1935 marked the seventh consecutive low-precipitation year for Southeast Idaho with predictable results. Cutoffs reached clear back to 1888 water decrees by mid-August, with the Teton basin area becoming the most difficult to police. The deputy watermaster there found headgates illegally opened almost immediately after he closed them, the farmers unwilling to comply with the law and hence lose their crops.
Upper Teton River waterusers, whose decreed rights extended to 1888, had been feuding for several years with Lower Teton users near Rexburg whose rights reached further back in time to 1885 and earlier. Their upstream position gave them leverage, however, so long as law enforcement didn't intervene, to draw water from the river before it reached downstream users. When the deputy watermaster locked headgates to users near Fox Creek and Trail Creek, farmers there broke the locks and released water to their fields. Downstream users suggested they would, like their upstream compatriots, also take matters into their own hands and would use whatever it took to assert their water rights.
Simultaneously to the Teton water thievery, the pea crop harvest was taking place in Teton County, and nearly two thousand pickers went on strike for wages higher than the offered seventy cents per hundred pounds picked--plus fifteen cents a hundred if the worker stayed to season's completion. The area, where farmers were harvesting their best pea crop in years in early August, was already short five hundred pickers. Idaho Falls area workers were offered bus service to come work.
The shortage and strike spurred charges that people on relief were refusing to work. As a result, Governor Ross ordered "relief to employables" stopped on August 14. Just a day later, he declared martial law, sending over one hundred National Guard troops from Boise, Buhl and Twin Falls to the area in twenty trucks loaded with soldiers, fighting equipment, tentage, medical personnel and other supplies. Most workers went back in the field, with the heads of the three pea contracting companies blaming unrest on "outside agitators". The sheriff claimed that local workers were satisfied with their pay, that a few outside whites initially stirred up trouble and the imported Mexican help joined them soon after. Transients from throughout the U.S. also worked the fields.
Three hundred farmers had collected at the Driggs courthouse to demand something be done about the strike. Fifteen train carloads of peas were being shipped out daily before the strike, each load representing about six thousand dollars in labor costs, and the farmers losses would reach ten to fifteen thousand dollars a day for twenty days if the peas weren't harvested. Growers had lost an estimated thirty-five cars when Ross called in the National Guard. He adamantly stated that the troop involvement had nothing to do with the ongoing water dispute.
The Guard expelled a hundred agitators, some of them called "communists" by authorities, and offered protection to strikers who wished to go back to work. 400 Randolph camp strikers refused that offer. Paychecks were issued with the stipulation recipients would either go back to work or leave the area. Strikers lowered their demands from one dollar a hundred pounds to eighty-five cents. By Saturday most workers returned to the field. Tuesday, farmers advertised for labor offering eighty-five cents.
At the canal heagates, soldiers with bayonets patrolled to keep order--one who was displaying gun safety shot himself in the kneecap with his display pistol. Their presence allowed water dispersal to the downstream users to proceed in a legal manner and upper users acceded to the water district authority.
The news of the pea picker strike, and the Governor's military response, spread throughout the world, with the Idaho Falls newspaper's photo of National Guardsmen escorting agitators out of the county picked up by major news organizations.
Labor unions condemned Ross' actions as interference in the right to strike, and a Boise farm wife columnist scolded detractors, suggesting that if the company president's wife had spent a day in the field picking peas she would have marched into the trustees' meeting and demanded higher wages.
To the end, Ross insisted the National Guard's arrival in Teton County had nothing to do with the water rights dispute there.
Ralph Thurston is the author of The Shanghi Plain: Bingham County's Early History, available at Kesler's Market in Blackfoot and online at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCCS7XLR?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860
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