On May 9 and 10, 1978, a federal judge heard two days of testimony over whose cattle would graze part of the Caribou National Forest that summer. Two of the witnesses came from Bannock Creek, which runs north out of Arbon Valley past Pauline and onto the Fort Hall Reservation. Sherm Swim, a non-Indian rancher, was one of the cattlemen who brought the suit. Melvin L. Neaman, a 24-year-old Shoshone-Bannock stockman who lived in the Bannock Creek area of the reservation, testified for the other side. The Idaho State Journal put the hearing on its front page on May 10.
A right kept in 1898
The dispute reached back to the agreement of 1898. Under it, ratified by Congress in 1900, the Shoshone and Bannock people gave up the southern and eastern part of their reservation, the cession that opened Crystal and nearby land to homesteaders in 1902, as an earlier post in this series tells. According to the Journal, the Tribes had kept a right to graze livestock on the ceded land, and part of that land later became the Pocatello District of the Caribou National Forest.
For many years non-Indian ranchers holding Forest Service permits, who paid a fee for each head, had used the allotments in question on that district. In 1978 the Forest Service agreed to let Shoshone-Bannock cattle onto some of those allotments without fees, and 522 head belonging to permit holders were to be displaced to make room for the same number of tribal cattle.
Non-Indian permit holders asked Judge Marion J. Callister to hold the change off for one year. The paper named four whose cattle would be displaced: Robert Swanson of Michaud Creek, Russell Hebdon of Chesterfield, the King Creek Cattle Association, and Sherm Swim of Bannock Creek. The legal question, as the paper saw it, was whether the Tribes had already been paid for the grazing right in a $15 million settlement for the ceded lands in 1972. The ranchers' lawyer said they had. The U.S. attorney for Idaho, speaking for the Forest Service, said the right was one the Tribes had reserved for themselves in 1898, so the settlement had not touched it.
Two men from the same creek
Of the 224 head on Swim's permit, 58 were to give way. He testified that he would rather sell them than haul them to new range near Tincup Creek, east of Henry, and that his whole herd numbered 300 to 400.
Neaman told the court that once he heard tribal cattle could use the forest range, he took out a loan from the tribe that spring and bought 60 head. The family's cattle, 138 head in all, grazed private and trust land. An injunction, he said, would force him to sell the 60. His sister-in-law, Barbara Neaman, told the court the family was counting on forest range to build up its herds, and that applying for it had cost her the permits she held from the Bureau of Indian Affairs.
On the paper's account, both Bannock Creek men expected to sell cattle if the ruling went against them.
Who Sherm Swim was
The 1978 article gives only his name and Bannock Creek, but the match with the Swim family history is close, and he was almost certainly Sherman Hale Swim, born in 1923, the son of Bob and Nell Roper Swim. From the early 1930s Bob Swim rented a ranch on Bannock Creek at the reservation line, and in 1950 Sherm was a stockman there. Seven weeks after the hearing, on June 30, 1978, the Journal ran photographs of a branding at Sod and Nelda Williams's ranch in Arbon Valley, with Sherm Swim roping calves. In June 1980 it described him as a 56-year-old Arbon Valley rancher, born and raised in the valley, who ran a Hereford ranch with his son Kirk. He died in 2011, as the Stories page tells. Melvin and Barbara Neaman are known to this site only from this article.
What is not known
The May 10 article ends before any ruling, and the papers read for this post do not report what Judge Callister decided, or whether Swim sold his 58 head. The case did not end there. In January 1983 the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit decided appeals in Swim v. Bergland, named for Sherman Swim and for Robert Bergland, the Secretary of Agriculture. Swim headed a long list of non-Indian permittees that included Michaud Creek Ranches, Russell and Sara Hebdon and the King Creek Grazing Association, and the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes took part as intervenor. The opinion opens by framing the appeals as a question of the permittees' and the Tribes' rights to graze the Caribou National Forest under the treaty of 1868 and the agreement of 1898. This site has read only that opening and the list of parties, not the ruling, so the outcome is not told here. The list also includes a Norman Davis, a William T. Evans and a Calvin A. Munn (valley surnames), but the decision does not say where they lived and they are not identified here.
On this site: the Swim family and its Bannock Creek ranch; Pauline and West Fork, the valley's north end at the reservation line; names on Bannock Creek; and an earlier valley cattleman's quarrel over forest range, Lloyd Brower's small range war.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, May 10, 1978, page 1. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Non-Indian ranchers holding grazing permits on the Caribou National Forest asked a federal judge in Pocatello for a one-year injunction barring Shoshone-Bannock cattle from their allotments. Judge Marion J. Callister heard the arguments over two days, Tuesday and Wednesday, and then told both sides to file written briefs within a week, with five days for replies.
The Forest Service had approved putting 522 tribal cattle on allotments in its Pocatello District, a move that would push off an equal number of cattle owned by permit holders. The Tribes were to graze without fees, apart from required improvements, under a right they kept when they ceded land south and east of the reservation in 1898.
At the center of the argument was a $15 million settlement paid in 1972 for the ceded lands. Max Whittier, representing the ranchers, said it covered the lost grazing rights, and noted that only timber rights had been named as reserved. Karl Shurtliff, the U.S. attorney for Idaho, said the Tribes had reserved the grazing right themselves and the settlement left it untouched. He added that the ranchers had been given enough notice and that the agency had looked hard for other range.
The operators facing displacement were Robert Swanson of Michaud Creek, Sherm Swim of Bannock Creek, Russell Hebdon of Chesterfield and the King Creek Cattle Association. Hebdon described the cost of trucking at $1.50 a mile for each loaded truck, and said cattle need two years to settle on new range. Swanson said his family had used its Midnight Creek range since 1903 and had made no profit in recent years. Orville Demick said the King Creek association would lose forest range for 140 of its usual 214 head.
Demick and Swim both pointed to the extra cost of hauling cattle to range far from their home places. Of the 224 head on Swim's permit, 58 were to be displaced, and he testified that he would sell those 58 instead of trucking them to Tincup Creek, east of Henry. His whole operation ran 300 to 400 head.
Melvin L. Neaman, 24, a Shoshone-Bannock from the Bannock Creek area in the reservation's southwest, said a tribal loan had paid for the 60 head he bought that spring with the forest range in mind; an injunction would mean selling them. His sister-in-law, Barbara Neaman, testified that she had given up her BIA permits as a condition of applying for Forest Service grazing, which the family was counting on to build up its herds.