The 2nd Teapot Dome Scandal Part 2

When I had the driver of the Clawson Oil Company truck inside the jail facility I decided to call Mr. Clawson himself in Salt Lake City in order to complain about the actions of his driver. I have always felt that most people will try to obey the law in most cases, but what I soon found was that Mr. Clawson could care less about Wyoming law and my problems with his driver. I spoke to Mr. Clawson and told him about the actions of his driver hoping that what had happened between he and I was just a fluke and that we could work out the problem so that it did not happen again with any of his other drivers.

After I spoke to Mr. Clawson he spoke these words, all given in a heavy southern accent, "Let me tell ya'll somethin' son, I'm running ten loads of crude oil through your little podunk town a day and you got one of my drivers but ya aint gonna get no more." Famous last words. The law gives an officer of the law some discretion about how to handle a case like this, and in most situations I would fall over backwards to keep from hurting a drivers drivers license, but in this case I decided that there needed to be a lesson. I advised Mr. Clawson that I was going to go over his truck with a fine toothed comb and that I would write a citation for every discrepancy I found in the truck. He hung up the phone on me.

The citations I issued to the driver totaled over $1,000.00, and added to that was a towing bill from Macy's Wrecker in the amount of $2600.00 which had to be paid before the truck could be released to Mr. Clawson. This bill was paid in a matter of hours, but every malfunction I found on the truck had to be fixed before the truck could be released, and so it sat in impound until the work was completed. When I told the driver the amount of his bail for the citations I wrote he said, "That's all right, Mr. Clawson assured us drivers that he would pay for all of their citations." I then asked him if Mr. Clawson was going to be responsible for the loss of his drivers license, when the judge suspended it for all of the moving violations I wrote him. This set him back a bit because he had not thought of this.

After I finished with the Clawson driver I contacted the Highway Patrol Commercial Vehicle Department in Cheyenne and explained to the Captain there what I had found with the Clawson driver. Immediately he sent an enforcement team of Commercial Vehicle Patrolmen to Farson and they began to stop and weigh every Clawson Oil Company truck on the highway. Within a week Clawson Oil Company was out of business. An interesting thing was found during the ensuing invesigation into Clawson Oil Company. The reason he was hauling ten loads of oil a day to the refinery in Salt Lake City as quickly as he could, was because he was stealing oil from the Shoshone Indian Tribe, from their leases located in the Tea Pot Dome area near Thermopolis, Wyoming.

Using an illegal oil tap line that had been placed on the tribe's oil collection lines, they would have not known about the theft for a long time if I had not caught the Clawson driver with the one load. I do not know how much oil was stolen from the tribe, but I do know that Mr. Clawson absconded with over $2,000,000.00 in cash to Brazil with the FBI hot on his heels, and to my knowledge he has never been found. The driver was left to pay his own fines for his traffic violation, and his drivers license was suspended because of his foolish actions and the problems he caused me. So much for misbased trust.

As a footnote Albert Fall was a United State Senator from the State Of New Mexico, appointed to that position by the newly formed legislature of the state when it was first formed from the Territory of New Mexico in 1912. He was then appointed to the position of Secretary of Interior of the United States by President Warren Harding in 1921. While in this position of responsibilty he was able to have the vast Naval Oil Reserves located in the Elk Hills of California, and in the Tea Pot Dome Oil fields of Wyoming transferred from the Department of the Navy to the Department of the Interior. He then secretly and without bids leased the vast reserves to his friends Mr. Doheny of Doheny Oil, and Mr. Sinclair of Sinclair Oil, receiving an estimated amount of $100,00.00 to $300,000.00 1921 dollars in return. This event was refered to as the Tea Pot Dome scandal. He was later caught and convicted of his crimes after an investigation that riveled the Watergate investigation that rocked the country in the 1970's during the Nixon administartion.

The later investigation I initiated was called the Second Tea Pot Dome scandal.