Commerce, Oklahoma

Commerce, Oklahoma, became the testing ground for Harry S. Truman’s first major failure of his own making. There, at the Eureka Mine, Truman and two inexperienced partners tried to turn discarded ore into a profitable zinc business. The venture’s practical hardships—bad roads, unreliable equipment, interrupted water supplies, and the need to keep traveling between the mine and the family farm—made Commerce more than a distant address: it was the setting in which Truman’s hopes of getting rich quickly collided with the labor and uncertainty of mining.

Setting and access

Commerce lay in the northeastern corner of Oklahoma, just over the Missouri line and 192 miles from Grandview, Missouri. Truman claimed that, with favorable weather, passable roads, no tire blowouts, and successful crossings of four river bottoms, he could make the journey in seven hours in the 1911 Stafford automobile (Lizzie). In practice, he more often traveled by train. The distance made the mine difficult to manage alongside the family farm, and Truman was frequently shuttling between the two, sometimes making the trip twice in a week.

The landscape brought its own obstacles. In a letter from Commerce early in 1916, Truman described rain leaving water six inches deep across the area and dry weather covering everything in deep dust. By July, he reported persistent heat, with temperatures around 110 degrees in the shade, mosquitoes active through the night, and flies during the day. These conditions formed the daily setting of the enterprise: transport and work alike depended on weather that could make an already demanding undertaking harder.

The Eureka Mine venture

Truman invested several thousand dollars in the T-H-C Mining Company, a partnership with Thomas Hughes, a Grandview farmer, and Jerry Culbertson, a Kansas City promoter. The three men were brother Masons, but none had greater mining knowledge than the others. They bought the Eureka Mine at Commerce and hoped to cover initial expenses by processing waste ore left above ground by its previous owner.

The plan was soon beset by setbacks. The superintendent they hired proved dishonest; a rival group cut off water needed to process ore; and equipment failed. Culbertson took little interest in the mine’s daily operation. When lightning destroyed Hughes’s barn at Grandview, Hughes stopped devoting time to the venture, leaving much of the work to Truman. He had to act as mechanic, superintendent, night watchman, and the person responsible for sorting out operational problems, while also trying to keep the farm running. After two hired men quit because they resented taking orders from Mary Jane Truman, Truman had to return by train to deal with the farm as well.

The mine’s remote, difficult-to-manage operation deepened the strain on an already fragile partnership. Truman’s confidence alternated with discouragement, but he kept trying to hold the business together. The effort was, as he recognized, an expensive education: the work and worry were unlike anything he had experienced before, while the money he had put in continued to disappear.

Closure and what followed

On May 19, 1916, after a trying day at the farm, Truman wrote to Bess Wallace in despair. He believed the mine was lost, feared he might lose his livestock, and said his finances were exhausted. He also worried that failure ran in his family and urged Bess to choose someone more capable. After a night’s sleep, however, his outlook recovered. Frank Blair of the Belton Bank lent him money, and Truman returned to the possibility of continuing in business; he even asked whether Bess would join him as a partner and help run the mine.

The July letters from Commerce likewise show that the venture remained bound up with hope as well as hardship. Truman asked Bess to wish him luck, and he postponed buying an engagement ring because he considered it bad luck to pay for one with borrowed money. He also imagined opening a Ford agency in Commerce, now seeing that business as a possible path to fortune. The mine itself closed in September 1916. By November, Truman was buying and selling oil leases from an office in Kansas City, Missouri, in another venture with Culbertson. Commerce thus marked the end of the zinc-mining attempt, but not Truman’s appetite for risky business or his search for a way to make his fortune.