On Saturday, February 11, 1922, Frank Kulock took his sleigh to Pauline, at the north end of Arbon Valley, for the mail. A blizzard caught him on the way home, and he froze to death about 150 yards from his house. His wife did not find him until the Tuesday. Papers from American Falls to Salt Lake City told the story.
A deep-snow winter
The snow was already deep. Early in February the American Falls Press's Pauline correspondent wrote that four people had gone over to Crystal on a Sunday afternoon "just to see how deep the snow was." A later Pauline column reported that a pie dance for the Pauline baseball team on a Friday night, probably the one before the storm, was "in every way a success." On Friday evening, February 10, a snowstorm "almost without parallel in recent years" swept over American Falls.
In the valley the papers put the blizzard on Saturday; they do not say whether it was the same storm. The Salt Lake Telegram's Pocatello correspondent wrote that the blizzard in the Arbon valley "raged with unabated fury for several hours Saturday and the thermometer dropped very low." At Pauline the snow came with "one of the strongest west winds we have had this winter," and the column reported, "The little village of Pauline is nearly snow-bound since the heavy snow Saturday night." The column, evidently written early the next week, does not mention Frank Kulock.
The mail trip
Frank Kulock, a Prussian immigrant, had homesteaded about two miles west of the Pauline crossroads. According to the Press, he started for Pauline in his sleigh at 2:30 that Saturday afternoon and left for home at 3:30. The blizzard overtook him and he evidently lost his way. In one of his own fields, close to his house, he stopped and unhitched his horses, apparently meaning to drive them home. The horses, it was presumed, broke away, and they reached home on Sunday evening.
His wife, named in the site's research as Augusta, at first believed he had stopped with neighbors to wait out the storm. The Press went on:
When he failed to return Monday she began to look for him. She located the sleigh but saw no trace of her husband.
Tuesday morning she started out once again and 100 feet from the sleigh saw a black object sticking out of the snow. This proved to be the foot of her husband. Screams of the woman brought neighbors to the scene and the body was removed to the ranch house and later taken to Pocatello.
He lay on his back with a bruise on his forehead, which, the paper wrote, suggested a kick from one of the horses or a fall. The receipts for his $1,000 life insurance were in his pocket. On Wednesday two neighbors, B. A. Burge and Ed. C. England, took the body to Pocatello. A Catholic funeral was planned for Thursday, and the site's research records his burial in Mountain View Cemetery at Pocatello. The Press ended its account: "Mr. Kulock had a son who has not been located."
How the papers told it
The Pocatello Tribune put the story on its front page on Wednesday, February 15, under the headline "Loses Way in Blizzard and Meets Death." The Salt Lake Telegram and the Deseret News printed it the next day, and a shorter version went around the weekly papers: the Filer Record in Idaho on February 23, and the Beaver County News, the Gunnison Valley News and the South Cache Courier in Utah on February 24. A separate short item from American Falls, in the Press's wording, ran in the Meridian Times on March 3.
The accounts differ in small ways. The Press called him John Kulock, and the Salt Lake papers and most of the reprints called him Frank Koolick. A notice in the Press of March 17 settles the name: on March 10 the Power County probate court granted letters of administration on the "estate of Frank Kulock, deceased," to C. A. Valentine. (The valley had been in Oneida County until Power County was formed in 1913.) The papers gave his age as 58, but the birth date in the site's research, March 29, 1864, makes him 57. The Telegram named the second neighbor as "Ed Ingling." The Press's Ed. C. England was a Pauline neighbor; the Pauline column that reported the storm has Mr. and Mrs. Ed. England visiting the Burges on the Sunday. "Ingling" was probably the Telegram's garbled version of his name.
The son did come home. On March 13 the Pauline correspondent wrote that Joe Kulock had arrived home after about three years in Minnesota. The site's research identifies him as Frank's son, who kept the place until his own death in 1941.
The rest of the winter
The snow stayed. On February 24 Erma Bailey Lusk, 21, the wife of Park Lusk and the mother of two small boys, died at Pauline after ten days of pneumonia. Her funeral was held in the Pauline meeting house on Sunday, February 26, and she was buried in the Arbon cemetery. A Cache Valley weekly, the South Cache Courier, reported that F. L. Kerr had come home from her funeral, and that from Pocatello the party had gone twenty miles by auto and then on by sleigh "thru the heaviest snow of the year. Three feet on the level, houses and barns drifted over!" By mid-March the Pauline column was reporting a "lagrippe epidemic," with two or three sick in nearly every family, though none seriously.
The thaw at the end of March brought trouble of its own. The Arbon correspondent wrote:
The U. S. mail from Pocatello did not get here last Friday due to the Bannock Creek bridge being under water. The flat near there was all submerged due to the melting snow.
The weather had turned warm and the snow was going fast, but the roads were almost impassable, the snow being "so rotten, that the horses break clear through," with water underneath. Teams went out on Thursday to break a new road from Pauline to Arbon for the mail carrier, D. Roper. The rural carrier, Ed Snyder, split his route, with "his son Dave Evans" riding the north and east part on horseback while Snyder carried the mail to the south end. By early May, after two weeks of fine weather, the Arbon column reported the snow going rapidly.
On this site: the Stories entries for Frank Kulock and Erma Lusk, the page on Park and Erma Lusk, and the history of Pauline and West Fork.
Sources
- American Falls Press, February 10, 1922, page 6
- Pocatello Tribune, February 15, 1922, page 1
- Salt Lake Telegram, February 16, 1922, page 2
- Deseret News, February 16, 1922, page 6
- American Falls Press, February 17, 1922, page 1
- Filer Record, February 23, 1922, page 5
- Beaver County News, February 24, 1922, page 6
- Gunnison Valley News, February 24, 1922, page 6
- South Cache Courier, February 24, 1922, page 2
- American Falls Press, February 24, 1922, page 7
- Meridian Times, March 3, 1922, page 2
- American Falls Press, March 10, 1922, page 4
- South Cache Courier, March 10, 1922, page 8
- American Falls Press, March 17, 1922, page 4
- American Falls Press, March 31, 1922, page 7
- American Falls Press, May 5, 1922, page 6