The Kentucky immigrants to southeast Idaho
The Claunch family and others who homesteaded near the Big Southern Butte
8/24/20266 min read
The Claunches did some custom grain harvesting to supplement their income, Reuben operating a header propelled with four horses that could harvest thirty acres a day (yields at that time hovered at ten to twenty bushel an acre). In 1913 Reuben had married "blueblood" Kentuckian Mary Gastineau and homesteaded on the desert two years after. They had one bed for themselves and their two babies, hauled food staples to the land to last seven months, then returned to the civilized Grandview area in the winters when the law changed —filers didn't have to dwell on the acreage full time to maintain ownership.
Lack of water proved a problem right away, of course. In 1917 the Claunches drilled a well but lost the tools at 120 feet and couldn't afford to redrill. Welldriller Frank Nelson tried again for them in August 1919, punching a hole four hundred feet deep before losing a set of drills. He again drilled to that depth nearby and this time hit a cavern ten feet deep, the drill landing on a slope "so he could not get it to take hold again." He abandoned that hole, too. The wheat was shriveling up even as he drilled, the newspaper reported, and Claunch was complaining how the sage hens were devastating what remained of the crop.
They weren't the only varmints that worked away at their plantings. Grasshoppers were so bad in 1922 that the Claunches, waiting for poison to bait the insects, devised a net comprised of a "long pole, two low wheels, 2 by 8 feet canvas, thirteen grain sacks, some pieces of two by four, and a piece of rope." It took two good horses and two riders to operate the contraption, as well as a man to bury the catch—the brothers harvested 130 bushels of grasshoppers by mid-July.
The dry years of the teens drove most of the Kentuckians to Grandview (also called Varney). Lloyd found work as the custodian at the Grandview school. Reuben farmed and operated the Grandview store—which he built—that a man name Lofgreen stocked. Everett and Bill farmed in Grandview and Sterling. Everett's wife Bertha died in 1920, leaving him as a widower with five young children, but two years later he married his housekeeper, Ellen Eliza Christensen, who was from Tilden.
Silas Barclay, one of the Kentuckians from Somerset, married Sterling's Grace Jones in 1922. Her father, T.L. Jones, had come from a fairly affluent position and acreage in Utah to the promise southeast Idaho offered. In 1903 he traded his ten room brick house with its extensive orchard for acreage on the bench above the flats of Otis and a one room log house with an unfinished upstairs.
T.L. and his wife Mary Ann shipped their belongings and 20 swarms of bees to Moreland, (the bees would be left in Blackfoot and winter-killing shortly after) their cows being driven on the road to American Falls to their new dwelling. "A more disappointed woman never lived than MaryAnn—so far from a town or doctor with a family of ten children, most of them small."
The five boys slept upstairs while the three girls, including the youngest, Ellen, slept on the bare floor. The prior owners, the Taggarts, hadn't yet moved out so twenty-four people lived in the house for two weeks. T.L. soon procured work on the American Falls Canal.
The Jones house, four miles southwest of what is now Sterling, was the last house on the bench road between Blackfoot and American Falls. Water had to be carried from a spring below the bench. The stagecoach used their homestead as a place to switch horses for the remaining thirty-mile stretch to American Falls. Being the last house for thirty miles, many people stopped mid-journey to spend the night and Grace often answered the door in the middle of the night to strangers. She cooked them supper—and breakfast the following morning. Often, the travelers wanted hay for their horses, too. Not many paid for the Jones' hospitality, according to a descendant.
The Joneses went to town, Blackfoot or Pocatello, twice a year for supplies but the children rarely accompanied them. The family garden was over the bluff, on the bottoms near water, so the children had to walk down to take care of it. They also tended the cattle, driving them sometimes almost as far as what is now Sportsman's Park to graze. The mosquitoes were so bad they couldn't milk the cows if they waited until dusk—the corral wouldn't hold the insect-maddened cattle. The men worked the canal and the family slept in tents wherever the canal work was taking place, with Grace cooking for them. Son George ran a horse and scraper and made twenty-five cents a day.
Everett Claunch's second wife, Ellen, was born at Tilden in 1898, where the Christensen family had just moved. Her mother, Christine, had braided a rug for the cabin her husband James had recently built but they had to use it on their ceiling as protection from storms and heat. Heavy fabric covered the door and window openings. By fall the roof was done—constructed by laying willows and straw on the planking and then covering with dirt. Daughter Edna wrote "the beds of the children consisted of straw mattresses spread out on the floor of the big kitchen." They were covered with a blanket and warmed quilts, removed in the daytime.
Her mother taught school, her pay $35 a month, for a year at Otis, but the male students were too rough for her to handle so she quit.
Lacking the emptily-promised water on their acreage, James did harvest work on the Herman Ranch on the eastern part of the Tilden flats, where his family shared quarters with the Pugmire family who were also helping the Hermans—the Christensens had an additional tent of their own.
After twelve years, canal water reached the Christensen homestead. During that long waiting period, James killed jack rabbits to sell to the Native population. He also bought beef, one cow at a time, butchered it out and peddled the meat door-to-door in Pocatello after crossing the Snake, which was sometimes running at dangerously high levels. Left alone with the children, Christine was terrified of the Natives, who often surprised her at her doorway. Occasionally, according to family accounts, a stray Native woman would enter the house and inspect the inside of it.
When James began working on the American Falls canal, the children would take him food, sometimes walking five miles to the worksite. Once the canal was done, he contracted to remove brush for other entrymen, using a rail on a frame pulled by four horses. The rail pulled up the brush which the children piled up and burned. it. When Ellen went to work as a housekeeper for Everett Claunch, ending up as his wife and serving as stepmother for his five children, her siblings were devastated. Ellen and Everett would have four more children together.
Most of the information here was collected from various accounts on Ancestry.com and The Idaho Republican
Above, the Claunch brothers
From Kentucky's rolling hills to Idaho's plain—drawn by 'free' homestead land, many families came from the Bluegrass State's warm, humid climate and mild winters to Southeast Idaho's dry heat and deeply chilling winters in the early twentieth century. William Claunch was among the first, filed on 320 acres. Tragedy struck almost immediately. Only a month in the area, having moved into the Lyman Skeen house in what is now Sterling, they suffered a fire at the home that took their two infant children.
William would eventually convince his brothers—Lloyd, Reuben, and Everett—and numerous other Kentucky acquaintances—Silas Barclay, Lee Smith, Joe Maxwell, A.R. and Noel Hubble, John Fulcher and C.H. McKinney—to come west. Most of them staked claims in the Big Butte area fifteen miles northwest of Grandview (some accounts say twenty-five miles, some say thirty-three) in the 'Wild Horse Lake' region. Reuben Claunch described his first home was "one room, twelve by twelve, bare lumber inside and out with a tarpaper roof."
below, the remains of the Claunch homestead.
