In the summer of 1906 Andrew Jenson of the church Historian's Office in Salt Lake City came by team into Bannock Valley and wrote a letter from Arbon. The Deseret Evening News printed it on July 14, 1906, under the headline "Andrew Jensen on New Garden Spot of Idaho," spelling his name with an e.
Arbon was then in Oneida County; Power County was not created until 1913. Jenson was touring the Malad Stake, to which the Arbon branch belonged, with the stake clerk as his companion. His letter is the earliest written account yet found of how the settlement began, written fourteen years after David J. Bowen of Samaria and others, by its account, first came over looking for land. After the paper's one-line introduction, the printed text opens with the question its readers might ask:
Some of the readers of the News will perhaps ask the question, Where is Arbon? They may never have heard of it before, and yet to the few families of Saints who constitute the membership of the branch known by that name the place is secondary to none in importance in this region of country.
Arbon, he explained, was "a new settlement of Saints" at the south end of Bannock Valley, about 40 miles southwest of Pocatello, in a valley that runs north from the edge of the Great Basin to the Snake River valley. Until a few years earlier, he wrote, most of the valley had been part of the Fort Hall Reservation and closed to settlement, though stockmen found it a convenient range for grazing in season.
How it began, as he heard it
The digitized text of the page has lost nearly every year. The years given here, and a few words the text garbles, are as the page image was read in the site's earlier research.
In 1892, Jenson wrote, Bowen, of Samaria in Malad Valley, came over with others to look for homesteads and water. Part of Bannock Valley, he said, had by then been released from earlier claims. Up what was known locally as Knox Canyon, on the west side of the valley, they found a stream rising high up that was lost in the canyon before it reached the open valley below. The men went to work and built a canal about seven miles long to bring that water down to the land they had taken up.
In 1893 Bowen built the first cabin raised by Latter-day Saints in the valley. The first grain was raised in 1894 without irrigation. Irrigation began in 1896, when about 1,000 bushels of grain were raised, and that winter of 1896–97 some of the settlers who had brought their families over stayed with them in the new settlement. In 1900 a branch of the church was organized with Bowen as presiding elder. A school (the text is garbled here, and it may be read as either a Sunday school or a day school) and a Primary association, the church's organization for children, were organized at the same time, "both of which are now in splendid running order."
When the post office came, the place was named Arbon "in honor of the oldest man among the original settlers," George Arbon, formerly of Samaria. Jenson gives 1897 for this. "At present there are 35 families in the new settlement," he went on, "of whom the great majority are Latter-day Saints."
The valley in 1906
Jenson also wrote for people who might move there. Thousands of acres of good land could still be taken up, and he suggested that those looking for homes might do well to see the valley before settling elsewhere. He was plain about the water, though: there was only enough to irrigate alfalfa, gardens and the young orchards. "Wheat, rye and barley are raised most successfully without irrigation."
He gave the valley's earlier history as the Latter-day Saints knew it. The colony called to settle on the Salmon River had passed through on its way north from Great Salt Lake City, and parties traveled to and fro after it. When Fort Limhi was broken up and its people were coming home, they were attacked in Bannock Valley, and one of them, Bailey Lake, was killed in March, at a point Jenson put about ten miles north of Arbon. Like the other accounts, his tells it only from the missionaries' side. The site's account of the ambush on Bannock Creek dates it March 31, 1858, and places it at the Rock Springs north of present-day Pauline.
The digitized text ends with the view. That day, he wrote, he and the stake clerk had looked down on the valley from the top of Rocky Ridge, the old road into the valley east of the Andersen homesteads, by which mail and supplies came in from Malad. He had seldom seen a more beautiful landscape. The farms, stretching up and down the valley for about eight miles, "looked like a veritable checker board," the green of the cultivated fields set against the part of the valley still covered with a growth of... There the text breaks off in the middle of a sentence; whether the letter went on is not known.
Where the accounts differ
The site's Stories set Jenson's letter beside other accounts. The family accounts remember a first ditch about a mile and a half long, where Jenson describes a canal of about seven miles. The Andersen family accounts give the first house to Otto Andersen's log house of 1893, and the Andersens were Latter-day Saints too. Other accounts have George Arbon and his son Joe staying through a first winter earlier, in 1893–94, 1894–95 or 1895–96; Jenson speaks of families staying through 1896–97. And the federal records put the first post office in 1898, with Bowen appointed postmaster on June 21 of that year, a year later than Jenson's date.
Mrs. E. A. Logan's history of the valley, printed in the American Falls Press on March 29, 1917, agrees with him on several points: D. J. Bowen had the first cabin, Bowen was the first presiding elder when the church was organized in 1900, and the settlers named their township for George Arbon because he was the oldest man among them. She described 1896–97 as a very hard winter for the pioneers who stayed. She also names J. R. Bailey as the first Sunday school superintendent, and she gives 1898, the year in the federal records, for Bowen's appointment as postmaster.
On this site: the Arbon area history, George Dennis Arbon, and the Stories entries on the first settlers and the first church congregation.