Columbus Delano covered a lot of ground.
Banker, lawyer, congressman from Ohio, his ancestors came over on the Mayflower.
After the Civil War, Manifest Destiny still roaring after thirty years, he was appointed Secretary of the Interior. In 1871, when the federal government decided to pay the bills for the first scientific expedition into Yellowstone, President Grant asked Columbus Delano to keep an eye on things.
The next year, he was appointed the nation’s first overseer of what would eventually become our national park system. In 1874, Columbus Delano called on Congress to approve a new agency to make sure Yellowstone would always be kept safe from miners, drillers, loggers and other developers.
He pushed for tough protections never before seen. And then, the following year, Columbus Delano was pushed out.
His cousin called for his resignation. The call came with clout, given that his cousin was President Grant. Delano’s Interior Department was laced with corruption and a pervasive spoils system. The Secretary refused to put the administration’s new civil service reforms in place, so cronyism kept running amuck.
In 1875, Columbus Delano went back to Mount Vernon, Ohio where he spent the last twenty-one years of his life farming and practicing law.
His legacy serves up one anomaly after another and we’re left to wonder what to make of him. How could the same man who saved Yellowstone more or less came up with the idea of Indian reservations? What made him put policies in place to support the mass slaughter of Bison?
Columbus Delano covered a lot of ground.
