He was initially considered as a nominee for Vice President of the United States by his law school classmate and best friend William McKinley.

In California he did some surveying, then moved to Salt Lake City, Utah (where his brother Enoch Bartlett Tripp (1823–1909), a prominent Mormon merchant, lived[2]) and taught school (1864–65).

[7] Bartlett was part of a commission that codified the laws of the territory in 1877 and again in 1903,[8] and served as president of an 1883 Constitutional Convention of for Statehood of South Dakota.

[9] In 1899, at the request of McKinley, he headed an American-British-German commission which visited Samoa and helped negotiate the Tripartite Convention of 1899 which settled disputes between those countries over the area.

Tripp was briefly considered a candidate to be the Republican nominee for vice president under McKinley in 1900, but he withdrew after Theodore Roosevelt entered the field.

[10][11] With no political opportunities left to him, he throw his full efforts into establishing a law school in South Dakota.