Between 1934 and 1939 the newspapers followed the efforts to get Arbon Valley's market road rebuilt: the road that carried the valley's wheat north across the Fort Hall Indian Reservation to the railroad. Idaho's governor came to inspect it, a senator promised his attention, the Indian Bureau turned the farmers down, and in 1939 another senator asked the Senate for $240,000 for a highway through the valley.
The road to the sidings
The valley had no railroad. In July 1918 the American Falls Press reckoned that the year's crop, nearly half a million bushels, would have to be hauled to Michaud, on the Oregon Short Line, twenty-five to thirty-five miles away. One road to Pocatello crossed the mountains by way of Mink Creek: the Bannock highway, which, as the Salt Lake Tribune put it in 1933, "connects Pocatello with Arbon valley." Much of the grain went by another road, north down Bannock Creek and across reservation land to the railroad sidings at Michaud and Schiller, between Pocatello and American Falls.
Heavy loads were hard on that road. The Press of December 28, 1922, announced a start on gravel:
Graveling of three and a half miles of the Arbon Valley road in highway district number one, will begin Monday, according to Irvin Allred, district engineer in charge. ... The Arbon road cuts up badly every year during the wheat hauling season ... The worst part of this road is the part that will receive the gravel first.
Twenty or twenty-one four-horse teams, all furnished by residents of the district, were to haul the gravel, so that as many people as possible would benefit from the work. The gravel came from a new pit on Bannock Creek on Indian land, used with the permission of the Indian agent at Fort Hall. In March 1929 leaders of Pocatello's chamber of commerce discussed with Congressman Addison T. Smith "a government appropriation to improve the Michaud to Arbon road."
The governor's inspection, 1934
On March 20, 1934, the Salt Lake Telegram reported from Boise that Governor C. Ben Ross was going to Pocatello to confer with A. L. Wathen of the federal Indian Service, also called the Indian Bureau, about a highway across the Fort Hall reservation that would give the valley access to markets. The road had been built years before, the governor explained, but the strain of moving "nearly a million bushels of wheat annually" out of Arbon Valley had broken it down, and it needed rebuilding.
The next day's Associated Press report said the governor, Wathen, the Indian Service attorney Jerry Humphreys of Denver, its supervising engineer L. M. Holt of Salt Lake City and local officials had inspected the part of the reservation the new road would cross. It would be a 20-mile highway giving Arbon Valley farmers access to the railroads. The old market road was "almost impassable," the report said, after much heavy farm traffic and no maintenance. Wathen was quoted as looking on the plan "with favor."
None of the reports names the route, but a 20-mile highway across the reservation toward the railroads was probably the Bannock Creek road. Nor does any of them say what the Shoshone and Bannock people of Fort Hall thought of a highway across the reservation.
A promise and a refusal, 1935–1936
On September 5, 1935, Senator William E. Borah passed through Pocatello by train on his way home to Boise and was met at the depot by delegates from the Pocatello and Blackfoot chambers of commerce. They were working for approval of the Indian Service's irrigation program under the WPA, the New Deal work-relief agency, including the Fort Hall irrigation project. The Tribune reported that Borah also assured them the proposed road program for Arbon Valley would have his further attention. Its prospects were favorable, he said, and he expected to hear from Washington about it when he reached Boise.
In June 1936 the Indian Bureau turned the farmers down. A Washington dispatch of June 11, 1936, printed in the Deseret News the next day, said that Superintendent Fred A. Gross of the Fort Hall reservation, then in Washington with a delegation, had received word that the "white farmers" asking for Indian Bureau money to improve the Arbon Valley road would have to look to other sources. The only copy found is jumbled with other columns in the scan. Fragments of it seem to put the cost of the work at $150,000 and to say that white farmers would get 95 per cent of the road's benefit, which may have been the bureau's reason, but the full report cannot be read.
A request to the Senate, 1939
On April 13, 1939, Senator Clark of Idaho asked the Senate to amend the agricultural appropriations bill with more money for blister rust control, reseeding, forest watersheds, predatory animal control and highway work. Among his requests, the Tribune reported, was $240,000 for a highway through Arbon Valley, so the area's farm products could reach the railroad sidings. The report does not say which road he meant.
That week the Tribune also reported the death of Irvin Allred, the district engineer in charge of the graveling announced in 1922. On the night of April 11 he was found dead in his overturned car a mile east of American Falls. He was 58. He had been Power County surveyor since the county was organized in 1913 (Arbon had been in Oneida County until then), and he was also engineer in charge of a Power County road district that took in part of the Arbon Valley route. The coroner found no visible injury severe enough to have caused his death, and a heart attack was suspected.
The papers read for this post do not say whether Senator Clark's $240,000 was granted, or when and how the road north was rebuilt. Nor do they name a single valley farmer among those who pressed for the road. By March 1961, when a plane crashed near Pauline, the Tribune could place the wreck about a mile from "the paved Bannock Creek road."
On this site: the first state highway tells how the new highway district set out to gravel the Bannock Creek road in 1919, the Arbon stage in Mink Creek follows the other road to Pocatello, the first oiled road traces the paving that came later, and the Pauline and West Fork history describes the north end of the valley the road ran through.
Sources
- American Falls Press, July 30, 1918, page 1
- American Falls Press, December 28, 1922, page 1
- Salt Lake Tribune, March 20, 1929, page 9
- Salt Lake Tribune, November 8, 1933, page 8
- Salt Lake Telegram, March 20, 1934, page 7
- Ogden Standard-Examiner, March 21, 1934, page 2
- Deseret News, March 21, 1934, page 16
- Salt Lake Tribune, September 6, 1935, page 2
- Deseret News, June 12, 1936, page 1
- Salt Lake Tribune, December 12, 1937, page 28
- Salt Lake Tribune, April 13, 1939, page 9
- Salt Lake Tribune, April 14, 1939, page 11
- Salt Lake Tribune, March 25, 1961, page 21