Albert Bacon Fall: Cold-blooded Criminal or Frontier Hero?
by Ernie Bulow
This story has more twists and kinks than a rusty barbed wire fence, involves a huge cast of characters, and has some strange ties to the Gallup area. The pivotal moment was 1922, the year the Gallup Inter-Tribal Indian Ceremonial began.
Fall is best known as the perpetrator of the Teapot Dome Scandal while he headed the Department of Interior under Warren G. Harding, a contender as the worst president in American history.
I first heard about Fall many years ago. He was the first – and only – cabinet level politician to spend time in prison for his misdeeds. I’m not sure why they singled him out with all that goes on in Washington.
The two years of Harding’s administration were interesting, if nothing else. The amazing thing about it all was that the President was already dead before his misdeeds came to light. Harding was the first man to say, “With friends like these, who needs enemies?”
Albert B. Fall, circa 1923.
But this story is about Albert Fall, cowboy, rancher, gun-toting lawyer and crooked politician. One thing many folks agree on, Fall was fearless when angry. He was known to have beaten up political opponents with his fists and a heavy walking stick he carried – in the Santa Fe legislature. In his book, The Fabulous Frontier, William Keleher writes, “Never a man to permit opposition without a show of temper, Albert Bacon Fall was always prepared for a fight and indifferent as to choice of weapons. A fist fight, a fight with a cane, or a gun, were all equally agreeable to Fall.”
Albert was a hard-core Democrat in the beginning, and fought the Republican political “machine” tooth and nail. He once shot a deputy sheriff in “self defense.” With the help of Oliver Lee and his gun-toting cowboys he backed down a company of New Mexico Militia who were trying to fix an election in Hillsboro, New Mexico, near Silver City. That town would see more of Fall.
Albert Fall was born in Kentucky in 1861 and was largely self-educated. He spent time as a cowboy in Texas and then moved to New Mexico and was admitted to the bar in 1891. He was soon named as a judge, but he preferred the rough and tumble of the courtroom.
Everyone knows how the sheriff Pat Garrett shot Billy the Kid in July of 1881. Less well known is the fact that Garrett had killed a buffalo skinner in Texas in 1878, and other men in the so-called Lincoln Country Wars – closely tied to politics in Santa Fe according to historians.
His notoriety as the slayer of the youthful badman didn’t do him much good as it turned out and he was back and forth between Texas – where he was a captain in the Rangers – and New Mexico, where he was a rancher and had gigs off and on as a lawman. When the notorious murder of Albert Fountain and his son Henry went down, the governor of New Mexico hired the Pinkerton agency and Garrett to get to the truth.
Fountain had once shot a political enemy named Frank Williams with the usual plea of self defense. All the principals in the story up to this time had taken one or more lives with a six-gun, which speaks to life in New Mexico at the time.
At the time of his apparent murder – neither body was ever found – Fountain was a special agent in charge of curbing cattle rustling in the state. He was an avowed enemy of Oliver Lee and his henchmen, which made him a mortal enemy of Albert Lee as well. All three men had extensive land and cattle holdings at the time.
It took Garrett a couple of years to put together the case against Lee and two other men and bring them to trial. Needless to say, Albert Fall was council for the defense. He got the three men off.
The trial was held in Hillsboro and a special telegraph line was strung so journalists could file reports to eastern newspapers, including the New York Times. The whole event got so much publicity that several historians have given the incident credit for slowing down statehood by many years.
Garrett, on the other hand, owed a lot of money to Oliver Lee’s brother-in-law, W. W. Cox, who took some of his land for a horse farm. No horses ever saw the grass there, and Cox brought in Jesse Wayne Brazel and his herd of goats. Garrett and Brazel exchanged some hot language and Brazel shot him dead. “Self Defense” was the plea.
Surprise, Albert Fall was the defense attorney for Jesse Wayne, who was soon turned loose. Garrett was only fifty-seven when Brazel gunned him down in February 1908. It wasn’t healthy to be an enemy of Judge Fall.
During the Spanish American War, Albert Bacon Fall joined Teddy Rooselvelt’s Rough Riders. Most of them were cowboys who hailed from New Mexico and Arizona. Fall never saw action and was soon back in his old haunts.
He claimed the whole Pat Garrett business was a Republican plot, but in 1904 he switched parties, joining the GOP as the winning side. While all the other state politicians were working hard for statehood, Fall was concerned with other matters.
When New Mexico was finally made a state in 1912, the powerful and intimidating Fall was one of her first senators. There were plenty of enemies in New Mexico from both parties. Both the Democrats and Republicans felt he had betrayed their causes.
Albert B. Fall being sworn in as Secretary of the Interior, 1921.
He almost didn’t get reelected, but two of his three children died in the great flu epidemic of 1918 and he got a sympathy vote. In 1921 one of the most reviled presidents in history was elected. I have never found out why, but Albert Fall was a close personal friend of Warren G. Harding – birds of a feather I suppose – and Harding appointed Fall as Secretary of the Interior. He was in Hog Heaven.
As fate would have it, Harding was only president for two years. Returning from a trip to Alaska to figure out first hand how to exploit the territory’s extremely rich natural resources, including oil, the Chief Officer died mysteriously after a short illness.
His personal physician – a homeopath – ruled it a stroke. Other doctors later called it a heart attack. Persistent rumors circulated that Harding had been poisoned. At that moment only one serious scandal had broken, concerning graft and corruption in the Veterans Administration. (The Great War had only ended a few years before.) Two highly placed politicos committed suicide.
Harding’s death set off a cascade of scandals at all level of government and involving all branches. Curiously, in his short term in office Warren had appointed four Supreme Court Justices including ex-President Howard Taft as Chief Justice.
The President was accused of, among other things, having held giant orgies in the White House, attended by his cronies of the “Ohio Ring.” It also turned out the man had two mistresses, one with whom he had fathered a child.
Some of the charges were questionable if not laughable. A high official of the Ku Klux Klan claimed they had held a special induction ceremony for Warren in the White House. No proof was ever produced. The Klan had a big resurgence in the twenties, mainly due to foreign immigrants.
On the other hand, several folks had made the claim that Harding had a black ancestor, something he made light of. At the time the “one drop” rule was in effect. That charge was never proven either way.
Albert Bacon Fall had taken full advantage of the corrupt political climate in Washington. As soon as he was sworn in, pretty much in the mold of his president and peers, he started taking bribes and passing out favors with both hands.
One belief that ex-Democrat Fall shared with his fellow Republicans was the certainty that they had a God-given right – a Divine imperative – to exploit natural resources to their mutual advantage.
As Secretary of the Interior, Fall had control of national petroleum reserves. Three extensive oil fields had been given in trust to the Navy. Two were in California, the third in the northeast corner of Wyoming. The Wyoming property was known as Teapot Dome because of a rock formation there.
At first it looked like Albert had been pretty cagey. Though some pals of his were given leases to tap these oil fields, and though Fall suddenly had a lot of spare cash, there was no paper trail. Fall was buying up extensive ranch land in eastern New Mexico to add to his already vast holdings in the Three Rivers area. He was also spending in a lavish way.
Eventually a $100,000 “loan” was found and he was forced to resign his position. It would take seven years of litigation to convict him for the Teapot Dome mess and he eventually spent a year in Federal Prison. Richard Hanna, keynote speaker at the Democratic Convention in Santa Fe, following Albert B. Fall’s scandal and resignation, stated, “We bow our heads in shame, and tender humble apologies to the nation for the unfortunate contribution New Mexico made to the disgraceful situation brought to light by these investigations.” Though Fall is known for this particular national debacle, his corrupt reach had more lasting effects.
A man named Holm Olaf Bursum took the Senate seat “still warm with the benevolence of Albert Bacon Fall.” They had been old cronies in New Mexico and both shared the belief that land and resources were there for the taking. In Bursum’s case, it was land belonging to the Pueblo Tribes of New Mexico that needed Federal attention. Though the Pueblos had only a fraction of their ancestral lands, the theory was that Anglos would make better use of what was left.
For years whites had encroached on Pueblo fields along the Rio Grande, sometimes justifying their claims with stories of Spanish Land Grants. The Bursum Bill would give the non-Indians title to the property once and for all.
Even after all these years the Bursum Bill is hard to parse, because some of its provisions clearly attacked Native beliefs and culture. One of Holm’s arguments was that Indians spent too much time practicing their heathen customs, especially their devilish dancing.
When Santa Fe intellectuals, writers and authors, came to the support of the Pueblos someone asked Senator Bursum just how many days they wasted on their ceremonials. His answer was, “More than thirty.” When queried about the appropriate time for dancing he retorted, “Sundays and holidays.”
The person pointed out that Sundays and holidays would add up to more than sixty days, rather than thirty; Bursum just snorted. It isn’t clear just what the bill intended to outlaw, but whatever it was would put an end to the traditional Pueblo culture.
Aside from the Bursum Bill, Albert Bacon had other bones to pick with the Indians. He was in a position to pick any bone he wished, after all, as head of Interior. Among other things, there is an interesting story related by Indian Agent Leo Crane in his book Desert Drums. Crane was ordered to find work for a young lady friend of Fall’s as a financial secretary.
Crane implies the unnamed girl was more than Fall’s “friend” but he remains coy. In subsequent letters Crane is informed that she needs a house, furnishings, and utilities and the money will come out of the Pueblo budget.
The next letter implies that she needn’t come to work at regular hours if it is inconvenient for her. The next one after that requests transportation – a car at her disposal. That was the last straw. Crane soon found himself transferred to a remote reservation in Montana and resigned from the Indian Service.
I am sorry that publishers – and perhaps the authors – were so timid, because in Joseph Schmedding’s book Cowboy and Indian Trader, he reveals an even more outrageous piece of Fall’s aberrant behavior. Schmedding was running the old Keam trading post at Keam’s Canyon and had just built a new store at the remote Low Mountain location near Black Mesa.
One February, with snow blocking the roads and trails, the Hopi agent knocked on his door and handed him a letter from the Secretary of the Interior himself. The letter revoked his trading license and gave him thirty days from the date of the letter to vacate the post. That would be impossible.
Schmedding saddled his horse and rode to the nearest town in the freezing weather. It would take two years and the work of dozens of friends, including the Territorial Sheriff and long time Senator from Arizona, Carl Hayden to reverse the act. Interestingly enough, the new trader never showed up in Hopi.
Fall’s only explanation for his act was “administrative reasons” and he would be long gone from Washington, and a new president in place before the trader would get his license back, whereupon he sold his trading posts and left the area.
Rumor had it that Fall was doing a favor for a friend who was a “wholesaler” in Gallup. The reason, as they figured out later, was that oil had been discovered on the Reservation (though a long way from Hopi) and Fall was reassigning trading permits to friends so they could be in on the ground floor of the expected “oil boom.” It seems that Teapot Dome had done something to his brain.
The most curious part of this story is that Albert B. Fall’s many friends in New Mexico never gave up faith in him. They never believed he was guilty of any wrongdoing. New Mexico cowboy author Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a longtime friend of Albert’s defended him in print. He said in no uncertain terms he would defend Fall “to the death,” if necessary.
Another well known Western writer, Eugene Cunningham, wrote pretty much the same endorsement, published in New Mexico Magazine, saying that Fall was a cowboy of the old school, knew his West, defended the poor, etc. etc. etc.
1922, the pivotal point of all this craziness, was an important year in local history, in addition to the story told here. Gallup, along with much of the country, was involved in labor disputes with the mining union, the railroads and others. Gallup was under martial law earlier in the same year that would see the first Ceremonial.
The local Indians were fighting for their very survival and the homelands they had just defended in World War I. Ironic that the Bursum Bill, outlawing Pueblo religious activities, would almost pass Congress the same year as that first Ceremonial, honoring Native Americans and their dances.
