When the Bannock Creek lands were allotted, 1911–1922

North of Pauline, Bannock Creek runs on through the Fort Hall Reservation. In the 1910s the government divided the reservation's land there into allotments for individual tribal members, and the American Falls Press reported what that meant for the valley next door.

Tribal members had farmed on Bannock Creek long before allotment. By the recollection of W. T. Oliver, printed in the Press in February 1915, Mosho, Pocatello Tom, China Eye and two others settled on the creek just above the railroad crossing in 1881 and broke the first ground there, planting a few potatoes and a few acres of wheat.

Allotting the reservation

A 1909 report reprinted in the Press from a Boise paper explained that each member of a family, not only its head, now received an allotment, "held in trust for a number of years" so that buyers could not take up the claims cheaply. In May 1911 the Press reprinted a Pocatello Tribune item, badly worn in the scan, saying that the allotting party had worked nearly all winter and that the corners of land owned by tribal members would be marked with iron posts, apparently because of boundary disputes with white homesteaders.

A road before the lines were drawn

Arbon had been in Oneida County until 1913; it now belonged to Power County, governed from American Falls. The valley's road to Michaud, the railroad stop between American Falls and Pocatello, ran across the reservation, and the new county's commissioners saw that allotment could close it. Their minutes, printed in the Press on October 28, 1915, gave the reason: the government was "now allotting the lands in Bannock valley on the reservation," and after the allotment permission for a highway would not be given. Without a road, the board went on, the people of Arbon or Bannock valley "would have no means of egress or ingress." Under a contract of June 14, 1915, Highway District No. 1 built the southern 5.2 miles of the road across the reservation, and in October the county ordered its bill of $4,554.08 paid. On December 2, 1915, the valley's news column reported that the old road over the reservation to Michaud had been given up for the new county road, which the farmers were "very proud of."

Leasing allotted land

Allotted land could also be leased to outside farmers. In June 1916 the Arbon column reported that W. E. Dawson was "busy plowing his leased land near Birch creek on the Indian reserve." Dawson, born at Weston, Idaho, in 1872, had homesteaded near Pauline in 1908 and was the Meadow Ward's first clerk. In the fall of 1917 the Press reported his harvest:

W. E. Dawson, who owns and farms a quarter section of fine land, one mile southwest of Pauline, this year harvested an average of 12 bushels of Turkey Red wheat from 130 acres on this ranch, and from 150 acres which he is farming on the Fort Hall reservation he harvested from 10 to 14½ bushels per acre of Turkey Red.

A November profile put the leased tract at 130 acres averaging 14½ bushels. The two accounts differ on the acreage, and neither says whose land he farmed.

Another valley man moved onto the reservation itself. In May 1917 the Idaho Republican of Blackfoot, describing farms at the Blackfoot and Fort Hall end of the reservation, well north of Bannock Creek, reported that "Wallace Jenks is a white man who moved recently from the Bannock valley country to the reservation and is leasing 80 acres." He was probably W. W. Jenks, who had homesteaded near Pauline. The same column described tribal farmers working their own land beside the white lessees.

Allotment lines

By 1918 the allotments were shaping where a road could go. At a special meeting on May 23, 1918, R. B. Greenwood, chairman of Highway District No. 1, reported on a talk with H. H. Miller, superintendent of the Fort Hall reservation:

the Indian department had requested that all new roads or highways be constructed, as far as practicable, on section lines or allotment lines, and that the old road between Bannock creek and Michaud as now constructed on the old railroad right of way grade, does not follow allotment lines, and will eventually be closed

The department recommended building any road from Bannock Creek to Michaud on the Idaho Pacific highway survey north of the railroad track; the board accepted the report and voted to turn the road it was building toward Michaud north to meet that survey.

The allottees

Federal land records list more than fifty trust patents, nearly all dated May 23, 1916, that include land in the two reservation townships north and west of Pauline, most of them for 180 acres. Among the names the land office wrote down are Pocatello, Dover, Hardy, Yupe, Ondabaga and Mosho, including a David Mosho.

On June 3, 1921, the Press reported that a "Bannock Indian of note," whose name the worn scan gives as Dave Mosho or something close to it, was to be buried that day at his ranch home on the reservation near Rattlesnake Creek. The paper spoke well of him and said several local people would attend the funeral. He may have been the David Mosho of the 1916 patent, and perhaps Oliver's Mosho, but no record read here says so. The name appears again in 1988, when a range fire on the reservation northwest of Pauline was reported as the Mosho fire.

Inherited land for sale

The Indian Service also sold the land of allottees who had died. In January 1922 the superintendent at Fort Hall invited bids, due March 1, "for the sale of deceased Indian land": irrigable allotments of 20 and 80 acres and grazing allotments of 160 acres in Power, Bannock and Bingham counties. Similar notices ran in 1923 and 1924. They do not list the tracts, so whether any Bannock Creek land was sold, and to whom, is not known.

The papers read for this post wrote from the settlers' side and do not record what the Bannock Creek families thought of allotment, the leases or the road. The Tribes' own history says the reservation was reduced to its present size "through subsequent legislation and the allotment process." In November 2024 the Sho-Ban News reported a speaker's figures: about 546,000 acres today, 97 percent of it held in trust for the Tribes and individual allottees.

On this site: Pauline and West Fork, United States v. Daniels, the first state highway and the foreclosures of 1920–1925, which reached the Dawson and Jenks farms.