Frank Wadleigh: Dedicated to the West How Early CMC Members Helped put Arches National Park on the Map
By Woody Smith or a club organized to promote the mountains of Colorado, it may come as a surprise that one of the CMC’s early members had a primary role in making the arches of Utah a worldwide destination. In the early 20th century, Frank A. Wadleigh, (1857–1933) and photographer George Beam (1868–1935) worked for the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad and, as a team, crisscrossed the West, documenting and promoting the railroad and the scenic wonders along its lines. In July 1923, Wadleigh and Beam were the lucky recipients of an invitation to visit some mysterious and hard-to-find natural stone arches located north of Moab, Utah, near Salt Valley. The invitation came from prospector Alexander Ringhoffer, who, along with his sons, had “discovered” several arches in December 1922. The Ringhoffers were certainly not the first to have seen the arches, but they are credited with being the first to begin the process that would eventually lead to the establishment of Arches National Monument in 1929. Ringhoffer had contacted the right men. In the 1920s, Wadleigh was the D&RG’s Passenger Traffic Manager, which meant it was his job to sell tickets. To fulfill his duties, Wadleigh became a tireless promoter of Colorado and the West—a one-man chamber of commerce willing to correspond with anyone showing the slightest interest in visiting, re-locating, or at best, conducting business locally. Most often Wadleigh personally filled requests for the D&RG’s Redbook, a guide to the stops, sights, and lodging along each route. Today such requests would be handled by mailroom employees, but Wadleigh was only too happy to write a few sentences, encouraging more contact and perhaps a visit. Wadleigh was also passionate about the potential development of western mineral resources, particularly oil and oil shale. Although long forgotten today, during the late 1910s and early 1920s, western Colorado experienced an oil shale boom in the same towns that would boom and bust again in 36
Trail & Timberline
the late 1970s and early 1980s. The boom was in response to USGS surveys (1913 and 1914) indicating a potential 40 billion barrels of oil locked into the shale plateaus of western Colorado and eastern Utah. The problem, then as now, was how to squeeze the oil out of the shale. Wadleigh was devoted to the subject. Beginning about 1904 he kept increasingly voluminous scrapbooks collected from newspapers, magazines, and government publications worldwide on all manner of arcane processes and obscure discoveries related to oil and oil shale. The scrapbooks also contain bits of forgotten history: Crew capping the first gas well at Fort Collins, which blew 80,000,000 cubic feet of gas a day until controlled… Cows, near Fort Collins, soaked with oil spray from Well No.1 two miles away. (Rocky Mountain News, Pictorial Section, 9/21/1924) A few clippings note the loss of log cabins after their chimneys, unknowingly built of oil shale, burst into flame. He also collected articles on dinosaur fossils, Egypt, and astronomy. But the subject always came back to oil, shale, and the prospects for its development. A gauge of Wadleigh’s enthusiasm is demonstrated by an interview with The Grand Valley News in February 1921: Mr. Frank A. Wadleigh…spent last Saturday visiting this city and vicinity. Mr. Wadleigh, who has proven a real live booster for this section of the Western Slope, has some valuable oil shale land in the Upper Parachute District. During his visit he called at the News office and discussed with its editor the present conditions of the country and its great need, the same being OIL! This need, this vociferous demand for oil, will be answered when these mighty shale hills are tapped and the great streams of shale oil are released to fill the big reservoirs
of commerce… Wadleigh became a known expert, which, along with his railroad duties, resulted in many valuable associates. Among them was Colorado’s governor, Oliver H. Shoup, and School of Mines President Victor Alderson. Wadleigh’s interests and responsibilities also made him a familiar figure on the Western Slope and into Utah. Knowing Wadleigh’s positive influence, his contacts kept him well informed. In January 1920, he received an update from E.S. Blair on Moab’s recent oil strike, which had occurred at a well located a half mile south of town: It appears that all of the oil rights both in Moab and in the Salt Valley sections have been taken up. In the Salt Valley district a standard drill is expected to be erected and work begun, as soon as it can be delivered on the ground. There are poor accommodations for handling a crowd at the hotels in Moab. Two persons to a room, cold room and cold beds seem to be the result of an influx of twenty-five to thirty strangers per day. There were about fifty outsiders there on the 21st, which is about all that can be accommodated. The road from Thompsons for the first five miles out was somewhat rutty and sloppy in places... A new road is under construction which will reduce the grade to about 6% and will take out some of the sharp curves. There is more or less skepticism manifested by visitors, and the lack of tangible evidence is disconcerting to those who hoped to see the oil bailed or pumped... I feel that I can re-affirm the statement…that I am convinced the Western Allies Oil & Gas Co., have tapped an oil body, the volume of which is yet to be determined. Despite the lack of any substantial success, oil wells soon pockmarked the plateau
