When Bannock Valley was cattle range, 1879–1909

Before Arbon Valley was wheat country, it was range for other men's cattle, horses and sheep. The newspapers caught that stockmen's valley only in glimpses, beginning with an old settler's 1915 memory of the winter of 1879–80, but taken in order they show the range giving way to farms. Bannock Valley, as it was then called, lay in Oneida County until Power County was created in 1913.

The winter of 1879–80

In early 1915 the American Falls Press was printing old settlers' stories. On February 4 it carried the recollections of W. T. Oliver, whom the same page calls Judge Oliver and places on the Shilling ranch, about nine miles north of American Falls, in those years. Under the heading "Hardest Winter We Ever Had" he set down the winter that killed most of the Oregon cattle wintering there.

In the fall of 1879, he wrote, stockmen were driving large herds of Oregon cattle to Granger, in Wyoming, the nearest shipping point. Four outfits whose cattle were poor stopped in the Snake River country to winter "on account of the splendid feed." Three, with permission from the Indian agent at Ross Fork, the Fort Hall agency, wintered on the Fort Hall reservation; one of them, with 4,000 head, built a dugout for winter quarters on Bannock Creek, about fifteen miles from American Falls, near where the Oregon Short Line crosses the creek.

The snow began in November and lay about two and a half feet deep. Then, Oliver wrote:

Early in January there was a thaw, followed by a sleet storm and freezing weather, forming so hard a crust on the snow that horses could not travel without being all cut up. It was not strong enough to sustain their weight, but was so hard that stock could not break through it to get at the feed buried beneath it.

In June 1880 the three outfits on the reservation began their roundup with fifty men. They found more dead cattle than live, he said, from Shoshone Falls to Idaho Falls and in the foothills and valleys along the river, and every small stream "filled with carcases." Near Arbon (Oliver used the name the place had by 1915), cattle lay dead where they had been snowed in on about half an acre. The number is lost in the scanned text. Of that ground he wrote:

The sage brush on this land had been six feet high, but it was eaten, clean as a floor, clear to the ground. Along the streams, willows up to two inches through, had been eaten clear to the roots.

Of the 12,000 head brought in, Oliver reckoned, only 4,000 survived the winter, and the survivors were driven to Granger and shipped. He wrote thirty-five years afterward, from memory; no report from that winter has yet been found to check his figures.

A stockmen's summer range, 1888

In 1888 the valley was still range. On May 22 the Salt Lake Herald printed a column of Malad news credited to the Malad Enterprise. Quite a number of people, it said, were leaving Malad Valley to locate ranches in Bannock Valley, "about twenty miles north and west of this city." It warned them what to expect:

Settlers in the Bannock are apt to meet with some difficulty at first because the valley is now occupied by stockmen as a cattle range and is in fact one of the best summer ranges in this whole region. No doubt the stockmen will make great efforts to keep settlers off but they will have to succumb to the inevitable at an early day.

It also suggested that they "be careful to keep off the Fort Hall Indian reservation." In 1906 the church historian Andrew Jenson wrote from Arbon that most of the valley had been reservation land, closed to settlement, until a few years before, though stockmen found it convenient for grazing in season.

The Malad column named no stockmen. The site's histories tell of the American Falls cattle firm of Sparks & Herman, whose Bull Canyon claims of 1885 are the earliest dated land claims in the valley's histories, and of a cattle outfit, probably theirs, that by family account built a cabin inside Donum Daniels's claim posts about this time. Whether they were among the column's stockmen is not known; who came first is a question of its own.

Roundups and sheep bands, 1903

By 1903 there were farms on the Arbon floor, but the stock had not gone. In 1919 the Press reprinted items from its first volume, when it was the American Falls Advertiser. The Arbon column of September 12, 1903, reported that "Two bands of sheep trailed through here recently," alongside news of a light second crop of lucern and the thresher starting work at T. B. Evans's ranch. The column of October 17 reported that the cattle roundup would start the next day, and that "Rock creek and Marsh valley men have been rounding up horses here the last week." Rock Creek, around Rockland, lies west of the valley, and Marsh Valley east, over the mountains. In November Walter Sparks was in the valley and bought some cows and two-year-old steers, and Jack Woodman was there on business for the Fall Creek Sheep company.

A trail around the farms, 1909

By 1909 sheepmen were looking for a way around the farms. On February 8 the Ogden Daily Standard reported that the Ogden wool growers had chosen A. G. Fell and Herman Kuchler to go to Pocatello and confer with the supervisor of the Portneuf forest reserve, in the mountains to the east, "with the view of securing trailing privileges over the reserve from the Bannock Valley eastward to Oneida." When the sheep moved from winter to summer range, the paper explained, the sheepmen wanted to cross the reserve "so as to obviate the necessity of passing through a farming district." The paper did not say which farming district it meant, and the answer they got has not been found.

Wheat

By late 1914 the change was plain. On November 26 the Press reported an Arbon farmer's estimate that Arbon and Crystal farmers had at least 46,000 acres seeded or ready for wheat, "two solid townships," and it looked back: "Six or seven years ago there was scarcely any grain grown there, the few settlers devoting themselves to stockgrowing." That was a broad stroke, since the paper's own Arbon column had a thresher at work in 1903, but it is how the change looked from American Falls.

On this site: the Daniels family, cattlemen at West Fork; the Summit area history, on cattlemen and sheepmen there; and the stock-killing winter of 1916–17.