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Daniels

The Daniels family has been in the Arbon Valley since 1885 when David Moroni Daniels applied for a water right on the Bannock Creek drainage. This water came from West Fork, on the north-west end of the valley. At least five Daniels settled in the West Fork: David, Henry, Jennette Daniels Price and her husband Thomas Price (their water was dated 1891), and John M. (“Donham”) Price. The way the water was set up, the tribal members, who had 812 acres, had first right of the water, while the owners of the “Big Meadows” in West Fork had second rights – these were the Bolingbroke, Lusk, and Price families. Dave Daniels had third rights, and Henry Daniels and Tom Price had the next right, granted in 1891.

In 1934, much of this land was returned by the government to the Shoshone-Bannock Indian Reservation. Before the government took back the land, many families had homesteaded the area known as the Big Meadows. At one time the area boasted its own log school house, where the LDS Meadows Ward met on Sundays. Today the only evidence of by-gone homesteaders are the occasional wild yellow rose bushes they planted, and one cement cellar with a rounded roof under a large shade tree. No Daniels families live in Arbon today.

Source: Ward, Laurie Jean, Bannock Valley (Providence, Utah: Keith Watkins and Sons, 1982).