They were armed, they were U.S. Marines, and they were approaching an oil derrick in the middle of Wyoming to kick out workers whose owner was a political enemy to the then U.S. Secretary of the Interior.
One Marine went on to become the New York State treasurer. Another would be designated a deserter in a couple of months. Both had received honors from France for their service in World War I.
From the Halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli — the U.S. Marines song leaves out the oil fields of Teapot Dome.
But that is exactly where four Marines and their captain found themselves in 1922 as the first act of the Teapot Dome saga played out on the way to a national scandal. The Marines were being used to police an oil field in central Wyoming where corrupt power brokers in Washington, D.C., and oil men who backed them, played their chess game to enrich themselves off the black gold beneath the land.
“Oil Drillers To Be Ousted, Government Sending Marines to Stop Operations on Mammoth Lease on Teapot Oil Reserve,” The Casper Daily Tribune’s bold headline declared on Saturday, July 29, 1922. “Acting Secretary of the Navy Roosevelt today ordered the commandant of the Marine Corps to send one officer and three or four enlisted Marines into the Teapot Dome oil reserve, about 40 miles north of Casper, to eject oil squatters who are reported to be drilling for oil.”
How Wyoming became part of one of the greatest political scandals in U.S. governmental history is linked to the election of Warren Harding who was an unknown Ohio senator. Through machinations at a 1920 Republican convention and financing from an Oklahoma oil man, Harding became the GOP nominee and then president, according to historian Laton McCarty, who wrote the book the “Teapot Dome Scandal: How Big Oil Bought the Harding White House and Tried to Steal the Country.”
The Actors
Included in the names of the actors involved in the Wyoming case are Harry Sinclair, whose name is lent to a city in Wyoming, gas stations, a refinery, and more. Other names include U.S. Secretary of Interior Albert Fall who received $230,000 in Treasury bonds from Sinclair for access to Teapot Dome fields and Teddy Roosevelt Jr., the then assistant secretary of the Navy who authorized the mission of the U.S. Marines.
Oklahoma oilman Jake Hamon, who financed Harding’s run for office with a $1 million loan, wanted the Teapot Naval Reserve for himself.
He was initially promised the Interior Department job, but would not live to see the day. He was shot by his mistress of 10 years when Hamon was told by Harding that to get the cabinet appointment he would have to cut off the relationship.
Hamon’s wife was a second cousin to Harding’s wife. The mistress was tried for the crime and acquitted.
After the death of Hamon, Fall was chosen by Harding to take the Interior Department job when he came to power.
Once in office, the Harding administration moved to put the Naval Petroleum Reserves — two in California and one in Wyoming —under the authority of the Department of Interior.
In his book, McCartney writes that Fall secretly leased the Teapot Dome to Harry Sinclair and received bonds in exchange. He then learned that other Harding supporters, a Col. James Darden, who was affiliated with Mutual Oil Company and in collusion with U.S. Attorney General Harry Daugherty, had previously obtained a lease in the nearly 10,000-acre reserve and started drilling on the land.
During congressional hearings on the Teapot scandal in 1924, Roosevelt testified that it was Harding and Fall who ordered the Marines to stop the drilling by Mutual Oil Company because the “squatters were about to take out oil on which the government would get no royalty,” the Washington Evening Star reported on March 13, 1924.
Oil wells operate near Teapot Dome, Wyoming. (Environmental Protection Agency) 
Left: Artist's conception of the famous Teapot Dome Scandal over oil leases, circa 1925. Right: A cartoon from the "N. Y. Tribune" entitled "The First Good Laugh They've had in Years," in which Cartoonist "Sing" satirizes the Democrats jubilation over the Teapot Dome Scandal. Undated illustration. (Getty Images) 
California oil man H.W. Ballard appears as a witness before the United States Investigating Committee during the Teapot Dome Scandal, circa 1924. (Photo by FPG, Hulton Archive via Getty Images) 
Edward L. Doheny, second from right, testifies before the Senate Committee investigating the Teapot Dome oil leases on Jan. 24, 1924. Pictured are, from left: Doheny, Sens. Dill, Pittman, Lenroot and Smoot. (Getty Images) 
Secretary of the Interior Albert Bacon Fall being wheeled from a Washington, D.C., courtroom during the investigation into the Teapot Dome scandal in October 1929. The court found Fall guilty of bribery and conspiracy. (Getty Images) 
The Senate Public Lands Committee meets to investigate the Teapot Dome scandal, Washington D.C., circa 1924. (Photo by Library of Congress/Corbis, VCG via Getty Images) 
A photograph of U.S. Secretary of the Interior Albert B. Fall's promise, dated Nov. 30, 1921, to repay oil tycoon Edward L. Doheny $100,000, which he claims to have borrowed to purchase additional lands in New Mexico. The document led to Fall's conviction for bribery and conspiracy in the Teapot Dome scandal. The signature, which was torn from the note, is said to have been entrusted to Mrs. Doheny so that if any accident befell either her or her husband the mutilated note would have made the loan a legacy for Mr. Fall. Notice that New York or Los Angeles, California, may mean a street corner, not a bank usually designed in making loans. (Getty Images) 
Oil baron Harry Sinclair, center with arms folded, sits in a congressional hearing on the Teapot Dome scandal. (Courtesy U.S. Library of Congress) 
U.S. Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall, center, walks into a congressional hearing on the Teapot Dome scandal. He ordered the U.S. Marines to shut down an oil well at the Teapot Naval Petroleum Reserve. (Courtesy U.S. Library of Congress)
Following Orders
U.S. Marines Lt. Gen. John Lejeune, who would later have a base named after him, told congressional investigators that he was just following orders in sending the troops.
“Roosevelt had ordered that men of ‘tact’ and ‘discretion’ be chosen, Gen. Lejeune said. Capt. George K. Shuler, then a captain of Marines, was selected, after a conference with Secretary Fall to command the detail sent to Teapot,” the Evening Star reported on March 13.
Roosevelt’s brother, Archie, happened to be a vice president for Sinclair’s oil company at the time. He was recommended for the job by Teddy Roosevelt Jr.
As the Marines closed in on Casper by train, Wyoming’s governor in August 1922 sent a telegram to President Harding. His words were reprinted in several newspapers, including The Billings Gazette in Billings, Montana.
Gov. Joseph Carey told the president that any issues on the Teapot Dome territory should be addressed in court, not by armed military from the nation’s capital.
“I would advise you that no state of lawlessness exists in Wyoming to justify use of armed forces,” Gov. Carey wrote. “Such procedure as contemplated ignores the courts of the nation, established precedent whereby any federal bureau or department may enforce its whims or mandates by military force rather than by legal action.”
The Billings Gazette reported on Aug. 2, 1922, that Gov. Carey wrote Harding that in only one other occasion in American history was military force used in a state over the protest of the governor - when troops were sent into Chicago by President Grover Cleveland to settle a strike by Pullman sleeping car employees.
The Marines handpicked for the mission in addition to Shuler, a World War I hero, were 1st Sgt. Harry Hutton, Gunnery Sgt. Ollie Cooper, Sgt. Ollie Brown, and Cpl. Victor Porkolab, also a war hero. All were stationed at the U.S. Marines Washington barracks in the nation’s capital.
The Casper Daily Tribune Reported on Tuesday, Aug. 1, 2022, that drillers for Mutual Oil Company were under orders to continue their work until they were stopped by the Marines. The well was reported at 2,355 feet when the Marines showed up at the newly fenced site.
No Hostile Actions
When the armed Marines arrived on Aug. 2, no shots or angry words were exchanged. Some accounts report they had lunch with the rig workers.
“No friction of any kind occurred between the Marines and the drillers in carrying out the department mandate,” the Ogden Standard-Examiner reported on Aug. 2, 1922. “By noon today all the removable tools had been removed in a large truck, the boilers are cooling off and the government seal has been placed on the rig by Captain Shuler, who pronounced it shut down for all further operations.”
On Friday, Aug. 4, the Casper paper reported that the Marines were on their way back to Washington.
Rigs from Sinclair’s Mammoth Oil Co. moved in and started drilling. Records at Casper College’s Western History Museum contain a file on the scandal. Inside the file is an April 19, 1923, Department of Interior report on a well being drilled by Sinclair’s Mammoth Oil Company, the company created specifically for Teapot Dome, giving the company permission to drill it.
“Approval is hereby given to drill as outlines above with the following understanding,” the report reads. It then lists four conditions for the well that includes sacks of cement, the size of casing and notification to the department “at the time of cementing.”
On May 10, 1923, the Salt Creek Journal reported that the Mammoth Oil Company drilled a gas well on the Teapot Dome site estimated at 90 million cubic feet.
But a congressional investigation led in large part by Montana Senator Thomas Walsh, followed by legal action, would bring the Harding administration’s corruption to light and bring the Teapot Dome riches back under the control of the U.S. government by the end of the decade.
During the 1924 hearings on the Marine mission, Sen. Walsh was reported in the Washington, D C., Evening Star as characterizing the entire incident as “an outrageous use of military forces.”
Fall charged that the Marines were used because Fall and oilman Sinclair did not want to cause a court action which would “raise the validity of the lease” to Sinclair made by Fall.
Headlines in the Casper Daily Tribune on Aug. 1, 1922, declared drillers were going to work until the U.S. Marines arrived. (Courtesy Newspapers.com) 
The Washington, D.C., newspaper The Evening Star on March 13, 1924, reported on testimony before a congressional committee on the U.S. Marine mission to Wyoming as the Teapot Dome scandal unfolded. (Courtesy Newspapers.com) 
The Casper Daily Tribune on July 29, 1922, had headlines declaring that the Mutual Oil Company drillers were to be “ousted” by U.S. Marines. (Courtesy Newspapers.com) 
The Casper Daily Tribune on Aug. 4, 1922, lists the name of the U.S. Marines who were ordered from Washington, D.C., to the Teapot Dome site. (Courtesy Newspapers.com) 
A Teapot Dome water and oil well sit side-by-side in the early days of the field’s development. (Courtesy Wyoming State Archives) 
The Teapot Dome oil field looking north in its heyday. The field has produced nearly 30 million barrels of oil. (Courtesy Wyoming State Archives) 
A family poses for a photo at Teapot rock, a formation for which the Teapot Dome oil and gas reserve was named. It sits about six miles west of the southern end of the 10,000-acre Teapot Naval Oil Reserve. (Courtesy Casper College Western History Center, Kathleen Hemry Collection)
Consequences
In the end, Sinclair would escape prison for his corruption, and for trying to buy off Fall with the U.S. bonds.
Sinclair spent time in jail for contempt of Congress. Fall was sentenced to prison for the money he accepted from Sinclair and another oil man in California for the right to use naval reserve oil sites in that state.
As for the Marines, Cpl. Porkolab, just three months after his mission to Casper, in November 1922, was reported missing in Washington, D.C. Speculation surrounded his assignment in intelligence work.
“His buddies fear that deserters he was tracking down may have murdered or kidnapped him,” the Washington Times Herald reported on Nov. 14, 1922. “He may be, however a victim of aphasia, as he was recovering from disability suffered during the many engagements he participated in overseas.”
Hutton, the Marine first sergeant also involved in the Casper mission, said Porkolab’s mother asked them to conduct the search. Porkolab, who received France’s Croix de Guerre medal for his actions in World War I, was days later declared a deserter. He was last seen by Hutton headed to his girlfriend’s house but never arrived.
The Marines commander, Capt. Shuler, also a Croix de Guerre recipient in World War I, left the military, and that November, became elected to be the treasurer of New York as a Democrat.
After wresting the Naval Reserve back from the Harding machine, the U.S. government kept the Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 3, or Teapot Dome, under its control until 2015, according to Wyoming Oil & Gas Conservation Commission Supervisor Tom Kropatsch.
Data at the WOGCC website states that the Teapot Naval Reserve has 1,473 wells in the field, with 742 permanently abandoned and nine dormant.
This year, the field has produced 97,146 barrels of oil and 13,011 Mcf (thousand cubic feet) of gas. Since 1922, it has produced nearly 30 million barrels of oil and 63 million Mcf of gas.
The field is now held by Green Reserve Energy Holdings LLC.
Dale Killingbeck can be reached at dale@cowboystatedaily.com.
