History
The river valley was inhabited by the Shoshone people. Fur trappers from the Hudson's Bay Company began to penetrate the area, exploring south from the Snake River as early as 1812. John C. Frémont explored the area in 1843, and the Mormon Trail crossed the Bear River south of Evanston. The California and Oregon Trails followed the Bear River north out of Wyoming to Fort Hall in Idaho. Some of the travelers on the trails chose to stay, populating the Bear River Valleys of Idaho and Utah. The Cache Valley was an early destination for Mormon pioneers in the late 1840s. On January 29, 1863 troops of the United States Army attacked a Shoshone winter village in the Cache Valley, slaughtering many of its inhabitants. The incident has come to be known as the Bear River Massacre.
The Bear River was surveyed through the Cache Divide for diversion and irrigation in 1868. After the First Transcontinental Railroad was completed in 1869, the Central Pacific was given over a third of the land in the Bear River Valley through land grants. Alexander Toponce purchased 52,000 acres (210 km2) of this land in 1883 for $65,000. He and John W. Kerr created the Corinne Mill, Canal and Stock Company and ultimately owned 90,000 acres (360 km2) of land in the area. John R. Bothwell purchased much of this land in 1888. Bothwell created the Jarvis-Conklin Mortgage and Trust Company with Samuel M. Jarvis and Roland R. Conklin, with $2 million on mortgage bonds. The majority of these bonds were bought by Quaker societies in Scotland, England, and Ireland. This money was used to create a diversion dam and irrigation canals, employing 7000 men in late 1889. The company also bought the Ogden City Water Works.
The company went bankrupt by 1893, and bondholders reorganized into the Bear River Irrigation and Ogden Water Works Company with W. H. Rowe as president. Part of the canal project was then purchased by the Bear River Land Company, and part of the irrigation project by the Bear River Irrigation Company.
After the success of the Utah Sugar Company growing operations and factory in Lehi, farmers in the Bear River Valley began to experiment growing sugar beets. This was successful, so Thomas R. Cutler, George Austin, and Mosiah Evans, executives at the Utah Sugar Company, purchased a portion of the Bear River Irrigation Company and organized the Bear River Land, Orchard and Sugar Beet Company in 1900. Cutler authorized the purchase of the entire Bear River Irrigation Company, plus an option on 31,200 acres (126 km2) of land from the Bear River Land Company, in 1901. This was financed by issuing and selling $500,000 in new stock in the Utah Sugar Company. Shortly, 50,000 acres (200 km2) were being irrigated and farmed.
Utah Sugar expanded the east canal between 1902 and 1905, installed a hydroelectric plant on the Bear River, and installed a 2700 horsepower water pump on the west canal. They also negotiated with the Oregon Short Line to construct a railroad from Corinne 16 miles (26 km) north to Garland, which was completed in 1903. Utah Sugar built a sugar beet processing factory in 1903 also, using the newly constructed rail line to transport the necessary machinery.
Utah Sugar's water rights, dams, hydroelectric plant, and transmission lines were purchased by Utah Power and Light Company in December 1912 for $1.75 million. Utah Sugar purchased the canals on both sides of the Bear River in 1920 and controlled them at least through the 1960s.
Read more about this topic: Bear River (Utah)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“It’s a very delicate surgical operation—to cut out the heart without killing the patient. The history of our country, however, is a very tough old patient, and we’ll do the best we can.”
—Dudley Nichols, U.S. screenwriter. Jean Renoir. Sorel (Philip Merivale)
“The history of work has been, in part, the history of the worker’s body. Production depended on what the body could accomplish with strength and skill. Techniques that improve output have been driven by a general desire to decrease the pain of labor as well as by employers’ intentions to escape dependency upon that knowledge which only the sentient laboring body could provide.”
—Shoshana Zuboff (b. 1951)