The Snake River Plain appeared as a blank slate of promise to only those not paying attention, for every cattleman or settler aim met obstacles in the weather, the privations of climate, combative insects and predatory animals. Bears, wolves, coyotes, lynx, bobcat and cougar threatened catte and sheep, while ground squirrels, rabbits and gophers and woodchucks destroyed crops.
Osbourne Russell, a trapper of the early nineteenth century, noted the presence of bear, wolves, buffalo and elk throughout what is now Bingham County, but a century later their appearance on the western plain happens rarely--though elk venture on to the west desert and the Reservation and wolf sightings occur on occasion.
Elk roamed commonly enough through the Reservation bottoms in 1890 for two area men to attempt to rope one at the Tilden bottoms, their intent to trail it to Blackfoot and let it loose in Danilson's store. Danilson, knowing the proclivity of bored cowboys to try to be comedians, had built the store with doors on both ends so horses could be ridden through and limit their damage to his goods.
Bears were still on the radar at that time, too, their prints regularly seen on the old road near Coumerilh's ranch that skirted the bluffs around the bottoms, near Danilson's Falls. Fay Austin killed a five hundred pound specimen near Tilden in 1896. It took him three shots with a .42 at close range to kill him. Lysander Shelman, camping with his wife and daughter in the lavas north of Springfield, spotted one in April of 1912. Charley Holland may have sighted the same bear, for he was tracking one with his bull dog at the Big Butte. Several were killed west of Aberdeen the next spring, two silver-tips spotted at Split Top in an "acre-wide crater with fifty or sixty foot walls". John Hiebert used the only weapon he had, a shotgun, to shoot them from directly above but only scaring them.
Wolves still visited the area in the 1910s, grazers paying a $100 bounty for a killed adult for a time--the equivalent of $3000 today. They dropped the amount to $25 a couple years later.
The Bingham County Grazers had organized a wolf hunt, equipped with a pack of dogs, in November of 1913. The wolves were growing so bold as to attack full grown horses and cattle, with large losses of Willow Creek cattle. The grazers reported paying out for 17 wolf kills, as well as for 934 coyotes and 75 bobcats taken in a stretch of land from Idaho Falls to Soda Springs. One rancher near Blackfoot was near the Blackfoot River bridge east of town when seven gray wolves began accompanying him, not necessarily giving him a scare but causing concern since he was carrying no firearm, making him feel "rather strange".
A Fremont County legislative representative had proposed a tax on sheep in 1899, one and a half cents a head plus a small assessment on all real and personal property to provide a bounty fund for the killing of bears, wolves, lynx, bobcats and coyotes. The Bingham County bounty tax in 1895 went to rabbits--two and a half cents apiece was paid out upon receipt of the rabbits' ears as proof. The Sheriff was "cremating" 12,000 ears in April 1897, just before the bounty was annulled, presumably because of the great cost. The county assessment for predator control would equal the outlay for the road department in 1917, one cent per $100 of property valuation.
The State, for a time, hired "wolfers" to kill off predators, but discontinued the practice in 1908, substituting a bounty of $1 per coyote scalp. Since trappers cried out that scalping ruined the skins for sale, the State agreed to paying when skins were brought in whole, with fore feet attached. The inspectors would then cut off the feet so the trapper couldn't "double dip". By February of '09, bounty payments went out on 6245 coyotes, 380 cats and 29 lynx.
Idaho's Supreme Court declared bounties illegal in 1914 during the trial of three trappers charged with defrauding the government by collecting multiple bounties on the same animals. The Court deemed the men innocent since the bounty law itself was illegal.
The bounties continued, however, after grazers lobbied for a new bounty law with better legal standing. The bounty report in 1916, which stated a cost of $46,000 in payments for 14,280 coyotes killed in the state, along with 815 cats, 879 bear, 82 lynx and 69 wolves. The State paid bounty on just five cougars. Given that the pelts could be sold after the bounties were paid, some coyote hunters made three to four hundred dollars a month. The local grazers paid out over $3000 in addition to the state payments. The Soda and Bingham Grazers had reported a kill of 1651 coyotes in their area in 1915, in addition to 89 cats and 39 wolves.
The bounty continued into the twenties, with some Taberites supplementing their meager dry farm earnings by trapping. A. T. Frazier killed 53 coyotes and 6 lynx, collecting nearly $150 in bounty payment from the Sheriff's office, which paid out for 599 coyotes in 1922, in addition to bounties on 59 wildcats, 10 lynx and two wolves.
Ed Webb, a farmer-stockman in the desert area south of Taber and north of Springfield, took to trapping coyotes in the winter before finding it easier to run down the animals astride a horse. He and his fellow riders harvested 200 coyotes in 1922 with this method.
Rabbits plagued early farmers, one man leaving his acreage near what is now Rockford one late 1890s morning, his grain thigh-high and making heads, and then returning that evening to find the entire plot mowed to the ground. Such devastation was common and happened suddenly.
One local man, trying to make lemonade out of the rabbit lemon in 1899, collected a train car load of live jackrabbits to his hometown state of Pennsylvania, hoping to capitalize on them as a meat product.
Rabbit drives became common, the settlers going out to the desert and chasing rabbits into an enclosure where they would then be clubbed to death. Coupled with other events, the drives became a social occurrence, with a rabbit drive and oyster supper in Pingree in 1911, a rabbit drive and literary society meeting at Campbellville (near present-day Liberty) in 1915. A contest at Rich between Thomas and Rich men to see who could kill the most rabbits took place in January of 1914, the Thomas men winning by a "hare", 816-814--the Rich men had to pay for the subsequent dance to be held.
Seven thousand were killed at Presto in 1912, with three times as many believed to have escaped. Other rabbit drives regularly happened throughout the county, at Rose, Groveland, Grandview, and Aberdeen, and the county began offering poison to combat the pests. The CCC joined the battle in the 1930s, poisoning tens of thousands of desert acres and killing over 30,000 rabbits by hand. The State of Idaho distributed 872,000 pounds of poisoned bait in a two year period from 1919-1920, placed across two million acres.
BIngham County officials told residents that two species of ground squirrels plagued the county, the Richardson ground squirrel south of the river in the foothills and mountainous regions and the Idahoensis north of the Snake. The Richardson was 7-9 inches long and grayish black with a three inch tail, the ensis bluish gray and smaller with a shorter tail. The two species required different concoctions in order to kill them:
The County distributed 1200 ounces of strychnine in 1919 to 148 users who covered 14,000 acres with bait.
A local man discovered his own method of gopher eradication and shared it thusly: insert a stick of dynamite an inch and a half long into the tunnel, wrapped in paper or cloth, attach a fuse 12 to 14 inches long, tamp in earth around the fuse and light it. The dynamite will burn and fill the hole with poisonous gas, rather than explode.
The county extension agent regularly made gopher trapping demonstrations throughout the county, particularly in the Springfield area where they proved most troublesome. The County provided poison to farmers and employed a gopher control specialist at least into the 1960s. He applied grain laced with strychnine into burrows. A gopher bounty was reinstated and exists today, the funds taken from the mosquito abatement account.
Not limiting the war against nature to just mammals, settlers waged campaigns against sparrows and magpies, too, the sparrows wreaking havoc on grain stores and magpies a pest primarily for sportsman, as the birds preyed on pheasant and other game birds' eggs. Grazers also thought that magpies spread disease through their herds. Hunter organizations paid a bounty on thousands of magpies throughout the thirties and forties.
Wolves, bears and cougars are now all but eradicated; elk, bobcat and lynx appear far rarely in present day Bingham County; the last rabbit drive took place in the 1980s, indicating a considerable population shrinkage; gophers and ground squirrels remain a pest in some places, though the crop rotation and tillage practices of modern agriculture provide insurmountable barriers to the species' spread in most areas. A century and a half of concerted effort has altered the landscape in a way that would be unimaginable to the first settlers.
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