the two.

What is not known

No homestead entry or patent in Emma Green's own name has been found, so where her claim lay and how it ended are not known. The papers read here do not say when she left Crystal, or which Jim Davis and Ralph Jones were at the picnic. The article's account of her influence on Ross is the paper's own, and is reported here as such.

On this site: Crystal; Crystal, the hidden settlement up Rattlesnake Creek; Crystal will be almost deserted, winter 1923–24.

The story as reported

Idaho Sunday Journal, March 12, 1967, page 17. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

Emma George Green of Pocatello, whom admirers called Minnie, reached her 100th birthday on Thursday, March 9, 1967. Friends joined her for the occasion at the place north of Tyhee where her daughter Glorein lived with her husband, James Stead.

She was born on March 9, 1867, at Elberfeld, Germany, and was an infant of seven months when the family emigrated. They made their home in Waukesha, Wisconsin, where her father worked laying stone. The Boston Bloomer Girls, a women's team that toured playing baseball each summer and worked the stage as actresses, singers and dancers each winter, were managed by Wallace Needham, and she married him at 22. She sewed for the club and played on it too; her bat from those days was still among her keepsakes. At one point as a young woman she ran a dressmaking business in the South. Her later marriages included one to Jake Jehlik in the 1890s and one to Samuel H. Green, at Pocatello in May 1913; Green died in 1919.

Mother and daughter came west together, reaching Pocatello in 1904. In Arbon Valley, Minnie's Crystal ranch had first been her mother's homestead, which Minnie bought; she took a homestead claim herself afterward. She had a hand in raising the fences, cellars and barns there, and the paper rated her equal to nearly every kind of ranch work. She took in people who turned up broke, giving them food and a place to stay and frequently clothes from her own needle. Her sewing for other ranch families was often paid back in work on her own place. The article recalled the poor roads of the time, Gumbo Hill east of Crystal among them, and a promise about the road made by Ben Ross and others after a picnic on her ranch.

The paper dated her ordination as a minister to about 1906, at Butte, Montana. For many years in Pocatello she gave readings and conducted séances. It said Ross consulted her as mayor and as governor, and credited her with foreseeing water beneath the Pocatello townsite, railroad tracks on Ross family land on Michaud Flats, a fall in the wheat market in 1925, and the result of the Dempsey–Tunney fight, of which she was quoted as saying "Dempsey will win but lose." She was also said to have warned Ross away from a sales tax.

She painted in oils, carded and knitted wool, and supervised war-work sewing in Pocatello. The only other kin the article named was a brother in Vista, California, Ernest R. George, aged 92.