In the fall of 1917 a correspondent who signed himself "The Pilgrim" went from ranch to ranch around Crystal, Pauline and Arbon for the American Falls Press page "With Power County's Farms and Farmers." The valley had been in Oneida County until Power County was formed in 1913. His columns are mostly about farming methods, but they also show how much of the valley was built from its canyon timber, and kept warm by it.
The first cabin
The paper called David J. Bowen Arbon's first settler. Bowen came into what was then Bannock Valley in June 1892 and staked his claim when he found that the stream in Knox Canyon ran all year. In the fall of 1893, the Pilgrim wrote, Bowen built "the first settler's log cabin erected in Arbon valley north of the west fork of Bannock creek." The logs "were cut from a quaken aspen grove in Knox canyon." A larger log cabin came later, and in 1898 the valley's first post office opened in it, with Bowen as postmaster.
The Pilgrim worded his claim carefully, and the site's story of the first house sets out the other accounts. In October 1917 the 1893 cabin still stood on the Bowen home site, beside a row of tall Lombardy poplars at the foot of Bowen's Peak. Bowen told the Pilgrim he was thinking of removing it. The Pilgrim urged him to keep it on its original site as one of the historical cabins of that part of the state. It needed some repairs, he admitted, but:
It has stood up there at the foot of the mountain since 1893 and surely is entitled to its reward of being classed among the historical structures of the Gem state, having witnessed the transformation of a great domain of erstwhile sagebrush flats into numerous productive farms.
The papers read for this post do not say what Bowen decided.
Cut, snaked and hauled
T. B. Evans and his family began in a dugout, then built a cabin of sawed logs and lived in it for sixteen years. For many years, the Pilgrim wrote, it was "the only place in the valley where accommodations were to be had" by travelers needing meals and lodging, and candidates of every party stayed there. The Arbon post office was in it for two years, with Mrs. Evans as postmistress, and in 1913 the valley's first telephone central was installed there.
R. Thyberg, southwest of the Arbon post office, built his cabin alone. He was probably Axel Rudolph Thyberg, whose homestead lay among the Iverson claims. "When he came here five years ago," the Pilgrim wrote in November 1917, "the first thing he did was to go into the mountains, cut his logs, snake them out and haul them to the homestead, and build the cabin—doing all this work single handed." Snaking meant dragging logs out of the timber.
On the east side of the valley, D. B. Ripley's family had lived in log cabins ever since they moved onto his homestead. They spent three years on that original claim, then moved into the four-room cabin John A. Gibbons had built on land Ripley bought. In November 1917 Ripley was building a seven-room modern house on a concrete foundation across the road, and the old cabin was to become a granary.
Aspen at Crystal
Around Crystal, one farm northeast of town adjoined the Pocatello National Forest, and the Pilgrim wrote of the aspen groves that "no ranch in the Crystal mountain country is without them—and they furnish plenty of fuel and poles." Mrs. John Bryant told him that at harvest many women got in the aspen fuel and chopped it, because the men were heading and threshing from early morning until late at night.
F. C. Reiger, who lived in a log cabin on Clifton Creek just outside Crystal, also had a homestead, filed in March 1916, three miles north in the hills. He said that in the deep snow of the previous winter he had cut aspen there for poles, thinking he was cutting close to the ground. The stumps left standing showed "that he cut them ten feet from the ground."
The Pilgrim also heard about a windstorm of unusual severity in the Crystal country:
The story goes that a young homesteader over there went to Crystal that night to attend a dance and when he returned to his cabin in the hills he was unable to locate it for the reason that the storm had blown it to pieces and the pieces were scattered far and wide down the gulch.
Next morning the young man bought a log cabin from a neighbor and moved it onto his homestead. On November 16 the Pilgrim named him: Carl Wrensted, who had filed in 1913 on land north of Crystal. The cabin had been built by Forrest Whiting and sold to David Handy, the neighbor who sold it to Wrensted. That fall it stood empty, because Wrensted had been called into the army and was training at Camp Lewis, Washington.
Wood for the winter
That fall southern Idaho ran short of coal. On November 20, 1917, a notice on the Press's front page told readers to get wood from the hills before the snow: "Wood is the only fuel we can depend upon." There had been times that fall, it said, when for a week at a time not a pound of coal was for sale in American Falls.
The same day the Pilgrim reported that a number of Arbon ranchers who drove to the railroad towns for their winter coal found the bins there empty and came home without any. Ever since, they had been "going up into the canyons to the east and to the west of the valley and coming back with pine and quaken aspen wood for fuel." In the Pauline items on that page, Noel Waylett, probably the homesteader Noel Byron Waylett, had cut his foot badly "while in the canyon getting his winter's wood."
The Pilgrim also summed up what he had seen. Arbon Valley, he wrote, was a home of log cabins, with "hardly a ranch up there being without a log structure and a majority of the farmers residing in log cabins." He went on:
The buildings constructed from logs are the warmest in winter and the coolest in summer and the least expensive. One thing, however, has been noticed, and that is the entire absence of the good old fire place.
Some families were already leaving their cabins. The Evanses had moved into a four-room frame house about 1915, and the Ripleys meant to move into their new house that winter.
On this site: the Arbon area history and the stories of the first post office and the first telephone line.
Sources
- American Falls Press, September 21, 1917, page 3
- American Falls Press, October 2, 1917, page 4
- American Falls Press, October 9, 1917, page 3
- American Falls Press, October 26, 1917, page 3
- American Falls Press, November 9, 1917, page 3
- American Falls Press, November 16, 1917, page 3
- American Falls Press, November 20, 1917, page 1
- American Falls Press, November 20, 1917, page 3
- American Falls Press, November 30, 1917, page 3
- American Falls Press, December 14, 1917, page 3