Prohibition–an experiment gone wrong in Albany County and nationwide

Jan 22

Written By Albany County Historical Society

A Wyoming Constitutional amendment prohibiting alcohol went into effect on June 30, 1919. About six months later the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution became effective. In 15 years of Prohibition, Wyoming’s most heinous crime of the entire era happened in Albany County.

Murder

The crime was the cold-blooded murder of rancher Frank Jennings on the night of Sept. 7, 1919. He was three miles north of Laramie, headed to his home on the Ghost Ranch near Bosler and was shot several times in the back as he drove.

The perpetrators fled the scene without searching for anything worth stealing or confiscating. The car landed in a ditch, unnoticed until the following afternoon, Jennings’ foot still on the gas pedal. At the coroner’s jury hearing the next day, two newly hired Wyoming Prohibition agents, John Cardillo and Walter Newell, plus Cardillo’s younger brother Pete (who had been promised an agent’s job), were questioned. Their stories conflicted and were later shown to be false.

Within four days Albany County Attorney and Prosecutor George W. Patterson had enough evidence to charge all three with the crime. Outrage in Laramie over the death of the popular 33-year-old rancher had reached a fever pitch so the three were jailed in Wheatland.

In a sensational Cheyenne trial the following April, they were convicted of manslaughter and served long prison terms. One of the three said after conviction that they mistook Jennings for a bootlegger delivering alcohol to Rock River. Few prosecutions in Wyoming for Prohibition-related crimes were as successful as this first one.

Wyoming’s troubles enforcing Prohibition were just beginning. Ordinary citizens became scofflaws, easily attaining bootleg liquor. Before the decade of the 1920s ended, multiple Wyoming state officials, mayors and sheriffs were suspected of collusion if not outright bribery by the bootleggers.

Saloons close

The eight saloons in Laramie closed with Prohibition in 1919. One, the Antler’s Bar at 111 Grand Avenue, was renamed the Antlers Café. In 1924 its proprietors, George Longpre and Alex Cameron, were arrested for selling whiskey to Wyoming Prohibition agents. Wyoming District Court Judge Volney J. Tidball (1883-1949) ordered the Antlers Café padlocked for a year and its owners were prohibited from selling both alcohol and soft drinks when it reopened.

This unusual ban on selling soft drinks gives a hint that the Laramie Bottling Co., then at 369 North 2nd Street, was suspected of bottling alcohol as well. Longpre and Cameron said they would appeal, and Judge Tidball allowed the café to remain open pending appeal, but there is no record of an appeal or any action taken.

Speakeasies

Above the Antlers Café was a brothel, or “disorderly house” as historic Laramie Police reports called them. Five were on the second stories of 201, 207, 209 and 211 South First Street, plus the Antlers at 111 Grand, based on U.S. census data and city directories. Another, at 317 S. 2nd Street was listed in the Laramie Municipal Court Records of June 3, 1919. Louise C. Moore was noted as the operator, but her fine of $100 for “keeping” a disorderly house was paid by Gus Larson, as noted in court records at the Wyoming State Archives.

The Chief of Police, E.E. Fisher, reported to Laramie City Council on Jan. 9, 1926, that there were eight disorderly houses with 24 “inmates” operating throughout 1925, though no addresses are given. Brothels had been completely illegal since the early days of Wyoming Territory, but the fact that one more illegal activity–selling liquor–was conducted there got little notice.

Prostitution benefitted Laramie City Government from the “fines” (a de facto license to practice) levied monthly against the prostitutes, as former Laramie mayor Germaine St. John has pointed out. It would have been easy for thirsty customers to know where to go during Prohibition, thus one could infer that Laramie’s brothels also became speakeasies.

Stills

Occasionally a still would be found in the county and the equipment seized. On Feb. 15, 1925, the Republican/Boomerang newspaper ran a short note on page 8 saying that Ed Kemmerer at the Bittner homestead 25 miles northeast of Rock River had been arrested by Wyoming agents for operating a still that was confiscated in a raid. Kemmerer was sentenced by Judge Tidball to 30 days in the county jail and fined $250.

It was not front-page news either when a raid was reported on page 3 in the Jan. 6, 1926, Republican/Boomerang. This time Federal agents easily nabbed the culprits—Ed Dettling and Walter Heaney who were “sledding” 95 gallons of whiskey to Laramie on Roger Canyon Road.

Because Federal agents arrested them, they were tried before Federal District Court Judge Blake Kennedy in Cheyenne. Kennedy was appointed in 1921 and served throughout the Prohibition era. In 1982 he was quoted as saying in an Annals of Wyoming article that Prohibition cases clogged his court and most involved serious violations of U.S. Constitutional provisions against improper search and seizure.

Prohibition enforcement was divided among municipal, county, state and federal jurisdictions. Penalties differed depending on who the arresting officers were, what laws were being enforced and which judge heard the case. Juries tended to acquit local officials, as was one trial with 29 defendants charged with Prohibition violations, including the Mayor of Casper, R.W. Rowell. Originally there were 36 people charged in Federal Court in Cheyenne but some defendants were dismissed and the remainder were found “not guilty” by a jury in May 1933 just as Prohibition was about to end.

Alcohol at UW

Rumors abounded about alcohol on the UW campus. President Arthur G. Crane’s correspondence at the UW American Heritage Center shows that after polling a few other colleges and Prohibition officials, he concluded that all college towns had the same problem, and that UW was “far better than similar institutions elsewhere.”

An incident in April 1926 infuriated Crane. A scandal sheet titled “White Mule Boomerang” appeared anonymously, implying that all fraternities were guilty of alcohol violations. It named one fraternity cook as a bootlegger and charged UW administration with doing nothing.

Crane ordered an investigation, not on alcohol violations but on the perpetrators of the scandal sheet. The mimeograph paper was traced to a Laramie church, as was the typewriter that created it. A Denver expert claimed to identify the handwritten headline on each sheet as that of the Rev. Raymond Lowry, a 29-year-old “special student” at UW whose position as Methodist student pastor put him “almost on a par with faculty members” but outside the control of UW, as Crane wrote to one angry parent.

It became a popular guessing game around town to identify the culprits—so much so that three students confessed to supplying the information because they knew many being implicated by the rumors were innocent. The students were Earl D. Seney, Kenneth G. Collins and J.C. Marshall. They were put on probation but no further action was taken against them.

Earlier, Rev. Lowry, well-known as an outspoken supporter of Prohibition, had denied twice in appearances before President Crane that he had any part in the publication. The students tried to exonerate Lowry, but it was clear that he had created the scandal sheet on church equipment without the knowledge of the minister, Rev. Walter L. French, of the First Methodist Church. Lowry was fired by the Methodists and his ties to UW ended, but challenges for President Crane were just beginning.

Professor nabbed

On Nov. 20, 1926, a raid was conducted by Wyoming Prohibition agents at the home of Dr. O. Carl Gebert, head of UW’s Department of Modern Languages. Two 10-gallon containers of fruit juice were found in his basement. Gebert, when called before President Crane, readily admitted that he was making wine for his own consumption, not for sale. He offered to resign and his letter of resignation was quickly accepted by the Board of Trustees on December 10, 1926. His salary continued for three more months as a severance token.

Thurman Arnold, Dr. Gebert’s attorney, said the agents did not have a proper warrant, which had been based entirely on the word of a Cheyenne resident, Mrs. Etta Self. The agent who seized a sample from one container had added a chemical that he could not identify, saying that “all prohibition agents used it to stop fermentation.” Such “doctoring” of the evidence was reason enough to make the raid illegal, Arnold claimed on behalf of his client.

Apparently, Professor Gebert, a naturalized U.S. citizen, was never charged or prosecuted by Albany County attorney S.C. Downey, or anyone else. Mere possession of alcohol was not a crime in the U.S. or Wyoming Constitutions, though enabling legislation did outlaw possession along with selling, transporting, making, or importing alcohol. Gebert’s career and UW’s reputation may have been damaged by the national publicity. The Branding Iron student newspaper reported that Mrs. Gebert and their children would live with Gebert’s parents in Germany and that he planned to “do work” at the University of Chicago.

Support wanes

The idea of Prohibition was supported by most Wyoming residents who voted in the Nov. 8, 1918 election. The vote was better than three to one in favor of adopting a prohibition amendment to the Wyoming Constitution. Two months later, on Jan. 16, 1919, Wyoming ratified the 18th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which banned alcohol as of Jan. 17, 1920.

Unintended consequences of Prohibition were surprising and sometimes deadly. A local tragedy was that former Albany County Sheriff George Trabing was killed in Seattle by a bullet from a colleague’s gun in 1931 while serving with the Federal Prohibition Enforcement Agency on a raid there.

Well-meaning citizens who merely wanted to close the saloons were hopeful that the many opportunities for corruption would dissipate as the public got used to life without alcohol. But after 13 years, even they could not ignore the difficulty of enforcing Prohibition. Wyoming reversed its 1919 support in 1933 by becoming the fourth state in the nation to ratify the 21st Amendment to the U.S. Constitution which rescinded the 18th Amendment.

National rescission became effective on Dec. 5, 1933. Wyoming waited 15 months longer, until March 1, 1935, to rescind its Prohibition laws. Thus, Prohibition in Wyoming began before Federal Prohibition and lasted longer, presumably to give state government time to figure out how to deal with alcohol once it became legal again.

Aside from civic corruption, organized crime, and flaunting of the laws, a long-lasting consequence of Prohibition may have been a contempt for government that developed in some quarters. Prohibition made criminals of ordinary citizens who took exception to governmental attempts to regulate their social habits. It is a legacy that historians still acknowledge.

By Judy Knight

Editor’s note: Judy Knight is collection manager at the Laramie Plains Museum. For more information see “Booze, Cops, and Bootleggers: Enforcing Prohibition in Central Wyoming” by Tom Rea, published in 2016 on the website “wyohistory.org.”