Horace Humphrey farmed in Arbon Valley, at Crystal and Arbon, from the 1910s until his retirement, and for a time his brother Roy farmed beside him. The American Falls Press noticed the brothers now and then between 1911 and 1922. Long afterward, obituaries in Utah papers followed two of Horace's Arbon-born sons, one to the Arctic coast of Alaska and the other to the Korean War, the valley's dry farms and a Utah rocket plant.
Two brothers in Bannock Valley
Roy Humphrey reached the papers first. In February 1911 the Rockland Valley column of the Press noted a visit from "Roy Humphrey, of Arbon." Arbon was then in Oneida County; Power County, with its seat at American Falls, was formed in 1913. In June 1915 the South Arbon column reported that "Roy Humphrey spent Sunday at the Lee home," and later that month the North and Central Arbon column listed Humphries, probably Roy, among four neighbors who had bought a combine harvester together, one of the valley's first combines.
Horace's name appears in July 1917, when the Press printed the county's draft registrants with their numbers for the drawing: number 490 was Horace Watrous Humphrey of Arbon. His obituary of 1959, whose scanned text is badly scrambled, appears to say that he was born in Washington, married Leah M. Hargett there in December 1915, and homesteaded in Arbon Valley from 1916.
In October 1917 the Press's roving column, "Along the Highways," gathered farm news around Arbon and Pauline and turned to Roy:
Roy Humphrey has sold all his mules except one team. He disposed of two spans of mules last week for $650, and one other span brought $300. Mr. Humphrey has a ranch two miles east of Arbon and will hereafter use horses on the farm. Besides raising grain he intends to go into the business of raising horses, range grazing land being close at hand in the mountains to the east of the valley.
Leased land north of Crystal
By the harvest of 1918 both brothers were working at Crystal, north of Arbon. Crystal itself had been settled on ceded Fort Hall Reservation land, opened to entry in 1902, as the Crystal history tells, and the reservation still lay beyond it. On Wednesday, September 11, 1918, Horace came in to American Falls for supplies for his combine. The Press reported that he and Roy were farming leased land on the reservation north of Crystal and that year were threshing better than twenty bushels an acre from their Bluestem wheat. The paper went on:
The brothers formerly farmed in Bannock valley. They are of the kind who are at all times optimistic, and if a little failure in past years was their fate now and then they greeted it with a smile just the same, if success rewards their efforts they smile a little more and make plans to obtain still more success in another year.
Bannock Valley was the older name for Arbon Valley, as the Arbon history explains; the paper set that earlier farming apart from the brothers' present lease on reservation land north of Crystal.
On December 6, 1918, Horace and Leah's son William R. Humphrey was born at Arbon, according to his obituary. In November 1922 the Arbon column noted that Mr. and Mrs. Horace Humphreys of Crystal had moved to Arbon for the winter. Their son Hubert S. Humphrey was born at Arbon on December 26, 1928, and his obituary says he grew up and attended school in Arbon. It was a large family: when Hubert died, his obituary counted five brothers and a sister who had died before him and three sisters still living.
Later years
Horace's 1959 obituary calls him a retired Arbon Valley farmer and appears to say that he and Leah left the valley for Pocatello in 1957. He died at his home there on September 14, 1959, at sixty-nine.
William's obituary says only that he was reared in Idaho. He later worked for the Intermountain School, probably the federal boarding school for Native American students at Brigham City, Utah. By 1971 he lived at Barrow, Alaska, on the Arctic coast (the town is now Utqiaġvik), where he was an executive of the Barrow Council on Alcoholism. He died in an Ogden hospital on June 13, 1971, at fifty-two, and was buried in the Brigham City cemetery. The Brigham City Box Elder Journal, which printed his obituary, placed his mother at Pocatello and his brothers and sisters at Arimo and Pocatello in Idaho, Brigham City and the town of Roy in Utah, Reno in Nevada, and elsewhere.
Hubert served in the Army from December 1950 to November 1952, during the Korean War. His obituary says he dry farmed in Arbon Valley for several years and worked for Thiokol, the rocket-motor maker, at its plant at Promontory, Utah; it does not give the years. He died at Pocatello on July 9, 1995, at sixty-six, and was buried at Restlawn Memorial Gardens in Pocatello with military graveside rites.
What the records leave open
The scanned text of Horace's obituary is mixed with several others on the same page, so what it says of his birth, marriage, homesteading and move to Pocatello is a careful reading, not a certainty. The papers read for this post do not say where his homestead lay; in 1918 the brothers were on leased reservation land. The sons' obituaries say they were born at Arbon, while the Press called Horace "of Crystal" in 1918 and Mr. and Mrs. Horace Humphreys "of Crystal" in 1922, and the papers do not say exactly where in the valley each was born. Roy's later years are not followed in these papers.
On this site: Crystal tells the history of the community the Press gave as the brothers' home in 1918, and The first combines follows the machine Roy probably shared in 1915.
Sources
- American Falls Press, February 4, 1911, page 3
- American Falls Press, June 3, 1915, page 4
- American Falls Press, June 24, 1915, page 8
- American Falls Press, July 10, 1917, page 8
- American Falls Press, October 30, 1917, page 3
- American Falls Press, September 13, 1918, page 6
- American Falls Press, November 16, 1922, page 8
- Salt Lake Tribune, September 15, 1959, page 26
- Box Elder Journal, June 17, 1971, page 13
- Ogden Standard-Examiner, July 10, 1995, page 20