In the winter of 1927 the elk of Arbon Valley made the news. The State of Idaho had set elk calves loose near Crystal years before, and by December a Crystal rancher and other farmers were complaining that the elk tore down fences and destroyed haystacks. The state promised a range rider that month, and a year later an Associated Press dispatch printed in Salt Lake City and Ogden named the cowboy hired for the job of "elk punching."
A herd planted near Crystal
On December 5, 1927, the Salt Lake Tribune printed a report from American Falls dated the day before. Elk placed in Power County "several years ago" by the Idaho fish and game department, and protected by law, were increasing so fast that they had become a nuisance to ranchers and farmers in the Arbon valley. A number of years earlier, the report said, the state had released calves in "the Arbon valley country near Crystal," about 200 of them as far as the blurred digitized text can be read. In the side valleys running back into the Bannock Range, where no hunters troubled them, they had multiplied until an estimated "fully 600" were in the county. The papers found so far do not say when the calves were brought in or where they came from.
Crystal is the high basin of springs and creeks that was homesteaded later than the rest of the valley; its story is told on the Crystal page. At this season of the year, the report explained, when snow began to cover the higher peaks, the elk came down from their summer range to lower ground. Scores had lately appeared around the ranch of John K. Myers, and Myers had sent a formal complaint to the state game warden, R. E. Thomas, saying he was suffering serious losses.
The paper quoted from the letter of "the Crystal man." The elk, he wrote, tore down fences "faster than I can build them up," and "Elk run wild around my haystacks." He went on to compare his fields, every morning and evening, to what the damaged text suggests was a game farm. He was probably of the Myers household that the American Falls Press reported at Crystal in April 1918, when "Mrs. John Myers" came home after a winter in Pocatello, though no paper links the two.
Thomas said he meant to make a special trip to Power County to look into the matter. If he found it necessary, he would employ a range rider to drive the herds out of the fields and keep the animals from tearing down and destroying haystacks.
A range rider for the state's elk
A week later, on December 11, the Associated Press reported from Boise that Thomas had announced the hiring of a range rider to ride herd on the state's elk in Arbon Valley. Farmers had complained that the elk had smashed fences and destroyed haystacks. The rider was authorized to drive the herd, 500 or 800 head (the figure is unclear in the scan), off the valley farms and "into the mountain ranges, where there is plenty of food that does not belong to farmers."
Whether a rider actually spent that winter with the elk, and who he was, the papers found so far do not say.
Harold Whitworth, elk puncher
The elk were back in the news in November 1928. An Associated Press dispatch from Boise, printed on November 22 in both the Salt Lake Tribune and the Ogden Standard-Examiner, told of a new kind of job. The Tribune headed it "Cow Puncher Gets New Job Shuffling Elk Away From Farmers' Feed Yards." The whole dispatch, quoted here in the Tribune's wording, ran three sentences:
When cow punching became too tame—and anyway there weren't any cows to punch this winter—Harold Whitworth took to the job of elk punching.
Farmers of Arbon valley, in southeast Idaho, complained to the state game department last year when the elk began eating all their stores of hay and Wednesday R. E. Thomas, state game warden, announced he had appointed Whitworth to shuffle the elk into other sections than the feed yards of the farmers. His job will continue all winter.
A cow puncher was a cowboy who worked cattle; Whitworth's work that winter was to keep the state's elk away from the farmers' feed yards. The Wednesday of the dispatch was November 21, 1928. Nothing more about Harold Whitworth turned up in the papers searched, and no report tells how his winter among the elk went.
Still in the grain, 1930
The trouble did not end there. In August 1930 another AP item from Boise reported that elk would not stay off the farm of J. N. Williams of Crystal. Williams told the warden that a band of elk came back after he drove them off at night, that other bands trailed through his crops, and that elk and deer from the Pocatello game preserve had destroyed 11 acres of his grain. Thomas said he would ask the governor to decide whether an open season was needed, under a law passed by the 1929 legislature, and a letter from the Bannock Sportsmen's association favored a short season of two or three days. The item does not say whether these were the elk planted near Crystal years before, and the papers read do not show whether a season was opened that year.
On this site: the Crystal page tells of the homesteads, schoolhouses and store of the basin near which the state's elk calves were set loose.