Twin Springs and the old road past the head of Arbon Valley

On August 3, 1973, the Idaho State Journal began a series of weekend trips called "Exploring Idaho," and the first one ran through Arbon Valley. Peter Maupin, editor of the paper's ENJOY magazine, sent readers over Mink Creek, south past Pauline and Arbon, and west to Twin Springs, a campground beside the wagon ruts of the Hudspeth Cutoff of the California Trail. Other pieces in the Journal and the Pocatello Tribune, gathered here, touch on the same old roads.

The road at the head of the valley

The Buist and Summit area histories on this site tell how the cutoff, opened in 1849, dropped into the valley at the Summit end, ran south along the valley floor and turned west through Bull Canyon to Twin Springs. Maupin's account was shorter. Maupin placed the springs in a small hollow roughly 10 miles north of Holbrook. A wagon party bound there from the Hawkins Basin country first had to get over the shoulder of what he called Mt. Elkhorn and then cross the upper end of Arbon Valley. No other water on that part of the cutoff ran all season. The state marker he quoted said that except in wet seasons there was no water for 22 miles to the east, so parties often pushed on late into the night to reach it.

A Pocatello Tribune article of June 6, 1944, said Hudspeth's cutoff was sometimes called the Sublette road. In a letter printed June 25, 1946, N. S. Coffin of Lava Hot Springs passed on how Albert (Dock) Boyce, a freighter born in 1854, remembered the road. It crossed Marsh Valley near where Arimo now stands, went over the low mountains a little south of Garden Creek Gap into Hawkins Basin, climbed to the divide and came down onto Rattlesnake Creek, then went on to Bannock Creek and west, through a place he called Moonshine, to Raft River. (A Moonshine divide west of the valley later carried a short-cut road to American Falls; Boyce's Moonshine was probably the same high ground.) A history of Fort Hall in the Journal of July 13, 1973, said California travelers began to bypass the fort on a cutoff through Hawkins Basin and Arbon Valley, but it dated that to the late 1850s, about ten years after the cutoff opened.

A wagon wheel in the pass, 1969

Early in 1969 Boy Scout Troop 876 of McCammon hiked what the Journal of May 7 called the "old Sublette Trail west of Arimo," as a step toward the Historic Trails Award. Erastus Capell, Owen Marley, Len Hickman, Jack Alvord and Rex Hickman told the troop what they knew, and Rex Hickman took Scoutmaster Don Aslett over it. Their marker was an old wagon wheel carrying a welded plaque, set in concrete on the hilltop in what the paper called "the main pass between Marsh Valley and Arbon Valley." According to the paper, the monument was Ernest Garrett's idea, and Bill Murphy built it. Martell Gunter hauled the wheel and the cement in over the trail, and the Scouts carried some of the load. The boys spent a cold night camped at the old springs with snow on the ground and explored the next day. Later the troop gathered at the wheel, where each Scout laid down a rock marked with his initials.

The article does not say what the plaque reads or exactly where the pass is. If the trail was the one Boyce described, the pass was probably the crossing from Marsh Valley into Hawkins Basin, on the east side of the basin, not at the edge of Arbon Valley itself. No later report of the wheel has been found.

A camp in Bannock Valley, 1857

The road from Malad north to Fort Hall crossed the valley too. On October 30, 2020, the Journal printed passages from the 1857 diary of William Knox, introduced by his great-great-granddaughter, Elayne Bybee. That September, with a federal army marching on Utah, Knox volunteered in Salt Lake City for a mission to the Blackfoot Fork of the Snake River. A church history Bybee cites gives the company as 43 people under Captain Andrew Cunningham, sent openly to found a settlement near the abandoned Fort Hall and quietly to watch for the army.

On October 8, with fresh snow on the mountains, Knox wrote that the company was camped below the ridge dividing the Great Basin's waters from the Pacific's, some three miles short of the Malad's headwaters: "We are camped in Bannock Valley." That puts the camp near the head of the valley, though he names no landmark. Bannock Creek itself was the next night's camp. By Bybee's account of the diary, the day turned cold with some hail, the water bucket froze a quarter of an inch deep, and the feed was good for the animals. On October 10 they went about seven miles on the Fort Hall road, turned onto the Oregon road and camped at Ross Fork.

Brigham Young's company crossed into Bannock Valley from Malad that spring (another post in this series), but its accounts do not say where it camped.

What is not known

A Journal story of November 24, 1972, said the California party of John Chiles (usually known as Joseph B. Chiles) in the 1840s turned off at Soda Springs and went along the eastern ridge of what became Arbon Valley. Other accounts have Chiles going to California with the Bartleson-Bidwell party of 1841 and again in 1843, when he divided his party at Fort Hall. Neither account found puts him along Arbon Valley, and the cutoff past the valley did not open until 1849, so the claim is probably mistaken. Maupin, like the July 1973 history, put John C. Fremont on Bannock Creek in September 1843; the Arbon area history on this site dates his visit to 1846.

On this site: Pauline and West Fork, where Maupin's route entered the valley, and the valley timeline.

The story as reported

Idaho State Journal, August 3, 1973, page 20. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

POCATELLO — Weekend campers looking for a taste of the gold-rush trail need go no farther than Twin Springs, a neglected Forest Service campground on the Hudspeth Cutoff some two hours by car from Pocatello. The Journal recommended the trip Friday in the first article of a new series on weekend outings.

Peter Maupin, editor of ENJOY magazine, wrote and photographed the piece. By his account, a traveler leaving Hawkins Basin found no dependable water again until reaching the springs, beyond the upper end of Arbon Valley. He quoted the state historical marker there, which calls the place a major gold-rush campground.

His route left Pocatello by the Old Bannock Highway and Mink Creek Road. Partway up the hill, he noted, there were beaver dams on Mink Creek, on national forest land where the wildlife was protected. Beyond the summit, open fields in wheat that summer fell away toward Bannock Creek and Arbon Valley, and Maupin thought them well suited to skiers and snowmobilers once snow came. According to him, John C. Fremont's party went up Bannock Creek in September 1843, bound for Fort Hall out of Salt Lake.

Pauline, by Maupin's report, had little for a traveler, not even a store at the junction; the nearest one was about a mile to the north. The route turned south past Arbon. Pavement ran all the way to Holbrook, and from there State Highway 37 led back up to the camp. Those willing to drive on gravel had a shorter way. Two or three miles after the road's first right-angle bend, two gravel roads branched off toward the western hills, and the second of them came out on the highway after about 17 miles. Maupin had tried the first one himself and found it led only to a farmer's field.

State Highway 37 carried the quickest drive from Utah to American Falls Reservoir right past the camp, yet Maupin found it little used and poorly kept. Growth had crowded in on all five campsites. Campers could draw water from a hand-pumped well, eat at sheltered tables and use pit toilets, and while Maupin was there no Forest Service employee asked him to pay. The cutoff ran straight through the campground, and Maupin wrote that its wagon tracks could be seen from camp on the hills to the east and west. West of camp the ruts stayed traceable for close to three miles of rolling country before a plowed field erased them. Maupin said that stretch was for walkers or four-wheel-drive rigs only, not ordinary cars or pickups. Over the first half mile a Bureau of Land Management road paralleled the ruts some 30 feet to their south; farther on, road and ruts became one. East of camp, farm traffic now used the old ruts as a road. For a different way home, Maupin suggested staying on Highway 37 north through Roy to Rockland. Nowhere before Rockland on the whole trip could a traveler buy gas or groceries, so he told readers to pack both.