Tragedies and hard times.

Five days after word came from Brigham Young to abandon the Salmon River mission at Fort Limhi, about ten men rode south ahead of the main company to report to church leaders in Salt Lake City. On 31 March 1858, at the Rock Springs on Bannock Creek north of present-day Pauline, they were fired on from ambush; Bailey Lake was killed, several of the men were wounded and the attackers drove off their horses. Lake, a 32-year-old Canadian-born Latter-day Saint, left three wives. It is the earliest death in the valley that the records describe, decades before the first settlers came.

As a single man in his twenties, John Moroni "Donum" Daniels set cedar posts around a claim at the foot of Bowen's Mountain and went back to Malad for the winter. When he returned in the spring, a cattle outfit had built a small log cabin inside his posts, an open challenge to his squatter's claim. The cattle companies of the time were powerful and, by the family's telling, not afraid to settle arguments with guns, so he gave up the claim and later settled at West Fork.

In October 1893 fire destroyed the building and stock of Andersen & Danielson, the Mendon store of Andrew Andersen and his partner Carl J. Danielson. That November the partners assigned everything they owned to Jasper Lemmon for the benefit of their creditors. George L. Andersen's memoir ties the loss to his father's search for land for his sons, which led them to a meadow at the head of Bannock Creek and to the Andersen homesteads on the Arbon floor.

Joe Arbon remembered blizzards that lasted a whole day in the first winter he and his father stayed in the valley, when their little home was drifted over completely. One morning he lit the cook stove and it began to smoke so badly that he could hardly breathe; he doused the fire with the water left in the wash basin and ran for the door, only to find the snow packed against it to the eaves. Prying it open a crack let in enough cold air to revive him, and the day went to repairing the chimney and shovelling snow out of the cabin and away from it. Valley people afterwards made a habit of bringing the shovel inside on winter nights.

The winter of 1896–97, from which Andrew Jenson in 1906 dated the permanent settlement of the valley, was remembered as a hard one. The Bailey daughters' family history says its worst blizzard came late, on 7 April 1897, and did not let up until the 10th. Mrs. E. A. Logan's 1917 history of the valley also lists 1896–97 as a hard winter.

One Fourth of July George Daniels crawled through a fence and his gun went off, shooting him in the leg. For a while the doctor thought the leg would have to come off; George had many Indian friends, and on their advice he treated the infected wound with sage tea, and it healed. Another year he jumped into a pig pen onto a board with a nail through it, and his helpers had to hammer the nail out of his foot.

One spring morning a stranger asked Julia Ward to cook him breakfast and a lunch of boiled eggs with no salt, offered to pay whatever she asked, and dozed in a chair, getting up every few minutes to look out the door. He set off toward Malad, but before dawn the next day Jesse heard someone drawing water at the well: the same man, who said the thunder and lightning in the hills had turned him back and that he would try Rockland instead. Suspecting he was after a horse, Jesse stayed home, carried the saddle and bridle into the house and turned the horses into the field. At the store they heard that officers were hunting a man who had robbed the passengers on a train and killed a man, and the Wards never saw the stranger again.

Elizabeth "Lizzie" Bolingbroke, a daughter of the Pauline homesteader Charles Bolingbroke, married Joseph Munn on New Year's Day 1901. Their son LaVern was born on 31 August, and about a month later, on 3 October 1901, Lizzie died of typhoid fever at Pocatello. The baby weighed only three pounds and was carried to his grandparents' home on a pillow; Charles and Maggie Bolingbroke raised him, and as Vern Munn he farmed at Pauline for the rest of his life.

When Merl Ward was two, about 1902, he went off riding a stick horse while his mother made breakfast; Julia Ward's first thought was the well, and Jesse went down it three times before they searched the rye, which stood about five feet high, and found him near noon almost at the top of the field, lost, tired and crying. Years later the walls of a well Jesse was digging caved in and pinned him to the hips. Afraid of a second cave-in, he ordered his sons to stay out, but they ignored him and dug him free.

Between midnight and one in the morning of 20 May 1903 a rider woke Richard Driscoll at his ranch on the Snake River and asked for blankets, saying he was working for Dave Daniels, the West Fork cattleman who ran stock on the Snake River bottoms. Driscoll brought out a roll of bedding; the man asked him to wait while he fixed his saddle, then drew a revolver and shot him through the left shoulder, close to the neck, and fired again and missed. The rider, a Bannock man the papers called "Wild Bill", rode off toward Bannock Creek and the reservation, and Driscoll was taken to Pocatello with a serious but not fatal wound.

One winter morning the mail carrier Tom Davis stopped at Otto Andersen's to water and grain his team before the climb up the Rocky Ridge toward Malad, just as a west blizzard broke. Otto begged him to wait; Davis promised to turn back if it got too bad, but in a lull Otto saw something up by the granary and waded out through the drifts to find him nearly frozen. Otto got him into the house; his long fur coat was so packed with snow that it took two hours to get him out of it and four days before it could be worn again. The blizzard lasted three days, and when it was over Otto and John Andersen broke trail to the summit with four horses so Davis could go on; the trip took him five days before he was back at the Andersen ranch for the night.

Settler ditches on upper Bannock Creek collided with the prior rights of the Shoshone-Bannock Tribes downstream, and the United States sued Daniels and the other upstream ranchers. The decree of 9 April 1907 kept the Tribes' earliest priority and fixed the settlers' shares, with the Daniels, Lusk and Bolingbroke rights dated 1 April 1892; it still governs the creek. In the dry August of 1935 the Fort Hall superintendent warned the white ranchers on the headwaters to respect the Indian water rights, reporting that some land on the lower creek had had no water all season and its grain was nearly ruined.

In August 1907 the infant son of Mr. and Mrs. Perry Lusk died while his parents were bringing him from Arbon to Malad for treatment; the funeral was held at the Wilkes home in Malad, and the notice is the earliest record placing Perry Lusk's family in the valley. In October 1915 Oscar Estep, the nine-month-old son of Luther and Lucy Estep, newly arrived from Kentucky, died on the way to Pocatello for treatment and was buried in the new Pauline cemetery. For families whose nearest hospital lay over the mountains, a sick child meant a long and uncertain drive.

In December 1908 Adam Affleck moved his family onto his ranch on Bannock Creek to finish the ranch house. There he cut an eight-inch gash in his foot and, with no doctor within reach, sewed it up himself with a sewing needle and silk thread. The Pocatello Tribune ran the story as "Home Made Surgery", and the American Falls Press passed it on.

The Nunnelleys, sawmill people from Somerset, Kentucky, moved onto their Summit homesteads on 10 August 1909 and soon learned what an Arbon winter was. They ran out of feed, and their horses would only lie down in the deep snow. Joe Arbon came with a load of hay and Ed Davis with groceries; the visitors stayed the night, and by the family's telling "we danced and sang."

One night about October 1909 thieves took horses belonging to Jesse N. Ward of Malad and Arbon from an island in the Snake River. In late July 1911 Ward found and claimed them at American Falls, and he testified at the preliminary hearing at which a man was bound over for trial. How the case ended has not been found.

On Friday 24 February 1911 Alma Wood, who had lately moved his family onto a homestead at the head of Rattlesnake Creek, left his father's place in Rockland village for the Evans electric sawmill at the head of Moonshine; his younger brother Carlisle took him part of the way on horseback. A snowstorm covered his tracks, and when he did not arrive a search party set out. He reached the Evans mill in good condition.

In the winter of 1911–12 snow buried the barbed-wire fences until only the post tops showed. George and Beth Andersen fed John Andersen's stock all winter, crossing the half mile between the places on snowshoes. Apart from family, the Arnns and Heber Woods were about the only people they saw until spring.

A January thaw and days of heavy rain sent every creek in the valley over its banks and took out the bridges along the Bannock. The Ezra Andersen and Dell C. Dalton families were going home together from a neighbour's when their sleigh box overturned in the rushing water at a crossing; Mr. Dalton freed himself and lifted the box off the others, and Mrs. Dalton and Eva Andersen were found holding children by their feet in the current. Three children were swept away: Nicholas Andersen, five, and two of the Daltons, George, seven, and the baby Dora, about two months old. The fathers and neighbours searched until dawn and found the bodies several miles downstream; Find a Grave and a photographed stone place all three in the Arbon Valley Cemetery, although the archive says they were buried at Pauline.

In September 1911 the Arbon news reported that lightning had narrowly missed Charles Orison at Summit. On 31 May 1915 lightning wrecked telephones and poles on the valley line and killed three of James Russell's horses. That August C. M. Torrance, collecting grain specimens in the Arbon valley for the Power County Fair, was nearly struck himself.

The Arbon column of 14 September 1911, busy with threshing news, reported that Mr. Matthews had lost his cabin to a sagebrush fire. He was William H. Mathews of Hyrum, who had entered a homestead at the Summit end of the valley about 1909–10; he patented the quarter in 1917. The same column noted that a Mr. Anderson was hurt when his horse stumbled on the way home from Sunday school.

Mrs. Lewis, who had come from Washington to teach a school in Bannock Valley, hired a livery rig whose driver did not know the new and unfinished road over the Moonshine divide. They spent a day floundering in deep snow and reached the Evans sawmill at dusk with no food and no matches. She finished the trip with Arbon people who happened by to fetch lumber.

Eldon, the first child of Lorin and Claribel Bailey, was a toddler when he followed his father out into the farmyard and was kicked in the head by one of the work horses. His father took him to a hospital and then on to Salt Lake City, where he died at the LDS Hospital during an operation meant to save him; the Salt Lake paper reported that he had been hurt on a Wednesday night and brought to the city the next day. He was buried at Malad, where his baby sister Wanda was laid beside him in 1923.

Jennie Bailey had married Lawrence Gibbons in December 1910, and the young couple planned to go to Malad for the birth of their first child, but her labour began unexpectedly, in the deep snow of late March. Her mother, Annie Bailey, had delivered many Arbon babies, but this time things went wrong, and by the time a doctor could be brought over the snowy roads from Malad, both Jennie and her baby daughter Bertha had died. Family and friends dug through deep snow and frozen ground for the grave, and Jennie was buried in the Arbon Cemetery with Bertha in her arms.

Typhoid sent dry farmers home from Buist to Utah in 1913 and 1915, among them William F. King, the future Mount View bishop, who recovered. In September 1915 the Clarence Knowles home on the Pauline side was quarantined for smallpox, "the first case of this disease in the valley"; a Dawson family was quarantined in 1919, and in January 1920 the star-route mail carrier Eggers came down with it. In 1923 scarlet fever struck the Crystal schools; with the Fannin and Snyder boys sick, Mrs. Martin Hayden took the post office into her own home.

Samuel Levell "Val" Allsworth died on 25 November 1914, aged 29, leaving his wife Ella, a daughter of the Crystal Whitings, with two small children on their homestead. The Whiting family memoirs remember that the next spring the whole of Crystal turned out to plant her grain. Ella married Frank C. Rieger the next November and was still at Crystal in 1920.

After a cold north wind died away in the night, a hard frost struck in the middle of June. George Andersen's wheat, waist high and "a perfect stand", broke off "clear to the ground" when he and Beth walked through it. They borrowed money for seed and planted again.

Water was the scarcest thing at Crystal, and the Bradleys held one of the oldest rights on upper Rattlesnake Creek. In January 1915 the district court calendar listed Monroe C. Keplinger, a neighbouring settler, against George and Julia Bradley for an injunction and equitable relief; what the quarrel was about and how it ended are not recorded. In September 1919 Alva Thacker stood trial before a justice-court jury on a charge of tampering with and opening the headgate of Julia Bradley's reservoir on the creek, and the jury set him free.

As the Luther Fellows family came down the mountain from Malad in July 1915, their three-year-old son George fell from the buggy and was run over by it. He died on 17 July; the funeral was held at the Valley View schoolhouse and he was buried in "the Arbon cemetery", one of the earliest dated burials there.

Smut, a fungus that turned wheat kernels into black dust, made threshing dangerous: in October 1915 the Sorenson brothers' machine at the south end had a smut explosion, though it was soon repaired. In August 1924 a smut explosion on the Ray Hatfield place destroyed Clive Hatfield's threshing outfit, five sacks of wheat, a wagon, a derrick and a grain stack. None of it was insured.

In the first days of December 1915 M. D. (Merl) Van Horn, 42, of Arbon, was cutting timber for his brother Hugh when a tree he was felling came down on him. The long-distance line to American Falls had been connected only days before, and it brought Dr. Noth out to the valley; it was among the first emergencies the telephone answered. Van Horn was taken to the Dee hospital at Ogden for surgery but died there of internal injuries, and his body was shipped back to Idaho.

Esther Westcott, a 26-year-old Danish-born mother of two, held a homestead beside that of Julian Maes, a well-liked New Mexico-born homesteader who had courted her until she turned cold to him. On Sunday 24 January 1915, after a quarrel, he came at her cabin from its blind, windowless side; she ran for her life across the field while her two children ran the other way to the neighbours, and he dropped to one knee, fired his shotgun, then put the gun to his own chest. Neither died at once, but both lived only a little while, and by the Davis family's account the bodies were taken to Ed Davis's store; in Maes's cabin neighbours found a note to "My Friends" naming Jesse Ward to settle his estate and asking that his land be sold for her children. Esther was buried in Mountain View Cemetery at Pocatello and her children went to their father in Nebraska; Maes, a murderer and a suicide, was buried in unhallowed ground outside the fence just west of the Arbon cemetery, in a grave now farmed over.

In July 1916 two prisoners escaped from the Power County jail at American Falls and rode to Pauline, where they hid at "the ranch house of Mr. Dawson, step-father to Beebe". Arthur Beebe, about nineteen, had pleaded guilty to forgery; he was probably Arthur Isaac Beebe, whose widowed mother Emma Jane had married the Pauline homesteader J. D. Dawson in 1910. The sheriff's chase took his men through the foothills south of Knox Canyon, and the two were recaptured near Malad.

Sarah Frances Karr Bollinger, 29, who held a homestead of her own at Summit, was coming home late from Pocatello with her husband George in November 1916, and rather than drive the last five miles they stopped for the night with his sister's family, the Gus Brahmstadts. In the night she was taken suddenly ill, and Brahmstadt drove her to Pocatello, where she died on 26 November. She was buried at Mountain View in Pocatello, and her heirs received the patent to her homestead in 1919.

Mayme Arbon, George Arbon's fourth daughter, was living at Arbon under her maiden name by 1915, probably on the 160 acres in Section 35 patented that July to a "Mary Ann Arbon". In July 1916 her house was destroyed by fire; passers-by saved the furnishings. In January 1918 she married her neighbour Jerry Baker Jr., and they farmed at Arbon until about 1930.

Ben O. Messinger, 35, came to the valley with the Dayton, Washington, settlers and held a 320-acre homestead on the east side of the valley. In February 1916, in Ogden to buy horses and mules, he was found dead from gas in his rooming-house room. His body was taken home to Dayton for burial; his homestead patent was issued after his death.

Walter Nunnelley, a Kentucky sawmill man, had bought the Clayton brothers' mill in 1911 and was running it in Bull Canyon by 1915, sawing lumber for the homesteaders' houses. In the spring of 1916 the mill burned, taking about 16,000 feet of lumber with it. The family stayed on at Summit until 1922.

By February 1917 Joe Arbon's horses were snowbound in the hills, and men carried hay to them on horseback, though a few died; rabid coyotes were loose in the valley, and dogs belonging to Julius Abter and one of the Andersens were bitten and had to be shot. In March the county agent reported that hay had run short and heavy snow had killed stock in the Rockland and Arbon valleys. Arbon men said no more than twenty horses were lost there, with heavier losses of Indian ponies and cattle on the reservation; one Davis wintered his horses high on Bowen's peak. The Andersen family remembered a winter, which they called 1919, when the hay ran out by March and the men drove the horses up the east-side ridges and carried oats to them on homemade skis — probably this same winter.

In March 1916 Henry D. Wall of Layton, Utah, was in federal bankruptcy court at Ogden; by May 1917 he was farming at Arbon on 320 acres on the Arbon–Pauline edge. A Power County suit of early 1917, Martin Van Dyke v. Henry Wall, may have been his. His land was delinquent for 1920 taxes, and in 1924–25 it was among the tracts facing a county tax deed.

David Thomas Davis Jr. had lived at Arbon with his brother Eynon on the north-end homestead before enlisting on 14 August 1917. He was killed instantly in action in France at the end of July 1918, on the 28th by the Arbon paper's count. Word reached Eynon in October, and early in 1919 Mrs. Myrtle Poppie of Arbon published a poem in his memory.

The epidemic reached the valley in October 1918: the Central school closed on 21 October, the Crystal Latter-day Saints stopped meeting until February, and neighbours went from house to house to cook, do chores and nurse the sick. Charles C. Myler, 57, whom the paper called "a pioneer resident of Arbon", died in a Pocatello hospital on 16 October, and the infant child of Eric and Clara Young of the Pauline side died there too. At Holbrook, by Buist, Gus Frome and his wife Cornelia Evans Frome died within hours of each other on 11 November, leaving six young children, while her brother-in-law Bishop Archibald Hall of the Mount View Ward lay seriously ill but recovered. Through the winter whole families were down at Crystal, George and Ella Bradley among them, and quite a few on upper Rattlesnake Creek; Sarah Staley, the Crystal bishop's wife, who had been sick that winter, died in April 1919.

John Emer Daniels, 21, son of Donum and Martha Daniels of Pauline, had been at Camp Fremont, California, for two months when the influenza struck the camp. His father set out for California as soon as word of the illness came, but John died on 22 October 1918 of pneumonia brought on by the flu, and his body was brought home to Malad for burial. Power County's honor roll of its war dead lists him as the son of Martha Daniels of Pauline; two months before, his nine-year-old sister Mary Jane had died at Malad.

Park Lusk married Erma Bailey on furlough from Camp Lewis in April 1918 and went overseas as a sergeant; in February 1919 she had word he was in a hospital in France, and some of her letters came back marked "wounded". Ernest Poppie Jr., of Company F, 361st Infantry, was listed in the casualty reports of February 1919 as an Arbon man wounded slightly; his brother Maurice reached France just after the Armistice and found him there. Mirlan Hallett of Kansas City, a nephew of the J. E. Keelers who had lived at Arbon a few years before, was wounded in the Argonne on 28 September 1918 and came back to live with them.

In September 1919 Charles Bolingbroke, one of the first ranchers at the north end of the valley, was thrown when a gate frightened his horse. For about five years afterwards he could not walk, but, a proud man, he refused to use a wheelchair. He died at the Pauline farm in June 1924, aged 71, of what the papers called spinal trouble, and was buried at Malad.

Early in December 1919 William Allard rescued David Ripley, Lucien McClary and Maurice Poppie, who were stranded between Rattlesnake and Pauline. Later that month a five-day storm drove the thermometer to 28 below at D. B. Ripley's, at the east end of the valley, and 32 below at John Bowen's on the west side. Side roads drifted shut, and the rural carrier Ren Evans could get only part way round his route.

By late July 1919 harvest had begun at Arbon, but the grain was short: most of the spring grain had frozen or burned up, the fall grain had burned too, feed and hay were scarce, and there was no pasture. Coming on top of the stock-killing winter of 1916–17 and the fall of wartime prices, the dry year helped drive families out of the valley; only about a quarter of the household heads of 1910 were still there in 1920.

In June 1919 C. W. (Conrad) Wiedemann, an Arbon farmer, swore out a complaint against a Spanish sheepherder who had drawn a revolver on him. On 1 July the herder was convicted on a reduced charge, fined and ordered to pay Wiedemann $50 in damages. Clashes between dry farmers and the sheep outfits that crossed their land were a familiar part of valley life.

Ralph Vaughn Jenson, eight, was working a team and disc in one of the family's fields when the horses ran away and he fell beneath the disc. He died almost at once; the Press reported that when found he was severely cut. His brothers Don and Clyde were in the field with their own teams, and the family remembered that it happened too fast for them to help; he was buried in Logan.

The front page of the Press of 25 April 1919 carried a short notice that the house of C. W. Wiedemann, a mile and a half south-west of the Arbon post office, had burned. No cause, injuries or losses are recorded.

Willie Jeppson, the eldest son of the Buist storekeeper and postmaster August F. Jeppson, was sent out in July 1919 to gather the work horses. His saddle pony apparently stepped in a badger hole and fell on him, breaking his neck; his uncle found him. He was just turning eleven; after the funeral at Buist the family went back to Brigham City for a time.

Farmers who had mortgaged their homesteads in the high-price years could not pay when wheat prices fell and the 1919 drought hit, and from 1920 the legal pages filled with foreclosures. Among them were the Iverson block on the south-west floor (judgment 1920, sheriff's sale 1921), Lawrence and Elizabeth Gibbons's homestead (sale advertised June 1921), Charles Myler's quarter at Pauline (1921), the McClain–Kettler farm at Crystal (1922), the Jenks and Knowles homesteads (1922–23), and two decrees of September 1923 against Lorenzo and Chloa Bailey, on 480 acres with three shares of the Arbon Irrigation Company and on the old Dalton place. At Crystal the sheriff advertised Isaac Phillips's farm (1923), Arthur Light's former homestead (1923), Moses and Cora Fannin's homestead, the former bishop's own (1924), and John and Mary Johnston's land (1924), while the Infanger and Roderick mortgages were foreclosed on the Arbon floor (1924) and W. E. Dawson's farm at Pauline (1925); the county took tax deeds on other tracts, and in August 1925 D. B. Ripley sued to foreclose on the ranch he had sold Thomas Toyn. Whether most of the sales went through, and who bought, the records seen do not show, but by 1923 a Crystal column predicted the settlement would be "almost deserted this winter".

The Joe Arbon family invited the neighbours for Christmas Eve, and the Davises went in their sleigh. While they were there it turned into a blizzard, and "Santa" — Ezra Andersen — had a hard time getting through with the children's toys. No one dared drive home, so about two in the morning the children were put to bed and the adults lay on the floor; at daylight they had to dig their way out through the snow piled in the doorway.

About eight o'clock on a Thursday evening in late February 1920 a fire started in the kitchen of Joe and Inez Evans's house, half a mile east of the Arbon post office. The house was a total loss, and there was no insurance. Mrs. E. A. Logan reported it for the American Falls Press.

Ground squirrels were a plague to the dry farmers, and poisoned oats were the usual remedy. In June 1920 a Davis of Arbon lost four of his best horses after they got into poisoned squirrel-bait oats that George Iverson had left in an open sack in the Davis field.

Driving home to Arbon in August 1920 with a car loaded with harvest supplies, C. C. Wall stalled on the Oregon Short Line tracks at the Pocatello stockyards. He ran up the track to flag down train No. 4, but the engineer did not see him, and the car was demolished. No one was hurt.

In August 1921 John and Sena Andersen's six-year-old daughter Alane fell ill with appendicitis, and they took her the fifty-odd miles of washboard dirt road to the Bethany Deaconess hospital at American Falls. She was operated on but died two weeks later, on 20 or 21 August. The funeral was held in the Latter-day Saint church at Arbon, and she was buried in the Arbon cemetery.

On the morning of 17 March 1921, after a quarrel with Dick Steed at a Pauline store, W. H. Ball, a Kentucky-born homesteader of about fifty, met his neighbour Ed Brandt on the road about a mile out of town and shot him through the arm. That afternoon Deputy Sheriff C. H. Torrance, who was also the county probation officer, deputized John Kowallis, Herbert Swim and Eric Young at Pauline and, with the local deputy Hyrum Secrist, watched Ball's place for two hours; when Ball came home about half past five, shots were exchanged, Torrance fell with wounds in the stomach and lung, Kowallis was hit in the arm and Swim's leg was broken. Ball, shot in one arm, got away, his cabin went up in flames, and after two tries he reached Ed Poling's place, where his wounds were dressed before Poling started with him for Pocatello; the two became separated, boys found Ball in Pocatello about three in the morning and brought him to the hospital, and his arm was amputated. Torrance died at the Bethany Deaconess hospital in American Falls on Sunday 20 March despite a transfusion from his brother, more than 600 people came to his funeral, and Ball was charged with first-degree murder.

Bound over in May, Ball went on trial for Torrance's death at American Falls in June 1921; the possemen testified that he opened fire when ordered to put up his hands, while he pleaded self-defence, saying he took the posse for a mob, and after sixteen hours the jury acquitted him on 24 June. He was re-arrested at once for shooting Brandt; the first trial in October was thrown out on a faulty information, and on 20 December a second jury acquitted him of assault with intent to kill, although Fred Bishoff and sixteen-year-old Kenneth Waylett of Pauline swore they saw him tie his team, walk back and fire, and that Brandt never had his gun in his hand. Ball testified that Brandt drew a rifle on him "but did not fire a shot", the Press criticized the verdict in an editorial, and a reader wrote in to scold the paper for printing only the state's side. Brandt sued Ball for $20,000, and in 1922 John Kowallis's claim for compensation as a compelled deputy was refused; what became of Ball afterwards is not known.

About one o'clock on a Friday night at the end of October 1921 fire broke out in W. C. Snyder's store at Crystal, which also held the post office, the settlement's amusement hall and the family's living rooms. Mrs. Snyder and her family, who ran the store and post office and lived upstairs, escaped in their night clothes, and the building was a total loss except for some insurance on the stock. W. C. Snyder, called "the first settler in Crystal", died at Pocatello less than a month later; Cora Snyder kept the post office again until December 1923, by which time she was leaving and "nobody seems to want to take the postoffice".

Brigham "Brig" Bowen, 28, son of the valley's first postmaster and Latter-day Saint leader D. J. Bowen, had come home from the First World War, carried the rural mail and patented some 400 acres beside his father's block. He had bought two trucks for a hauling venture and could not meet the payments, and on the morning of 24 May 1922, by the newspapers, he shot himself with his rifle. The ranch hand Elmer Roderick found his body in a manger at noon, with a note in his pocket: "Am discouraged, stay with father, he will treat you right." He was buried at Samaria.

Erma Bailey Lusk, 21, the mother of two small boys, caught a cold in the hard winter of 1922 that turned to pneumonia; she was thought too ill to survive the trip to a hospital over the winter roads, and her mother Annie nursed her. She died on 24 February 1922 after ten days' illness, ten years almost to the month after her sister Jennie. Relatives from Cache Valley drove twenty miles out from Pocatello and went on by sleigh through three feet of snow, past houses and barns drifted over; after the funeral in the Pauline meeting house, her father James Bailey dug through the drifts and frozen ground to lay her beside Jennie in the Arbon cemetery, and her boys were raised by their aunt and uncle, Annie and David Lusk.

On Saturday 11 February 1922 Frank Kulock, 57, a Prussian immigrant who had homesteaded two miles west of the Pauline crossroads, drove in to Pauline for the mail. A blizzard caught him on the way home; he got as far as unhitching his team, but froze to death about 150 yards from his house. His wife Augusta did not find him until the Tuesday, and neighbours brought the body to Pocatello for a Catholic funeral and burial at Mountain View; their son Joe came home from Minnesota and kept the place until his own death in 1941.

One spring Eddie Davis went ahead with the buggy to fill a washout so May could cross with the car, and the frightened team bolted back and ran right over the car with May and two of the girls inside; a horse put its foot through the side window, the buggy was smashed to pieces in Chauncey Payne's field, and no one in the car was hurt. Another time a hired man of Joe Arbon's sheltering under his wagon in a thunderstorm had the team back the wagon over his baby's head; with no one else at home, May drove the unconscious child through the mud to the doctor, and he was all right within hours. When Joe Arbon cut his hand badly on a broken water jug, she drove him to Pocatello faster than she ever drove before or since, wishing a policeman would stop her, and the doctor put him in hospital for loss of blood. Crossing a steep-banked creek in the buggy on the way to pick chokecherries, she saw little Lois thrown out under the front wheel in the mud, and held the spirited team still on the bank until she could ease the wheels just far enough to pull her out, cold and muddy but unhurt.

Walt Andersen had made the last Andersen homestead entries about 1913–14 and farmed his brother George's place before moving on to Arco and then to Oregon, where he worked as a timber scaler and timekeeper at a big sawmill. Early in October 1923, aged twenty-nine, he died there; his mother in Mendon had the news on 4 October, and he was buried at Mendon the next day. The family remembers that a tree fell on him in a logging accident; his son Raymond was about five months old.

On 4 December 1924 a deputy sheriff and federal prohibition agents raided a ranch house on the east fork of Bannock Creek that was being used to distil moonshine. They found a complete still in operation, confiscated about twelve gallons of liquor and destroyed a hundred gallons of grain mash. The two men found running it, Earl Daniels and Melvin Price, were lodged in the Bannock County jail at Pocatello.

John Henry Payne, an English-born railroad man, had been one of Arbon's early settlers: with his wife Emily, George Arbon's daughter, he kept one of the valley's first stores and the "Payne hotel", ran a sawmill in Knox Canyon and served as justice of the peace. By 1924 he had left the valley and was a supply man at the Oregon Short Line roundhouse in Pocatello. On 12 December 1924 he and Mrs. Martha Tuttle were found shot, and the coroner's jury returned a verdict that he had shot her and then killed himself, although his son James Lester Payne of Arbon testified that he had never seen a gun in his father's possession.

On the afternoon of Wednesday 5 March 1924 Thomas Toyn, a prominent Arbon Valley rancher, was sitting in his ranch-house kitchen with his wife and John Conway, a printer by trade who had boarded with them since harvest; Mrs. Toyn left the room, Conway walked to the corner and picked up Toyn's rifle, and Toyn was shot from behind through the left shoulder, just above the heart. Mrs. Toyn raised help through the Arbon telephone operator, Mrs. Evans, and Toyn was taken to the Bethany Deaconess hospital at American Falls, where his father, Bishop Toyn of Grouse Creek, Utah, came to his bedside. Conway said the rifle went off while he was unloading it, but neighbours' stories led to a charge of assault with intent to commit murder; at the preliminary hearing, where Conway acted as his own lawyer and a suspect cheque drawn on Toyn's account was produced, he was bound over on $1,500 bond. Toyn recovered and served as bishop of the Arbon Ward in 1924–25; how the case against Conway ended has not been found.

On a Monday evening in September 1925 Ila Lenore, the three-year-old daughter of Mitchell Peterson, Pauline's blacksmith and garage man, was run over on the road at Pauline by a truck hauling grain. She was taken to a Pocatello hospital, where she died of internal injuries; a neighbour, Mrs. Jewel Horton, went with the family. Her mother died the following year at Rupert.

In August 1925 Mrs. Leslie Marble of Holbrook, a young wife born in 1904, was struck and killed by lightning near a wire fence beside her house. The Marbles farmed at Holbrook, on the edge of the Buist and Mount View district.

In early September 1925 the motor stage between Pocatello and the Arbon Valley, which carried the mail, lost its steering when a rod failed and plunged off the road down an embankment into Mink Creek. Its passengers were Mrs. Mose Fannin of Crystal and three of her children; Mrs. Fannin was badly cut and her daughter Ethel's arm was broken.

Norman, the youngest child of John and Sena Andersen, was severely burned when he was a toddler, born as he was in June 1924. His mother nursed him through many months of care, and he grew up to farm at Arbon with his brother Glenn after the Second World War.

In September 1927 Joseph Kulock, "residing in Arbon valley", was arrested on the complaint of several neighbours and charged with the theft of sacked wheat. He was released on a $300 bond to await a preliminary hearing. How the charge ended has not been found; he kept the family place until his death in 1941.

On 7 June 1927 about 400 sheep and some 1,700 pounds of wool belonging to Joseph W. and Jesse N. Ward were stolen by a herder, and a sheriff later turned the animals over to the man who had them. The Ward brothers sued Eugene Peterson of Hyrum in federal court for their value. In January 1928, after a six-day trial at Salt Lake City, a federal jury awarded them $2,910.40.

After the wartime boom, the outlying settlements went dry and broke: the Whiting brothers, who had bought 1,200 to 1,600 acres at Crystal and were worth some $87,000 before the crash, lost their farms by 1932, and Floyd Denning signed his place over to the county for taxes. After mid-1931 "almost the whole ward" — about a dozen Crystal families, with Bishop Whiting — left for the Hagle Ranch on Kirtley Creek near Salmon, bought on one big contract, and lost that ranch too; fifteen families were left in the Crystal ward at the start of 1935, and it was disorganized that December. At Buist, thinned by drought, the farm depression and the influenza, 122 people in 1920 had fallen to fourteen families by 1930; the post offices at Buist (1936) and Crystal (1938) closed, and federal land-utilization purchases from 1934 to 1942 turned much of the south end into what became the Curlew National Grassland.

Jean Daniels's father ran the store at the crossroads of the Arbon Highway and Mink Creek Road while she was growing up. One day her parents were driving home from town and saw smoke pouring out of the building; out of a window came several puppies, thrown to safety, followed by the children, Mary Lou, Virgie, Jack and Jean. Asked years later why the pups went first, Jean said little sisters were easy to come by, but Dad would never let them have a bunch of puppies; the original log store burned down, and Jean and her husband Waldo Evans later ran its successor from 1960 to 1975.

On New Year's Day 1935 a car driven by John Bolingbroke, 21, of Arbon skidded off the road, crashed through a guard rail and went into the Portneuf River. Two girls from Arbon, Lois Davis, 16, and her sister Ardella, 13, were being held above the water when the police arrived and helped them ashore, while Harry Lawton, 17, of Pocatello and John Lusk, 22, of Arbon waded out; all were treated for cuts and exposure. Bolingbroke was arrested for drunken driving and speeding, yet the officers credited his heroism with the fact that no one was killed.

George Willard Bradley, 65, one of the first settlers on upper Rattlesnake Creek, was driving on a slippery highway about five miles east of American Falls when his car skidded, threw him through the top and came to rest on him. Other motorists passed before two Pocatello men, Ralph Pardini and H. A. Nachtrich, found the body, and the Power County coroner took charge. A widower since 1927, he left Ruth, twelve, and George, ten, whom their aunt Laura Haight took to Indianapolis; the family remembered that he was coming home from Christmas shopping for them, and it was a sad Christmas for the whole valley. His body was taken home to Augusta, Michigan, for burial, and the ranch was leased to neighbours until his son came back to run it.

David Dale Orison, 22, born at Arbon, a son of the Summit homesteaders Charles and Jean Orison, was struck by a car while crossing the street at Malad on Saturday 14 May 1938. He died in the Malad hospital on the Monday. His funeral at Logan was conducted by Bishop Don Jenson of Arbon, and Bishop Joseph Arbon and Willard Andersen of Arbon took part.

John R. Breeze, son of William H. Breeze of Arbon, enlisted in the Marine Corps in 1938. On 8 September 1940, at Guam, he rescued two youths from drowning, and in February 1942 the Treasury awarded him its silver lifesaving medal for "fortitude and presence of mind".

Carl Estep was born at Arbon on 13 April 1918, the son of Luther and Lucy Estep, who had come to Pauline from Kentucky in 1915. He registered for the draft at Arbon in October 1940, was inducted the next spring and served as a corporal in Company G, 1st Armored Regiment, 1st Armored Division. He went missing on 14 February 1943, the first day of the fighting at Sidi Bou Zid in Tunisia; the War Department later recorded a finding of death, and his name is on the Tablets of the Missing at the North Africa American Cemetery. His mother became a Gold Star Mother, and the family raised a memorial stone at Falls View that reads "Killed in Africa."

Archie Duaine Orison, eight, was watching his father, Archie Orison, load a truck from the granary at the family's Arbon Valley ranch on 6 July 1943. The suction of the elevator loading the truck set the grain sliding, and the wheat engulfed the boy; before his father could tear the siding off the granary to reach him, he had suffocated. He was a grandson of the pioneer L. B. Evans on his mother's side.

On the evening of Saturday 14 August 1943 Leslie E. Nelson, 39, of Arbon was driving toward American Falls with nine people in his pickup, five of them in the front seat. Twelve miles east of American Falls it collided head-on with an empty wheat truck driven by Irvin Walz of Arbon. Nelson was killed and his wife's collarbone broken; the seven other passengers had only scratches and bruises.

Hyrum Leon Buist was born at Mendon in 1921 to William E. and Marilla Buist, the homesteaders whose name the Buist post office probably bore. He joined the Army Air Corps in December 1941, trained in California and Texas and was sent to South America as a radio operator; in June 1943 he was reported missing, and the federal records list Private First Class Hyrum L. Buist of the 4th Photographic Squadron, 1st Mapping Group, as missing in Brazil on 8 June 1943, never recovered. Sidney Ralph Phillips, born at Crystal in January 1918 to Sidney and Ruth Whiting Phillips, had registered for the draft at Salmon in 1940, and died in military service in 1944.

On Thursday 20 January 1944 a four-engine heavy bomber took off in formation from the Pocatello Army Air Base on a combat training mission and went out of control about ten miles south-west of the base. Seven men were killed — Second Lieutenant Donald W. Harries and Sergeants Frederick J. Alderman, Raymond W. Shook, Clifton S. Hurt, Gerald H. Cuddington, Jack C. Slough and Glen M. [surname unreadable] of Kimberly, Idaho — and three were injured. In 2013 a researcher of wartime crashes wrote to the valley's website asking anyone who knew where the bomber came down near Arbon Valley to tell him; the archive does not record an answer.

Guy and Hazel Bolingbroke had built a log house near the Pauline store, and in 1947 bought a home in Pocatello so their eldest could go to high school. In the fall of 1948 they got the shocking news that the Arbon house had burned to the ground. The only thing saved was the piano, which they had already moved to Pocatello that fall.

Families were snowed in from the day after Christmas 1948 until 22 March 1949, and in February a seventeen-day storm swung every day between south wind and the dreaded west blizzard. Sod Williams, feeding cattle for the J. N. Arbon family, went out to the stock only on south-wind days, but often had to face a west blizzard to get home; one night, after ten o'clock, Nelda heard at last the crunch of hooves in the frozen snow and met the pack mare at the barn door, white with frost to the whiskers. Mail was flown from Pocatello and dropped in a field, the rural carrier delivered it on horseback, and hay was airlifted to ranchers who could not reach their stacks; up Bull Canyon, Walter Fredrich was snowed in for the season.

On the evening of Thursday 2 November 1950 Gene Armstrong, 26, a Pocatello flight instructor and war veteran, took off from Phillips Field in a four-seat Cessna with two students, Paul Shepherd, 28, and Shirley Webster, both veterans, on a cross-country round trip. In a driving rainstorm and fog the plane struck the side of a sloping ravine about eight miles north of Arbon with such force that the tail folded to within eight feet of the nose. Farmers near Rattlesnake Creek heard an aircraft sputtering about eight o'clock, and Ben Hayden and Leonard Judkins went out to search but could not find it in the dark; fifteen to twenty planes joined the hunt, and the wreck was spotted from the air the next morning on the Norman Grover farm, with all three men dead.

Robert Lagrande Willie, 41, a son of the Buist homesteader Robert H. Willie, went to school at Samaria and Holbrook and farmed in Oneida County. At Malad's annual rodeo on Friday 10 July 1953 he was thrown from a horse and fatally hurt, and he died in the Malad hospital the next day, leaving two sons.

Pilfering, thievery and looting were on the rise in the remote valley. In October 1954, at the request of several farmers, Power County Sheriff Rulon Neal organized twenty ranchers into the Arbon and Crystal Valley Vigilantes, with Lloyd Brower and Sherman Roper as official deputies. They planned to patrol the valley in rotation through the winter — on skis if necessary, and by spotter plane once the snow closed the roads — to sign up every man in the valley, and to learn their lawful rights in carrying firearms.

Keith Norman Hayden, 17, a senior at Pocatello High School and a Future Farmers of America member, was the son of the late Norman Hayden of the Crystal farm and Marie Krueger Hayden. On the evening of Sunday 5 January 1958 he died while skiing in Arbon Valley near Crystal, and a post-mortem examination was held. He was buried at Mountain View in Pocatello; two years before, he had been photographed on Gumbo Hill for his uncle Carl Hayden's article about Crystal.

In late March 1962 creeks across south-eastern Idaho overran their banks, and in "little Arbon Valley" they cut through the roads to Crystal and to American Falls, isolating the community. Telephone lines to Arbon went down on the morning of 28 March, and 25 dry-farm families were still cut off the next day, though the authorities said no one was in danger.

On Saturday night 23 March 1963 two Airways Inc. planes were flying home empty to Pocatello after carrying stranded airline passengers to Salt Lake City, just thirteen miles from home, when they ran into a snow squall; one pilot reported his plane icing. Allen J. Manning, the company's president and a Pocatello mortician, and Wayne Koch were found dead the next morning beside the burned wreck of their Piper Aztec on the Ben L. Hayden ranch north of Crystal, where farmers had heard a plane in the night. More than thirty planes searched in heavy turbulence for the second plane, a Piper Apache flown alone by Wayne L. Carter, and on Monday afternoon its scorched wreckage was spotted in the Deep Creek Mountains sixteen miles south-west of Pocatello, and his body was recovered.

In 1968 C. T. Hansen had a bad tractor accident and spent more than two weeks in hospital and two more on bed rest at home. The people of Arbon came and did his farming — seeding, summer fallowing and cultivating — with Dave Lusk, his son and his hired man bringing their big equipment. Sadie Hansen remembered that it was probably the first time their work had ever been done early.

Reese Mark Andersen, son of Mark and Delores Andersen of Arimo and Arbon Valley, served a mission — paid for, the family remembers, by his father's pig sales — and was commissioned a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. Serving with B Company, 3rd Engineer Battalion, 3rd Marine Division, he died near Quang Tri on 19 April 1969, aged 25, of an accidental gunshot wound; the family account says a fellow Marine was cleaning his rifle and it went off, striking him in the neck. He was buried at Arimo on 3 May 1969, and the Vietnam Veterans Memorial lists his home of record as Arbon, Idaho, on Panel 26W, Line 6; his brother Dean died eighteen years later after a round-up accident.

William Allard homesteaded on the Knox Canyon Road in 1909, and from 1951 his daughter Eleanor and her husband J. D. Nuckols farmed the place. Their son Dan, writing in 2013, recalled that the house burned down in 1981, though most of the other buildings were still standing.

Earl Dean Andersen, 50, ran and in 1975 bought his father Mark's farm at Arbon. On 18 September 1987 he was hurt in an accident during a cattle round-up, and he died of his injuries in Pocatello on 29 September. He was buried in the Arbon cemetery, and his son Ardean took over the farm.

In mid-June 1988 two range fires broke out on the Fort Hall Reservation at the north end of the valley. The Mosho fire, about four miles north-west of Pauline on the east side of the Arbon Valley Highway, grew from 2,000 acres to 3,500 overnight, and the Beacon fire four miles farther north, on the west side, from 30 acres to about 1,500. Together they burned at least 5,000 acres before the Bureau of Land Management expected to contain them.

Rocky Mel Andersen, born in 1969 to David R. and Karen Mathews Andersen, died on a hunting trip in October 1996, aged 27, of accidental suffocation. He was buried in the Arbon Valley Cemetery, where his father was later laid close to him.

About three in the afternoon of Saturday 21 August 2010 a human-caused fire started at the Lee Bailey homestead; it was nearly out when a spark jumped almost 800 yards into wheat stubble to the north, and gusting winds drove it into the neighbouring CRP and stubble fields. Within minutes tractors came down from fields all over the valley, water trucks from farms and meadows, and the county road crew mobilized, joined by BLM crews, planes, helicopters and Fort Hall firefighters; several families were told to leave or be ready to. The fire raced up draws and canyons along the east side toward Rattlesnake, stripping good deer cover, before dying winds and rain helped contain it on 23 August; one rancher reckoned it burned 8,000 to 10,000 acres.

Christine Kemp Wright, 61, a special-education teacher who had fought cancer since 1995, had been dividing her time since 2007 between the couple's farm at Arbon and her mother's home in Ogden. She died on 15 November 2011 of complications from injuries suffered in a horse-riding accident.

Sherman Hale "Sherm" Swim, born in 1923, son of Bob Swim, grew up on the family's Bannock Creek ranch, drove the school bus to American Falls and became one of the biggest cattlemen in Idaho. He died at 87 on 18 January 2011 in California, where he spent his winters, in what the family's history calls a ranching accident. The valley held a celebration in his memory that month.

On 11 July 2012 lightning started a fire in Knox Canyon; the valley's new emergency text system alerted everyone for the first time, sheep were moved out and tractors stationed to protect fields and homes. Later that year, when lightning lit another fire at 1:15 one morning, fifteen neighbours had it out in forty minutes, some with pajama tops tucked into their trousers; Hans Hayden told a reporter there was no fire department to call, so everyone in the valley was the fire department. In August 2016 the Power Line fire, probably started by lightning, burned more than 4,000 acres of grass, sage, pinyon and juniper in the Starlight Creek area of Arbon Valley on the Fort Hall Reservation, while tribal crews, helped by the BLM, the Forest Service and the Power County and Chubbuck fire departments, worked to contain it.