Through January 1982 the Idaho State Journal of Pocatello kept mentioning Arbon Valley in its storm reports. They told of drifted roads, deep cold, a school bus that could not get through and, as the snow piled up, a warning that Bannock Creek might flood. On Friday, February 12, 1982, the paper ran a feature on how the valley's families were getting through the winter, with photographs by Doug Lindley. It filled pages E-12 and E-13 and was continued from page 11, which was not read for this post, so any byline there is unknown.
January: drifts, cold and a stalled bus
Power County's road supervisor, Ted Neu, told the Journal on January 5 that his men had been putting in days of 12 to 16 hours ever since Christmas, and that overtime and equipment for the three-day holiday weekend by itself came to roughly $5,000 for the county. The same report listed the Stone and Holbrook areas of western Oneida County, plus a place it called the Arbon area, as cut off for a time by drifts. Arbon Valley had been in Power County since 1913; the paper may have meant the valley's south end, near the county line, but does not say.
Two days later the cold followed. Pocatello recorded 24 below on the morning of January 7. Children around Holbrook and Arbon had no school that day because of the bitter cold, the paper's Oneida County news said; Holbrook read 20 below, and it was 25 below south of Malad.
A fresh storm arrived on January 22, pushed along by wind. Drifts on the roads south of Pocatello stopped the Arbon Valley bus, the Journal said. By Ted Neu's account the wind had made a mess of most roads outside town, and his crews, who had been at it since 5:30 that morning, could still be working when the weekend came. The report does not say which school the bus served.
A flood warning
On January 27 the paper ran a flood warning. The snow piled up in the reservation's part of Arbon Valley worried Alex Mendez, the tribes' land use policy director at Fort Hall: a sudden thaw or a hard rain, he warned, could send it all down as serious flooding. About 50 ranching families lived in the valley, which he said was narrow, with Bannock Creek carrying off its water, and he pointed back to three winters of heavy flooding there, 1962 through 1964. Sandbags had been tried on the creek in 1962, he noted, and the flood got past them anyway. Should one come, Mendez put residents' time to leave at up to 90 minutes; watchers posted at the valley's upper end would raise the alarm with the tribal police and with him. His advice to families was to work out ahead of time what they would do, carry flood insurance, stock enough to last seven days and be on familiar terms with the people next door. Anyone forced out would find shelter waiting at the tribal gymnasium or at nearby churches, and sandbagging supplies were to be left at points in the valley still to be named.
By February 16 rain was falling and other parts of Idaho were flooding. A spotter's check that morning turned up no trouble on Arbon Valley's stretch of Bannock Creek, Mendez said, but he warned that more rain might yet push it over. The valley's 50 ranching families had sandbag piles waiting for them beside the creek, and Mendez meant to drive out and judge what further steps to take. The pages read for this post do not say whether the creek flooded that spring.
The people in the feature
The feature's central figure was Gena Newport. In the Journal's telling she was the final survivor of Arbon's first homesteaders, having come to the valley with her husband, since dead, when he claimed land there in 1909. The records gathered for this site tell a different story. Gena Huberta Rust was born in Pocatello in 1900, and in 1915 she visited her sister, Mrs. E. A. Logan, at Arbon. She married Lee Allard Newport in 1932. Lee had come to Idaho in 1923, and the couple rented at Arbon before buying the T. B. Evans farm in 1940. There Gena kept the valley's telephone switchboard, as the Evans family page and the first telephone operator entry tell, and she was Arbon's postmaster from 1942 to 1947. Lee died in 1978. The 1909 date fits neither of them. Her sister's husband took up an Arbon homestead about 1909 or 1910, and the date may have come from that, but this is only a guess. She turned 82 eleven days after the story ran.
Her son John, who ran cattle on the home place, was almost certainly John Lee Newport, Lee and Gena's adopted son, who with his wife Judy later gave land and a building to the Arbon Bible Church (see the Arbon area page).
The paper named Carolyn Lusk's husband as Dave, the county highway foreman in charge of Arbon's roads. CaroLynne Lusk was the wife of Steve Lusk, whose retirement in 2011 closed nearly half a century as the valley's road foreman. The paper probably had his first name wrong. Ruby Christensen and her husband Lloyd were running the two-room Arbon school, whose future a dispute over taxes on a church farm put at risk that year. The paper does not say which Evans family the cattlemen Mont and Jerry Evans belonged to, and this post does not guess.
On this site: the winter of 1948–49, which Gena Newport judged worse, and a valley account of it; the floods of March 1962; and the Hubbards' school bus.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, February 12, 1982, pages E-12 and E-13. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
Arbon Valley families were getting through a hard winter with snowmobiles, full pantries and the habit of turning out for one another, the Journal reported in a picture feature on pages E-12 and E-13. Readings of 40 below, snow in quantity and ground blizzards that cut visibility to nothing were among what the valley had put up with. It lived by farming, and plenty of its people, the paper noted, had pioneer parents. Phones in the valley had been dead for seven days at one stretch that winter.
Gena Newport, 82, had seen a harder one: "I think 1948-49 was worse." Before snowmobiles, she recalled, people kept to the house unless a horse-drawn sleigh could take them, and groceries were bought a case at a time. In those years households harvested ice from Bannock Creek, she said, and what they stored in their icehouses kept until summer ended. John, her son, ran 150 cattle on her land. People grumbled, he said, yet nobody had any option but to endure.
A snowmobile pulling a sled did the feeding whenever drifts trapped the hay truck. One photograph from the Newport ranch showed cattle kneeling side by side in pairs to drink through a hole opened in the snow that wind had packed over their troughs. In another, brothers Mont and Jerry Evans were moving roadside hay out to their herd. John Newport told of frozen pipes at his son's house and a frozen tub in his own, during a stretch of nearly two weeks when the wind whipped up a blizzard each day.
According to Carolyn Lusk, almost every household owned a snowmobile and kept plenty of food on hand, and the children had lost little time from school. Most closures she could recall had come with west-wind blizzards. Once a storm let up, she said, the county's rotary plow could reopen the roads, and the worst a side road usually suffered was a day or two shut. Her longest memory of a closure was six weeks on the Mink Creek Road, after a storm in the early 1970s.
Attendance at the two-room Arbon Elementary School, which Ruby Christensen and her husband Lloyd ran, had stayed steady, she said. The school had been in session as many days as Pocatello's, and now and then it held classes when the city's schools had closed. Snowmobiles took children from home to the bus on the main road, she said, and a few parents drove them clear to the school.
She also described the valley pulling together in emergencies. In the previous autumn a young couple went missing on a hunting trip, and local people set out on snow machines, keeping in touch by CB radio, until they found them. Earlier that winter it was a pair of snowshoers from Pocatello trapped by a blizzard; once they were located, a shortwave radio message went to their wives. And when a harvester threw off a spark and set grain burning the summer before, a water truck arrived and tractors ringed the blaze with plowed furrows until it was out. She did not claim the people of Arbon were better than anyone else. As she saw it, farm families had made the valley their home, learned to live with its climate and stuck it out. "That's what it takes—determination," she said.