SNAFU—The Day the Navy Nearly Wiped Out the U.S. Government

 

Currier & Ives made a lot more money on disaster pictures than on the Christmas Card scenes we associate with them.  The Explosion on the deck of the USS Princeton was naturally a big seller and hung on many American walls for years. 

The USS Princeton was supposed to be the future of the United States Navy.  Fairly bursting with new technology, it was likely the most advanced warship of its class in the world, surpassing even anything floated the British Royal Navy, then the undisputed master of the oceans of the globe.

She was the vision of Captain Robert F. Stockton, a politically well-connected former Senator from New Jersey and the beau ideal of a dashing officer.  After resuming a naval career interrupted by years in business and politics, he turned down an offer by President John Tyler to become Secretary of the Navy, preferring an active command, preferably on the new class of war ship he envisioned.

It was Stockton’s passion—and political clout—that convinced the Navy and a notoriously tight-fisted Congress to authorize the construction of a steam powered corvette armed by two heavy guns capable of throwing shot or shell up to five miles.  Her speed, punch, and long range would make her a threat to even the heaviest ship of the line.  

A breaktrough modern marvel and the pride of the Navy, the USS Pinceton.

She was designed leading naval architect and inventor of the era, Swedish-born John Ericsson, who would later win fame as the designer of the Civil War ironclad USS Monitor.  The sleek 969-ton ship had three masts with square rigging under sail.  But her breakthroughs were her engines and propulsion.  
Ericsson designed two vibrating lever steam engines built by Merrick & Towne, of Philadelphia. The advanced engines burned Pennsylvania hard coal rather than bulky and inefficient wood.  They were installed totally below the ship’s water line and turned a six-bladed screw propeller 14 feet in diameter mounted aft.  She would be the first warship in the world to abandon side or stern paddle wheels and be propelled by a screw.  Another innovation, the smoke funnel, could fold down when she was running under sail to get out of the way of the spars.

                           

Swede John Ericsson, a naval architect and inventor was the innovative genius behind the Princenton and one of her massive guns.  Too bad he didn't have input on the second.

The keel to the new ship, named for Captain Stockton’s home town, was laid at the Philadelphia Navy Yard on October 20, 1842.  Ericsson personally supervised the construction under the watchful and probably meddlesome eye of Stockton himself.

She was launched and commissioned in September 1843 with Stockton in command.  Following a test run on the Delaware River, the Princeton was taken out for sea trials in October.  After running up the coast to New York City, Stockton matched her in a race against the famed British steam packet SS Great Western which in those years perpetually held transatlantic crossing speed records.  It was a sprint rather than a long race, but the Princeton won handily making newspaper headlines and establishing her as a legitimate threat to the lumbering armadas of the world.

In January of 1843 she was ready for regular service and Stockton took her to New York to be fitted with her two massive guns.  Both were smooth bore muzzle loading 12” wrought iron cannons capable of firing a 225-pound shot 5 miles with 50-pound charge.  The guns were so impressive that each was given a name.

Despite their similarities, however, there was a critical difference.  The Orator, soon renamed the Oregon as a taunt to the British over the disputed boundary of that territory, was designed by Ericsson and cast at the Mersey Iron Works in England in 1841 and shipped to the states awaiting the ship who could handle it.  Critically, in a dramatic innovation the breech was re-enforced with a built-up construction application red-hot iron hoops which pre-tensioned the gun and greatly increased the charge the breech could withstand.

Unfortunately, the Navy did not have enough money to have two guns manufactured in England.  Instead Stockton sought to duplicate the capabilities of the gun by supervising the creation of the Peacemaker at Hogg and Delamater in New York City.  Stockton never consulted Erickson and did not appreciate the critical importance of the re-enforcing rings.  Instead he attempted to achieve the same results simply by making the breech thicker.  He did not realize that given the innate brittle nature of wrought iron, the new breech could not withstand the huge sudden build-up of pressure when being fired.  Sooner or later it would fail catastrophically.

Both guns benefited from another Ericson innovation, a re-coil absorption system that would keep the ship from being rolled by the power of its gun blasts.

After they were fitted, Stockton test fired the guns a few times before sailing to Washington to show off and to lobby for funds to build a whole flotilla of Princeton class corvettes.  After arriving in January of 1844, Stockton showed her off on several short cruises on the Potomac in February with Navy brass and important civilians as passengers.  On each occasion she fired her guns at least once.

An accidental President after the early death of William Henry Harrison, John Tyler was a Virginia Democrat on a Whig ticket.  His troubled presidency almost destroyed the Whigs.  He would later be the only former U.S. President to serve in the Confederate Congress. 

But the big day was February 28.  On that day she picked up President Tyler, his Cabinet, assorted politicians, and even iconic former First Lady Dolly Madison at Alexandria, Virginia.  The cruise was a gay affair as visitors crowded the deck to witness a firing of the two great guns.  After a break for an elegant lunch below decks most of the visitors returned to the deck for one more thrilling test fire.  President Tyler, who could not abide the noise, remained below.

On the second firing of the Peacemaker the breech exploded.  Killed instantly were Secretary of State Abel P. Upshur, Secretary of the Navy Thomas Gilmer, Chief of the Bureau of Construction Equipment and Repairs Capt. Beverly Kennon, Virgil Maxcy former Chargé d’Affaires to Belgium, Colonel David Gardiner of New York, the President’s slave and valet Armistead, and two sailors.  Several others, including Missouri Senator Thomas Hart Benton and Stockton, were injured by shrapnel.

President Tyler was enjoying some discrete private moments with Julia Gardiner below deck when the cannon exploded on deck.  The pair rushed to the scene to see her Congressman father among the dead and Tyler's cabinet and inner circle decimated.  Tyler was a recent widower whose first wife, an invalid, died while serving as First Lady leaving seven children.  Despite a thirty year age gap and perhaps united in grief, the two wed and she gave Tyler seven more children after he left office.  This is the first photograph of a sitting First Lady taken when she was 26 years old.

The President and the lovely Miss Julia Gardiner who had been sharing private time below, rushed to the deck to find a scene of horror and carnage.  When Miss Gardner discovered her father among the dead, she collapsed into the President’s arms.  The two were later married.

There was understandable public outrage at the accident that had nearly obliterated the whole administration.  Both Congress and the Navy launched investigations.  It would have meant the end of a career to any other officer, but Stockton was well protected politically.  A Court of Inquiry investigating the cause of the explosion exonerated Stockton by blaming the explosion on Ericsson who had nothing to do with the design or construction of the Peacemaker.  This understandably embittered Ericsson, who refused to work again for the Navy until the emergency of the Civil War.

In full heroic mode Robert Stockton as Commodore of the Pacific Flotilla which participated in the conquest of California in the Mexican War.  He bested swasbuckling adventurer John C. Fremont and the Regular Army under General Phil Kearney to assume political controle of the new territory and become first Military Governor. 

Stockton was promoted to Commodore and won fame in the Mexican War as the commander of the Navy squadron that helped seize California.  He was subsequently named first military governor and had a town named after him.  He later served as a Democratic Senator from New Jersey and attempted to mediate a peaceful solution to southern secession.  He was named commander of the New Jersey Militia when fears of a Southern invasion were at their height.  He died full of honors in 1866.

The once proud Princeton fared worse.  She served in the Home Squadron until 1847 and was then assigned duty in the Mediterranean which caused her to miss action in the Mexican war.  Upon return to the United States in 1849 her timbers were found rotting from poor maintenance.  She was decommissioned and broken up for scrap at the Boston Navy Yard on June 17, 1849 after less than six years of active service.

Congress never approved plans for a flotilla of Princeton class ships, which would have been invaluable in maintaining the blockade of the Confederacy during the Civil War.

A successor USS Princeton, a World War II Independence class light aircraft carrier, suffered heavy damage, fires, and ammunition explossons after multiple air attacks during the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October 1944.  Having lost her stern and burning heavily, surivors abandoned the ship after a second attack and she was destroyed by U.S. naval torpedos.  An new Princeton carrier was built for service later in the war and was decommissioned in 1970 after seeing action in Korea and Vietnam.  A heavy guided missle cruiser now bears the Princeton name.

Two years later her innovative twin engines were used in a new Princeton, the first of five successors bearing that name including a famous World War II aircraft carrier lost at the Battle of Leyte Gulf in 1944 and a guided missile cruiser commissioned in 1989, currently in still in active service.

 

Samuel Colt Patented a Superior Killing Machine

                            Samuel Colt as a very successful businessman and manufacturer in 1855 from a photo by Mathew Brady,  A long struggle finally paid off. 

With all of other harum-scarum and drama of Donald Trump’s rampage on the Constitution gun violence seems to have faded in the public consciousness.  Not that murder by firearms has gone away—there is still a steady drip, drip, drip of incidents leaving a handful of dead and injured.  Many of those were domestic violence cases and murder/suicides.  Most sources tracking gun death incidents exclude “shootings associated with organized crime, gangs, or drug wars.”  

Others add murders committed in armed robberies or car jackings.  Those kinds of incidents occur heavily disproportionately in ghettos and barrios, and other minority communities where gang violence is assumed to be inevitable.  Conservatives expect nothing less of urban savages and blame the victims along with the perpetrators.  There have not been since the latter days of the Biden administration the kind of  random attacks by deranged individuals  on large numbers of innocent and usually mostly white victims.  Out of sight, out of mind. 

Perhaps a look backward at the man, the invention, and the revolutionary industrial process that made the muzzle loading, single shot muskets and pistols that the Founders understood when they offered that amendment for a well-regulated militia.  

Colt's breakthrough 1835 patent for his revolver.  Many more patents would follow.

On February 25, 1835 Samuel Colt, a twenty-two year old Connecticut Yankee tinkerer was granted a patent for a revolving gun.  The patent was actually Colt’s second.  At the age of just 18 he had applied for a patent on an earlier, cruder version.  But this time, young Colt was ready to go into business producing the Patterson Pistol at a plant in Patterson, New Jersey.

The son of a farmer turned textile manufacturer, Colt was apprenticed to a farmer at age 11 and began studying the inventions of Robert Fulton and others.  He decided then and there that he, too, would become an inventor.  Overhearing a conversation between soldiers wishing for arms that could fire multiple times, he determined to make the creation of just such a weapon his own personal mission. 

At age 16 his father sent him to sea.  On his first voyage he observed that the ship’s wheel could spin freely but be stopped by a clutch which could be applied to a spoke.  He understood the same principle could be applied to revolving barrels of a gun.  He began to carve a model out of wood on his way home.

With an insufficient loan from his father, Colt had two pistols constructed by incompetent craftsmen.  One blew up on testing.  The other failed to fire at all. After taking to the road demonstrating laughing gas (nitrous oxide) to raise money to have prototypes made by a skilled gunsmith, he applied for his first patent in 1832.

In 1835 Colt traveled to England and Europe to try drumming up customers from the armies of various countries.  He observed an earlier revolving barreled weapon, a flintlock pistol and incorporated elements of that design into his gun, for which the British reluctantly issued their own patent.

Back home Colt submitted his new design to the Patent Office.  Armed with the paper, he established the Patent Arms Manufacturing Company to begin production.  While not the first revolver, his was the first to apply the improvement of the percussion cap to a multiple-shot weapon.

Another innovation was in the manufacturing process itself.  Previously each gun was substantially built in all of its components by hand by a single craftsman.  Colt determined to have uniform parts manufactured by machine that could be assembled by semi-skilled factory operatives instead of gunsmiths.  This was the first use of interchangeable parts, which in itself became revolutionary.  Using this method, the cost per pistol plummeted.

Despite these advantages, Colt had a hard time selling his new gun.  There was not enough of a market in sales to individuals to sustain production.  Although he got an endorsement from President Andrew Jackson, Congress only passed a resolution asking the War Department to allow him to demonstrate the weapon.  Without an appropriation, however, the Army could not order any.  The South Carolina Militia expressed interest, but Federal law forbad state militias that were not also in Federal service from acquiring the guns.  Lack of sales and a financial Panic almost doomed the fledgling company.

Colt's 1837 .36 caliber, five shot Patterson Holster Pistol was similar to those ordered by the Army for use in the Florida Seminole Wars. Note the guardless trigger that only dropped down when the hammer was cocked and which perplexed some troopers. 

The Seminole War finally spurred the Army to make a sizable order of both pistols and a revolving barrel musket.  The both weapons were popular in the field with soldiers, but the multiple moving parts tended to jam.  Some soldiers could not get used to a “hidden hammer” feature of the pistols and kept disassembling the gun to figure out how it worked.  Then the Army reneged on full payments for the weapons.  By 1843 Colt had to close his factory.

He turned to another project, underwater mines, and the water-proof cable necessary to set them off.  The cable was just what Samuel F. Morse needed to encourage stringing of lines for his new telegraph.  Not only would the cable allow connections under rivers and streams, but it would be essential for the planned Atlantic Cable.  

Colt concentrated on his cable business until he was contacted by Captain Samuel Walker of the Texas Rangers.  Walker had been impressed by the Seminole War pistols.  Now he wanted to order a thousand heavier and improved versions for use in the Mexican War and against the Comanche and other Texas tribes.  Walker helped Colt create a workable prototype.  Colt contracted a machine shop operated by Eli Whitney Blake to produce the guns.  When Walker ordered 1000 more, Colt took his $10 per gun profits, incorporated the Colt’s Patent Fire-Arms Manufacturing Company and established a factory near his hometown of Hartford, Connecticut.

 

Texas Ranger Captain Samuel Walker and the Colt .45 revolver he ordered.  The guns were so successful they launched Colt's second company 

The use by the Rangers of the guns, the rapid expansion of Western settlement, the California Gold Rush, and conflicts with Native Americans all contributed to brisk sales and the need to constantly expand his manufacturing facilities. 

 

Smaller weapons like this 1845 Pocket Revolver--the Saturday Night Specials of their day, lead to a spike in urban crime and violence and encouraged the formation of armed police forces. 
 
Colt added more guns to his line, including lighter, smaller caliber weapons that could be concealed in a pocket.  The introduction of those guns led to a wave of new violent crime in the cities—and for more demand for guns as “protection” by law abiding citizens and fledgling police forces.   

Colt was soon a very rich man.  He ran his empire as a benevolent father.  He reduced the work day to 10 hours for his employees with a full hour for lunch.  He built washing stations in his plants for his workers and a community recreation facility with a reading room.  He became the richest man in Connecticut, and one of the richest in the country.

The Civil War proved another boom for the company.  Colt raised his own regiment which was to be armed with his new Colt Revolving Rifle.  But for whatever reason, the Regiment was never called into service and Colt was discharged from the service by the end of 1861. 

Within a few months, Sam Colt died at the age of 58 in 1861.  He left an estate of a then staggering $15 million, all earned in little more than a decade.  His company survived as Colt’s Manufacturing Company, a privately held company and small arms supplier to the Defense Department.

Ironically, gun worshiping National Rifle Association (NRA) members nearly destroyed the private domestic market for Colt guns when in 1994 then CEO Ron Stewart announced that he backed gun registration and requirements for fire arms training.  Not only was there an effective boycott of new purchases, but gun owners were encouraged to dump their Colt weapons on the used market at prices well below what the company could sell new arms.  Although Stewart was removed, the damage was done, and Colt has never regained favor among the gun crazed.

Colt has lost its last major defense contract for the M4 Carbine shown here with a banana clip.  It also lost a fight to trade-mark the military designation  M4 and competitors like Bushmasteer have cashed in with knock offs for the civilian market. The carbine is is a shorter barreled version of a civilian AR-15, the weapon of choice in many mass shootings.  The press rarely differentiates between the two versions and labels both AR-15.  Both have been used in mass shootings.
 
They may have even caused political interference with the company’s military contracts.  For a while it had only one important defense contract, to produce M4 Carbines, but the company lost the contract in 2013. That forced the parent company, Colt Defense LLC to file Chapter 11 Bankruptcy in 2015.  A year later a Federal Judge approved a restructuring plan, but its future or ability to prevent it being swallowed by larger publicly held corporations was cast in doubt.

After restructuring, a reinvigorated Colt introduced several new versions of its the Model 1911 Army .45 Automatic pistols, including stainless-steel competition and target models and in 2017, Colt returned to the production of double-action revolvers with the .38 Colt Cobra, followed in 2019 by an improved version of the 1999 .357 Magnum King Cobra.  Other models for the civilian and collectors’ markets followed.

In 2021, Colt was purchased by the Czech Česká zbrojovka Group (CZG), which would rename itself Colt CZ Group in 2022.  Lubomír Kovařík, the chairman of the CZG, said that the acquisition would allow for co-operative research and development between the two companies, and specified that Colt products would continue to be manufactured in the United States.
 

 

Stroke of Silent Cal’s Pen Brought Grand Teton National Park into Existence

The Cathedral Group of the Teton Range, Mount Moran center in the fall when the aspens turn.

Calvin Coolidge was something between an empty suit and a place holder as President of the United States.  Even his succession to office was accidental—roused from his bed in a New Hampshire cabin by the news that the rascal Warren G. Harding had croaked in far away California and sworn into office by kerosene lamp light by his Justice of the Peace Father.  He was also probably the most deeply profound old fashion way the most conservative Republican ever to hold the office.  His main claim to fame which had landed him on the 1920 GOP ticket was breaking the Boston Police Strike the year before.  

Cal got his well-deserved nick name for not saying much because he didn’t have much to say. He carried that same philosophy into governance where he did as little as possible because he didn’t think that the government should do much.  Instead be became best remembered for being willing to pose for pictures and newsreels in Indian bonnets, cowboy hats, and silly outfits in honor of various White House visitors. 

One of the many times Coolidge was photographed in a ten gallon hat, this time at the dedication of Mount Rushmore in 1927.
 
Yet the country rolled on in a period of unprecedented prosperity and the wild excitement of Prohibition, speakeasies, and the jazz age.  Coolidge was elected in his own right in 1924 and could probably been reelected by a landslide four years later.  But Cal would have none of it and famously said “I do not choose to run for President" in 1928 opening the door for Herbert Hoover.

But on February 26, 1929 just days before Hoover took over, Coolidge did something totally uncharacteristic—he signed into law the creation of Grand Teton National Park over the vehement objection of Wyoming’s solidly Republican Congressional delegation and state government as well as Western cattle, timber, and mining interests who hated any real or imagined interest in restricting exploitation of natural resources.  Despite enjoying spending his lengthy vacations at a Summer White House in the Black Hills of South Dakota and enjoying fishing at his New Hampshire get-a-way, Coolidge was never an ardent conservationist in the style of his Republican predecessor Theodore Roosevelt.

In approving the bill Coolidge preserved one of the most stunningly beautiful gems in the National Park System.  And as a boy growing up in Wyoming, one of my favorite places.

The awesomely majestic Teton Mountain Range is the youngest in the vast Rocky Mountains.  It was up thrust a mere 7 to 9 million years ago.  It runs for about 40 miles south of the Yellowstone High Plateau and includes ten peeks.  Mount Moran towering 15,775 feet is the tallest looming above Jackson Lake and with its near neighbors  Nez Perce Peak, Middle Teton, Mount Owen,  and Teewinot Mountain together forming the Cathedral Group which has long inspired artists and photographers.

The Tetons are unusual in that no foothills obscure their rise.  From the east they can clearly be seen in their blue snow-capped majesty from their bases.  That is because deep and wide Jackson Hole, the bed of an ancient sea lies at their feet.  Run-off from the annual winter mantle of snow and glaciers on the mountain sides feeds numerous streams which have carved a series of u-shaped valleys and canyons which cut deep into the range between the peeks.  The streams feed several lakes at the base, the largest being Jackson Lake.  Others include Leigh, Jenny, Bradley, Taggart, and Phelps Lakes which are all part of the flowage of the Snake River as it descends into Jackson Hole.  In addition at higher elevations there are nearly 100 small alpine lakes the highest being Lake Solitude more than 9,000 feet up.

Paleo-Indians were visiting the Tetons and Jackson Hole at least 11,000 years ago following migratory herds of elk and bison.  They made summer camp in Jackson Hole but established no year-round villages.  They were known to have made spear points and arrowheads from locally found obsidian, some of which they may have traded to the Clovis people who in return traded some of their tools.

At the time of first contact with Whites, eastern Shoshoni peoples were following the same pattern.

That first contact came in the person of the legendary John Coulter, often called the first mountain man.  Coulter was a member of Lewis and Clark’s Corps of Discovery who left the expedition during the return from the Pacific with the approval of the two captains to explore on his own the territory south of the route.  His main interest was the discovery of areas rich in furs.   Most famously Coulter entered what is now Yellowstone Park and observed the geysers and hot springs there.  His description of what he saw was ridiculed as a hoax or an elaborate tall tale by many when he got back to St. Louis.  The Yellowstone country was called derisively Coulter’s Hell.

John Colter, based on life time drawings.

Despite the derision, some were intrigued by his accounts.  The St. Louis based Spanish fur trader Manuel Lisa who had opened a trading post called Fort Raymond at the mouth of the Big Horn River in what is now Montana hired Coulter lead a small party of trappers in a  second trip west.  On this trip during the winter of 1807-08 Coulter passed through Jackson Hole and was the first White man to see the Teton Range.  He groped his way along the base of the range until he discovered the relatively easy-to-navigate Teton Pass near the southern end of the chain which allowed him passage into what is now Idaho.  In the Tetons cold streams and crystal clear lakes he did find probably the richest beaver territory in North America completely unexploited by European trappers or natives trapping for trade.

Coulter met Clark in St. Louis in 1810 and provided the Captain a detailed account of both of these trips, possibly drawing crude maps for him.  Based on this information, Clark included a map of the Yellowstone and Tetons in his long awaited official report.  Although some still doubted Coulter’s accounts the discovery of a stone crudely carved into the shape of a skull and inscribed “John Coulter” on one side and 1808 on the other which was found just beyond Teton Pass in Idaho in the early 1930’s.  Although it cannot be conclusively proved that it was left by Coulter, weathering of the stone and inscriptions are in line with the timeframe.

Soon competing fur trading companies were sending expeditions into the area.  Early American trapping parties called the mountains the Pilot Knobs because they could be seen clearly at such a great distance and were like a beacon calling the Mountain Men to the richness of their waters.

But the British also had claims on the region considering it part of Oregon.  Donald Mackenzie led a North West Company expedition made up largely of veteran French and Métis voyagers and trappers into the region in from the west in 1818-19.  It was the French trappers who gave the range their name from the three main peeks in the Cathedral Group—les trois tétons (the three tits.)

The British challenge was answered in from the mid-1820’s by the Rocky Mountain Fur Company organized by Jedediah Smith, William Sublette, and David Edward Jackson, names fans of 2016  Oscar winning movie The Revenant might recognize in the story of Hugh Glass.  Davy Jackson oversaw operations around the Tetons and Jackson Hole giving his name to the broad valley and the largest of the Lakes.

Mountain men entering Jackson Hole with the Tetons in the background and Snake River below them.

Intensive trapping depleted even the rich streams of the Tetons by the late 1830s and beaver hats, the main driver of the trade, were going out of fashion.  By 1840 the glory days of the fur trade were over.  The trading companies stopped sending companies into the mountains.  A few stubborn and grizzled individual trappers continued to visit the area, but except for transient Native American hunting parties region was nearly devoid of human activity for nearly 20 years.

In 1859-60 the U.S. Army sponsored an exploratory expedition led by Topographical Engineer Captain Capitan William F. Reynolds and guided by Jim Bridger, the boyish trapper in The Revenant, entered Jackson Hole.  The expedition failed to make headway exploring the Yellowstone territory to the north and the Civil War interrupted follow-ups.  But naturalist F. V. Hayden, who was with Reynolds, would return to lead his own expeditions beginning with the Hayden Geological Survey of 1871.  While Hayden mapped Yellowstone his subordinate James Stevenson led the Snake River Division into and around the Tetons.  Accompanying Stevenson as photographer was William Henry Jackson who took the first dramatic pictures of the mountains.

1871 photo by William Henry Jackson.  

Among the charges to the Hayden and Stevenson expeditions was searching for possible mineral wealth—gold, silver, or copper which could be exploited.  Fortunately for future preservationists they found none allowing the Yellowstone and Tetons to remain relatively undefiled.  

By the late 1870’s Hayden’s reports and Jackson’s photographs began to lure wealthy tourists to the region and rustic lodges were established for them and crude roads laid out to accommodate talley-ho coaches for visitors.  Tourism became the first economic activity in the region since the collapse of the fur trade.

In the 1884 a handful of homesteaders began to settle in Jackson Hole.  By 1890 there were about 50 of them and two years later the construction of Menor’s Ferry allowed access to the west side of the Snake River by wagons.  Around the turn of the 20th Century and the approach of rail service led to large scale cattle ranching displacing hardscrabble homestead farming in Jackson Hole. 

 The construction of automobile roads along the old military trails and roads in the region began a new surge of tourism in the ‘20s and ‘30s. 

Explorer F.V. Hayden not only participated in or led several expeditions to Yellowstone and Jackson Hole but was a relentless campaigner to establish Yellowstone National Park and then to add the Tetons and Jackson Hole.

Yellowstone had become the first National Park way back on March 1, 1872 when Ulysses S Grant signed the legislation creating it after a campaign led by F. V. Hayden.  As early as 1900 conservationists began attempts to add the Tetons and Jackson Hole to the park.  They were met with fierce local opposition, some of which still hoped to have Yellowstone Park dissolved and made available for commercial development.  The waters of the Snake River water shed were also coveted. 

In 1907 the Bureau of Reclamation dammed the outlet of Jackson Lake eventually raising its level 39 feet to provide agricultural irrigation water to Idaho.  When the Bureau began to advance a plan to do the same to same to other lakes and alarmed Yellowstone Park Superintendent Horace Albright renewed the campaign to extend the park south. 

Local opposition remained fierce, but a proposal to create a separate park pretty much confined to the peeks themselves and most of the lakes at the base, was put forward as a compromise that would leave most of Jackson Hole in private hands.  It was the bill accomplishing just that that Coolidge signed in 1929.

Albright was not done with his hopes of preserving more land.  He made contact with America’s richest man, John D. Rockefeller  of Standard Oil who built a summer lodge for himself in Jackson Hole in the mid-‘20s.  Albright convinced the millionaire to quietly start buying up land in Jackson Hole with the aim of transferring it to the National Park Service.  To this end he created the Snake River Land Company.  He acquired significant holdings but in 1930 locals got word of what was going on and raised a stink.  For more than a decade expansion of the Park was in limbo with fierce opposition in Congress.

In 1942 a frustrated Rockefeller threatened to sell his holdings to developers unless Park expansion was approved.  Interior Secretary Harold Ickes recommended that President Franklyn D. Roosevelt use the Antiquities Act to create the Jackson Hole National Monument adjacent to the National Park using Rockefeller’s donation and transferring land from the Teton National Forest.  The Monument also came under the management of the Park Service but lacked a funding allotment requiring the Park Service to re-direct funds from elsewhere to operate it.

Despite continued local opposition, there was growing public support nationally for bringing the Monument into the Park.  That was finally accomplished in 1950.  In 1972 24,000 acres north of the Grand Teton Park was added making it contiguous at last to Yellowstone.  In 2007 the Rockefeller family donated their private retreat, the JY Ranch, to the Park expanding it to the southwest and establishing the current boundaries.   The park today includes 480 square miles and 310,000 acres.

 

Grand Teton National Park had 3,417,106 recreational visits in 2023, a 22% increase from 2022.  But heavy usage and years of Park Service cut or frozen budgets have left the park with rundown physical facilities.  Environmental threats to the pristine waters and traditionally clean, clear air are mounting.  Many sunny days now find the mountains shrouded with haze.  Renewed calls to further privatize lodges and guest facilities and allow the construction of vacation condos  remain a threat.  Active so-called Patriot Militias in the region have threatened to seize the park.

Most devastating of all the Elon Musk war on Federal Workers has already slashed thousands of Park Service employees and threatens more.  Facing the ax are firefighting forces, timber management, fish and game management, educational services—also muzzled on climate change and basic history—and visitor support.  Among other cuts, 16 of 17 supervisory positions at  Grand Teton National Park were eliminated leaving just one person to hire, train and supervise dozens of seasonal employees expected this summer.  Grand Teton and the whole National Park System are on the teetering edge of destruction.

Calvin Coolidge’s good deed is be undone by a Republican President and Congress.

 

How Hiram Revels Became the Black Man in Jefferson Davis’s Chair

On February 25, 1870 Hiram Revels was seated as a United States Senator from Mississippi.  Two things made the event unusual.  First, Revels was Black.  Second, he was elected by the  Reconstruction legislature of the state to finish the term that Jefferson Davis had vacated to take up the Presidency of the Confederacy.

Hiram Revels is sworn in as a U.S. Senator from Mississippi.

Seating him was anything but routine.  Democrats rose to argue that because the Dred Scott Decision held that no Black man could be a citizen, that there were no Black citizens prior to the adoption of the 14th Amendment in 1860.  The Constitution required a Senator to be a citizen for six years and they argued that Revels had only been one for two.  

The Republican majority said that would apply only to those of pure Negro blood.  Revels, who was born a free man in North Carolina in 1827 to a mixed race father and Scottish mother was ruled a citizen and seated.  

Revels had apprenticed as a barber to his brother and was gifted his estate by his widow when he died.  He used the money to attend Union County Quaker Seminary in Indiana, Knox College in Illinois, and a Black seminary in Ohio.  He was ordained a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and preached in several states, including Missouri where he was briefly jailed for gathering Blacks to worship, before settling into a Baltimore parish in 1845 and opening a private school.  

He became perhaps the leading free black citizen of Maryland.  When the Civil War broke out he helped raise two regiments of Black soldiers in Maryland and Missouri and served as a Chaplain.  He saw action at Vicksburg.  

 

              Senator Hiram Revels.

 In 1866 he took up a new pastorate in Natchez and put his efforts into establishing schools for Black children.  He was elected Alderman in 1868 then to the Mississippi Senate in 1869.  He was selected to give the opening prayer at the 1870 session of the legislature and so impressed the members with his eloquence and grace that he was quickly elected to fill the unfinished U.S. Senate term.  

In the Senate Revels impressed his colleagues with both his work ethic and his oratory.  He served on the Committee for Education and Labor and on the District of Columbia Committee.  Although he rose on the Senate floor to defend the black Georgia state legislators who had just been illegally ousted by White representatives, he did not advocate the continuance of a harsh or vengeful Reconstruction policy.  He argued that Confederates who swore a loyalty oath should have their citizenship rights restored.   

 

Revels served only a little more than a year.  He resigned in March 1871, two months before his term ended to take up the Presidency of Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College (now Alcorn State University.)  He served there with distinction with two interruptions until his retirement in 1882.  

Those two interruptions were instructive.  First, he temporarily assumed the duties of Mississippi Secretary of State in 1883.  He witnessed the corruption of the administration of Republican Governor Aldebert Ames and wrote a public letter to President Grant accusing him and his Carpetbagger administration of corrupting the Black vote for their own private profit.  Needless to say, he was fired as college president.  But when Democrats returned to power in the state in 1876 they reappointed him to his post despite the fact he remained an avowed Republican.

 

      Hiram  Revels, front and center,  with a graduating class and faculty at Alcorn Agricultural and Mechanical College.

After his college service Revel returned to the ministry and then taught theology at Shaw College (now Rust College) in Holly Springs, Mississippi.  He died in 1901.  

Despite his accomplishments and illustrious career Revel is now nearly a forgotten figure, a victim of the successful seizure in the early 20th Century of American history texts for public schools by Confederate sympathizers and apologists who painted Reconstruction as a bloody oppression and Black political leaders like Revel as ignorant apes and puppets of evil Carpetbaggers.