Early on Friday, November 9, 1917, two men drove a wagonload of stolen wheat away from a grain platform at Pauline, at the north end of Arbon Valley. Before dawn they were under arrest in front of a farmhouse about three miles to the south. The American Falls Press told the story the next Tuesday, and later followed the two men to the penitentiary and to their pardons.
Wheat at the platform
That fall buyers took the valley's wheat at platforms at Pauline and Crystal, sparing farmers the long haul to the railroad, and trucks carried the sacks to the railroad at Michaud. By early November bad roads had stopped the trucks for a time, and the sacks piled up. The valley's first grain warehouse grew from a platform at Pauline.
Ed England bought wheat at the Zaring platform and lived just behind it. For the past few weeks loads coming in from the south had first gone to the scales at the tithing yard, a quarter mile north, to be weighed, and then come back to the platform to be unloaded.
A lantern and a telephone pole
About one o'clock that Friday morning England heard a wagon. Thinking some farmer had come in late with a load, he went out and saw it heading for the tithing-yard scales. Instead of stopping at the platform, it went on south past it, and England grew suspicious. The Press continued:
He went for a lantern and followed the tracks of the wagon from the platform to the tithing scales and saw that the load had been turned there. This evidently was done to throw him off the trail. Mr. England telephoned to Deputy Sheriff Secrist, who resides about three miles south of the platform, and this officer went north to the first cross road and awaited the coming of the wagon.
It was very dark. Secrist could hear the men talking, and heard them mention that a light was burning in his house. They stopped the team. After about ten minutes Secrist went back home, "blew out the light and then took station behind a telephone pole in front of his yard." The Press went on:
When the outfit was abreast of him he stepped out, halted them and told them to drive into his yard, placed the men under arrest, put the team into his stable, then put the men to bed in his home and stood guard over them until morning, when they were taken to American Falls and placed in the county jail.
American Falls was the Power County seat; the valley had been in Oneida County until 1913. The men confessed to taking 29 sacks of wheat and asked Secrist to telephone England "so they could square the matter. This Mr. Secrist declined to do." The paper believed they had meant to bring the load back the next day and sell it to the platform it came from.
Two to fourteen years
They were Godfrey Harris, who had been threshing in Arbon Valley that fall with his own outfit, and William Straugh, who worked for him, both of American Falls. On Friday the Press added that Harris had come from Washington state and that Straugh had once been fined for bootlegging. The papers spell his name both Straugh and Strough.
The two waived a preliminary hearing. On Wednesday, November 14, they went before Judge Terrell at Pocatello, pleaded guilty and were given indeterminate sentences of two to fourteen years. "TWO TO FOURTEEN YEARS FOR WHEAT THIEVES," ran the headline on November 16. On the evening of November 15 the penitentiary chaplain, James Leitch, came for them and left with them for Boise. "But retribution came quickly," the paper wrote, "and the men will eat breakfast this morning with Warden DeKay, as enforced guests at the penitentiary."
The names caused one more stir. A neighbor told Andrew Stroh of Aberdeen that his son William, a farmer near Blackfoot, was the man in jail. Father and son both came to American Falls to set it right, and on November 20 the Press obliged: "Stroh is Stro. Straugh is Straw."
The sentences did not run their length. On October 8, 1918, the Press reported: "Pardons have been granted William H. Strough and Gottfried H. Harris, to take effect December 24." It recalled that they had pleaded guilty to stealing wheat in Arbon and had been "caught with the goods" by Constable Hy Secrist. Christmas Eve of 1918 came a little more than thirteen months after the men reached Boise.
The farmer-deputy
The 1917 reports give only his surname, but the 1918 notice and later items make the officer, almost certainly, Hyrum Secrist, "Hy" in the valley columns. In March 1917 the Press had noted that Hyrum Secrist had built a "fine bungalow on his splendid farm," and that his son Jesse had finished a house on his own homestead. Mrs. Secrist was a sister of William Affleck and of Mrs. John Bullock of Arbon. The papers do not say when he became deputy sheriff or constable.
He went on keeping the peace in the valley. In July 1920, in the same Arbon column that credited neighbors with "keeping the sheep back," the correspondent reported that he had spent two weeks "riding the ranges, on the lookout for sheepmen, also arresting several for Trespassing." On March 17, 1921, he was with Deputy Sheriff Charles Torrance's posse in the gunfight at W. H. Ball's place near Pauline; the Press reported that Ball's first shot took the cap from Secrist's head. Torrance was mortally wounded, as the Stories entry on the shootings tells. That September Secrist and a deputy game warden from Blackfoot were in the Crystal country "rounding up violators of the game law," and late that year the county paid him for serving subpoenas and warrants of arrest.
He kept order of another kind as well. In the summer of 1922 he managed the Saturday dances at Central Hall in Arbon, newly renovated. In August a correspondent complained that moonshine had broken up a dance, wrote that Secrist had tried to make the hall a clean and respectable place, and warned that it would be closed if that crowd kept it up. That November Mr. and Mrs. Hy Secrist and Mr. and Mrs. Jesse Secrist moved to Pocatello for the winter.
On this site: the history of Pauline and West Fork tells of the north end of the valley, the Stories entry on the first grain warehouse tells of Ed England's wheat buying at Pauline, and another tells of a later charge of wheat theft, against Joe Kulock in 1927.
Sources
- American Falls Press, March 29, 1917, page 7
- American Falls Press, November 13, 1917, page 1
- American Falls Press, November 13, 1917, page 3
- American Falls Press, November 16, 1917, page 1
- American Falls Press, November 20, 1917, page 1
- American Falls Press, October 8, 1918, page 3
- American Falls Press, March 12, 1920, page 3
- American Falls Press, July 16, 1920, page 3
- American Falls Press, March 18, 1921, page 1
- American Falls Press, September 23, 1921, page 4
- American Falls Press, December 9, 1921, page 9
- American Falls Press, July 13, 1922, page 4
- American Falls Press, August 24, 1922, page 1
- American Falls Press, November 2, 1922, page 2