John Shelton Howard part II

Shelton Ward was originally known as East Willow Creek, being an out worth of Willow Creek Ward. The first Latter-day Saint settlers in the part of Snake River Valley belonged to the Rigby Ward; afterwards they became a part of the Willow Creek Ward. Later the locality was know as East Willow Creek, and still later as Enterprise. When John Shelton Howard arrived in the locality in the fall of 1889, as an exile from Bountiful, that, owing to anti-polygamy persecutions, the Farmers Friend Canal had already been build and a couple of years later the Enterprise Canal was constructed. Reuben Cole was appointed to preside in the meetings at an easily day and in 1892 John Shelton Howard was chose as presiding Elder of the branch then called Enterprise. This Branch was organized as a regular bishop's ward August 14, 1892, with John Shelton Howard as Bishop. He was succeeded in 1919 by Edmond Lovell, who is 1929 was succeeded by William Fransis Burtenshaw, who preside December 31, 1930, on which date the Shelton Ward had a membership of 294, including 69 children.

The plain truth of the matte was the John S. Howard pioneered to Idaho as John Shelton.

The use of the alias was not a matter of criminal subterfuge, but of the breadwinner's survival while politic hacks made headlines denouncing the Mormons, and the courts mulled over the constitutionality of the mishmash of anti-plural marriage statuses.

Upper Snake River Valley was a land of opportunity in 1889, when John Howard arrived from Bountiful, Utah, looking for a place for new beginnings. Other young Utah place for new beginnings. Other young Utah home seekers-the Cleverlys, the Burtenshaws, the Egans, the Browns, John Johnson and others preceded John Howard to the promising glen where Willow Creek emerges from its canyon to meander westward to the Snake River, Even earlier, in the 1870's, ranchers George and John Heath, the Sermons, the Orville Buck family of Connecticut and a few others had staked out cattle ranches along the creek. The valley was filled, in 1889, but there was land to be had, some still open from homesteading, some for sale or relinquished by earlier sojourners. John Johnson, a young Bountiful school-teacher who had spent a couple of summers herding sheep in Idaho, shared his timer claim with John Howard.