A Solid Sense of Place

Ninety-year resident Oren Furniss has witnessed a lot of change in Teton Valley

BY JENNIFER REIN

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In 1918, Teton Valley was populated with a special brand of individuals, a breed that scraped together a living by depending on the land, the livestock they raised, and one another. Oren Furniss became part of this hardy fabric on May 6 of that year.

When visiting Oren Furniss today, you stand on the very property where he came into this world. Behind his home on Bates Road sits the two-room cabin where he was delivered by a midwife. Now, at age ninety-one, Mr. Furniss speaks with quiet fondness about his life in Teton Valley, a history peppered with tales of a pioneer existence.

At the age of eight, Oren began catching lambs to assist with their docking for the Buxton family. He then worked for a number of years as a sheepherder for the Buxtons, earning one dollar a day. During his daily trips home on horseback from Bates Elementary School, his favorite activity was to check his trapline among the willows along the Teton River. He sold pelts of ermine, skunk, and badger for one to three dollars apiece. Oren’s labor was of great help to his family, a brood of ten, most of whom—a couple of them died at early ages—likewise supported their father in ranching and sheepherding.

Seemingly born in the saddle, this grandfather of twenty-nine stopped riding less than three years ago, at age eighty-eight. He’d trained his loyal horse to perform a half kneel so that he, Oren, could dismount without aggravating his hip.

When asked about winter recreation during the time of his youth, Oren chuckles at the idea of downhill skiing. “The only skiing we did was when we used a rope to get pulled behind a sleigh,” he says. Naturally, the horse-drawn sleigh also played a significant transportation role in Teton Valley’s formative years—when, Oren attests, the winters were much harsher and longer. “Winters now aren’t what they used to be,” he says, explaining that sleighs were pulled over the snowpack, through often-unforgiving conditions.

Teton Valley itself isn’t what it used to be, either. The individuals making up the populace in Oren’s younger days were so familiar with one another, he says, that the make and model of a car driving by would identify its owner. Now, says Eva Furniss, Oren’s wife of almost seventy years, “I drive into town and there are so many people that I don’t know. It’s so crowded.”

“Crowded” is certainly not a word that would’ve been used to describe the Teton Valley of 1940, the year Oren and Eva were married. Eva was seventeen; Oren, twenty-two. Less than nine months after the nuptials, Eva prematurely gave birth to the first twins born in the new Teton Valley Hospital. The fact that Eva had a multiple birth was a surprise to everyone involved, including the attending physician.
The onset of the couple’s life together found Oren working in the Big Holes, at the Horseshoe Canyon coal mines near the now-defunct settlement of Sam. He grows quiet at the mention of his time spent there. “It was hard work,” he says, elaborating no further.

“A lot of men died up there,” Eva explains.

At one point, Oren’s health was in serious jeopardy as the result of an injury to his breastbone. Many treatments left on an ongoing infection that only worsened, until he was treated successfully in Idaho Falls with a trial version of a drug that would soon change modern medicine: penicillin.

“I had all boys, except for five of them,” Eva says, laughing. The five girls and their only brother, Mike, grew up on the land that Oren’s father worked, raising cattle and sheep and growing crops to keep the family fed. This all took place in what was then Bates. Not far to the south was the community of Cedron. What valley residents now know primarily as road names were then small clusters of private property named as towns. They were home to the families that, like Oren’s father’s, had settled the valley in the late 1800s....(Continued)