An excerpt from the preface:
On an Idaho map, the Snake River plain forms a smile-shaped arc--though perhaps a stroke-affected smile--which runs over a hundred and fifty miles east to west and fifty miles north to south. Mid-nineteenth century, non-native travelers called it the Shanghi Plain (they called the Snake the "Saptin"), perhaps suggesting that only the "shanghaied"--a term coined for those drugged and abducted, then set aboard ships to serve as laborers in China--would cross its desolate aridity. But thousands did cross, heading either to the Lost River mines or westward to Oregon, oftentimes using the Big Southern Butte, near the western edge of what is now Bingham County, as a compass point as they cut across the smile from Fort Hall on the lower lip toward the cover and water of its upper counterpart. The travelers' smiles no doubt shrank in size and number as their water supply dwindled and their travails increased on the way.
Arid, rocky and sagebrush-riddled as the Shanghi Plain was, it was virgin frontier and therefore ready to be claimed and used. Cattlemen followed the earlier miners to the area in the 1870's and grazed the territory, the public domain theirs alone for a couple decades. They moved their herds there to pasture in the spring, when winter snowmelt offered small reservoirs and false creeks, before taking the cattle to the Fort Hall and Tilden bottoms and other sheltered areas to feed through the fall and winter. Settlers, tempted by the Homestead and Desert Claim Acts, soon challenged the cattleman's hold on the plain, lustily eyeing the pockets of arable soil and igniting a tussle between ways of life. Sheepmen emerged as competitors, too, recreating a similar friction between factions seen throughout the West.
Congress passed the Carey Act in 1894, an added inducement for settlers to tame the vast territory with irrigation projects, thereby ushering in a new era. Free homestead land lured dry farmers to the eastern shadows of the Big Southern Butte, an area referred to as the "Taber Tract", while Carey Act entrepreneurs proposed a million acre irrigation project which would essentially move the Snake from the plain's southern lip to its northern, to both aid their efforts and usurp their methods. Government heads rejected that idea, in all of its many incarnations that appeared for over two decades, but the spread of electricity and the arrival in the 1950s of a new technology--sprinkler irrigation--allowed agriculturists to capitalize on the lands for which they hungered for over half a century. The Shanghi Plain, an inhospitable area crossed only riskily, had become the Snake River Plain, domesticated.
The back cover photo, taken near Taber (the center of that domestication), depicts a Bingham County development on the old Arco Highway, twenty miles northwest of Blackfoot, its decrepit remains as a labor camp a reminder of the past. Twenty boxcars and a set of four cinderblock buildings--which served as community bathrooms (which the boxcars lacked)--housed pipe movers and farm workers, both single men and families, for over a decade, beginning in 1957. The Shanghi Plain doesn't quite reach to that period of time, just as it doesn't stretch back to pre-European times, instead focuses on the preceding century, arbitrarily beginning with Wyeth's establishment of Fort Hall in 1834.
The book's temporal "beginning" neglects the Native Americans who roamed southeast Idaho for a few thousand years--with no written records, any history morphs into anthropology, a separate field. The Shanghi Plain instead details what might be called the "immigrant era", the time when newcomers invaded the tribal areas, first in small parties of trappers, then as a trickle of Mormons on their way to Fort Limhi (now Salmon), then as an offshoot, anti-polygamy Mormon sect, the Morrisites of the 1860s, a people primarily from the British Isles. Many of the first cattle companies in the area were Scottish and English, too, and by the late nineteenth century a host of accents peppered the language spoken on Blackfoot streets. If you were so inclined as to get your pleasure from sampling the sounds of different tongues, in 1905 you would have not only heard variations of American English that spanned the drawls of the South to the languor of the Midwesterner to the New Jersey, New York and other Eastern linguistic twists, you could stroll along doing your business and get your ears dazzled by an array of accents.
Down at the bowling alley there was Henry Mizuzuchi, a Japanese employee, at the Mill the Robert family had the Canadian lilt. Pick your blacksmith, hear Stiglitz' German or Anderson's Finnish, then head into the D.W. Standrod financial institution and catch a little Welsh from D.L. Evans. Get your eyes checked by Mr. Mack, a German, and pick up some general merchandise from the Scotsman Peter Johnson. Get your hair cut by another Scot, Max Smith, pick up some groceries at the Canadian Young's store, get your harnesses fixed by the Austrian Henesh brothers. Maybe trade some junk or buy some hides from the German Morris Volpert, have the Hopkins German butcher, Mr. Goetz, slice you some steaks and then check with the German realtor Charles Molden to see property prices. Have a look at the clothing at Jacobs', the Russian, consider your labor needs at Mr. Mori's Japanese Labor Association. Of course, you need some clothes cleaned at the Oriental Laundry, the Japanese business of Uri and Furie. Stop at the Canadian Pharmacy (John McIntosh) and get your photo taken by the Englishman, J.H. Cutler. Before you go home, pick up some lumber at the English Arnold Quantrell's place, get a cigar from the Turf Exchange where the Swiss Fred Gortsch, loyal employee, could set you up. And before you go home, stop at the Japanese Restaurant, the Togo, authentically operated by S.F. Kani1--you'll be another hundred years before you can get the same fare in Blackfoot.
Striking as the diversity might have been in 1905, a decade later a more curious set of immigrants came en masse to Springfield. Thirty Finlander families showed up to settle property they bought in 1913, enough of an anomaly for most every newspaper in Idaho to reprint a single paragraph in March, a year later: "a large colony of Finlanders, comprising about thirty families from the Black Hills country of South Dakota, have arrived at their new homes near Springfield, where they have purchased a large tract of land under the Aberdeen-Springfield ditch."2 Their story remains a mystery, as does that of thousands of others who came and went--all of them newcomers, most only briefly staying.
The cover photo of the Pingree Commercial Club, taken sometime in the 1910s when promise was at its most robust, depicts a number of those early immigrants. The Shanghi Plain is a compilation of their and other settlers' stories. Those who have planned a wedding list know an historian's difficult task: who gets invited, who gets left out. A famous biologist, noting the arbitrariness of separating his discipline into fields, said "there are no lines in nature", and the historian echoes that idea, for wherever he draws a line in time something precedes it and something follows, wherever in space he demarcates inside and outside, something crosses his boundary and something abuts it. Hence, every history comes inherently incomplete and somewhat vaguely bordered--this one especially, since the area now known as Bingham County, the central location of the book, once extended from Montana to Utah, before the legislature surgically removed significant northern and southern portions to form other counties, just as it had severed the greater part of Oneida County to form Bingham.
Any history, truthful as it might aim to be, lies in its omissions. The missing here include women--who, though no doubt essential to this history, left little record of their work; the Hispanics--who also left few records, their importance ignored by the record-keepers in part due to prejudice, in part due to language barriers, in part due to their essential but background (and therefore hidden) roles. They deserve a book of their own, given their omnipresence as farmworkers through the twentieth century. Missing, too, the cowboys who roamed the area before getting squeezed out by settlers; the Shelleyites, the Wapello folk, those in the foothills to Blackfoot's east--some of the first to the area; Aberdeen gets the short shrift--but they're used to it, having tried to secede from the county in the 1930s, tired of lousy roads. More omissions? The early canal builders of the 1880s, prior to the Carey era, who left little record save their still-intact work. World War II. The INEL's emergence on the desert. What about Cantonment Loring, the short-lived army post just southwest of Ferry Butte? Fort Lander, an attempt to establish a camp just north of the old Fort Hall? Flagtown, briefly a community west of Moreland? Paul Solem calling down flying saucers for a week in the summer of 1969? Malcolm Forbes' balloon crash in Springfield? The CCC camps in the 1930s there and in Midway?
Despite its historical gaps and despite the arbitrariness of lines, this book nonetheless groups its essays into six sections, the last the most important and an obvious choice. Given the importance of southeast Idaho's "working river", the Snake, it deals primarily with area canals and reservoirs, omitting the massive Twin Falls project but, just for kicks, including the Priestly Siphon Elevator near Hagerman, which was too intriguing to leave out. The first section contains information pertinent to the Fort Hall Reservation, though bypassing a vast, sprawling native history. The second section takes a look at the small towns that sprang up with the canal system, omitting Thomas, Rich, Moreland and Riverside (and others) which arose earlier and have been written about elsewhere. Part three has a few biographies of men, some of lesser prominence than other historical figures associated with early history, while the fourth collects selected events of importance or interest in Blackfoot, which inevitably bleeds into Bingham County's significant occurrences, collected in part five.
Use this book as a reference only to guide you to more accurate sources. It should be viewed as part entertainment and part relic, a last stab at preserving past events and ideas.
You can purchase a copy online at: https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCCS7XLR?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860 and soon at Kesler's Market in Blackfoot.
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