Peter Wrensted, the photographer's brother, at Crystal

Benedicta Wrensted is remembered as the Pocatello photographer whose glass-plate portraits of Bannock and Shoshone people were reported to be held by the Smithsonian. A short profile of her in an Idaho State Journal history section, "Idaho's First 100 Years," toward its close points to Arbon Valley, where, it says, her brother Peter's family held land near Crystal and still had kin living when the piece was written.

The page prints no date of its own. The Marshall Public Library archive files it under October 30, 2020, but the section's title and the article's talk of a Smithsonian book still being planned suggest it was first written some years earlier, probably around Idaho's centennial in 1990.

From Pocatello to the forest

According to the profile, Benedicta and her mother were bound for California in 1894, where they planned to live with another son of the family, a San Francisco seaman, and broke the train journey at Pocatello to see Peter; a telegram there told them the seaman had died, and they went no farther. A 1968 history of the Caribou National Forest by its ranger, Tom Farr, as reported in the Journal, names him as the first supervisor of the Pocatello Forest Reserve, created in 1903, and puts him in charge of the Portneuf Reserve in 1907 and of a tree nursery on Mink Creek in 1908. The Pocatello Tribune of October 18, 1911, found him at the government's forest nursery at Camp Steely, 13 miles from Pocatello, while a quarter of a million Douglas fir seedlings were being set out in the Mink Creek watershed:

The work of transplanting is under the supervision of Forest Ranger Peter Wrensted at the nursery and Supervisor Bruins at the planting end.

In the profile's telling, the police job came first, in 1910, with the forest work following it. The order of his posts is not clear from what we have read.

A homestead over the divide

The land notices gathered for this site show Peter Wrensted, then giving his address as Pocatello, filing on a homestead in September 1909 in Section 34 of Township 8 South, Range 34 East, and giving notice in July 1911 that he would prove it up by commutation that September, with four Crystal neighbors as witnesses. By the summer of 1913 he was "of Crystal" himself, a witness in turn for Curtis Gabbert, Howard Tate and Ezra Burwell. That August a Pocatello merchant who drove the Mink Creek road to Arbon described the grade "from the Mink Creek forest station to Wrensted's ranch" as steep but passable for the average car. In 1919 a sheriff's notice placed the ranch of Peter T. Wrensted "four miles south of Crystal, Postoffice."

The family at Crystal

The American Falls Press columns show a family settled into the neighborhood. In 1915 Mr. Wrensted of Crystal lost a cow in two hours to frosted alfalfa, and P. T. Wrensted was one of seven Crystal farmers chosen for the county agent's acre of peas beside an acre of wheat. Mrs. Peter Wrensted, a patron of the Gabbert school, went to the Farmers' Institute at Pocatello in 1916. In the war years she worked for the Red Cross, and in November 1919 Mrs. Anna Wrensted was named a Crystal district chairman for the Red Cross roll call, one of two the list gives for Crystal, with Mrs. A. B. Bryant. Anna and Peter Wrensted appear together among Crystal's Fourth Liberty Loan subscribers in October 1918, and the 1920 census at Crystal lists Anna M. Wrensted as Peter T. Wrensted's wife. In 1920 and 1922 the county's school levy statements list Peter Wrensted of Crystal as a district clerk.

Their son Carl, the Press said in November 1917, was born in Pocatello in 1892, had always helped his parents on their ranch, and had filed on his own homestead two and a half miles north of Crystal in 1913. That does not fit the profile's statement that Peter reached America only the year before 1894. Another son, Paul, was in Pocatello with his father that same November.

Two girls named Wrensted, Marie and Helen, were pupils in the Crystal district in 1918, and Helen finished the eighth grade at the Gabbert school in 1921. In December 1923 there was a party at Mrs. Wrensted's for Helen, who was going back to her work at "the Tech" in Pocatello. The papers do not name their parents, but the 1920 census there lists Marie L. and Helen P. Wrensted, aged 16 and 12, as daughters in Peter and Anna's household. In 1950 the census found Anna at Crystal with her daughter Helen P. Sherwood, and Colleen Hayden Turner's 1978 history of Crystal names a Helen Wrensted Sherwood among the people she interviewed, so the niece the profile quotes, Helen Sherwood of Bellflower, California, was very probably Peter's daughter Helen.

The family stayed. Carl Wrensted of Crystal was photographed as a Power County commissioner in April 1950, and the 1968 forest history reported that Paul still had a ranch close to the summit separating Mink Creek from Arbon.

On this site: Carl's departure for the army is in the draft send-offs of 1917 and his cabin in a valley of log cabins; the 1924 Bible class at the Wrensted home is in Crystal almost deserted. See also Crystal, the hidden settlement up Rattlesnake Creek, the Mink Creek road and the valley's Red Cross in the First World War.

The story as reported

Idaho State Journal, archive date October 30, 2020, page 30. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

Benedicta Wrensted kept a photography studio in Pocatello for some twenty years from the 1890s, yet the people studying her work knew very little about her, according to a profile by Beryl Taylor. Smithsonian researchers at work on a book about American Indians had lately come to the Bannock County Museum hunting for more of her pictures and whatever could be learned of her life, and members of Pocatello's city council had their own questions about her.

Taylor put her birth in 1859. The sea had already claimed her father, a captain from Denmark. In 1894 mother and daughter set out by rail for California, where one of the sons, a seaman based in San Francisco, was to give them a home. Peter, another son, was then in his second year in the country, Taylor wrote, so they stopped in Pocatello to see him. The stopover became permanent: a telegram met them in Pocatello with news that the sailor son had died, and the three of them stayed on.

Weddings, funerals and the town's leading figures all came before her camera, and in Taylor's view almost everything she made in the studio was superb work. Taylor singled out her portraits of Fort Hall's Indian people as the work closest to her heart. Word was that about 148 of her glass negatives of Bannock and Shoshone subjects had ended up at the Smithsonian, where many of the sitters remained nameless. Her South Main studio, put up for her around 1900 once the business could pay for it, was known to later Pocatello as the Mountain Folk building. It had lately changed hands, and the plan was said to be a remodeling rather than demolition.

In 1913 she traded Pocatello for Hollywood, California. She took no more photographs after the move and never married, according to a niece, Helen Sherwood of Bellflower, California.

The profile's link to Arbon Valley came through her brother. Peter's Idaho years outlasted his sister's: in 1910 he was Pocatello's police chief, and later he worked for the Forest Service on the Caribou National Forest. The Wrensteds' Arbon Valley land lay near Crystal, Taylor wrote, and the area was still home to some of the family.

Little could be pinned down about Wrensted or her pictures, Taylor found, even with the help of Mary Lee Lien, who looked after the museum. Taylor's closing note was that she remained a riddle, a woman who ran a business of her own in years when few women worked outside their homes.

The page's photographs, lent by the Idaho Museum of Natural History, showed Bannock-Shoshone women outside the Cox Cobbler Shop, an Indian woman in 1900, Frank George and his wife, and Police Chief Peter Wrensted with deputies in 1910.