On the morning of Friday, September 24, 1965, Richard Sorensen Christensen, a 47-year-old dry farmer from Brigham City, Utah, was killed at harvest in Arbon Valley when the combine he was running tipped over on a hill and rolled onto him. His death was reported in the following days by three Utah newspapers, and their accounts are the ones retold here.
A morning's harvest
The fullest report is the one the Box Elder Journal of Brigham City printed on its front page two days later. By its account, he had gone to Idaho early that morning to harvest grain for Ray Adams, a friend who also lived in Brigham City, and when that work was done he moved on to the next farm, owned by Morgan Smith of Crystal, Idaho. Crystal is one of the valley's communities, a high basin of springs and creeks farmed mostly without irrigation. The Box Elder Journal, the only paper to name Smith, gives his home as Crystal, but none of the papers says exactly where the field lay. They place it only in Arbon Valley, near or "below" Pocatello.
As Christensen tried to turn the combine around on a hill, the paper said, the machine tipped over, threw him to the ground and rolled on top of him. The accident was thought to have happened about 10 a.m., but he was "not found until 12 noon." The paper said he had apparently been killed instantly.
A short wire report from American Falls, the Power County seat, printed on the front page of the Logan Herald Journal the same Sunday, gave the account of Power County sheriff's deputies. They said "the leveling mechanism on the combine apparently failed" while the machine was making a turn on a steep downhill grade, and that it crushed him when it rolled over. A leveling mechanism was the part meant to keep a combine level as it worked across sloping ground. On September 30 the Tremonton Leader put it in nearly the same terms: the combine had "failed to adjust mechanically to the contour of the hill" and tipped over on him. The Brigham City paper said only that he was turning on a hill. The mechanical failure comes from the deputies and from the Tremonton paper.
Who he was
Richard Christensen was born on May 1, 1918, in Bear River City, Utah, the son of Hyrum E. and Inger Sorensen Christensen. He grew up there and attended Box Elder High School. On September 20, 1939, he married Leone Bunot in the Salt Lake Temple. He dry farmed at Bear River City and at Promontory, in Box Elder County. In the LDS church at Bear River City he had served as secretary of the Young Men's Mutual Improvement Association, the YMMIA, and in the Sunday school superintendency. After he moved to Brigham City, he was a Sunday school teacher and superintendent and a ward clerk, and at his death he was a counselor in the bishopric of the Brigham City Eighth Ward. He left his wife, a daughter and two sons, his parents, two sisters and a brother.
The Tremonton Leader told how the news reached that brother. Chester Christensen of Bear River City was up Logan Canyon hunting elk when word came that Richard had been killed in Arbon Valley. The Box Elder Journal said the funeral was set for Monday, September 27, in the Brigham City Eighth Ward chapel, with burial in the Bear River City cemetery.
What the reports leave open
The accounts show a Brigham City man cutting Arbon Valley grain for a Brigham City friend in 1965 and then moving on to the next farm. They do not say whether Ray Adams owned or rented his Idaho ground, whether Christensen was being paid for the work or helping a friend, or how he came to be cutting the Smith grain. No Idaho newspaper report of the accident has been found for this post.
On this site: the history of the Crystal area, the Stories entry on the first combines of 1915, and the Tragedies list, which includes C. T. Hansen's tractor accident of 1968.