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Show FALL 2013 UHQ pp 304-385_UHQ Stories/pp.4-68 9/16/13 1:25 PM Page 322 confluence of Cobble Creek and the South Fork. Just days before Glasmann announced his retirement, he asked the Ogden City Council to initiate steps to construct a new dam for the benefit of farmers in Ogden Valley and other rural districts of Weber County.65 Seven years before, in August 1904, Glasmann had entertained several dignitaries, including Weber County Commissioner Barlow Wilson and Fred J. Kiesel, on a trip up Ogden Canyon, but nothing substantial ever came of it.66 In early 1911, however, talk began in earnest about building a dam on the South Fork. Glasmann had witnessed the discovery of bedrock at the site shortly after he arrived in Ogden from Lake Point in 1892. He knew right where to go to uncover Moroni Skeen’s test holes and prove the dam’s feasibility.67 It seemed that all of Ogden jumped on the bandwagon, and by the spring of 1911, a host of people converged on the site, digging holes to find bedrock, including David Eccles, Thomas D. Dee, Hiram H. Spencer, M. S. Browning, John Pingree, John Watson, Charles Kircher, and Alex Brewer.68 For the next five years, the South Fork Dam consumed Glasmann. Its progress followed a tortuous path of intrigue, political vengeance, and outright misrepresentations that Glasmann patiently refuted.69 One thing was for certain: Glasmann probably fought more tenaciously than any foe, and in the end, he always prevailed, though at a large political price; he gradually lost his supporters for the dam. In the midst of his work on the South Fork Dam, the 1912 election disrupted all of Glasmann’s efforts of the previous years to mend the Republican Party of Utah. His friend and hero, Theodore Roosevelt, was likely going to lose the Republican nomination and become a third-party candidate running against Woodrow Wilson and President William H. Taft. In December 1911, anticipating that Glasmann would remain true to Roosevelt, Senator Smoot sent the loyal Federal bunch member and U.S. assayer, Jody Eldredge, to Ogden to buy the Ogden Standard’s sister paper, the Morning Examiner, for the conservative Republicans’ mouthpiece in Ogden. Later, Glasmann publicly lamented that the bargain price at which he sold the morning paper brought him just enough to pay its debts. In reality, however, he welcomed the chance for a true adversarial newspaper foe. When the election ended, Roosevelt and the newly organized Progressive or Bull Moose Party had lost, and Taft had carried Vermont and Utah. Wilson’s win came even though the Democratic Party had garnered the lowest percentage of the electorate in twenty years. The tattered Republican Party became—to Smoot’s liking—the conservative party, and 65 “Big Reservoir Must Be Built,” Ogden Standard, March 27, 1911. “Another Canyon Accident,” Ogden Standard, August 8, 1904. 67 “Work Begins on South Fork Dam,” Ogden Standard, November 16, 1912. 68 Ibid. 69 “The Nigger in the South Fork Dam,” Ogden Standard, August 15, 1912. 66 322 |
