In the spring of 1969 the Idaho highway department was getting ready to build the next piece of Interstate 15-W, the freeway's branch west from Pocatello toward American Falls. Its route, roughly seven and a half miles over Fort Hall Reservation land at an estimated cost of $2.6 million, would close the gap between the freeway's western end outside Pocatello and the Igo overpass short of American Falls. For eight to ten years, by the account of a Power County Highway District man at the hearing, the plans had put a full interchange at Bannock Creek, where the blacktopped road from Arbon Valley comes down the creek. That spring the plan changed, and for the next five months the people who used that road argued for it.
The change
Talks that spring between the state and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribal Council produced a different spot for the full interchange: Gasline Road, some three and a half miles farther west on the reservation. In September the Idaho State Journal said the switch had been made at the tribe's request; the papers do not give the council's reasons. Two full interchanges, the state said, were more than it could afford, so Bannock Creek and the Truckersville road were left with an overpass and nothing more. A three-quarter-mile county road on the south side of the freeway, which Power County would build with federal secondary-road funds, was to link that overpass with the Bannock Creek highway. Valley traffic could then reach the freeway by frontage roads, east to the airport interchange or west to Gasline Road.
On May 4 the Journal's "Buzz of the Burg" column printed a letter from Lamond "Buck" Bailey of Star Route, Pocatello, meant for his neighbors in Arbon Valley and along Bannock Creek and for the Michaud families living east of the creek. His full name, nickname and Arbon Valley land all match the Lamond "Buck" Bailey on the site's Bailey family page, so he is almost certainly the same man: he grew up on his father's homestead in Arbon Valley and by 1969 ranched on Michaud Flats as well. Getting from the valley to Highway 30 had always meant a roundabout trip by way of the Schiller or Rudeen crossing, he pointed out, and that had been true for half a century or longer; the new plan would simply swap those detours for frontage roads. The valley's oiled farm-to-market road, which ran up from Snowville and Malad, crossed Arbon Valley and followed Bannock Creek down, would come to a dead stop at the freeway. He suspected the change favored special interests, noted that Rockland had an interchange, and asked his neighbors whether "second class" was good enough for them.
Schiller was one of the old railroad sidings where the valley's wheat went out, as told in the 1923 buying war at Schiller. The road down Bannock Creek had its own long history across reservation land, from the road controversy of 1915 to the wheat road of the 1930s.
The hearing
The State Highway Board set a public hearing for June 17 at the Bannock County courthouse. Some twelve witnesses from the area's farms, ranches and businesses took the stand. They spoke of grain elevators and warehouses along the railroad, of thousands of truckloads of beets, potatoes and grain, of irrigated land north of the freeway line and more planned in Arbon Valley, and of the narrow gravel road that angled from the Arbon Valley road to the airport interchange. A man from the Power County Highway District spoke for it, and the county commissioners promised written testimony. A tribal member from Michaud Flats spoke for a Bannock Creek interchange as well, though he said he did not speak for the Tribal Council, and no one represented the tribe.
The outcome
By late July the highway board had changed its mind and announced it would back a second interchange. The people pushing for it then gathered the numbers, and the board carried them to the federal Bureau of Public Roads. On September 23, 1969, board chairman C. Ed Flandro announced that the bureau had approved a full interchange at Bannock Creek and Truckersville in addition to the one at Gasline Road. Flandro noted that a stretch that short would ordinarily get just one full interchange under federal practice, so the approval was an exception. He put the added cost at upward of $100,000, with Washington paying the bulk of it. The win, in Flandro's telling, belonged jointly to farmers, industry and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and the Indian bureau drew his warmest thanks. The Journal added that the American Falls Chamber of Commerce, the American Falls school board and the City of Pocatello had also asked for the interchange, and that the airport commission had urged the city council to support it.
For the valley itself the spring plan stood: Power County would still build its three-quarter-mile road from the interchange over the Union Pacific line to the Bannock Creek–Arbon Valley road already in use, and Flandro said a signal was proposed where it met the tracks. Cattle would have a trail of their own under the freeway along the creek's west bank, and the stretch of Bannock Creek running through the roadwork was to get a concrete-lined bed.
In 1969 the forecasts had put bids in late 1969 or the spring of 1970 and construction in 1970, but the interchange structures were bid later. When the Journal reported those bids in August 1971, the job was two concrete underpasses, one at Gasline Road and one at Truckersville Road, and Goodwin Construction Co. of Blackfoot had apparently come in lowest, at $430,407. The papers read for this story do not say when the interchanges opened or the county road was finished.
On this site: the Bailey family and Arbon.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, June 18, 1969, page 8. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
People who made their living from the farm country west of Pocatello turned out at a State Highway Department hearing on June 17, 1969, to ask that Bannock Creek and Truckersville get their full Interstate 15-W interchange back.
Of about 35 people at the Bannock County courthouse that afternoon, roughly a dozen testified. Two department men ran the session: executive secretary Wayne Summers, up from Boise, and Orion Grunerud, the Pocatello district engineer. A ruling would come later that summer, Summers said, and anyone with more to add could mail it in through July 1, which Power County Commissioner LeRoy Lindley said his board intended to do.
The state's plan, drawn up after talks that spring with the Shoshone-Bannock Tribal Council, put the only full interchange on the 7 1/2-mile stretch at Gasline Road on the reservation. Lacking money for two, the state offered Bannock Creek only an overpass, tied to the Arbon Valley highway by a Power County road three-quarters of a mile long. By Grunerud's estimate, adding a second full interchange there would run about $100,000 more. He said Idaho generally spaced its interstate interchanges six to eight miles apart, and the airport interchange and Gasline Road sat about that far from each other.
The traffic at stake, witnesses said, came from Arbon Valley farms, from grain elevators of General Mills and the Power County Grain Growers' Association, and from the Zimmerle and potato warehouses along the Union Pacific near the creek. By the count of Blaine Shoemaker, a Pocatello rancher, the area shipped 21,000 truckloads of beets to Idaho Falls, along with 7,000 of potatoes and 1,600 of grain, and he argued that more traffic used Bannock Creek than Gasline Road. State Representative S. Albert Johnson made the point that beets, potatoes and grain alike left the area by truck. Irrigation was spreading, according to Buck Bailey, who ranched on Michaud Flats and owned land in Arbon Valley: deeded Indian land north of the freeway line already watered 16,000 acres, and the valley's north end expected water on 8,000 more. Truckersville Road, he added, was the produce trucks' way north to Syphon Road and U.S. 191. Several witnesses, Bailey and Shoemaker among them, warned that the only present link, a narrow gravel road angling across to the airport interchange, was dangerous.
Bob Ewing, who headed the American Falls Chamber of Commerce, said his group was glad to see Gasline Road in the plan, though in its view Bannock Creek deserved a full interchange as well. Bob Ward, the owner of Truckersville, and Weaver Douglas, whose property lay nearby, both testified that the state's right-of-way men had told them to expect a full interchange there. Plans had pointed to Bannock Creek for eight to ten years, said Russell Lindley of the Power County Highway District, and he took the state to task for abandoning them. Colman Paniogue, a Shoshone-Bannock tribal member living on Michaud Flats, was careful to say he was speaking only for himself, not on the Tribal Council's behalf; leaving Truckersville without an interchange, he argued, shortchanged the people who depended on it most. The tribe sent no one to the hearing.
Vince Schimmler of Boise, the Bureau of Public Roads' man for the area, said demand for roads to airports was rising across the whole country, not just in Idaho, and he answered Shoemaker's traffic argument by saying that social and economic needs counted alongside vehicle numbers.