The Jenks family's years at Pauline, 1909–1923

From about 1909 into the early 1920s, the family of William Wallace Jenks farmed at Pauline, at the north end of Arbon Valley where it meets the Fort Hall Reservation. Their story comes back in pieces, from obituaries printed between 1952 and 2002 and from short items in the papers of their own day.

From Weston

The Jenkses came from Weston, Idaho, a Cache Valley town just north of the Utah line. W. W. Jenks's first wife, Annie Severn Randall Jenks, was the mother of Wallace Albert, born at North Ogden, Utah, in 1888; Asael, born there in 1894; and Olive Ann, born at Weston in 1899. Olive's obituary says her mother died when Olive was two. Lucy Dawson, born at Weston in 1874, became W. W.'s wife, and both of Albert's obituaries name her as his stepmother.

The obituaries do not agree on when the family reached the valley. Lucy's, in the Logan Herald Journal in 1953, dates her marriage to October 1898 and says she "upon marriage moved to Arbon Valley." Olive's says the family moved to Arbon Valley in 1909, and Albert's in the Salt Lake Tribune says he lived at Weston until his own marriage in 1910. The obituaries do not explain the difference, nor how an 1898 marriage fits Olive's birth to Annie in 1899. A daughter, Thelma, was born at Arbon on July 12, 1911, which puts the household in the valley by then. The valley was still often called Bannock Valley, and it lay in Oneida County until Power County was formed in 1913.

At Pauline

Lucy was a Dawson, and Dawsons were among the family's neighbors. In August 1913 a Wallace Jenks of Arbon (printed "Jinks"), probably W. W., was one of four witnesses Emma Jane Dawson named for her homestead's final proof, set for October 6, 1913, to vouch that she had lived on and farmed it so that she could receive title. A history of the valley that the Press printed in March 1917 recorded his part in the Latter-day Saint congregation at Pauline, the Meadow Ward, though papers of 1911 date it to June of that year:

In 1912 a ward organization of the L. D. S. church was formed with W. F. Kowallis as bishop, Charles Myler and W. W. Jenks, his counselors.

In December 1915, when the valley's teachers met at the Pauline meeting house, a Mrs. Jenks, one of the school trustees' wives, helped serve them a picnic dinner. In February 1916 the Arbon news reported a surprise party; the partly legible item names Mrs. Wallace Jenks (again "Jinks"), "the surprise being on their daughter, Miss Olive." That spring Virgil Jenks, whom Lucy's obituary lists among her sons, and a Lucy Jenks were on the Pauline school's perfect-attendance list. Olive's obituary recalled that she had served in Arbon Valley's first Primary, the church's organization for children, and as a Sunday school secretary.

Leaving in stages

The parents left first. In May 1917 the Idaho Republican of Blackfoot printed a column surveying farms on the Fort Hall Reservation, where, it explained, tribal members were leasing tracts to white farmers. It reported that Wallace Jenks had "moved recently from the Bannock valley country to the reservation and is leasing 80 acres," and added: "Mr. Jenks has his family with him and they are raising some stock and some white leghorn chickens." Lucy's obituary dates the couple's move to Blackfoot to 1917, so this was almost certainly W. W.

The grown sons stayed on. When the Press printed the county's draft registrations in 1917, the list included Asael Jenks, Joseph Alford Jenks and Wallace Albert Jenks, all of Pauline. Asael was to leave on a special train for Camp Lewis, Washington, on April 2, 1918, and served in France with the infantry. His obituary says he married Mable Smith (the year is illegible) and farmed in Arbon Valley for a year before moving on to Blackfoot. Olive moved to Blackfoot in 1919 and married Virgil Manning there that May.

The papers show Albert at Pauline the longest. He had married Izetta Olsen, born at Weston, in the Logan Temple on November 2, 1910. They were still at Pauline in the dry summer of 1919, when the Pauline correspondent wrote:

It is almost impossible for the farmers to get hay to do their harvest work let alone get feed for winter. There was a nice rain fell here last week which has made the roads better, settled the dust and refreshed the air. It came too late to do crops any good.

In October 1921 the Arbon news reported: "Born to Mr. and Mrs. Albert Jenks a boy. All concerned are doing nicely." In February 1922 the Relief Society women of Pauline met at a neighbor's home, with Mr. and Mrs. Albert Jenks among the guests:

The husbands were invited and most of them were there. A fine dinner was served about 2 o'clock and the rest of the time spent in games and chatting.

The mortgages

On February 27, 1922, the Devereaux Mortgage Company won a decree of foreclosure against Wallace Albert and Izetta Jenks for $410.50 with interest, one of many such cases against valley farmers after wheat prices fell and the 1919 drought hit (the foreclosures of 1920–1925). The sheriff advertised their land in Section 29 for sale "at the front door of the court house in American Falls" on March 27. A court summons dated August 17, 1923, named Wallace and Lucy Jenks, Albert Jenks and Joseph A. Jenks as defendants in the Utah Mortgage Loan Corporation's suit to foreclose a mortgage on land in Section 23. The papers do not say how either case ended. About 1923, by Lucy's obituary, she and W. W. moved on to Cache Valley, in Utah; he died in December 1944.

How long was Albert there?

Both of Albert's 1952 obituaries say he homesteaded in Arbon Valley and then moved to Pocatello. The figure reads as eleven years in the Salt Lake Tribune and, as far as its scrambled columns can be read, in the Deseret News as well. Izetta's obituary in 1964 says two years. The papers of the time show Albert at Pauline from at least June 1917 to February 1922, which fits the longer figure; when they first settled there is not recorded.

In Pocatello Albert worked as a boilermaker for the Union Pacific Railroad; he died in July 1952, aged 64. Izetta, later a practical nurse at Pocatello General Hospital, died in 1964. Lucy died in 1953, Olive in 1957, Asael in 1961, and Thelma, the daughter born at Arbon, in 2002.