A wreck at Fort Hall, on the Fort Hall Reservation, ended the life of Mabellene McKie of Arbon Valley on the night of Saturday, June 5, 1982. She was 46. Her husband, Merle, was in the car with her and lived through it. The only account found of the accident is a short report the Idaho State Journal of Pocatello printed on the following Monday, June 7, and this post rests on it alone.
The Journal put the time of the crash at 10:45 to 11 that night and the place at Fort Hall, where Philbin Road meets Ballard Road. The car finished in a canal with its front end submerged, having first left the road and hit a telephone pole. Word of the wreck reached Fort Hall police at 11:05 p.m. Fred Mann, Bannock County's deputy coroner, traced her death to injuries of the abdomen. When the paper went to press, police were still investigating, and the report does not say what made the car leave the road.
The Journal called her simply "an Arbon Valley woman" and named no community, so the report does not show whether the McKies lived near Arbon, Pauline or one of the valley's other settlements. Nor does it say where the couple had been that evening or where they were bound.
Much is unknown. No other report of the accident has been found, and no obituary; the Journal's obituary pages for the days after it were not among the pages searched. Neither Mabellene nor Merle McKie turns up anywhere else in the papers and records gathered for this site. The few other McKies found in them have no known tie to the couple. So nothing more can be said here about when the family came to the valley or what they did there. The printed figure for Merle McKie's age is crossed by a rule on the page scan and cannot be read with certainty, so it is left out.
On this site: the valley's communities and the Tragedies list, which gathers other accidents and losses in Arbon Valley.
The story as reported
Idaho State Journal, June 7, 1982, page 9. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.
A car crash at Fort Hall late on Saturday, June 5, 1982, killed Mabellene McKie of Arbon Valley, who was 46. Merle McKie, her husband, was also in the car and survived.
The scene was the corner of Philbin and Ballard Roads. By the account of Herb Allen, Fort Hall's police chief, the McKies' car went off the roadway sometime from 10:45 to 11 p.m. A telephone pole was the first thing it struck; a canal was where it came to rest, front end down in the water. Allen gave 11:05 p.m. as the time his department first heard of it.
The cause of death, as Bannock County deputy coroner Fred Mann reported it, was injuries to the abdomen.
The report did not say which of the two was driving or why the car went off the road. Two days after the crash, when the Journal printed its account on Monday, June 7, police were still looking into it.