North of Casper, about a dozen miles south of the oil town of Midwest, a weathered sandstone knob stands beside Wyoming Highway 259. Early in the twentieth century it looked enough like a teapot, handle and spout and all, to be called Teapot Rock, and the low oil-bearing fold of ground a few miles west took its name: Teapot Dome. Windstorms broke off the handle and spout in the 1920s, about the time the name stopped belonging to the rock and came to mean something else.
The ground was lived on long before anyone drilled it. Hearths, rock shelters, stone circles and cairns across the dome record thousands of years of camps, and in the 1860s the Bozeman Trail, cut through Lakota, Cheyenne and Arapaho hunting country, crossed its northeast corner.
Oil for the Navy
Oil was reported at neighboring Salt Creek in 1886, and by the 1910s the Salt Creek field was one of the richest in the West. The Navy, meanwhile, was converting its fleet from coal to oil and worried about a wartime supply. In 1915 President Woodrow Wilson set the Teapot Dome lands aside as Naval Petroleum Reserve No. 3, alongside two reserves in California, to stay in the ground until the country needed them.
In 1921 President Warren Harding moved the reserves from the Navy to the Interior Department and its new secretary, Albert Fall, a New Mexico senator with no use for conservation. On April 7, 1922, without competitive bidding, Fall and Navy Secretary Edwin Denby leased all of Teapot Dome to the Mammoth Oil Company, which Harry Sinclair of Sinclair Oil had formed for that purpose alone. The Wall Street Journal broke the news a week later. Wyoming's senator John Kendrick was already asking questions, prompted by a Casper oilman, Leslie Miller, who had watched Sinclair trucks haul drilling equipment into a reserve that was supposed to be closed.
Mammoth moved fast. By the end of May 1922 it had contracted for twenty derricks, and its tent camps and truck fleets turned the dome, in one Navy historian's phrase, into an ant hill. That August the field also saw what the historian Laton McCartney called the only time the Marines have invaded an American state: a captain, four Marines and a geologist sent from Washington to evict a rival driller, a Harding friend named James Darden, from land Fall had leased to Sinclair. They posted No Trespassing signs, ate lunch with the foreman, and left. A gusher came in the following May.
What the money bought
Senator Thomas Walsh of Montana spent two years pulling the thread. His committee found that Fall, whose New Mexico ranch had been visibly prospering, had taken about $400,000 in cash, Liberty Bonds and loans from Sinclair and from Edward Doheny, who held the lease on the Elk Hills reserve in California. In March 1924 court-appointed receivers took over the field. In October 1927 the Supreme Court upheld the finding that the lease had been obtained by fraud, and in January 1928 Teapot Dome went back to the Navy, which plugged most of its wells.
Fall was convicted in 1929 of taking a bribe and sentenced to a year in prison, the first member of a presidential Cabinet to go there for his conduct in office. Sinclair was acquitted of bribing him but served six and a half months for contempt of the Senate and of the court. Doheny, who had handed Fall $100,000, was acquitted. Harding had died in 1923, before most of it came out, and his administration has carried the teapot ever since.
After the scandal
The reserve sat mostly idle until 1976, when Congress opened the naval reserves to full production. In its last decades the Energy Department ran the field as a testing ground for oilfield technology, and in 2015 it sold all of it, about 9,500 acres, to a private company for $45 million. The field set aside a century earlier for battleships is now one more lease in the Salt Creek country. Teapot Rock, listed on the National Register in 1974, still stands by the highway without its spout.