In the week that began on Sunday, January 19, 1969, Charles and Leonora Connelly of Pocatello had birthdays three days apart, his 89th and her 79th. The Idaho State Journal marked the week with a long feature in its Sunday paper of January 19, and much of it concerned the thirteen years the couple had spent homesteading at Crystal, from 1915 to 1928. Much of it is in Charles's own words, and much of what he remembered was snow.
Coming to Crystal
Charles Russell Connelly was born in Kansas in 1880 and had worked his way across the northern Plains and the West before he married Leonora Bezold in 1910: harvest crews, the Butte copper mines, two summers at a Yellowstone hotel, a malt house in Omaha. They were in eastern Washington when they heard of homestead land. That news brought them to Crystal in March 1915, where they took up a 160-acre claim; the site's research notes add that their son Wallace was born there that August. The same notes list a homestead entry for Connelly dated 1919, on the Pauline side of Crystal, so the history of the claim is not fully clear.
In September 1917 the American Falls Press's roving writer, the Pilgrim, passed a ranch that was very probably theirs:
R. Connelly, whose ranch is located in a picturesque spot three and a quarter miles southwest of Crystal, right up against the Indian reservation, has just finished a new granary.
The page is worn, but the Pilgrim also mentioned the past winter and pictures Connelly had taken of the depth of the snow. Half a century later Charles still remembered that winter of 1916–17. Drifts buried the roads, and what travel there was went along the high ground of the fields. So much snow piled on the family's one-room cabin that Charles shoveled it off every morning rather than risk losing the roof. He had a defense for the nights as well: three trenches dug into the snowbank uphill caught the wind-driven snow before it could bury the house, and every day he shoveled them clear to be ready for the next night's drifting.
Leonora turns up in the Crystal Red Cross. In April 1919 she was one of three women who signed the chapter's resolution of sympathy on the death of Mrs. John Staley, and that October she made the "Welcome Home" letters that hung in the Crystal hall for the ball given for returning soldiers. Charles, for his part, kept the books of the Crystal highway district as its secretary-treasurer for several years.
Wheat, chickens and a Ford
Getting wheat to market in winter, the Journal explained, meant a twenty-mile sled haul from Crystal to the elevators at Arimo. Neighbors shared the work of breaking trail, the horses had to rest a night at Arimo before the return, and that was the routine until trucks reached Crystal. The couple also kept chickens. In December 1923 the Pauline schoolchildren's column reported:
Mr. and Mrs. Gardell from the Idaho Tech was at Chas. Connelly's farm Sunday culling chickens.
Wallace went to school at Pauline. He was on the upper-grades honor roll in the winter of 1923–24, which fits the 1969 article's claim of a perfect attendance record, earned on a four-mile ride to school aboard his pony, Prince. In March 1924 the pupils' news noted that Mr. Connelly and his son had gone to Pocatello and that he had bought a new Ford.
The blizzard and the string
The car the family owned by the mid-1920s lived three miles from home, in a garage Charles kept beside the main road at Pauline. A winter trip to Pocatello began with a sled ride to that garage and went on by car over the Bannock Creek route. What he called the winter of 1925 brought the trip he remembered best. The errand was the family's first radio, and the day Charles and Wallace set out to buy it was bright and clear; by evening, as they started back, a blizzard had blown up. At Pauline they left the car, hitched the team to the sled and struck out through the sagebrush. Their field had a single safe route down, one that skirted a hollow where the snow lay too deep for a team, and blinded by the storm they lost it and kept looping back on their own track. A stand of quaking aspens they knew finally told them where they were: the house lay just below. The horses stayed there, blanketed and tied to the sled, while father and son, hand in hand, slid down the slope to the house.
Once the wind dropped the next morning, Charles headed back up the hill after the horses. Leonora, joking, offered to put a string around his finger so he could "follow the string home" if he went astray a second time. No sooner was the team hitched to the sled than another blizzard struck, and Charles, lost and circling again, could have used Leonora's string. This storm was short-lived, and once it lifted he got home with the team.
These are memories told more than forty years later; no report of the trip from the 1920s has been found, and whether it was the winter of 1924–25 or 1925–26 is not clear.
In 1928 the family gave up the Crystal land for an acreage in Pocatello, and the poultry flock begun on the homestead grew much larger there. Charles's verdict on the homestead years was that cash was always short, though "they did enjoy life".
On this site: Crystal's early years are told in Crystal, the hidden settlement up Rattlesnake Creek, and another Pauline blizzard in Frank Kulock and the Pauline blizzard of February 1922. That Crystal post also traces the store: John O. Johnston kept it for almost three years until October 1917, when Ezra Lindsay took over the store and post office, and the store and hall of W. C. and Cora Snyder burned in 1921. Johnston was running the store when the Connellys arrived, so he was probably the man Charles remembered as Jack Johnson, though no record says so.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, January 19, 1969, page 5. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Charles R. Connelly of Pocatello was to turn 89 on Friday, January 24, 1969, and his wife, Leonora, 79 three days earlier, on Tuesday, January 21. The family was planning a dinner to mark both birthdays.
The Connellys were early homesteaders at Crystal in Power County. Arriving in March 1915, they filed on a quarter section and added a second 160 acres by purchase, dry-farming on a large scale until they sold out in 1928. In Pocatello the chicken flock begun at Crystal kept growing until it numbered as many as 1,200 laying hens, housed in a building 120 feet long.
Crystal's post office served 78 families, according to the article, and Connelly remembered nearly every quarter section being occupied; a man he called Jack Johnson kept the store, the post office and the dance hall. He described 1916–17 as a winter of heavy drifting, when clearing the roof of the family's one-room cabin was a daily chore. Grain went out by sled on the twenty-mile, overnight trip to Arimo until Clarence Garrett's trucks, the first at Crystal, put an end to the hauling. Cars were unknown there before 1920.
Another hard winter he dated to 1925. The family's car was garaged at Pauline then, and Connelly took his son, then 10, to Pocatello for the household's first radio. Heading home that evening, they traded car for sled at Pauline, and in a blizzard on the three-mile run to the cabin they wandered off course until a stand of aspens they knew placed the house for them. The team was blanketed and left tied while father and son finished on foot. Returning for the team the next morning, Connelly was turned around by a second storm before it cleared and he reached home.
For several years he was the Crystal highway district's secretary-treasurer. Wallace, the couple's son, kept a perfect attendance record despite a four-mile pony ride to school.
Before Crystal, Connelly had worked from age 16 in harvests in Minnesota and the Dakotas, in the Butte mines from 1904, at Yellowstone's Fountain Hotel in 1906 and 1907, and for malting firms in Omaha and Dayton, Washington. He was born at Concordia, Kansas, in 1880. Leonora Bezold was born in 1890, and they married at Billings, Missouri, in 1910. After 1928 he worked on a ranch north of Pocatello, helped build the Pocatello air base during the Second World War, worked at the Naval Ordnance Plant, and at the atomic energy site west of Idaho Falls, retiring in 1952. Wallace was a Union Pacific engineer.
Sources
- Idaho State Journal, January 19, 1969, page 5
- American Falls Press, September 18, 1917, page 3
- American Falls Press, April 25, 1919, page 7
- American Falls Press, October 17, 1919, page 5
- American Falls Press, December 20, 1923, page 2
- American Falls Press, March 6, 1924, page 1
- American Falls Press, March 20, 1924, page 2