In the fall of 1914 a letter mailed at American Falls for Crystal, no more than twenty-five miles away by a direct route, went by rail to Brigham City, Utah, back north to Malad, and over the divide to Arbon and Pauline before anyone carried it on to Crystal. For two years the American Falls Press followed the valley's campaign for a better way.
Until 1913 the valley lay in Oneida County, seated at Malad, and its mail came from there (the first mail carriers); that year it joined the new Power County, seated at American Falls. The Malad mail ran on a star route, a route between post offices carried under contract.
The Malad contract
On March 5, 1914, the Salt Lake Tribune listed the Idaho star-route contracts for the next four years: Malad City to Arbon went to a Malad City man at $1,500. In the Press of the same day, J. W. Butler of Arbon, in town the day before, called the renewal "a great disappointment to the people of his section," who had hoped for a route from American Falls instead. In April the Press reported the American Falls Board of Trade working for one.
The long way round
On October 15, 1914, the Press led its front page with news brought by C. R. Butterfield of Crystal (printed "C. K." in this story). He had seen no newspaper since the county fair three weeks before. Crystal had a post office, but "No mail route has ever been established to Crystal." Its mail came whenever someone went to Pauline. The paper traced a letter's way:
Mail leaves here for Brigham, 179 miles by rail, and then is taken back to Malad 60 miles by rail. From Malad there is a tri-weekly service to Arbon, 37 miles, over a divide that is sometimes impassable in winter except for letter mail which can be taken on horseback or on foot.
From Arbon the mail went twice a week to Pauline, and the Crystal post office lay nine or ten miles beyond. Yet Crystal was only eighteen miles from the Pocatello post office, by a good road. Delivery took several days, sometimes two or three weeks. Butterfield often took a hundred letters to Pocatello or American Falls to be mailed, and his neighbors did the same. The Press asked for an 18-mile route from Pocatello.
Accounts differ here. A Pocatello item the Press reprinted in 1912 had said a star route from Pocatello to Crystal and Pauline was recently established, and the Crystal page, from a later local history, has neighbors fetching mail from Hawkins Basin; these papers say it came through Pauline.
"About the poorest mail service in Idaho"
In January 1915 I. W. Phillips, "one of the pioneers of Crystal," told the Press the settlement most needed a mail route. On February 4 the paper's new Pauline correspondent opened the first "Pauline Paragraphs" by explaining why weekly news would be hard to send:
We, no doubt, have about the poorest mail service in Idaho. Our precinct, and also Crystal, both of Power County, are without an adequate mail service. We have petitioned our postmaster general until, I suppose his eyes have got sore reading them.
Pauline was forty miles from Malad, which supplied both settlements, and about twenty-seven from American Falls or Pocatello. A petition for a route from American Falls had failed: "The result is, we have carried our mail three years from Arbon to Pauline. And Crystal has put up with this for five years."
The same issue reported that Butterfield had just received his first mail in two months, and it called the "parsimonious policy of the postal department" indefensible. A week later the Press reported Postmaster General Burleson's announcement that no new rural delivery or star routes would be established for an indefinite period, owing to "the deplorable condition of Uncle Sam's finances." Economy elsewhere, the Press said, should save the $1,000 needed to pay for the route.
A petition and a rural route
In March 1915 W. F. Kowallis, bishop of the Meadow Ward at Pauline, had gathered the names of the heads of 346 families (345 in the headline) from Arbon, Pauline and Crystal "who want a mail route established giving them direct connection with American Falls." He expected bids soon for star routes to Arbon from both American Falls and Pocatello.
What came that spring was a different service: an examination at the Arbon post office on April 24 "for the position of mail carrier on R. F. D. No. 1." Rural free delivery brought mail out to the farms along a route, and by 1916 its regular carrier was Newell Leishman (the first rural mail route). Arbon's own mail still came from Malad; in February 1916 that route was so blocked with snow that the carrier had to change horses four times.
In December 1915 Elmer Benton, a Crystal farmer, reported mail three times a week from Pocatello, whereas before "sometimes it took weeks to get a piece of mail there from any outside point." Yet in January 1916 Butterfield said the Crystal office had only just received its mail for October and November. "Getting mail out of the office is like getting money out of a busted bank," the Press wrote, "you have got to wait until it just naturally drifts in." The papers do not explain the difference.
The Pocatello route
In October 1916 papers from Parma to Salmon City printed the news:
The contract for the star mail route between Pocatello and Arbon has been let to Lorin Bailey of Arbon. A road is now in operation between the towns and the route will also serve Crystal and Pauline.
On November 2 the Arbon column said Arbon people were proud of their mail from Pocatello, which came "several days sooner," with Lorin Bailey carrying it (the first mail route from Pocatello).
In March 1917 Mrs. E. A. Logan's history of Bannock Valley in the Press said the Pocatello route supplied Crystal, Pauline and Arbon, and a rural carrier served everyone south of the Arbon post office three times a week. It gave the valley, she wrote, "the best mail service in the county." That April Bailey bought a car, but with snow still lying he could drive the reservation road only as far as a place near the cement bridge at Pauline, where he changed to a sleigh.
On this site: the first post office at Crystal, the first post office at Pauline and Pauline and West Fork.
Sources
- American Falls Press, August 22, 1912, page 1
- Salt Lake Tribune, March 5, 1914, page 4
- American Falls Press, March 5, 1914, page 5
- American Falls Press, April 9, 1914, page 1
- American Falls Press, October 15, 1914, page 1
- American Falls Press, January 21, 1915, page 5
- American Falls Press, February 4, 1915, page 4
- American Falls Press, February 4, 1915, page 5
- American Falls Press, February 11, 1915, page 4
- American Falls Press, March 11, 1915, page 1
- American Falls Press, April 8, 1915, page 4
- American Falls Press, December 9, 1915, page 8
- American Falls Press, January 13, 1916, page 1
- American Falls Press, February 24, 1916, page 8
- American Falls Press, May 18, 1916, page 2
- Parma Herald, October 19, 1916, page 3
- Idaho Recorder, October 20, 1916, page 6
- American Falls Press, November 2, 1916, page 12
- American Falls Press, March 29, 1917, page 7
- American Falls Press, April 26, 1917, page 3
- The first rural mail route, Stories, on this site
- Crystal, on this site
- The first mail carriers, Stories, on this site
- The first ward at Pauline, Stories, on this site