World War I ended in November 1918, at least for the U.S., and shortly after that promoters sought to wed their own interests with Americans' urge to reward veterans. Their scheme: match the returning landless soldiers to manless lands in the West, including eastern Idaho.
Congressmen floated bills to provide funds for servicemen to homestead Western lands and the railroad advertised open acreage. Earlier in 1918, F.H. Newell had called for the appropriation of one hundred million dollars for irrigation projects in the west in order to provide homecoming soldiers a place to live and work. But the idea stalled and interest waned.
In January of 1919, railroad immigration and colonizing agent R.A. Smith, who was also the head of the Union Pacific agriculture department, claimed he received a hundred calls in two weeks from servicemen, especially sailors, seeking information on western homesteads. "Few men," he said,"who've had a taste for outdoor work will be content with office jobs."
Nearly a year earlier, the railroad had promoted the Idaho promise, though careful to note it had no land to sell or interest in those who did. The railroad just wanted to help build up the territory in order to increase its business. It sent agents of the Colonization and Industrial Bureau to investigate land agents and land for sale, instructing them to judge whether the land's climate and soil was suitable for farming and that it was reasonably priced. The agents then needed to assess a land agent's trustworthiness and reliability.
The Bureau's advertising reached five million people, yielding ten thousand inquiries. They shipped nearly 2500 carloads of household goods in the prior six months (November 1917-April 1918), suggesting a major immigration when including those who went west without their belongings. In May 1919, newly appointed commissioner of immigration O.H. Barber, a publisher of the American Falls Press, called for information on available homesteading lands that might be utilized by incoming soldiers and settlers.
Nebraska proved to be the hotbed of interest for Arco area lands, where independent agents J.S. Vernon and H.A. Stroud had located acreages for homesteading at a place called "Pioneer" (at a fee to them of $125 per plot). Thirty Nebraskans veterans were heading for their southeast Idaho land in May. More came in early July, under the direction of John Cotter of the Settlers Reclaiming and Co-operative Company in Arco. Charges of fraud came almost immediately, with Commissioner Barber ordering an investigation into the agricultural worthiness of the homesteaded lands.
The Settler's Reclaiming organization purportedly acted as a community organization that shared work and profit. Its nearly sixty soldiers had bought a tractor and sold shares to members to work the land, each paying $15-$25 a month to clear his claim. When accusations of fraud appeared, the government appointed a committee of experts comprised of an Aberdeen experiment station manager, a University of Idaho soil specialist, and a federal land man who looked at the land in late July and adjudged it inarable. The railroad's R.A. Smith had traveled to the land earlier in the year and judged it usable, however, while Barber had at the same time given the thumbs down.
J.A. Stewart, a real estate man of Blackfoot, was one of the whistleblowers exposing the scam. Stewart, who had dry farmed at Taber, abandoned that effort in 1918 and turned to promoting the Dubois Project of a scale unimaginable even to its earlier proponents who had proposed variations of the scheme for the past two decades. Three million acres were to be irrigated by a massive enterprise taking the Snake from near Ashton and rerouting it toward Howe and then downward near Taber and eventually to American Falls. It would irrigate most of the land south of Mud Lake and east of the Big Southern Butte, all the way to to reach of the Aberdeen-Springfield canal system. Much of the land offered the soldiers, though advertised as part of the proposed project, sat at an elevation above that imagined canal system. Some of it was almost all lava bed, other plots were gravel or mountainside.
The railroad claimed innocence, stating it only sold tickets and had appraised the land as suitable for colonization.
By February of 1920, most of the defrauded soldiers, disagreeing with the railroad representatives' claims, had brought forth a suit against R.A. Smith and the Union Pacific Railroad for reparations of nearly $16,000. Record of that suit's outcome remain unknown to me.
Ralph Thurston is the author of the recently published volume, The Shanghi Plain: Bingham County's Early History, in which you can find more about the Dubois Project. Purchase the book locally at Kesler's Market, The Idaho Potato Museum, or online at https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0CCCS7XLR?ref_=pe_3052080_397514860
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