On October 26, 1917, the American Falls Press gave a long article, headed "Arbon's First Settler," to David J. Bowen, whose ranch lay at the foot of Bowen's Peak on the west side of Arbon Valley. Its roving farm writer, who signed himself "The Pilgrim," had heard Bowen tell how the valley's settlement began.
When Bowen came, the valley was called Bannock Valley and lay in Oneida County; Power County was created in 1913. The Pilgrim began:
Some people who have been in the county less than a score of years count themselves as among the pioneers. In a measure they are, but they are not in a class with David J. Bowen of Arbon, who was one of three men to begin the making of a home there twenty-four years ago.
Over the mountain from Samaria
Bowen was born in Salt Lake City in 1861, the son of a Welsh father who came west in the first handcart company of 1856. He grew up on Henderson Creek in Malad Valley and at Samaria, married Mary S. Smith, a native of Spanish Fork, in 1884, and after three unfavorable years in Wyoming's Salt River country was back at Samaria by 1892.
In June 1892 he made his first trip into Bannock Valley with S. D. and H. E. Davis of Samaria. The digitized text is scrambled here, but apparently S. D. Davis had been there before with a Spanish teacher from the Brigham Young academy at Provo, who had reported a running stream in one of the canyons. When Bowen found that the stream, later called Knox Creek, was "a permanent water course and not a mere freshet from melting snow," he staked a claim.
The land was not yet surveyed, so he held it by squatter's right. The Pilgrim dates the claim to 1892; Mrs. E. A. Logan's history of the valley, printed in the Press in March 1917, has Bowen and others staking their land in 1893. A homestead patent to him, dated April 17, 1907 and probably for this land, is in the site's Bowen family album.
The cabin of 1893
In the fall of 1893 Bowen built "the first settler's log cabin erected in Arbon valley north of the west fork of Bannock creek," of quaking aspen cut in Knox Canyon. Cowboys had put up shacks near the creek bottoms, but those were not settlers' cabins, "and to Mr. Bowen belongs the credit of being the pioneer rancher of the valley."
The family lived in the cabin three summers, wintering in Samaria. In the third season they raised enough hay and grain to winter their stock and stayed; Bowen's brother-in-law, W. T. Hawkins, and his family had the cabin that winter, while the Bowens lived in a log building later used as a stable.
Other families have their own claims to the first house. The Andersen accounts give it to Otto Andersen's log house of 1893, and on November 23, 1917, the Pilgrim found a building put up in 1893 by Andrew Anderson, father of the Anderson brothers, still in use as an ice house on H. W. Anderson's ranch; these are probably Andrew Andersen of Mendon and his son Henry Waldemar. On November 6 he wrote that J. N. Arbon had farmed in the valley since coming with his father, George Arbon, in 1892.
Water, mail and church
Work on the Bannock Valley Irrigation project began in the spring of 1893. Bowen and a Davis, probably S. D., did all the surveying "with a common spirit level," and by 1917 the main canal ran more than eight miles, to the Jesse Ward ranch.
In 1898 the valley's first post office opened in a larger log house Bowen had built, with Bowen as postmaster. It was named for George Arbon as "the oldest in point of years" of the settlers, and the valley later took the name too. For six months there was no mail contract, and patrons had to "take turn about in carrying mail from Malad, 35 miles away." Fred Paine was the first carrier the settlers hired, and in the spring of 1899 the first government contract went to an Evans whose initials the digitized text garbles, possibly Dave Evans, whom his family remembers as the first carrier. Mrs. Logan's history instead puts a young Fred Payne first, carrying from Samaria. The Pilgrim went on:
In those days the mail was carried on the saddle or in a wagon, but now the mail is brought in by automobile three times a week. Mr. Bowen relates that the cancellation for the first quarter of his term as postmaster amounted to $1.32.
By 1917, said the postmistress, Louie Leavitt, cancellations and money-order fees brought in well over $100 a quarter.
In 1900 the settlers became a branch of the Samaria Ward of the Latter-day Saints, with Bowen as presiding elder. A garbled sentence then mentions the Arbon Ward of 1908 and says Bowen was made bishop "and holds that responsible position now." Joseph N. Arbon was the first bishop in 1908; Bowen succeeded Ed Davis, as the Deseret Evening News reported on January 6, 1917, and a Deseret News church notice of October 21, 1944, gives his term as 1916 to 1922. In 1917 he was the bishop, though not the first.
The ranch and the old cabin
Bowen owned 320 acres under the peak "named Bowen's peak in his honor," and farmed it with his son Brigham, whose 640 acres adjoined it. His first wife, Mary, had died in May 1905; in 1912 he married Maggie Young of Perry, Utah. He called the winter just past "the longest and the most severe" he had known there. The valley lies beside the Fort Hall Reservation, and Bowen said the Indians who hunted and camped near his ranch had always been "his good friends."
In "Along the Highways," on the same page, the Pilgrim wrote that Bowen was thinking of removing the old cabin, and pleaded for it to stand as one of the historic cabins of the region. The row of tall trees before it had grown, he wrote, "from little sprigs."
It has stood up there at the foot of the mountain since 1893 and surely is entitled to its reward of being classed among the historical structures of the Gem state, having witnessed the transformation of a great domain of erstwhile sagebrush flats into numerous productive farms.
Whether Bowen kept the cabin, the papers read for this post do not say. He lived until 1955, as his portrait page on this site records.