The north end of Arbon Valley, then called Bannock Valley and part of Oneida County, bordered the Fort Hall Reservation. Under an agreement signed in 1898 and ratified in 1900, the Shoshone and Bannock people gave up the reservation's southeastern part, and in 1902 that land, the Crystal basin among it, opened to homesteaders. Two Salt Lake Tribune items, from 1900 and 1904, show how the region's white press wrote about the reservation.
The Pocatello land bill
On January 23, 1900, the Tribune reported that the Senate had passed, the Friday before, Senator Shoup's bill to ratify the agreement made with the Bannock and Shoshone Indians in February 1898. Twice before, the paper said, the bill had passed the Senate only to be killed in the House, where eastern representatives saw in it "an attempt to rob the Indian of his heritage." Its long article, printed with a map of the proposed cession, set out to show otherwise.
By the paper's account, the agreement ceded nearly a third of the lands set aside for the Tribes by the Fort Bridger treaty of 1868, and the acting agent had certified that its signers were a majority of the reservation's adult men. Of the money, $75,000 was to go to a modern school at Ross Fork and the rest to the Tribes in yearly payments; the article puts the total at $600,000 in one place and $500,000 in another. Tribal members living on the ceded land could keep the land they had settled, or take land inside the smaller reservation and remove or sell their improvements.
The writer described the ceded land as mostly mountain and lava, with perhaps 50,000 acres fit to farm. In a passage too damaged in the scan to quote, he described the valley of Bannock Creek, which the Tribes would keep and where many Bannocks were farming with implements the government had given them.
He was arguing for the bill, and his account of the Tribes' lands and lives is his own, written in the condescending manner of the day. His conclusion, that the Indians "obtained decidedly the best of it," led to the passage that names the valley:
They receive a handsome sum for the lands that are useless to them, the arid hills and plains where their forefathers hunted the jack rabbit and the lava stretches where they carved the obsidian arrow heads and spear points. And they retain for their own the rich and picturesque bottom lands of the Snake, the fertile Bannock valley, the rich stretches lying south of the Blackfoot...
The "Bannock valley" the Tribes kept was probably the reservation's part of it, the lower course of Bannock Creek downstream of the settlers' farms. The writer ended with a joke, told in mock dialect, about a Bannock man and a settler's lost horse, which is not repeated here.
The land opens
Congress approved the agreement on June 6, 1900. Proclamation 472, dated May 7, 1902, opened the ceded land to settlement at noon on June 17, 1902. Settlers could take up to 160 acres each under the homestead, townsite, stone and timber and mining laws, and paid by the acre as well: $2.50 for farming land and $1.25 for grazing land, a fifth at entry and the rest at final proof, when a settler proved up by showing he had met the law's terms. The proclamation noted that allotments had already been made to each Indian living on the ceded land who wanted one.
The ceded tract began at the southwest corner of township 9 south, range 34 east, on the reservation's south boundary, and ran north from there. That corner of the cession takes in the Crystal basin, where, as the first Crystal homesteads entry tells, the first entries were made on October 2, 1902. West of the cession's line, the lower Bannock Creek country probably stayed in the reservation.
A borrowed wagon
On January 26, 1904, the Tribune's "Intermountain Nuggets" column reprinted a paragraph from the American Falls Advertiser, saying it showed the "brotherly spirit" between white men and Indians near American Falls:
Bishop Bowen of Arbon was down Wednesday with butter. There is a heavy fall of snow in the mountains, and the bishop came as far as the reservation in a sleigh. The sleighing gave out there and he had to borrow a wagon from an Indian farmer in order to complete the trip.
"Down" probably meant down to American Falls, the Advertiser's town. The bishop was probably D. J. Bowen, who had presided over the Arbon Branch of the Latter-day Saint church since its organization in 1900, as the first congregation entry tells; Arbon had no bishop in the strict sense until it became a ward in 1908, as the first bishop entry tells. The item does not name the farmer or say where he lived. The original Advertiser has not been found, so the date of that Wednesday, probably in January 1904, is not known.
The Tribes' account
The papers of 1900 and 1904 speak from the settlers' side. The Sho-Ban News, which covers the reservation, has given the Tribes' side in recent reports on a land case. In September 2025 tribal attorney Bill Bacon told the paper that in 1898 federal officials came to the Tribes to discuss ceding land back to the United States, and the agreement the Tribes signed became the 1900 Act. The Act allowed the ceded land to be disposed of in three ways: under the homestead, townsite and mining laws, one person limited to 160 acres, or by public auction. A 2024 report put the cession at 416,000 acres.
The Act still matters to the Tribes. In 2023 a federal district court ruled that a proposed land exchange between the Bureau of Land Management and the J. R. Simplot Company near Pocatello violated the 1900 Act and the government's trust responsibility to the Tribes in the ceded lands, and in August 2025 a Ninth Circuit panel affirmed the ruling. After the appeals court heard the case in November 2024, Fort Hall Business Council Chairman Lee Juan Tendoy said, "The ceded lands are still a part of our Treaty language," and that the Tribes would protect them.
On this site: Crystal follows the community that grew up on the ceded land, Pauline and West Fork tells how the line moved again when the government bought the West Fork farms in the later 1930s, and United States v. Daniels tells how the 1907 decree divided Bannock Creek's water between the Tribes downstream and the settlers upstream.