The Teapot Dome Scandal, by Laton McCartney, $26.95 The oil industry chieftains who are so influential in politics today may well have learned their tactics from their predecessors in the Warren Harding administration. These men bought and paid for Harding’s election and were so influential that they were known as the “oil Cabinet.”
Harding’s closest petroleum buddies named Cabinet officers, set policy and, most scandalous of all, bribed federal officials into giving them the most lucrative oil lands in America, namely Teapot Dome and Salt Creek in Wyoming.
In “The Teapot Dome Scandal,” which is subtitled “How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country,” McCartney unravels the byzantine network of oil executives, corporations, dummy companies, bagmen and corrupt officials who put together the most scandalous government-business venture in American history.
The plot began when well-heeled businessmen, among them Jake Hamon and Harry Sinclair, picked Harding, an obscure Ohio senator whose only qualification was that he looked presidential, to run as the Republican candidate for president. Their payoff was the position of secretary of the Interior, which was to go to Hamon. But Hamon was murdered by his mistress after he announced he was taking his wife, not the other woman, to Washington, so Interior went to New Mexico’s Sen. Albert Fall.
Everyone, it seemed, had his hand in the pot, even the publishers of The Denver Post, Harry Tammen and Fredrick Bonfils, who castigated the oil deals in print and launched an investigation of Fall, only to fall silent after reportedly being bought off. Evalyn Walsh McLean, whose father discovered the Camp Bird Mine near Ouray, plays a part in the drama. Another Denverite who figured in the scandal was A.E. Humphreys, whose home is now a Denver landmark. Humphreys apparently committed suicide over the scandal.
With its cast of many villains and one hero (Sen. Thomas Walsh of Montana), this is a cautionary tale of what happens when corrupt and indifferent public officials give an industry undue influence over public policy.
Summit County, by Sandra F. Mather, $19.99 In 1916, the editor of the Summit County Journal bragged about the “wonderful transformation wrought by man” in Summit County. Why, he pointed out, when the prospectors arrived in 1859, there was only wilderness. Now, there were “great brown and white dumps. . .fuming smoke stacks. . .rumbling mills.” He was serious. Such intrusions were signs of progress.
In a wonderful little picture book, Mather takes readers through the history of this “progress.” Old photographs show how miners ripped up the earth, first with placer mines, then hydraulic mining and underground mines and eventually dredging. In the latter process, huge gold boats churned up mountain streams, leaving behind two-story rock piles lining the gulches around Breckenridge. Like much of western Colorado, Summit County was made up of proud little mining towns with their false-front stores, gingerbread houses, schools and churches plus businesses, saloons and dance halls. Miners, shopkeepers and railroad men formed volunteer fire brigades and joined Masonic orders, while the women civilized the towns, engaging in philanthropic activities and decorating their houses with the latest in Victorian gewgaws. All of this is pictured in “Summit County,” a handsome booklet that shows what Breckenridge, Frisco and Dillon were like before skiing and tourism became the region’s economic mainstay.
Skiing goes back to the county’s earliest days, when men as well as women in long skirts, strapped on long skis and poled themselves around town. But in those days, snow was dreaded by much of the region, judging by photos of rotary snowplows and stalled engines on Boreas Pass, the highest rail station in the country. Residents of Boreas used a snow tunnel to enter their post office.
Summit County today has lost much of its historic character. “Summit County” brings it back.
Best of Covered Wagon Women, edited by Kenneth L. Holmes, $19.95 Elizabeth Elliott, traveling across the prairie in a covered wagon in 1863, began a letter to her parents, telling that 44 people in her wagon train had come down with the measles, and three children had died. “Anyone would think so much trouble would kill her,” she wrote of a grieving mother. A few days later, Elizabeth added to the letter that her own child had died.
The 11-volume “Covered Wagon Women” series, a collection of diaries, narratives and letters originally published by Arthur H. Clark Co., has been whittled down to eight accounts in “Best of Covered Wagon Women.”
One of the most heart-breaking stories is in the diary kept by Mary Ringo, whose husband was killed in an accident. A few months later, she gave birth to a deformed stillborn child. She continued on to California, with the help of her other children, including her son, who later became the outlaw Johnny Ringo.
Sandra Dallas is a Denver novelist who writes regularly about new regional nonfiction releases.
