THE MISSOURI COLONY OF BINGHAM COUNTY
Missourians colonize Cerro Grande
10/14/20265 min read
The dry farm 'boom' of the late 1910s proved to be the briefest of all the inflated dreams that immigrants to Bingham County brought. In 1915, twenty-four Missourians hailing from the Sedalia area staked their claims west of what is now Atomic City, near a railroad siding named Cerro Grande. That siding had been the rumored departure point for a railroad line that would start at the Mackay Branch and head through Salmon country and eventually into Lewiston. Those rumors, along with a nationwide frenzy suggesting dry farming to be far easier and more lucrative than it ever could be in an arid country, may have spurred the Sedalians to leave a moderate climate for a high desert one.
Cerro Grande railroad rumors (and irrigation projects to the north that began but would never come to fruition) earned the spot a post office in 1915, when eleven Sedalia families staked land claims of 320 acres. Initially they were an entity of their own, only two non-Missourians with claims nearby, but within but a couple of years much of the tillable acreage in all directions had drawn homesteaders from other Southern and Midwest states, all of them with the same dreams and all facing the same harsh conditions.
Some of the Sedalians supplemented their efforts, which couldn't have been profitable at first, by working elsewhere. C.A. Discher was working in Ogden to pay the bills, leaving his wife and four children to clear brush five miles northeast of Cerro Grande in 1916. H. McAuley found work in the Little Lost area at that time, expecting to start on his claim three miles from Cerro Grande in 1917. He already had cleared about forty acres.
The editor of the Blackfoot newspaper, The Idaho Republican, took a trip out in August of 1916 to report on the commotion in the desert,. The editor, Byrd Trego, found C.E. Edmonson on his land five miles northeast of Cerro Grande, who reported a crop failure. The dry spring failed to germinate his crops properly, he said. He was working in Pocatello to make ends meet while his wife stayed on the claim. Mrs. Edmonson wasn't so enthralled with the situation on the desert, telling Trego that if their crops failed again they'd be leaving,
J.R. McIntyre, Trego wrote, had a place nearer to Cerro Grande "in the 'suburbs" where he was raising wheat. Kenneth McLaughlin, who came in 1915, had seeded, if not grown, 60 acres of wheat. Dustin Wakefield came in 1915, too, and had just built a home. His brother had an adjoining claim. He owned a 'Studebaker six' and with his family was moving rocks from the roads (we would call them trails at best, or ruts) so they could get to the big cities of Blackfoot or Arco or the closer but much smaller Springfield to the south. The Wakefields' sister, Mrs. T.J. Lewis, lived nearby on a claim, too, and "had a piano and furniture." The Wakefields had just purchased a mercantile business from McGee and Flaherty at Cerro Grande and were erecting a new building in 1916.
The most dramatic story emanating from the Missouri tribe hay have been Mrs. James Connor's. James had died in 1914, and his widow Ollie, with her three sons and four daughters, were working her claim four miles north of Cerro Grande. They had horses, mules, cows and poultry and had erected several buildings. She was raising a substantial garden using water from the Delzer well in what is now Atomic City—a circuitous trip around the lava beds (see shaded area of attached map). Her lettuce, onions and peas were yielding well in August, according to Trego.
Will Gilbert, a railroad man from Sedalia who was related to the homesteaders, stopped to visit in late November of 1915. He was on his way to work near San Francisco where he would mail word of his visit back to his hometown. "The land here, " he wrote, "Is covered with sage brush, growing as high as two feet, scrawling and stockey at the base, looking much like dwarf cedars and making fine kindling and quick burning fire wood. The soil is a brown, volcanic ash, rich...and easily workable, having occasional patches of lava rock." The brush was cleared easily, he reported, with the use of a tractor plow they could rent for three dollars an acre. "Sufficient rain falls... to make good crops" due, according to the Missourians, to the rainfall caused by the nearby Big Southern Butte. The community, Gilbert wrote, was already locally known as 'The Missouri Colony' "with no foreigners...anywhere about and the community spirit is a unified family feeling." He described the housing: "The shacks are one story frame houses...with gabled roofs. finished inside with beaver board (the equivalent of today's fiberboard or particle board) held on the walls with finished battens." The windows were stained, the walls tinted. Most of the houses had two or more rooms. "The windows have shades and lace curtains" and many homes had pianos. The homes, according to Gilbert, were "commented upon by neighboring settlements as unusual in this country." "Altogether," he wrote, "It seems a contented and enthusiastic settlement."
Gilbert, on his arrival, had been met at the railroad tracks (perhaps at the Blackfoot depot) by his fellow Missourians, who were "astride their fine Missouri saddle horses with a led horse bridled and stock saddled for me." Johnny Connor had come in with a full team to haul bricks back to the community in order to build a chimney for his mother's house. GIlbert would stay, it being Thanksgiving weekend, and the entire community, after feasting on Thanksgiving Day, took a five mile walk in the driving snow toward evening. In the morning, he wrote, "we brought in a coyote snared...during the night."
By 1925, the community and the rest of Cerro Grande had been abandoned. The only three children remaining were attending school in Arco. A sheepman from Darlington, Will Jones, bought the schoolhouse, its pump and engine, for $650, likely to use it as herder housing,
The dry farmers, from Missouri and elsewhere, left little trace of their histories in the area, scattering to other dreams and promises. Ollie Connor's children, save the oldest girl Sylva, ended up across Oregon, from Klamath Falls to Malheur. Her son John was 18 when they arrived at Cerro Grande in 1915, so was able to help, no doubt, with the farming, and Ira was 15 so of some assistance, too. Ralph was only eight, and the girls were 16, 12, 10 and 7 years of age. They, too, likely helped with chores, both domestic and agricultural, of all sorts.
Sylva would marry a Springfield boy, Lyman Tanner, in 1918. Lyman's father, a polygamist who married Annie Pingree after the Mormon Manifesto prohibited multiple marriage, would be excommunicated in a famous (in LDS circles) spat with the Presidency. Sylva married Lyman in May, gave birth in November while both she and her husband were in the throes of the Spanish Flu. They worked Nathan's Springfield land (near where the Crystal Springs—or Boone Creek—Fish Hatchery now is) and the Connors' Cerro Grande place, and ran the Springfield Hotel for a short time in 1920. Lyman, who was eleven years older, and Sylva would settle in Pocatello. She, like her mother, would live as a widow for three decades.
The attached maps show Cerro Grande's position, with the Big Southern Butte shown in the lower left, Atomic City upper right.
