We Go A Long Way Back
Who Will Write Our Stories?
There are many Pocatello perspectives and narratives.
The city’s mainstream history has been mostly written by academics who, if at all, have generally touched lightly upon the unique character of the city’s diverse ethnic makeup.
Missing in most of the official telling of Pocatello’s history are the significant contributions, good and bad, that have been made by the city’s early Bonneville Neighborhood residents.
Pocatello’s early history is generally like the early histories of most western towns during America’s Manifest Destiny expansionism period.
Yet, there is one impressive element to Pocatello that makes its early history distinctively unique from the rest of the cities in Idaho.
The Gate City’s eastside Bonneville District, comprising a resilient cast of multi-ethnic people and mostly anchored to the railroad business, succeeded in creating life lasting friendships, cherished memories and extended families through cross-cultural and racial lines that were taboo in similar sized western cities throughout Idaho, the Mountain West and the rest of the nation.
Pocatello’s Ethnic District
No other Idaho city could match or come close to having a bigger population as ethnically diverse than Pocatello’s Bonneville District.
The area, necessitated by the rapid growth of the railroad business at the turn of the century, was comprised of large numbers of descendants of black slaves mostly from Texas, Mexicans refugees escaping the carnage of war from the Mexican Revolution, and recent Japanese and southern European immigrants. All of them were staking claims in Pocatello, of which a big part of it was and still is situated on ancestral Shoshone-Bannock tribal land that was ceded to the city of Pocatello.
The Shoshone-Bannock found the stores, services and people within the Bonneville District neighborhood more accepting of them when they came to trade than when they frequented restaurants and merchants on the the city’s westside.
The interaction between all these different minority groups, cramped together in a contained eastside area, produced a solidarity against the duress of the prevailing social order that accommodated public prejudices, and at times threats of violence against the poor, the natives, the immigrant and the colored. The solidarity produced a harmony of community that still resonates today in the hearts of those lucky and old enough to have experienced it.
The results have now given way to a more tolerant and integrated residential landscape throughout the city that began in earnest in the early 1960’s. Yet, for decades, the Bonneville District and specifically, the North 4th Ave enclave “4th Street” of mixed people of color and cultural roots had limited exchanges with the larger Mormon dominated Anglo-Saxon and Northern European populations of the city.
Basque In Boise
Boise, Idaho’s largest city had no black, Mexican, Italian or Greek populations in numbers that Pocatello had. The only ethnic population that Boise could claim in large numbers and in contrast to its mainstream dominate population was its Basque community, and for what its worth, Boise found ways to promote its Basque community and today the city is world famous for the distinction of having a large Basque population among other features and demographics unique to the area.
I.F.’s Legacy
Idaho Falls, traditionally Idaho’s third largest city, after Pocatello, throughout most of state’s history appears to have maintained a legacy of having only a handful of black families, including the few Green Flake descendants, living in the area throughout most of city’s history and up until the early 1980’s. The city’s demographics began to change as more people of color who worked at the nearby Idaho National Laboratory began to plant roots in Idaho Falls. More I.F. History: Here
How Times Have Changed
People of color in Pocatello were regulated to specific areas of the city by consent of everyone.
It was a controlled type of interaction, a system seemingly duplicated from what the Mormons had applied to Salt Lake City’s own walled enclave of colored people who, like the colored people of Pocatello, were needed to work and fuel the economic boom happening in the Mountain West at the beginning of the 20th century.
At the time there was no fair balance in housing, employment, justice and common decency for people of color in Pocatello.
With a social order in Pocatello dominated and dictated by the LDS faithful elite, the resulting evolving interactions throughout the following decades in the city produced more good than bad experiences for everyone who lived in the Bonneville District, yet everyone knew what red lines they could and would not cross socially in the city.
Old Whitman Hotel tourist flyer reflected the general public’s prevailing attitude and accepted behavior one would expect and tolerate from business services and trade in the city.
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