Stories retold in 2026 from the newspapers that reported them, with quotations and links to the original pages.
Routine notices (meeting notices, reminders and classifieds) are left out of this list; find them under Notices.
Elmira and Delone Smith, daughters of the Summit homesteader E. G. Smith, turn up again and again in the South Arbon column of 1915, and their obituaries carry the story on for seventy years.
In the spring of 1915 the Pauline nine wore new red suits, bought with help from a dance, as the valley's neighborhood teams met each other on Sunday afternoons.
A pile of logs at John Payne's sawmill in the spring of 1915 told Arbon's correspondent a building year was coming, and the paper's columns followed the canyon mills and the new houses through the season.
An old settler's 1915 memory of the winter that froze the Oregon herds opens three decades of glimpses of Bannock Valley as range for cattle and sheep, before wheat took it over.
In 1914 William Allard, a homesteader from Arbon, won the Republican primary and the November election to become the first man Power County sent to the Idaho House.
In 1914 a letter from American Falls to Crystal rode 239 miles of rail through Brigham City and Malad, and the valley kept petitioning until a Pocatello route came in 1916.
In 1914 Ed Hooker told the Pocatello Tribune how he had shoveled down through several feet of snow and ice for a tent site when he came to Arbon Valley, where he homesteaded until 1917.
In July 1914 the Pocatello Tribune asked readers to help Mrs. Elizabeth Jackson, homesteading on Rattlesnake Creek, whose house had burned with everything in it.
A June frost in 1914 cut down the Bannock Valley wheat after the best spring anyone remembered, yet by winter the valley had still shipped its grain by the carload.
Arbon Valley dry farmers joined the Farmers' Society of Equity in 1913, and for four years the cooperative talked of a grain elevator for the valley that the papers never show being built.
Power County voted to forbid the sale of liquor on May 20, 1914, 698 to 626, with Arbon going dry by three votes and Crystal by two, and the official count held up a week waiting for Arbon's returns.
In the spring of 1914 Arbon farmers offered a right of way and $1,000 a mile in bonds to a promoter whose grain cars would hang from a single rail on posts, but no line was ever reported built.
At the end of a snowy winter in 1914, an American Falls store's monthly paper carried the Arbon news, almost certainly from Mrs. E. A. Logan, and the American Falls Press reprinted it.
In January 1914 the new Power County asked its voters for $125,000 in road bonds, with a trunk road promised from Arbon, and the valley turned them down.
From 1909 to 1914 the land-office notices in the American Falls Press tracked Arbon Valley homesteaders turning claims into titles, with neighbours standing witness and contests over claims nobody lived on.
In the valley's first harvest under Power County, the papers followed Arbon's wheat from the threshers to the railroad, through a farmers' co-operative, a call to Tulsa and three crop counts that never agreed.
On Christmas Eve 1913 Santa Claus brought presents, candy, nuts and oranges to 125 children at Arbon's Central school, and dances and sleighing parties filled the holiday week.
From 1913 to 1928 children of Arbon, Pauline and Buist wrote stories for the Sunday School's magazine, while Cora Sorensen of the Summit end spent thirty-three years teaching the youngest class.
In the summer of 1913 a Congregational minister mailed a hill of dry-farmed wheat from Arbon with a report on the valley's crops, land and people, while he set about starting its first two Protestant churches.
Writing from Arbon the day after a divided Fourth of July in 1913, B. W. Rice sized up the valley's grain and named its farmers one by one, and within days two Congregational churches were organized there.
In June 1913 John Ryan, a hand on the Evans and Daniels ranch on Bannock Creek, sold a load of hogs in Pocatello, left his team in a shed and dropped out of sight.
In June 1913 homesteaders south of the Mink Creek divide fought sheep permits on the Pocatello forest reserve, and when someone proposed turning it into an elk refuge, T. B. Smith wrote to the paper that the settlers needed summer grass, not game.
In June 1913 a man from Arbon brought word to Pocatello that Short Line engineers were surveying a branch railroad over the Malad divide and down Bannock Valley.
For nearly twenty years the Logan papers followed Jack King of North Logan to his Arbon dry farm and home again, through a dry 1931, a hopeful 1932 and the death of his wife Ruby that August.
In May 1913 the commissioners of the new Power County spent four days looking over roads at Crystal and Arbon, opening a season of petitions, a rival offer from Pocatello and a change of road overseer.
In 1912 and 1913 Pocatello's businessmen and the Arbon farmers pledged money for a road over the Trail Creek divide, until a reservation right of way and a shortfall of cash stopped it.
When American Falls cut a new road into Arbon Valley in 1912 and drew off its grain, Pocatello's paper raised the alarm and an Arbon farmer came to town asking for a road over Trail Creek.
On a December morning in 1912 two Whiting brothers from Crystal took out marriage licenses in Pocatello minutes apart, neither knowing the other was marrying.
Told by the old-timers that nothing would ripen at his altitude, Arbon homesteader G. S. Butler ended up supplying them with potatoes and won over the Kansas father who had predicted his failure.
Between 1911 and 1919 the land notices and valley columns of the American Falls Press followed Arbon and Crystal women as they proved up land in their own names, from wives' desert claims to a mother and her daughters on Cherry Creek.