Valley firsts.

The Summit history calls Charles Herman Thomas Sparks's hired man, but Utah newspapers of 1884 name the firm of Sparks & Herman of American Falls, with Herman a leading stockman. Their range outfit resented the homesteaders' fences, and the Daniels family remembers its cowboys driving Donum Daniels off his first claim on the upper Bannock Creek meadows.

Family accounts reach back to David Daniels coming into the snowbound north end in March 1885, the Lusks staking a claim in 1888 and Henry Bolingbroke filing on Rattlesnake Creek water in 1889. On the Arbon floor the Bailey history gives the credit to George Arbon and his son Joe, while the histories of 1906 and 1917 begin with D. J. Bowen and Samuel Davis coming over the mountain from Samaria to look for water in June 1892. The oldest dated records are three Rattlesnake Creek water rights with a priority of 1 April 1892, belonging to the Daniels, Lusk and Bolingbroke families. In 1908 the valley's own promoters wrote that the first settler had come fourteen years earlier, in 1894.

The Andersen accounts say Otto and John cut logs in Bull Canyon in 1893 for a 12-by-16-foot house on Otto's place, with a door to the west, a window to the south and a dirt-covered pole roof, when most settlers still lived in wagon boxes, dugouts or tents. The Arbon area history gives the first cabin, a one-room house 14 by 16 feet, to David Bowen and calls the Andersen house the second. Andrew Jenson, writing in 1906, says Bowen built the first cabin raised by Latter-day Saints in 1893, but the Andersens were Latter-day Saints too. John Andersen's own sketch remembers his first summer in a dugout of quaking-aspen logs.

While the other families went back to Malad, Samaria or Cache Valley each fall, the Arbons stayed on in a dugout; Joe remembered blizzards that lasted a day, snow drifted to the eaves and prying the door open to breathe. The 1917 history puts their winter in 1895–96, and Andrew Jenson wrote in 1906 that the first families stayed through 1896–97, the winter from which permanent settlement dates. The family says the valley has never been empty in winter since.

Jenson drew on the Mount View Ward's own history and says several other families settled nearby at the same time, but he names none of them. The Buist history remembers Mansfield urging other Samaria men to take up land in the lower valley. Mendon's Richards brothers were ranching there from about 1905, and the township itself was homesteaded in 1909.

The 1917 history and her father's 1941 obituary both call her the first white child born in the valley, which had been part of the Shoshone and Bannock homeland long before. The obituary gives 26 January 1898 and the 1917 history 1897; her age when she married in 1917 fits 1898. Where the Flints lived and why they had come are not recorded. Other early babies followed: Lizzie Bowen in April 1898 by one family record, and Thomas Bailey and Ernest Davis, born at Arbon in May and June 1899 by their own later statements.

The next is Bertram Evans, Tom and Susannah Evans's son, who died at twenty-two in February 1909, a death reported at the time. That May Dave and Hannah Evans's newborn son Homer was buried in an unmarked grave near the old iron gate. Who gave the land for the cemetery, and when it was first used, are not recorded.

The Arbon letter printed on 8 January 1914 counted a very pretty wedding at the bride's parents' home among the holiday events, though the printed names are jumbled. The founding couples had married before they came or away from the valley: Jesse and Julia Ward at Woodruff on New Year's Day 1896, and Joe Arbon and Lizzie Davis, both still giving Samaria as home, in Salt Lake County in November 1898. An earlier wedding in the valley may simply not have been reported.

When Elizabeth Horton, a homesteader in her own right, was buried on 9 May 1915, the paper called it the new cemetery near the Pauline post office, so hers is the earliest burial there in a record of the time. Find a Grave dates the grave of the infant Sarah Pearl Waylett to 31 December 1914, citing the 1982 book Bannock Valley. A 2010 post names a Fredrickson baby buried on 19 November 1914, but the state death index has a Fredrickson child stillborn at Pauline on 19 November 1915, probably the same burial.

The first Crystal news column reported that the small child of Forest (probably Forres) Whiting died on 18 April 1915 and was buried on the Whiting farm. The Crystal Ward bought land for a cemetery on 14 May 1919, and Lorenzo Snow Whiting Sr., who died at Crystal on 12 June 1920, was its first burial and its only adult. Its eight graves were moved to Pocatello in May 1977.

By the Davis family's account and the 1917 history, Samuel Davis planted a trial patch of wheat in 1892. George Arbon plowed new ground and sowed ten acres of rye that was cut for hay the next year, in the fall of 1893 by most accounts. The first grain was cut in 1894 with D. J. Bowen's Osborne dropper and threshed with a machine brought over from Samaria, and the Andersen brothers raised their first crop the same year. The 1917 history dates the first irrigating, and the first alfalfa, to 1896.

In June 1892 Bowen and Samuel Davis found Knox Canyon water sinking into the ground before it reached the valley floor and decided ditches could carry it out; work began that fall with help from Samaria. The family accounts date the mile-and-a-half ditch to 1893, 1894 or 1895. By 1906 Andrew Jenson described a canal about seven miles long, and its Knox Canyon Creek water right carries a decreed priority of 24 July 1897.

A federal court decree of 1907, United States v. Daniels, settled the water of Bannock Creek and its branches and still governs it. It gave the earliest settler priority, 1 April 1892, to rights of the Daniels, Lusk and Bolingbroke families of Malad, though the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes' rights are older than any settler's. Family accounts reach further back, to a Daniels water right of 1885 or 1887, a Bolingbroke filing of 1889 and Samuel Davis's filing of 1892, but none of those has been found in the records.

By the Ward family's account Joseph W. Ward applied for a possessory claim and water rights on Lake Canyon on 15 May 1893, though no record of it has been found. The oldest rights still on the books there are Evans family spring and stream rights with a decreed priority of 1 June 1893, on the old Dave Evans homestead and near Lorenzo Evans's land, still held by Waldo Evans's sons. The community ditch from Knox Canyon followed with a priority of 24 July 1897.

Its earliest meeting, in August 1893, set out to own and control the water of Knox Creek, and the company was formally filed in Samaria on 18 March 1895. Members pooled money, labor and horse teams and kept minutes down to each man's pay; Ed Davis held 4⅗ shares and Lorenzo Evans four. The minute books have not been found, but a federal canal file confirms the company's name.

No water right of that date survives in the state's records, so the claims rest on the family history; the oldest recorded claims on Summit springs date from 1913–15. Larsen's first documented act at Summit is his homestead entry of 2 July 1901.

Before the townships were surveyed the only federal claim open was the desert-land entry, which required the claimant to bring water to the land. Evans filed on 320 acres north of the later Central school, made his yearly proofs and was patented in February 1902. Gertrude Daniels used the same law in the Big Meadows of West Fork on 17 July 1895.

Settlers had squatted on unsurveyed land for years; when the plats opened they went to the land office at Blackfoot. Jennett Price and her brother Henry Daniels filed on 12 March, followed by Donum and Thomas D. Daniels later that month, and Charles A. Bailey made the first entry on the Arbon floor on 28 March. Jennett proved up in her own name and received her patent in 1909.

She filed her desert-land entry at Blackfoot on 17 July 1895, giving Malad City as her home, and made the yearly proofs of reclamation. The patent of 15 July 1901 was the first Daniels title and the legal foundation of the West Fork ranch; her husband David never patented land himself.

Larsen and Manning, probably brothers-in-law, took adjoining quarters at the mouth of Bull Canyon, and Wood a quarter at the south edge of the Arbon floor; all three proved up in November 1906 and received patents on 19 April 1907. The Summit history credits Larsen and Wood with the first claims there. A Nunnelley obituary calls that family the first to settle at Summit, but the Nunnelleys did not file until 1909.

Booth and W. C. Snyder filed on 2 October, the first day of Crystal entries, Joseph H. Meadows and Henry Kettler of Pocatello on 3 October and John O. Johnston of Hawkins on 18 October. The Meadows claim was the first proved up, commuted to a cash entry on 29 July 1907 after Meadows had died, and the patent went to Melvin Meadows, probably his son. In 1921 the American Falls Press called Snyder the first settler in Crystal, though the Bradley family says George Bradley had a cabin up Rattlesnake Creek by 1900.

By the family's account Bradley built a cabin in the upper Rattlesnake Creek drainage in 1899–1900, but this right is the earliest record of him there. W. C. Snyder's right downstream at Crystal followed with a priority of 29 September 1902, three days before he filed on his homestead.

He entered his quarter at the north end of the Arbon floor on 27 May 1901 and received his final certificate on 20 March 1903, with residence counted from about 1898; the patent followed on 2 June 1904. Thomas Gibbons's patent of 16 September 1904 is usually called the first in the Arbon township because his land lay wholly inside it, while Davis's straddled the township line.

Ten known entries carry consecutive land-office serials of about July–September 1909: William Buist, Emer and Willard Richards, the widow Margaret E. Smith, the four Willie brothers and their brother-in-law William F. King. John E. Richards, the new postmaster, received the township's first patent on 20 June 1910.

A. H. Richards's right on Cedar (Bull Canyon) Creek carries a priority of 17 January 1910; his son Emer's Sheep Creek springs right is the next oldest at Buist.

It came barely six years after the 1908 campaign that brought dry farmers to the north Arbon floor. A gold medal reported in a 1917 promotional section has not been checked against the official award list.

The Davis family says Ed Davis discovered it after leaving a field idle one year, and the Arbon family says Joe Arbon and his father George were the first to introduce it. The earliest dated case is George Andersen's: he summer-fallowed eighty acres in 1916, and his brother made more from the farm the next season than ever before.

Eph Bolingbroke and Mrs. W. L. Daniels led the Pauline club, and Joe Arbon and Susannah Evans sat on the Grange organizing committee. The county agent also noted that 1933 was the first year Arbon Valley men pooled their lambs for sale at American Falls.

The 1917 history dates it to 1901; the Power County history gives the first school day as 13 October 1902 and puts the building in Section 12, while family recollections place it on Church Road, where the present meetinghouse stands. Around 1904 its logs were covered with lumber, and by 1907 it was Oneida County School District 46. The Bailey family says Lorenzo and Chloa Bailey gave the land, although neither of them held land in the valley in 1901–02.

The 1917 history and the Evans and Bailey family histories all name her, and the Power County history agrees that she opened the log school on its first day. She later married Adam Affleck, the homesteader next door, and the couple left the valley about 1915.

By the Daniels family's account the West Fork school let Martha Daniels stay through the winter instead of taking the children to town, and the 1917 history has Mrs. George Butler teaching pupils in a West Fork log cabin in 1910. H. Perry Howell opened the Pauline school in Ed Pellum's log cabin in 1911 and then moved it into the new meetinghouse. In 1913 District 13 bonded for a two-room school on John Noble's land, the building that, enlarged, is still Arbon Elementary.

Five smaller schools served the fifty-square-mile district. In December 1915 Crystal was hailed as the first rural school in Power County to teach manual training and domestic science, and the Crystal Latter-day Saints held their meetings in the Central schoolhouse.

The Buist School met in the Willie home until its own building went up north of Mountain View School; it closed in 1931, and its lumber went into a house on West Basin Road. Mountain View lasted until 1935.

The district bought a three-acre lot joining the church lot that August, and the contractor McIntyre built a two-room school with Guy Benson's help and timber logged by James Nunnelley; 36 pupils attended in October. It also housed the Latter-day Saints' Sunday meetings and the Highland Literary Society, and it served the south end until about 1941.

Her "Bannock Valley: A Historical and Industrial Review" gathered the story of 1892–1900 from pioneers she knew, and many of the firsts on this page come from it: the first white child, the first election, the first school and the first sawmill. She also kept the records of the first Protestant Sunday school and was Arbon postmaster in 1923–25.

The crusade was a national children's health campaign, and the American Falls Press praised the school and its teacher, Susie Cox, in an editorial.

Dan Nuckols, who grew up in the valley from 1951, remembered riding the high-school bus to American Falls with Sherm or Rhea Swim at the wheel, and the Lewises driving a Volkswagen school bus. When a bus first replaced horses, sleighs and family cars for the valley's schoolchildren is not recorded.

D. J. Bowen was presiding elder, by family accounts in his own home, and J. R. Bailey was the first Sunday School superintendent, with Ed Davis and Joe Arbon as his assistants. Some pages call it a ward with a bishopric, but the 1900 minutes and Andrew Jenson's history show a branch; Arbon became a ward only in 1908. For decades church was held only in the summer, when families were in the valley.

The Arbon Valley Notes of March 1911 reported that the new meeting house at the north end would be completed that week, with a dance planned, and that June the Meadow Ward was organized, probably meeting in the same building. The Mount View Ward at Buist held its first meeting in a $10,000 frame meetinghouse on 27 July 1919, and Arbon's $11,000 meeting and amusement hall, begun in 1928, was celebrated as finished on Pioneer Day 1929.

He had presided over the branch since 1907, served as bishop until 1914 and again from 1925 into the 1930s, when he oversaw the building of the 1928 church house. His obituary counts twenty-six years as bishop, more than his documented terms.

The Latter-day Saints formed the Crystal Branch on 25 May 1913 under presiding elder John A. Brown, and it became a ward on 15 October 1916 with John W. Staley as its first bishop. The ward met in the Crystal Central schoolhouse and was disorganized in 1935.

W. E. Dawson was its first clerk and Anna E. Lusk its first Relief Society president, and the 1917 history says a Latter-day Saint Sunday school had been organized at Pauline the year before. Church tradition says the area took its name from the bishop's mother, Auguste Pauline Kowallis. About half the people in the area were not Latter-day Saints.

William Allard was superintendent and Mrs. E. A. Logan secretary and musician, and it met in homes until the Central school was built. A Congregational church was organized at the Central school on 13 July 1913, in a community-church drive that counted 123 Gentiles and 295 Mormons in the valley.

A frame social hall had gone up in 1912, and the ward built a $10,000 meetinghouse, thirty by ninety feet, holding its first meeting there on 27 July 1919. The Buist history calls it the Meadow View Ward, but church records name it Mount View.

Joseph Taft Benson, a son of Apostle Ezra T. Benson, presided over the branch and became the first bishop of the Summit Ward in November 1915. The Highland church, part of the Rev. B. W. Rice's community-church drive, stood on or beside an acre of Mamie Nunnelley's homestead; a student pastor served it in the summer of 1915, and it disbanded in the early 1920s.

The 1917 history says young Fred Payne carried the mail from Samaria for three months about 1897. The Evans family remembers Dave Evans as the first rural carrier between Arbon and Malad, by horseback, sleigh and packhorse, while a Davis family biography says David T. Davis carried the Arbon–Malad mail about 1900; they may have been successive contractors.

It served about seventy people by special supply from Malad City, thirty-five miles away, and was named for George Arbon, the oldest of the first settlers, who said he was too poor that year to buy a two-cent stamp. The first mail went out on 7 October 1898: three letters. Family pages put the first office in the Tom Evans home, with Susannah Evans as postmistress for twenty-five years, but the appointment registers show Bowen first, then J. R. Bailey from 1900, and Susannah Evans for one term in 1903–06.

Richards had asked for an office called Taft; on the department's form that name was struck out and "Buist" written in, probably for the homesteader William Buist. The office closed in 1912, reopened in 1914 under the storekeeper August Jeppson and closed for good in 1936.

The office had no mail route: neighbours took turns fetching the mail from Hawkins Basin, twelve miles away, and a letter from Pocatello could take two months, until Pocatello mail began coming three times a week in December 1915. Margary Hayden held the longest term, 1923–37, and the office closed in 1938.

Church tradition says the name honoured Auguste Pauline Kowallis, mother of the Meadow Ward's first bishop. Hestella Kowallis kept the office in her home from 1914 until it closed in November 1929.

The examination for the route was held in April 1915; until then the mail had come once, then two or three times a week, from Malad. That March Bishop W. F. Kowallis had petitioned for service for 345 families, because Pauline and Crystal had no route at all. Ed Snyder later carried the rural route for about twenty-three years.

His family remembered it as the first government contract between Arbon and Pocatello; in winter he switched to a sleigh, changing teams at W. C. Snyder's in Crystal, and the Fannin homestead later served as the halfway stage station, where Cora Fannin cooked for the passengers. Earlier, in December 1912, bids had been called for a new twice-weekly route from Pocatello to Crystal by way of Pauline, to start in January 1913, though by 1915 Pauline and Crystal people were complaining that they had no route at all. By 1924 Theo Daniels was bringing the Pauline mail by truck.

Bull Canyon timber built many of the valley's log houses: the Andersens cut logs there in 1893, and newly married George and Beth Andersen camped beside a small sawmill there in 1910 while the logs for their house were sawed. Later mills were run by the Gibbons and Payne families in Knox Canyon, the Dawson brothers, the Nunnelleys and the Whitings at Crystal, and Walt Fredrich is remembered as the last of the Bull Canyon sawmill men. Earlier still, in October 1894, Ephraim and Steve Wight of Malad Valley planned to move their Rock Creek sawmill into Bannock Valley, but whether they did is not known.

The same Arbon Valley Notes mentioned Allen Hawkins striking water at 75 feet, but the hall's owner is not otherwise identified. In later years the valley danced at Central Hall by the Central school, the Meadow Ward meeting house and the Crystal Central schoolhouse.

The 1917 history dates it to 1902, and the Evans family remembers it as the first store and their home as the stopping place for anyone heading north or over to Crystal, though where the store stood is not recorded. The Paynes' country store, "Aunt Emmy's," where the candy was kept in open buckets, is remembered from about 1907 and documented from 1909. Ed Davis's family dates his store to 1910, but the records show him selling groceries from his home by 1912–13 and opening his false-fronted general store about 1915.

Cora Snyder was Crystal's first postmaster from 1910, and the store and hall probably stood on the Snyder homestead; Ezra H. Lindsay was storekeeper and postmaster in 1918–20. When the store first opened is not recorded.

The Arbon News of late August 1911 reported that Archey Lindley had succeeded H. E. Hooker as the village butcher, and that September Joseph N. Arbon was building a blacksmith shop on his own ranch. H. E. Chapman was named in the valley news as early as March 1911, and he still kept a blacksmith shop at the south end in 1915, when he hired a smith from Pocatello.

Visitors that year stayed at what the paper called the Payne hotel, and John and Emily Payne also kept a general store whose supplies John hauled from Pocatello. Where the hotel stood is not recorded.

Until November 1913 it was the partnership Noble & Kowallis; Polk's 1914 directory lists the firm, and by his obituary Noble kept the store until 1923. His wife Fanny became Pauline's first postmaster, and by 1921 the store had the neighbourhood's telephone. One family memory of an earlier Evans store at Pauline is not borne out by any record.

Jeppson reopened the Buist post office in June 1914 and kept it until 1926, on John E. Richards's former homestead.

Maurice Johnson, who had followed his sister's family from Kansas in 1909, and his widowed brother-in-law Leslie Featherstone held a public auction cried by Col. Cotant of Rockland before going back to Kansas. It was an early sign of the departures that thinned the dry-farm settlement after 1916.

In 1917 Robert Wheatley bought grain there for the Intermountain Milling Co., and Ed England later bought wheat at what became a covered building, while others hauled the sacks to the railroad docks at Schilling. "The England Warehouse" at Pauline was still in use in 1931–32.

The American Falls Press called it the first oil well to be sunk in that part of the country, and the two-day celebration on 25–26 June brought barbecued steers, ball games and an auto excursion from Pocatello. Oil flowed from the well for a day that November before giving out, and in 1927 the Gem State Petroleum Co. announced a gas strike at about 2,300 feet in its own test well, but no producing well is recorded.

After poor first crops, 1896 brought a good harvest, and the header shared by Ed Davis, D. J. Bowen, James Bailey, Lorenzo Evans and Joseph Arbon cut all the grain in the valley that year. The Andersen accounts remember their first crops being cut with a binder and shocked by hand.

In 1894 the settlers threshed with a machine brought over from Samaria through Mine Canyon, and the 1917 history counts its first thresher in 1897, when grain was still hauled to Kelton, Corinne, Collinston or McCammon. In the fall of 1907 Julius Abter and William F. Arnn ran "the Arbon threshing machine" and carried the valley's yields to the American Falls Press, and by the next fall Abter owned it; Tom Evans owned another by 1914. About 1913 the Andersen brothers bought their own horse-powered thresher, remembered as a Red River Special.

Walter Sparks drove two companions out in his car for the meeting of about 31 December 1910. Valley families' own cars appear in 1915, when Ed Davis had a new car in May, J. P. Sorenson drove relatives to Mendon in his new car that October and Joe Jensen of South Arbon bought a Ford. By 1916 J. R. Bailey drove a Dodge, the Kowallises drove to Kaysville, Ed Davis sold gasoline at his store and the Pioneer Day celebration had an auto parade; in April 1917 Lorin Bailey bought a car to carry the Pocatello mail, though winter still sent him back to the sleigh.

By March 1911 the Dawson brothers were running a steam ploughing outfit, probably the same rig, and that harvest their big steam threshing outfit turned out Turkey Red wheat at seven bushels a minute, with B. D. Lindley tending the separator. The same fall G. S. Butler, Ed Keeler, Frank Swim and other owners bought a self-feeding Case thresher run by a crew of eight. An editorial that August counted nine threshers following forty headers on the Arbon floor.

The Fergusons, a widow and two sons from Greenville in Cache Valley, farmed at the Summit end from 1911. By 1915 Thomas King had bought a machine at Malad, and the Sorenson brothers and the King boys were running their own.

The North and Central Arbon column reported that Humphries, E. A. Logan, Hill and Messenger had bought a combine together, and the Stotts and Lees of South Arbon another. The first combines were pulled by eight to twelve horses; Willard Andersen remembered going from the header and thresher to an old horse-drawn combine that took twelve.

In July 1918 valley farmers talked of motor-truck routes to haul nearly half a million bushels to Michaud, and in 1919 the contractor graveling the new Bannock Creek road worked with trucks. Theo Daniels carried the Pauline mail in his truck in 1924, and the Ward family's first motor vehicle was a Chevrolet truck bought in 1926, which ended their slow wagon trips over to Malad. Ed Snyder and later Waldo Evans carried the winter mail in a truck cab set on sleigh runners, pulled by horses and warmed by a little stove.

In September 1920 a Salt Lake dealer reported selling a Trundaar tractor to Frank Reiger of Crystal; in April 1921 Thomas S. Toyn of Arbon advertised his 1919 Cleveland tractor for sale, and that December a Crystal estate offered a Case tractor. The families date their own change from horses later: the Arbons bought a gasoline Caterpillar in 1928, the Bolingbrokes a Caterpillar in the early 1930s, the Lusks traded their horses for a Model M crawler in 1937 for $1,650, and Mark Andersen's family bought its first tractor about 1941. Who drove the very first tractor in the valley is not recorded.

The Andersen family remembers that Willard Andersen, who farmed the John C. Andersen place with his father, bought the first hay baler in Arbon Valley. No newspaper or other record found so far names it, and the family does not recall the year. His son David R. Andersen's funeral life sketch counts the hay baler, with the tractor, electricity and the bulk-bin combine, among the changes his generation saw. Before balers, valley hay was mowed, raked and stacked loose, with children riding the derrick horse, as the Ward family remembered.

The Evans family history says Tom Evans's son-in-law Adam Affleck, who lived next door from about 1907 to 1915, helped string the first primitive line on barbed wire, though no record of the time mentions it. In March 1913 the Arbon Commercial Club wrote that it was building its own line, with poles secured and phones subscribed, and on 6 September 1913 a company was organized at the Central school with D. J. Bowen as president. That January Bishop W. F. Kowallis told a Logan paper that the Bell company was building a branch line from American Falls to Arbon, and by the end of 1914 the farmers' line was the Falls-Bannock Telephone Co.

Ruth Evans married Jess Keeler that April, and the wedding report noted she had been the telephone operator. From December 1915 the switchboard stood in the Evans home and Susannah ran it until 1940, when Gena Newport took it over in the same house and kept it into the 1960s. Family memory gave Susannah twenty-five years as postmistress, but her quarter-century was at the switchboard.

It had taken more than two and a half years of effort, a county franchise and a right of way across the reservation. A Pocatello report of 2 December said simply, "The first connection was made today," and added that the valley's own system was an independent company now hooked to the big one. Within days the line brought Dr. Noth out from American Falls when Merl Van Horn was hurt by a falling tree, and the switchboard was moved into T. B. Evans's new house west of the Central school.

Crystal had been one of the valley's most isolated corners, fetching its mail from Hawkins Basin until Pocatello mail began coming three times a week in December 1915.

The house was going up in January 1918, but when the wheel was built is not recorded. Other families made power as they could: the Guy Bolingbrokes had a Delco plant, Eddie and Rosa Davis bought a wind charger for lights, an iron and a radio, and John C. Andersen's house was modernized with electricity in 1935, probably from a home plant. Most families read by coal-oil lamps until the 1940s.

Each household had its own ring on a party line that anyone could listen in on. Buist moved to a modern system from Holbrook in 1952, thirteen years before the rest of the valley had dial phones.

The Pauline school children wrote their own news column for the American Falls Press that winter and reported the outing. Later, families without power lines ran radios off wind chargers, as Eddie and Rosa Davis did.

In November 1926 the planned route ran down the Arbon Valley through the Daniels section and on through Malad Valley, and in April 1927 heavy roads, too soft for motor trucks, held up the contractor hauling poles from Schiller. The current was turned on on Tuesday, 28 June 1927, and the Mountain States telephone company had feared interference where its own line ran beside the new wires for several miles up the valley. It was a through line: valley farms waited about twenty more years for power of their own.

The Eph Bolingbroke page dates it to 1945, but Zella Bolingbroke's own text in Bannock Valley says 1947 was the year electricity came, and the Buist history says about 1947. Families bought electric stoves, refrigerators and freezers, and by February 1954 crews were working around the clock to keep the power lines up at Arbon when frozen fog loaded them with ice. Which co-operative first served the valley has not been found.

Neighbours came to watch for weeks. In 1958 the Bolingbrokes had the valley's first color set, at a time when actors on the screen often looked an unnatural green.

Joe Arbon, Sod Williams and Claude Gibbons raised $200 subscriptions, and Gibbons wrote to one telephone company after another until one agreed to serve the valley. Until then every call went through Gena Newport's switchboard in the old Evans house. The Joe Arbon of the drive may have been Joseph G., who ran the ranch, rather than his father.

Mail, supplies and the first grain all crossed it to and from Malad, and in winter Otto and John Andersen hitched four horses to a sleigh to break the trail so the mail could get through. The Turkey Trail, about a mile to the south, was the second; neither was surveyed or graded.

In November 1908 Oneida County put $300 into a surveyed route to American Falls over the foothills, and Bailey, Abter and Otto Andersen helped lay it out. By family tradition the county hired Summit homesteader Joseph C. Jenson in 1910 to supervise the road over the pass, built with a horse-drawn Fresno scraper and blasting powder; the Summit history calls him the valley's first commissioner of roads and the pass road the first surveyed road out of the valley. No county record of his appointment has been found, and the pass may be named for a different Jensen family.

That August the Crystal road overseer was ordered to build three bridges, two on Rattlesnake Creek and one on Clifton Creek, and in 1915 the Whiting brothers' sawmill cut lumber for the county's Crystal bridges. Crystal organized its own highway district in 1918.

About 1918–19 the mail and stage between Pauline and Pocatello changed horses at Moses and Cora Fannin's Crystal homestead, the halfway place, where Cora cooked hot meals for the passengers. In September 1925 the motor stage, carrying Mrs. Fannin and three of her children home to Crystal, went off the road into Mink Creek when a steering rod failed.

In 1920 the district built six miles of new road and graded and graveled fourteen more, before losing its cash in a bank failure in 1921. Late in 1915 the old road across the reservation to Michaud had already been abandoned for a new, level county road the farmers were proud of.

The 1920 census had already listed an auto mechanic living at Pauline, John F. Campbell, though the reading of his surname is uncertain.

He saw it on the northbound run and reported it on landing at Pocatello. No record of an airplane landing in the valley in those years has been found.

In December 1950 the state called for bids to gravel 7.48 miles of the Bannock highway between Holbrook Junction and Arbon, and by March 1961 the Bannock Creek road near Pauline was paved. The Eph Bolingbroke page says the highway was paved about the time electricity came in 1945, while Zella Bolingbroke's own text says a new highway was built shortly after 1947, which fits the 1948–50 contracts. Joe Arbon counted hard-surfaced roads to the ranch among his fondest dreams come true.

Annie Kerr Bailey, at Arbon from 1894, was called to births and sickness all over the valley, and Sarah Daniels, "Aunt Sal," was midwife to many young mothers at the north end. Annie Andersen Pett, trained in nursing in Salt Lake City, delivered many babies on the coldest, stormiest nights, usually without pay, and a "Sister Shandrew," probably Anna Shandrew, delivered Claribel Bolingbroke Bailey's babies. Which of them was first is not recorded.

The same Arbon column reported the funeral of seventeen-year-old Noal Waylett at the Meadow Ward meeting house and his burial in the new Pauline cemetery.

Before him the nearest doctors were at Malad, American Falls and Pocatello; in March 1912, by the family account, the doctor could not reach Jennie Bailey Gibbons in time over the snowy roads, and in December 1915 the new telephone line brought Dr. Noth out from American Falls. How long Dr. Castle stayed is not known; in August 1920 Dr. C. F. Schlitz attended a birth at Arbon.

George Arbon, D. J. Bowen and a Daniels served as judges; the 1917 history prints the third name as Donam and the 1920 version as D. D., probably meaning Donum Daniels. Both accounts come from the same author, Mrs. E. A. Logan.

He had been elected Oneida County probate judge in November 1912. The new county board ruled that the judge must live at the county seat in American Falls, and by March 1913 another man was acting judge; the family's memory of his serving from 1914 is not borne out by the records.

He served again in 1919–20, this time as a Democrat. Norman Hayden of Crystal sat in the Idaho Senate in 1937–38, the only Crystal resident found in the legislature, and Royal O. Swenson, who had farmed at Summit, represented Oneida County in the House in 1945. Earlier, Thomas Sparks, the cattleman behind the 1885 Bull Canyon claims, sat in the territorial council in 1888–89, but he lived at American Falls.

From then until about 1935 the third-district seat was held by valley men: Brahmstadt, E. C. England of Pauline, Perry Lusk, who rode about forty miles to American Falls each month for $25, T. B. Evans and Roy Lindley. Before that the Arbon and Crystal roads were in the charge of Walter S. Sparks of American Falls, one of the county's first commissioners. On the Oneida side, C. W. Hughes of the Summit end sat on the board in 1919–20.