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 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.

country. The boom was still bubbling a year later when, on March 8, 1921, Wadleigh and Beam came to town. Ironically their guide led them through Salt Valley, the geologic heart of the present day park, but with nary the mention of an arch.

Frank A. Wadleigh, General Passenger Agent of the Denver & Rio Grande, and George L. Beam, official photographer of the railway, both of Denver, were in Moab on Tuesday to investigate the oil fields and secure data relative to the activities… They were on a general trip throughout Eastern Utah and had been in Price and Green River. F.W. Strong, president of the Big Six Oil Company, met them at Thompsons and piloted them through the Salt Valley and Moab fields. Mr. Beam secured a large number of photographs of the various structures. Mr. Wadleigh stated that he was confident that the activities of the Big Six Companies in southeastern Utah presage oil production in some, if not all, the [geologic] structures. (“Railroad Men Visit Southern Utah Oil Fields,” Deseret News, March 14, 1921)

But Wadleigh’s enthusiasm was not enough to change reality. Eastern Utah’s oil was low in quantity and hard to drill. But the oil men’s bane turned out to be a tourist boon—since it was about this time Wadleigh received the letter from Alexander Ringhoffer. Wadleigh recounts what happened next in a letter to another friend of influence, Stephen Mather, Director of the National Park Service:

...I wanted to take up with you personally the matter of making a National Monument out of a new beauty spot recently brought to my attention and explored by Mr. Beam and myself in September [1923].

In July we had a letter from a miner... telling us about some wonderful rock formations that he had discovered...and asked us to come over and take a look at them.

This man, Alexander Ringhoffer, met us at Thompson station, and guided us to an unknown region approximately eighteen miles southeast of that point. He drove us to the foot of a very high rocky ridge, when we left the automobile and some two or three miles of very heavy climbing to the place which Ringhoffer had named “The Devil’s Garden.” There are no trails and there is no way to get into this “garden” except over the rocky ridge referred to.

Arriving we found some stupendous sandstone formations and unlike anything I have ever seen in the Rocky Mountain region. The monoliths are greater than those in the Garden of Gods, the Colorado National Monument…or in any of the southern Utah regions that I have visited—excepting Zion. We found what undoubtedly is fifth in size of the known natural bridges. We had but two days at our disposal and could only cover a small part of the district in that time.

I would like to have you interest yourself in this matter and, if feasible, have the section surveyed with the view of setting it apart as a National Monument.*

Very Truly Yours, Frank A. Wadleigh November 2, 1923

While there was subsequent confusion as to the exact location Wadleigh and Beam had visited, this letter would set in motion the bureaucracy that would eventually lead to Herbert Hoover’s Presidential Proclamation of April 12, 1929, setting aside the Windows and Devils Garden section as Arches National Monument. The Klondike Bluffs were finally added to the Monument on November 25, 1938.

*Although called the “Devil’s Garden” by Ringhoffer, the area visited that day in 1923 is now called the Klondike Bluffs. The natural bridge referred to is Tower Arch. The “Devil’s Garden” now applies to a section of the park on the east side of Salt Valley.

Frank Wadleigh Bio

Frank A. Wadleigh was born November 14 or 15, 1857, in Clinton, Iowa, to parents Emmaline Emmons, native of Vermont, and E.G. Wadleigh of New Hampshire. Wadleigh graduated from Iowa State University in 1879 and earned a post-graduate degree at the University of Michigan (1879-1881). Wadleigh began his railroad career immediately, selling tickets for the Chicago Northwestern Railway in his hometown of Clinton. In 1882 he became a clerk in Pueblo, for the Chicago & Iowa Railroad. In 1887 he was promoted to Assistant General Passenger & Ticket Agent, a position he held until 1895. He became the General Passenger & Ticket Agent of the Rio Grande Western at Salt Lake City (1895-1899), and then General Agent of the Western Passenger Association and Immigrant Bureau of Western Lines of New York. This meant he helped the newly arrived migrate west.

In 1904 Wadleigh joined the Denver & Rio Grande as Assistant Passenger Agent in Denver. Wadleigh took over in 1920, upon the retirement of Major Shadrach Hooper—a 16-year apprenticeship. Wadleigh married in 1912. His wife’s name was Harriet.

Wadleigh and George Beam were accepted into the Colorado Mountain Club on March 16, 1916, as part of the regular business of the board of directors. Their membership in the Club seems to have been largely a choice of moral support, since their railroad jobs certainly got them out and about. Only Beam is mentioned as going on any hikes. Coincidentally it was to Green Mountain and Royal Arch, near Boulder, on November 19, 1916. The trip leader was early Club stalwart Bill Ervin. Harriet Wadleigh joined the CMC on June 21, 1917.

Wadleigh’s correspondence also contains the last known letters of CMC member Agnes Vaille, who worked as secretary for the Denver Chamber of Commerce. The letters dated December 23 and 27, 1924, asks for and accepts Wadleigh’s participation on a committee to promote oil shale development in Colorado. Wrote Vaille, “We desire to have the interests represented [of those] who have devoted their attention to and appreciate the possibilities of this great resource.” (12/27/1924) Vaille died just sixteen days later on Longs Peak.

Wadleigh retired from the D&RG in 1927, but, unable to remain idle, became Traffic Manager for the Rocky Mountain Motor Co. working on a limited basis until a stroke hospitalized him. Wadleigh passed away on July 31, 1933 at the age of 75. George Beam passed away in 1935. Both men remained CMC members until their passing.

Thanks to Vickie Webster, retired historian at Arches National Park, and Lee Ferguson, Park Ranger at Arches National Park, for historical information. △