At the end of the twentieth century, regional newspapers told three stories about the farmers and ranchers of Arbon Valley, southwest of Pocatello in Power County, Idaho, and the wild animals they lived beside. In 1989 Idaho's governor held up the valley as an example of farmers and deer hunters working together. In 1997 an Arbon Valley rancher was among those who told the state they were losing livestock to mountain lions. On New Year's Day 2000 Nelda Williams shot a cougar that had killed her dog outside her home.
These papers are recent enough to be under copyright, so this post retells them in its own words and quotes only short phrases.
"No Hunting" signs, 1988
On August 15, 1989, Governor Cecil Andrus spoke to an international conference on relations between landowners and hunters. The United Press International report from Boise, printed in the Logan Herald Journal the next day, says he told the meeting that the two sides could strike a balance only when each admitted that the other had legitimate concerns. For his example he chose "southeastern Idaho's Arbon Valley."
The report describes the area as 80 miles long and about 4 miles wide, "prime deer habitat" that was also heavily farmed. In 1988, it says, more and more "No Hunting" signs went up, because landowners had had trouble with people hunting without permission, with hunters driving through their fields and with damage to their crops. Relations grew so bad that most of the valley was closed to hunting.
The scanned page is jumbled, with lines from other stories mixed into the report. It says that the Idaho Fish and Game Department worked with both groups "last summer"; the words "a balanced and reasonable" follow, but the rest of that sentence is lost. The report adds that the area had 2,663 hunters "last fall," when 1,760 deer were taken. Written in August 1989, the report probably means the summer and fall of 1988, but the page does not make the order of events clear. Nor does it say what the two sides agreed to or which landowners took part. Andrus called it a small story that showed what can happen when everyone with a stake sits down together and works out a problem.
Lions and calves, 1997
In February 1997 the Associated Press sent out a story datelined Arbon. Dozens of southeastern Idaho ranchers, saying that cougars were killing too much livestock, objected to a study proposed by the Fish and Game Department. The department wanted to measure the mountain lions' effect on deer by allowing only one lion to be killed in certain hunting areas during each of the next five years. At a meeting with two members of the Fish and Game Commission, Roy Brown and Fred Wood, the ranchers asked that hunters be allowed to kill more of the cats instead.
The story quoted an Arbon Valley rancher. The ranchers did not want to sit through the study with the lions around, he said, "worrying about our livestock and fearing for our children." He figured he had lost an average of 12 calves a year to lions over the past four years. The scanned text, from the Ogden Standard-Examiner of February 16, 1997, gives his name as Barr Williams. The same page drops the last letters of several other words, so he was probably Barry Williams, a cattle rancher in the valley and a son of Donald "Sod" and Nelda Williams. The article itself does not settle it. None of the papers read for this post say what the commission decided about the study.
A cougar on the porch, 2000
On New Year's Day 2000, a cougar came to the home of Donald and Nelda Williams in Arbon Valley. The Associated Press carried the story, and Betsy Marston, editor of High Country News, retold it in a column that the Park Record printed on February 19. The cougar killed the couple's blue heeler, then went after their cats along the front porch. Nelda Williams took her rifle and killed the cougar, a male. A wildlife biologist told her that cougars were usually protected, but that in this case she was in the clear.
She was 76 that winter. Her age and her husband's name match Nelda Ward Williams, the wife of Sod Williams, whose memory of the winter of 1948–49 is told on this site.
A news photograph of her holding a .22 rifle reached Susan J. Tweit, a Colorado writer, who opened a column on mountain lions with it. The Logan Herald Journal printed the column on May 11, 2000. Tweit noted that most western states allow a person to kill a lion that threatens people, livestock or pets, so Williams had the legal right to kill it; straight after, she asked whether Williams also had the moral right. Later in the column she reported Williams as saying she shot the lion because it had "got in her face" by killing her dog. Tweit disagreed, and argued that people who live in lion country have to learn to live with lions. The column notes that voters in several western states had already restricted lion hunting, so the Arbon Valley stories were part of an argument over lions that was going on across the West.
The papers leave questions open. They do not say what the valley's farmers and hunters agreed to or whether the arrangement lasted, whether the lion study went ahead, or whether the ranchers got the larger hunt they asked for.
On this site: Nelda Williams's own account, Winter of 1948-49 Hits Hard In Arbon; the Ward family, into which she was born; and her 90th birthday party in 2013.