The story of uranium in Wyoming is a high-stakes drama whose cast includes fever-driven prospectors, ranchers defending their property rights, government officials intent on national security, entrepreneurs, engineers and world-class mining companies.

Uranium has been part of Wyoming’s economy since it was first discovered in the tailings of an abandoned silver mine near Lusk, Wyo. in 1918. After World War II ended with the explosions of two atom bombs, however, the Cold War began and the U.S. government cornered the domestic uranium supply with a guaranteed price to producers. The industry boomed, and uranium-rich Wyoming benefited.

Setting the stage

Uranium has a long history, both in terms of its geological significance and its importance for society. Wyoming has the largest uranium reserves in the United States, with known occurrences in 20 of the state’s 23 counties.

Though uranium is widely found in small quantities, it is necessary to find areas of high concentrations before mining is economically viable. Processed ore is often transported as a partially refined powder called yellowcake—a uranium oxide, U₃O_8. Uranium produced in Wyoming has already provided the energy equivalent to that of 5.9 billion barrels of fuel oil or 1.9 billion tons of coal. For comparison, Wyoming coal production in the early 2000s peaked at close to 450 million tons per year.

Yellowcake is currently produced at seven U.S. uranium facilities, three of them in Wyoming. From the 1950s through the 1980s, Wyoming uranium was mined mostly in strip mines. Now all production in the state is done by in-situ leaching, which involves injecting a water solution into the ground to bring the uranium to the surface.

The three Wyoming plants, located in Sweetwater County, Converse County and on the Campbell-Johnson county border, account for 81 percent of the nation’s production. The remainder comes from Nebraska, Texas and Utah. The Smith Ranch-Highland operation in Converse County, the largest uranium production facility in the nation, is owned by Cameco Resources, Inc. This plant produced 15 million pounds of U₃O₈ between 2002 and 2011.

The rush begins

Nearly 20 years after the discovery at the abandoned Silver Cliff mine near Lusk, uranium was discovered in the Red Desert. But there was little market for it. Following World War II and the first military use of atomic bombs, however, the U.S. Congress established the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC).

In 1948, with tensions increasing between the United States and Russia at the start of the Cold War, the AEC issued a series of circulars providing for the procurement of uranium ores, setting minimum prices, bonuses for the discovery of new deposits, and other incentives for high-grade ores, haulage allowances, etc. Prospectors began scouring the West. Another Wyoming discovery occurred in the Black Hills of Crook County in 1949.

Conventional wisdom before 1950 held that uranium deposits originated with hydrothermal activity. But at that time U.S. Geological Survey geologists Denson, Bachman and Zeller hypothesized that uranium came from thick volcanic ash beds that covered Wyoming’s landmass more than 35 million years ago. The beds were laid down by eruptions of ash from the once volcanic mountains that now make up the Absaroka Range in northwestern Wyoming.

Another USGS geologist, J. David Love, further researched this theory and decided it was time to see if it would produce results. In 1951, Love took to the air to conduct an aerial check of the Pumpkin Buttes country of the Powder River Basin in southern Campbell County. Later, along with his colleagues, he conducted on-the-ground fieldwork to confirm what he had noted as uranium “hot spots.”

The flanks of Pumpkin Buttes indeed had very impressive concentrations of uranium. The find was important geologically as it appeared to verify the hypothesis of ash-sourced uranium deposits. Now it appeared that uranium could possibly exist in nearly all parts of the state. But the find was important commercially, too—and the commercial possibilities led to conflict, and even threats of violence.

High stakes at Pumpkin Buttes; National Guard alerted

Love’s discovery ultimately led to uranium fever: Prospectors and ranchers postured for potential stakes, but the ultimate beneficiaries of this find were lawyers. What historian T.A. Larson calls “the complex pattern of rights to land and minerals” in Wyoming led to confusion in all directions. Lands patented early on in the West usually conveyed both surface and subsurface rights to the owners. However, subsequent laws in 1909 and 1916 conveyed only surface rights, reserving minerals to the government. Those mineral rights remained available to mineral interests—anyone who staked a claim, even if the surface was privately owned. Further complicating matters, the state owned smaller amounts of land scattered through all the counties. Under state-owned land usually mineral rights were reserved for the state.

In March 1952, the federal government withdrew more than 65,000 acres of federal land in the Pumpkin Buttes area from availability for public entry—the staking of claims—under the mining laws. After a survey, government officials set May 3, 1955, as the date for reopening that land to the public.

Prospectors prepared to stake claims. Ranchers, who owned the surface but not the minerals below, worried that the likely throng of people racing for uranium would damage the lands. The ranchers declared they would use force to protect their properties, if necessary. Wyoming Gov. Milward Simspon, concerned about a possible outbreak of violence, alerted the National Guard. The federal government delayed the reopening of land to the public until November 1955.

In the interim, ranchers formed the Pumpkin Buttes Mining District. Under its terms, instead of filing claims with the county clerk, prospectors were required to file with the district, which had set aside more than 46,000 acres. In addition, those filing claims also promised to pay those who owned surface rights a royalty on production. Larson noted that 400 prospectors—more than the number of people who lived there—entered the area on the opening day.

Fortunately, no violence occurred. The legal complexity of surface, subsurface and other rights, however, brought numerous lawsuits. Most prospectors did not reap financial gains from their claims. If they found a producible quantity, they didn’t have the necessary resources to develop the claims. Eventually, larger companies, some headed by Wyoming entrepreneurs, raised capital to purchase the better claims, and the Wyoming Supreme Court declared the Pumpkin Buttes Mining District illegal.

Lucky Mc and Bob Adams strike it rich

On Sept. 13, 1953, while antelope hunting and prospecting with his wife, Maxine, Neil McNeice of Riverton, Wyo., using a powerful field glass, spotted a thick yellow layer in a cliff. He took samples, and officials at the AEC office in Douglas, Wyo., confirmed his discovery of uranium. He filed the claim for the Lucky Mc, located in the Gas Hills of eastern Fremont County, about 50 miles northeast of Rawlins and 50 miles south of Moneta. By mid-October, 140 other claims had been filed nearby, and by 1955, claims in Fremont County totaled 7,000.

Rawlins businessman and restaurant owner Robert W. “Bob” Adams’ had been hearing a lot of uranium talk by USGS geologists who came into his restaurant after exploring in the nearby hills. Adams’ interest in uranium was piqued when he had read about a $1 million strike near Moab, Utah, in 1952 by prospector Charlie Steen. When he learned of McNeice’s good fortune, Adams himself began searching for ore deposits in the hills north of Rawlins.

He fixed radiation detectors that could signal occurrences of uranium in the ground to the wings of his private plane. In 1954, Adams found uranium in the Crooks Gap area, in the Green Mountains south of the Sweetwater River and north of the Red Desert. He formed the Lost Creek Oil and Uranium Company.

Adams also found a wealthy physician, C.W. Jeffrey of Rawlins, to serve as his financial backer. Adams bought property just south of the river near a post office and gas station called Home on the Range, on U.S. 287/Wyoming 789, the highway from Muddy Gap to Lander. Adams soon christened the place Jeffrey City in honor of the man who had provided him with capital.

With Jeffrey’s help, Adams was also able to build the nearby Split Rock Mill in 1957, the first uranium mill in Wyoming. Ore for the Split Rock Mill came from both the Gas Hills and Crooks Gap areas. In 1958, a year after the Split Rock Mill opened, according to historian Larson, more Wyoming mills opened after producers signed contracts with the AEC: three at the Gas Hills (two at Gas Hills west in 1958 and one at Gas Hills east in 1960) north of the Sweetwater River, two in Shirley Basin far to the east, and one each at Crooks Gap and Riverton.

Larson writes that in the 1950s and 1960s, the most productive mines developed were in eastern Fremont County at the Gas Hills and Crooks Gap and in Shirley Basin of northeastern Carbon County. In the 1960s, Larson explains, more than half of Wyoming’s production occurred in Fremont County, and “Riverton claimed to be the uranium capital.”

Jeffrey City: A yellowcake boomtown comes and goes

Adams renamed his company Western Nuclear, Inc., in 1957, and Jeffrey City—like many other similar towns in western states—grew from a trailer town to a thriving community as the mining and processing of uranium increased. According to information released by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Western Nuclear used a variety of methods—including acid leach, ion exchange and solvent extraction—to process about 8 million tons of uranium ore between 1957 and 1981. The Split Rock Mill, originally designed to process 400 tons of ore daily, was expanded throughout the 1970s and increased production to 1,700 tons daily.

Jeffrey City, built by Adams’ company, quickly grew to include 26 houses, 145 trailers, a dormitory, a restaurant and bar, bathhouses and a combination firehouse and dispensary. One large structure served as a community meeting place, the local school, Laundromat, church and movie theater. Western Nuclear provided the town manager and a road maintenance crew. By mid-summer 1957, with new mining hires, the town was planning for nearly 200 families to join the community, which would have increased the population to more than 750 residents.

The fortunes of the residents of Jeffrey City followed the slumps and rebounds of the uranium industry. Because uranium is of strategic importance to the nation, governmental policies affected mining, processing and price. But in the early 1960s, with tens of thousands of nuclear devices in U.S. stockpiles, government demand for uranium for weapons began tapering off.

In 1964, President Lyndon B. Johnson authorized a “stretch-out” program to help avoid overproduction of uranium. The government would extend its price guarantees through 1970, rather than to 1966, to mill operators who reduced their annual production. Historian Larson reported that despite the new policy, production actually increased. Bob Adams sold Western Nuclear to Phelps Dodge, a mining conglomerate, in the 1960s.

But now there was a peaceful market for uranium—to burn in nuclear power plants to make electricity. As more nuclear power plants were built throughout the nation in the 1970s, huge utility companies contracted for long-term deliveries of yellowcake. Though no nuclear plants were built in Wyoming, the renewed interest in the industry sparked more exploration. The price of yellowcake skyrocketed from its 1950s and 1960s value of $8 or $10 per pound, to more than $50 per pound in 1977.

By 1980, more than 4,000 people lived in Jeffrey City, with more than 1,000 employed in the industry. About 600 students attended the school.

But a partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island plant near Harrisburg, Pa. in March 1979 dealt a blow to the uranium industry from which it has yet to fully recover. Suddenly, nuclear power was perceived as dangerous. Yellowcake prices plummeted. In 1981, the Split Rock Mill was placed on standby. By 1988, Jeffrey City was mostly vacant. In September 1988, the mill was decommissioned. Eventually it was dismantled and its components buried. Surface reclamation was completed in the mid-2000s.

The drama continues

The March 2011 earthquake, tsunami and subsequent radiation leaks at the Fukushima nuclear plant in Japan have dealt a second serious blow to the recovery of uranium prices worldwide. According to information released by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, Kennecott Uranium Company and Wyoming Coal Reserve Company’s Sweetwater Uranium Project mill in Sweetwater County is set to produce 3,000 short tons of ore per day, but is on standby status at this time.

Two other mills, both in Fremont County, are as yet undeveloped. A report based on information from the Wyoming State Geological Survey and published in the Casper Star-Tribune in the fall of 2012 indicated there are 27 uranium projects in various stages of development in Wyoming. Many of these list in-situ recovery as the planned mining method; however, a few listed open pit mining as the extraction technique.

And the stage continues to be international in scope. According to a report published in the Casper Star-Tribune in mid-January 2013, a Russian company planned to purchase Uranium One, a developer of some of the Wyoming uranium projects. Company officials said that no Wyoming uranium would be exported to Russia. According to the article, Wyoming’s Republican Sen. John Barrasso continues to monitor the situation.

Resources

• Amundson, Michael A. Yellowcake Towns: Uranium Mining Communities in the American West. University Press of Colorado, 2002, 17-49.
• Chenoweth, W.L. “A summary of uranium production in Wyoming.” Wyoming Geological Association 42nd Annual Field Conference Guidebook. Casper, Wyo.: Wyoming Geological Association, 1991. 169-179.
• Fugleberg, Jeremy. “Russia seeks full buyout of Uranium One.” Casper Star-Tribune, Jan. 15, 2013. Accessed April 2, 2014, at http://trib.com/business/energy/russia-seeks-full-buyout-of-uranium-one/article_995e957f-29a2-58aa-b73f-1c2d2931e5a4.html.
• Galloway, Winifred. “History of Uranium in Wyoming.” Master’s thesis, University of Wyoming, 1961.
• “General Mining Act of 1872.” Accessed April 2, 2014, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/General_Mining_Act_of_1872.

• Gregory, Robert. “Wyoming’s Uranium Resource: Summary Report, February 2014.” Laramie, Wyo.: Wyoming State Geological Survey, accessed May 7, 2014 at http://www.wsgs.uwyo.edu/public-info/onlinepubs/docs/Uranium-Summary.pdf. A short, clear report with good graphics.

• Larson, T. A. History of Wyoming. 2^nd ed., rev. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1978, 514-517.

• Love, J.D., “Preliminary report on uranium deposits in the Pumpkin Buttes area, Powder River Basin, Wyoming.” U.S. Geological Survey Circular 176 (1952).
• McPhee, John. Annals of the Former World. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1998, 282.
• Roberts, Phil, David L. Roberts and Steven L. Roberts, eds. Wyoming Almanac. Laramie, Wyo.: Skyline West Press, 2001, 294-295.
• “Smith Ranch-Highland.” Accessed April 1, 2014, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smith_Ranch-Highland.
• U.S. Energy Information Administration. “Domestic Uranium Production Report—Quarterly,” 4^th Quarter 2013. Report released Jan. 31, 2014. Accessed March 26, 2014, at http://www.eia.gov/uranium/production/quarterly/.
• U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “Western Nuclear—Split Rock Uranium Recovery Facility.” Accessed March 26, 2014, at http://www.nrc.gov/info-finder/decommissioning/uranium/is-western-nuclear-inc.pdf.
• Voge, Adam. “Uranium Projects in Wyoming.” Casper Star-Tribune, Sept. 27, 2012. Accessed April 1, 2014, at
• http://trib.com/business/energy/uranium-projects-in-wyoming/article_d0685c1a-6a36-5fac-b84b-fba3459d4c1a.html.
• Wilson, William H. “Uranium, Thorium and Rare Earths.” Mineral Resources of Wyoming. Bulletin No. 50. Laramie, Wyo.: Geological Survey of Wyoming, April 1966, 201, 202.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Gold Flakes to Yellowcake Historic Mine Trail.” Wyoming Historic Mine Trail and Byway Program. Accessed March 26, 2014, at http://www.wyoshpo.state.wy.us/pdf/GFbrochure.pdf.

For further research

• See this video of a 1957 conversation on atomic energy and the Wyoming economy, hosted by Wyoming’s U.S. Senator Joseph O’Mahoney, a Democrat. The senator speaks with two staffers from the Atomic Energy Commission—information officer Shelby Thompson, formerly of Cheyenne, and Jesse Johnson, chief of the raw materials branch of the AEC and thus in charge of securing uranium sources around the nation and the West. The video, in the collections of the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, runs just under 14 minutes.

Illustrations

• The 1953 photo of the uranium-manganese concretions is from the U.S. Geological Survey photo library. Used with thanks.
• The 1953 photo of Maxine and Neil McNeice is from the collections at the Riverton Museum. Used with thanks.
• The photo of David Love is from the dedication page of the Wyoming Geological Association’s 1980 Guidebook. Used with thanks.
• The closeup of the uranium-bearing mineral from Brazil and the photo of the Urani-Tector are both from the collections of the Wyoming Geological Survey, and provided by the author.
• About the device, the state geologist’s office adds:
• The Urani-Tector (CMG Industries, Laramie, Wyo, 1955) provided the novice with an inexpensive means of prospecting for uranium and provided the professional prospector with a daylight "black light" unit and chemical tests in addition to his geiger and scintillation counters. When a fluorescent uranium rock (such as autunite, or torbernite) is placed under the Urani-Tector in daylight the uranium will glow a yellow-green. The chemical apparatus in this kit is to make the uranium in non-fluorescent ores (such as carnotite, or pitchblende) become fluorescent and thus glow under the Urani-Tector. The brighter the glow the higher the percentage of uranium.

The story of Wyoming in the 20th century is the story of a shift from a ranching and farming economy to an industrial one, dominated by the extraction of oil, gas and coal.

Part of that story is contained in the history of five of the state’s major oil fields—the Lance Creek, Elk Basin, Oregon Basin, Grass Creek and Big Muddy fields. The Lance Creek Field in Niobrara County was the most productive of the five by the end of 1956, followed by the Elk Basin and Oregon Basin fields in Park County; Grass Creek in Hot Springs County; and the Big Muddy Field in Converse County. All were early large producers, sparking the development of roads, pipelines and refineries as the market for oil grew.

By the early 1920s, the Salt Creek Oil Field in Natrona County was one of the most productive in the nation. But the business was growing fast across the state; these other fields, less well known now, contributed substantially to Wyoming’s wealth and to the oil business’s drilling and production knowhow—and spurred the birth and growth of towns in far-flung parts of the state.

Their producers all faced similar problems: dry holes, claim jumpers, how to house workers and how to deal with them when they became stir-crazy living in isolated camps without female company. Later, the few women who braved life with their husbands in the earliest camps might, for months on end, have only one other woman to talk to. Worker safety was also a constant problem, with fires and collapsing derricks the most common hazards. And because it was a long way to railways and refineries, hauling equipment to the field and moving the oil out were often extremely difficult.

Oil was used mostly as a lubricant before 1850 when kerosene began to take over the market for lamp oil, replacing costly whale oil. In 1895 a refinery was built near Casper, but it was the era of the automobile with the resulting demand for gasoline that put oil production in Wyoming into high gear. From 1900 on, an increasing number of Wyoming residents purchased cars, and by 1917, the state had five refineries.

Wyoming's early oil fields were almost always discovered by amateur or professional geologists who noticed the presence of oil seeps or, more often as time went on, anticlines—arched strata that trap oil underground under the crest. As producers and geologists accumulated experience with each discovery, investors became more willing to risk money on drilling, even after a succession of dry holes or shallow wells in a given location. Although the expertise of geologists was not widely accepted at first, by 1915 it was generally known that oil would probably be found where the experts predicted.

For more than 100 years, that persistence plus the lure of big money from ever-increasing demand has pumped a combined total of more than 1.4 billion barrels from the five, although records are sketchy between 1956 and 1978. As of 2013, all these fields were still producing, with Elk Basin in the lead, followed by Oregon Basin, Grass Creek, Lance Creek and Big Muddy. Salt Creek remains the largest, producing 4.5 million barrels in 2013 alone.

Park County: Oregon Basin and Elk Basin

C. A. Fisher was the first geologist to investigate and map a portion of the Oregon Basin, 14 miles southeast of Cody, Wyo. A 1907 bulletin emphasized the likely oil and gas producing properties of the area. In 1908, another geologist, Thomas Harrison, then working for the U.S. Government Land Office in Cheyenne, Wyo., visited the basin—not looking for oil, but inspecting the coal mines and an irrigation project. Harrison compared the geology of the Oregon Basin to that of other Wyoming fields, and moved to take advantage of what he decided was a good opportunity.

In September 1912, Harrison became vice president of Enalpac, a company that included two experienced drillers from the Salt Creek Field. They had already begun drilling in the Oregon Basin that summer, with the first significant well completed on Aug. 24, 1912. Drilling reached 1,322 feet when it penetrated a natural gas-bearing strata and was halted. The enormous pressure from the gas blew dirt and rocks 50 feet into the air, endangering the crew.

A more serious episode occurred the following winter. In early September 1912, Harrison had drilled a second deep well, the Pauline. But it caved in, filled with water, and tools were lost down the hole. In January and February of 1913, at temperatures of 16 degrees below zero and with freezing water spraying on them, Harrison's crew attempted to partially fill in the caved-in, watery hole. Their goal was to pack the hole with rocks and a concrete casing until this artificial bottom reached a level that had previously shown an oil-bearing sand. They finally succeeded in filling the hole to the desired level, but could not pump out any oil. Harrison had nothing to show for all that work.

Another 10 years of off-and-on drilling followed. Enalpac and the Oregon Basin Oil and Gas Company had discovered oil in small quantities, but with additional high-pressure gas wells continuing to cause problems. Exploration, it was becoming clear, was not viable for small companies.

The Ohio Oil Company, which later became Marathon, began drilling in fall 1924 under the able supervision of John "Jack" McFadyen. The Ohio made the first major oil strike in the Oregon Basin on Feb. 1, 1927. The well produced 800 barrels per day. By 1947, the major producers in the field were, in addition to the Ohio, the Texas Company (Texaco), Husky Refining, Pacific Western Oil Corporation and the interests of Casper businessman Fred Goodstein.

The Oregon Basin's cumulative production through 1956 was 76.6 million barrels, a figure that includes the West Oregon Basin Field, discovered in May 1955.

The Elk Basin laps across the border between Carbon County, Montana and northeastern Park County, Wyoming, 20 miles north of Powell. Farmer and geologist George Ketchum, who had a small farm at Cowley, Wyo., is generally credited with first recognizing the Elk Basin as a likely source of oil. Ketchum accompanied C. A. Fisher through Elk Basin in 1906; possibly Fisher was on the same expedition that took him through the Oregon Basin. Eventually, the Utah-Wyoming Oil Company rented a rig for drilling, and a local company, Grub Stake Oil, was organized to finance a well.

In addition, however, another group of Greybull and Basin men had taken out a claim in the same area.

In a fight over drilling rights, there was a confrontation in the field when the Grub Stake men turned back another outfit at gunpoint.

On Oct. 8, 1915, nine years after Ketchum and Fisher first investigated Elk Basin, the Midwest Refining Company, by then well established in the Natrona County fields, drilled the discovery well—the first successful well—in Elk Basin, which produced between 50 and 150 barrels per day.

The Midwest Company was soon joined by Ohio, and eventually the Continental Oil Company as well. As in the Oregon Basin explorations, the small companies, such as Grub Stake, lost out to the larger ones, because drilling was expensive and at least a few dry holes were inevitable. After drilling one well, the Grub Stake men were forced to quit.

By 1916, both the Midwest and Ohio companies had built camps for their workers in Elk Basin. This settlement became a small town with streets and sidewalks, a hotel, community hall, hospital, gas pump, post office and a barber shop. In winter, Anna Haney, whose husband, Oscar, worked in the field, battled foot-high snowdrifts blown into her tin and tarpaper house. In summer, the dust was so thick and the wind blew so hard that food had to be eaten quickly before it got too gritty.

School was conducted in two buildings, one for grades one to six, and the other for grades seven to eight, serving 80 students at its peak. High school students attended classes in Powell, boarding there because roads between Powell and Elk Basin were bad.

The population of Elk Basin peaked at between 800 and 1,000 sometime before the early 1940s when the town had to be moved to Polecat Bench, a few miles south. Poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas, escaping from deeper wells, was endangering the health of the workers and their families. Housing at Polecat Bench was more modern, and roads had improved, siphoning residents away to Powell. In 1955, the town was disbanded along with the company camps, and some residents purchased their houses in Polecat Bench and moved them to Powell.

Elk Basin and the South Elk Basin Field, discovered in June 1945, together produced a cumulative total of 92.8 million barrels by the end of 1956.

Hot Springs County: Grass Creek Field

The first well in the Grass Creek Field, 40 miles northwest of Thermopolis, Wyo., in the foothills of the Absaroka Mountains, seems to have been drilled in 1907 or 1908; sources differ. But all agree it was a chaotic time in the business—and the successful companies were the ones that figured out how to take advantage of the situation. Operating on the principle that where small discoveries had been made, larger ones were likely to follow, the Ohio Company drilled a producing well in 1914, ending the year with 11 producing wells in the field. This proved that it could be simpler and less risky to invest in properties that others had already shown to be productive.

Difficulties were numerous, however. Claims overlapped because of imprecise surveys. Competing parties spied on each other, climbing ridges and watching through binoculars. Once a claim had been staked, rivals came in at night, moved the stakes, and began the process of legitimizing their claims by putting up a building.

Before the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920, land could be legally claimed by persons paying $2.50 per acre and improving the parcel with a building or other improvements. This entitled them to ownership of all oil, coal, and other mineral commodities discovered on that land. After passage of the Act, producers of oil, coal, natural gas and phosphates paid up-front to lease federal land, and then paid the government a one eighth royalty on the mineral revenues from that land. So claim jumpers could no longer simply move in, displace stakes and put up a building.

In addition to the problem of claim jumpers before 1920, the Grass Creek Field was remote. Drill pipe and other equipment was freighted in by mule teams from a distant railroad siding, and transportation costs often totaled more than the $3 per foot it cost to drill.

The early Grass Creek oil camp, established in about 1914 by the Ohio, soon became a town. Along with bunkhouses and a separate cookhouse for the workers, Grass Creek had a post office, hospital, theater, saloon, dance hall and pool hall plus a store, the Wyoming Trading Company. There was also a women's Community Club, Girl and Boy scouts, 4-H Clubs and a Sunday school and church services. The town grew to 500 before the oil camp began to be phased out in the early 1960s.

A murder at the Grass Creek Field made national news. Two oil field workers, Albert Lampitt and Harry Foight, had been vying for the affections of Grace Lee, a housekeeper and cook. When a dynamite-nitroglycerin bomb exploded directly under Foight's bunk at 2:00 a.m. on May 7, 1921, Foight and his roommate, Worely Seaton, were killed. Three other men were severely but not critically injured. Circumstantial evidence pointed to Lampitt, who had purchased a fuse and caps, and had also sought information from the camp's expert on how to rig a dynamite-glycerine charge. In addition, the camp's explosives storehouse had been robbed. Lampitt was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, later commuted to 65 years. He was released after serving half his time.

In addition to the Ohio, companies active in the field were Midwest, later absorbed by Standard Oil; Mexico-Wyoming; Exxon; Atlantic Richfield and Amoco. Cumulative production reached 60.7 million barrels by the end of 1956.

Niobrara County: Lance Creek

In the Lance Creek Field, about 22 miles north of Lusk, Wyo., drillers drilled dry holes for five years before oil was finally discovered. It was a cattle ranching area until 1912, when a Dr. J. E. Hawthorne of Lusk tried without success to raise funds for drilling. The Lusk, Wyoming Oil Company incorporated on April 29, 1913, drilled down to 2,250 feet by August of that year but failed to find oil. A lack of money stopped further exploration by that company in June 1914.

Next, four more companies or individuals drilled without success until the Ohio drilled on March 13, 1918. Eighty barrels flowed in the first 24 hours. Seven months later, on Oct. 6, 1918, the Ohio drilled deeper and this time the well flowed at 1,500 barrels in the first 24 hours. This was recorded as the discovery well.

Derricks sprouted everywhere in the instant boom. In four days, 555 tons of freight were hauled from Lusk. At the peak of oil operations in the field, the community of Lance Creek housed 1,500 people, served by cafes, barber shops, beauty parlors, mechanic shops, grocery stores, filling and service stations and many other businesses. Residents could play golf or tennis, shoot at the rifle range, go roller skating, see a movie, go bowling or play pool. Seven civic organizations also served the community, including Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and a square dance club. By 1986, with the decline of field activity, the population of Lance Creek had dwindled to between 75 and 100; the 2010 census counted 43.

By the end of 1956, the cumulative production of the Lance Creek Field plus the East Lance Creek Field, discovered on Sept. 4, 1919, was 96.4 million barrels.

Converse County: Big Muddy

The Big Muddy Field is located between Casper and Glenrock, Wyo., on the south bank of the North Platte River about two and a half miles east of Glenrock. In 1913, under a directive from the U.S. Department of the Interior, geologist V. H. Barnett conducted a geological and land classification survey in the Big Muddy area. Barnett reported that oil would likely be found in the field, but only drilling could verify this.

The discovery well was drilled in 1916, probably by the Merritt Oil and Gas Company. Initial daily production was 26 barrels per day, and early on, within the first year or two, other wells averaged 35 barrels per day, with a few producing 300 to 400 barrels per day. The usual frenzied development ensued, characteristic of Wyoming's early oil fields after the first significant discovery. Claim jumpers were ready to move in, and McFadyen of the Ohio Company drilled only at night, during the day pretending to be constructing a pipeline camp. He also instructed his men not to talk about their work when they went to town.

Thirteen steam boilers were stolen from one company's stock. As at Oregon Basin, tools were lost down holes. Scotty Yost, a "tool-pusher," was lowered 50 feet down a hole 20 inches in diameter to recover a 15-inch drill. One small outfit, the Green Drilling Company, hit a well that flowed two to three hundred barrels in 15 minutes straight into the Platte River─because the company was unprepared either to store it or to pipe it.

Typical camp conditions prevailed, with cookhouses, bachelor bunkhouses and houses for married workers. In the Ohio camp, a Mrs. Fred E. Smith was for some months the only woman in camp except for a cook and a waitress. One summer day, Mrs. Smith looked out of her house to check on one of her babies, asleep in a playpen. A six-foot rattlesnake, also asleep, lay next to the baby. Mrs. Smith approached the pen, carefully lifted her daughter out and carried her inside.

Settlement proceeded along with development. Parkerton, the community, and the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad’s Parkerton station located at the Big Muddy Field, were named after an early driller, H. Leslie Parker, and sprang up about 1917. Businesses followed, and schools: From 1916 to 1920, three were established, including a high school and a grade school with a gymnasium. The population of Glenrock also mushroomed from 500 to 2,000 by 1918.

By 1923, the population of Parkerton had peaked at 2,500; also in that year, schools were consolidated with the Glenrock district. By 1935, Parkerton had largely been deserted and was occupied by pumpers, well tenders and field supervisors.

By the end of 1956, the cumulative production of Big Muddy was 37.6 million barrels.

Economic benefits for Wyoming

By 1987, Oregon Basin, Elk Basin and Grass Creek were still among the top 25 oil fields in Wyoming. Oregon Basin led the state in 1987 production with 9 million barrels, exceeding even the historic mega-producer, Salt Creek, for that year—ranked third below Hartzog Draw, an oil field about 35 miles southwest of Gillette, Wyo., off Highway 50. Although Salt Creek produced only 5 million barrels in 1987, it still led the list in cumulative production at the end of 1987, at 621.5 million barrels.

Figures from the Wyoming Department of Revenue from the beginning of the four decades from 1940 to 1970 show a steady increase in oil production and valuation for the state as a whole. In 1940, nearly 20.5 million barrels were produced; in 1970, 140.5 million. Valuation in 1940 was approximately $16.5 million; in 1970, $393.5 million.

Holders of oil and gas properties always paid taxes on the value of the properties, but the state did not significantly tax oil and gas revenues until 1969. Historian Samuel Western notes that in 1968, Gov. Stan Hathaway discovered that Wyoming had only $80 in the general fund. The general fund is the state's main bank account, from which state agencies are funded. Revenues to the fund come from taxes on cigarettes and liquor; sales and use taxes; and license and permit fees, among other sources. Hathaway's startling realization led to the creation of the one percent severance tax on oil, gas and coal, which the Legislature passed in 1969.

The tax was increased another two percentage points in 1973, and by then, the general fund had increased to $100 million. The Legislature then established a system whereby the severance tax revenues flow into the Permanent Mineral Trust Fund, which by law protects the capital—the corpus of the fund—allowing spending only of the interest and other revenues generated by the fund.

This increase in revenues from mineral extraction reflects the economic shifts in the relative values of the different sectors of Wyoming’s economy. In 1910, agriculture led the state, with assessed valuations on cattle and sheep at $32.9 million. Output of mines—this included oil and gas—was assessed at $5.2 million. By 1955, at least one sector of recreation had overtaken agriculture: Expenditures for hunting and fishing passed $23.4 million, more than the cash value of all agricultural crops produced statewide. By 1970, mineral valuations had far outstripped agriculture, with minerals at $470.1 million; sheep and cattle at $52.4 million. By 2008, the state’s gross domestic product figures show, mineral production stood at $13.9 billion, leisure and hospitality (forestry and fishing; arts, entertainment and recreation; and accommodation and food services) at $1.4 billion and agriculture at $380 million.

Enhanced oil recovery (EOR)—by the injection of gas, chemicals and steam into old oil fields—began in the late 1960s, and has been widely implemented in Wyoming. Chemical EOR has been done in the Oregon Basin, Elk Basin and Grass Creek fields, and water flooding to increase natural pressure in oil reservoirs has been done in the Lance Creek and Big Muddy fields.

Distributions from mineral revenues, not limited to oil, but also including natural gas, coal, trona, bentonite and other marketable minerals, have benefited every citizen in the state. Thus, however much we think of ourselves as the Cowboy State and cherish our clean air and wide, unspoiled vistas, the mineral extraction industry is the mainstay of Wyoming's economy.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Hernandez, Lollie. "Elk Basin town no longer exists but memories live,"Powell Tribune, Aug. 16, 1979.

Secondary Sources

• Biggs, Paul and Ralph H. Espach. “Petroleum and Natural Gas Fields in Wyoming.” United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines Bulletin 582. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1960, 29-32, 92-99, 115-117, 149-154, 195-198.
• Brubaker, Elbridge Leroy. "The Early History of the Big Muddy Oil Field." Unpublished paper written for University of Wyoming's Field Summer Work Shop, Course 674-M, Resource Development in Oil and Gas. Mr. Ed Swanson, Instructor. July 9, 1962. Casper, Wyo.: Casper College Western History Center, 1962, 4, 9-16, 23-25.
• Cook, Jeannie, et. al. Buffalo Bill's Town in the Rockies: A Pictorial History of Cody, Wyoming. Virginia Beach, Va.: Donning Company Publishers, 1996, 109-110.
• DeBruin, Rodney. “Wyoming's Oil and Gas Industry in the 1980s: A Time of Change.” Public Information Circular No. 28. Laramie, Wyo.: Geological Survey of Wyoming, 1989, 6.
• Hancock, E.T. “The Lance Creek Oil and Gas Field: Niobrara County, Wyoming.” Contributions to Economic Geology, Part II. Bulletin 716-E, United States Geological Survey. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1920, 91-93.
• Harmston, F.K., et al. A Study of the Resources, People and Economy of the Big Horn Basin, Wyoming, rev. ed. Division of Business and Economic Research, College of Commerce and Industry, University of Wyoming. Laramie, Wyo.: Wyoming Natural Resource Board, 1959, 38.
• Jones, Nick. Personal email to the author, July 22, 2014.
• Larson, T. A. History of Wyoming. 2d. ed., rev. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1978, 533.
• Lindsay, Charles. The Big Horn Basin. University Studies of the University of Nebraska, vols. 28-29, 1928-1929. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska, 1932, 250-252.
• Mackey, Mike. Black Gold: Patterns in the Development of Wyoming's Oil Industry. Powell, Wyo.: Western History Publications, 1997, 33-44.
• Mackey, Mike. Wyoming in the Twentieth Century: Topics in the History of the Cowboy State. Sheridan, Wyo.: Western History Publications, 2011, 78-81.
• Milek, Dorothy B. Hot Springs: A Wyoming County History. Basin, Wyo.: Saddlebag Books, 1986, 197, 261, 268, 270.
• Niobrara Historical Society. "Niobrara Historical Brevity," July 1, 1986. Accessed June 6, 2014, at http://www.niobraracountylibrary.or/history/index.php?id=36.
• Rea, Tom. "Boom, Bust and After: Life in the Salt Creek Oil Field." Accessed June 6, 2014, at http://www.wyohistory.org/essays/boom-bust-and-after-life-salt-creek-oil-field.
• Roberts, Phil. "The Oil Business in Wyoming." Accessed June 6, 2014, at http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/oil-business-wyoming.
• Spence, Hartzell. Portrait in Oil: How the Ohio Oil Company Grew to Become Marathon. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962, 50, 72-76, 95-100, 102-104, 189.
• Wasden, David J. From Beaver to Oil: A Century in the Development of Wyoming's Big Horn Basin. Cheyenne, Wyo.: Pioneer Printing and Stationery Co., 1973, 264-267.
• Western, Samuel. "The Mineral Leasing Act of 1920: The Law that Changed Wyoming's Economic Destiny." Accessed July 20, 2014, at http://www.wyohistory.org/essays/mineral-leasing-act-1920.
• Western, Samuel. Pushed Off the Mountain, Sold Down the River: Wyoming's Search for Its Soul. Moose, Wyo.: Homestead Publishing, 2002, 64-66.
• Wyoming Department of Revenue. Annual Report 1939-40, 67. Accessed June 6, 2014, at https://sites.google.com/a/wyo.gov/wy-dor/dor-annual-reports.
• _______________. Annual Report 1969-70, 75. Accessed June 6, 2014, at https://sites.google.com/a/wyo.gov/wy-dor/dor-annual-reports.
• Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. Accessed July 9, 2014, at http://wogcc.state.wy.us/. 
• Wyoming State Board of Equalization. Twenty-Sixth Biennial Report of the State Board of Equalization for the State of Wyoming, 1969-70, 75, 84. 
• Wyoming State Tax Commission. First Biennial Report of the Commissioner of Taxation, 1909-1910, 30, 31, 34. 

Illustrations

• The photos of trucks leaving Lusk, derricks near Lusk and the Big Muddy Oil Field are from the Slug Sides and Terra Brown collections at the Niobrara County Library in Lusk. Used with permission and thanks.
• The 1928 photo of the tank cars near Cody is courtesy of the Park County Archives. Used with permission and thanks.
• The rest of the photos are from the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, also used with permission and thanks. The 1917 photo of the gusher coming in at Elk Basin is from the AHC’s Kalstad Collection. The photo of Buffalo Bill Cody and others on the Shoshone anticline is from the George T. Beck Collection.
• The photo of the Star Machine is from the F.E. Smith Collection at the AHC. Star Machines, reports Everett DeWitt, oilfield historian for Anadarko at the Salt Creek Field in Natrona County, were initially pulled from place to place by a team of horses and later by a McCormick tractor. The machines were steam powered with a boiler that was pulled along on another wagon. Finding fuel for the boiler, DeWitt notes, could be tricky in parts of Wyoming where there were few trees and no coal.

Axle bearings on the wagons and carts used on the emigrant trails in 1800s needed regular lubrication. Most wagons carried the grease in a hanging bucket. Dusty conditions or excessive use could deplete the carried grease. This created a demand for axle grease among the travelers. The resulting grease trade is thought to be the first commercial petroleum business in Wyoming.

Sources of the grease

Seeps and pools of oil on the surface were the source of the grease. When fur trader Capt. B. L. E. Bonneville traveled to the Wind River Valley in 1832, he found oil springs southeast of present Lander near Dallas Dome. And an oil spring near Hilliard in present Uinta County was well known by the time Fort Bridger was established nearby in 1842.

In what’s now Natrona County, Wyoming, an anticline—an up-fold in rock layers—now called Oil Mountain has a collapsed region at its northwest end. There was an oil seep at the fault and even today there is evidence of oil still visible at the place where the seep was shown on early maps. The site is now inaccessible without crossing private land. Oil no longer escapes there, but the ground smells like crude oil and is saturated with gummy black petroleum.

In pioneer times, grease merchants skimmed oil at the seep and carried it by pony some four miles to the emigrant trail. The crude oil was mixed with flour to make suitably stiff axle grease.

Although no diaries have yet been found that record a purchase of grease by pioneers near Oil Mountain, numerous geologic documents, all written at least three decades after the fact, mention petroleum commerce with emigrants near the Oil Mountain seep.

In the later documents the trade was variously described as having started shortly after emigrants first began using the trail in the 1840s, or in 1849, 1851 or 1863. The reports usually mention famous English-speakers, including frontiersmen Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Jim Baker and, in some cases, even 1880s pioneer oil prospector Cy Iba as the principal grease merchants. The sources also allude to the participation of usually nameless “half-breeds,” who were the mixed-race offspring of early trappers or traders and their Indian wives.

Sgt. Isaac Pennock, Company L, 11th Kansas Cavalry, kept a diary in the spring, summer and fall of 1865, which included careful observations at the times of the battles of Red Buttes and Platte Bridge. He also recorded hearsay about an oil spring near the trail, which soldiers and travelers used.

On May 26, Pennock wrote, “South of Willow Springs is an oil spring said to run 50 barrels of petroleum per day.” With two alterations, Pennock’s report would be consistent with the facts of the Oil Mountain seep. Fifty barrels per day of running petroleum is almost certainly an exaggeration; that much oil would make a great mess anywhere. Second, changing “south” to north locates Oil Mountain, which is five miles nearly due north of Willow Springs. Willow Springs is about 25 miles west of present Casper, Wyo.

The seep or well began to appear on maps in the 1880s. G.F. Cram’s 1882 Rail Road and Township Map of Wyoming shows a spring of petroleum at approximately the right place in a region that had not been surveyed by the government. A cadastral survey made in 1882 and published in 1883 shows the oil “well” at its correct position.

Mitchell Lajeunesse, a likely grease merchant

John Hunton, Confederate survivor of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg and an early stockman and diarist in Wyoming Territory, reported years later in an account published in 1920, “In 1873, Mitchell Lajuenesse, son of Bassell Lajuenesse, advised me that he had found oil in the vicinity of the present town of Casper.”

The Lajeunesse family had been well known for years by that time in central Wyoming. Basil Lajeunesse was a voyageur on the early expeditions of explorer John C. Fremont, and is a vivid figure in Fremont’s reports. He was killed in Oregon in 1846 on Fremont’s third expedition to the West. Basil’s brother Charles was for a time bourgeois or chief trader at Fort Laramie, and later, with his associates, ran a toll bridge at Independence Rock and a trading post at nearby Devil’s Gate, on the emigrant trail on the Sweetwater River. Mitchell—the French name would have been Michel—and his brother Noel had a Shoshone mother and were of the next generation from Basil and Charles.

Charles especially, and other members of the family were also called by the name Cimineau, often rendered by English speakers as Seminoe or Seminole. The Lajeunesse children were bicultural by virtue of their French and American Indian families and continuing contacts with other Europeans and their mothers’ tribes.

Diarist Hunton noted that “Little Bat [Baptiste Pourier, another member of the French-named, mixed-race community of central Wyoming] Lajuenesse and I took supplies and set out for this ‘oil field.’ Arriving upon the spot, we at once began operations by ‘spooning’ up the oil. After working industriously for some time, Little Bat and I had acquired about a quart, while Lajeunesse had succeeded in obtaining a smaller quantity of the crude.”

That night, some Arapaho men visited them as they were gathered around their campfire. The Indians told the prospectors they were not welcome in the area, and told Lajeunesse to make sure the party left in the morning and followed the North Platte 75 miles east down river to Fort Fetterman. Some subsequent historians have assumed Hunton was referring to oil springs at what later became the long-lived Salt Creek Oil Field 45 miles north of present Casper. But his reference to the route the Arapaho told the men to take to Fort Fetterman makes it far more likely he was talking about the seep at Oil Mountain.

The prospectors thought it a good idea to comply promptly. “Upon reaching Fort Fetterman,” Hunton notes, “we placed the oil in a bucket of hot water and I found that I had a pint bottle of crude oil.”

The Indians had been in the area for generations—the Shoshone probably for millennia—and they would have known where many oil seeps were. They used the oil medicinally and in paint. Some of the early state and U.S. government geological reports indicate a specific mixed-race person involved in the grease commerce. Robert Morris, in an 1897 report, wrote, “as early as 1863 Seminole collected the oil and sold it for axle-grease.” W. T. Lee noted in 1915, “It is reported that Cimineau, a French trapper, and others sold lubricants to the caravans from the oil spring at sec. 28, T. 33 N., R. 82 W.”

Connections between Jim Bridger, the Lajeunesse family and Oil Mountain are well known. Bridger bought a trading post near Fort Bridger from Charles Lajeunesse in 1852. Bridger is tied to Oil Mountain and the seep areas by the trail he blazed in 1864 trail from what’s now central Wyoming to Montana, as well as reports that he sold grease. The Bridger Trail and the seep were less than one mile apart.

The distance from Independence Rock to the Oil Mountain seep is 31 miles, and most of that could have been traveled along the emigrant trail. The mixed-race persons involved in the grease trade likely came from the communities near Independence Rock and Devil’s Gate, and very likely involved the young Lajeunesse, Michel “Seminoe.”

Other mixed-race offspring from the area could also have been involved. Louis Guinard, who built the bridge at present-day Casper, also had a Shoshone wife and was associated with the community at the Sweetwater Bridge near Independence Rock. John Richard, known as Reshaw, operated in the 1850s from the bridge that bore his name at present-day Evansville and had an Oglala Lakota wife and mixed-race offspring. There is no evidence that Richard’s family traded grease, although they probably knew of the Oil Mountain region on the trail.

Aughey’s report and modern oil development

By the mid-1880s, oil exploration in Wyoming had a scientific basis. Samuel Aughey, the territorial geologist through 1885, wrote a report that Gov. F.E. Warren released in early 1886. He described, among many other things, the characteristics of eight oil basins. Aughey gave directions by road from Jim Averell’s store and road ranch on the Sweetwater to six contiguous townships that he called the Seminole Oil Basin. The basin included, near its center, the oil seep that was four miles from the Oregon Trail.

Aughey switches between “Seminoe” and “Seminole” in his report. He refers to both “Seminoe Mountain” and “Seminoe Ridge” in specifying the locations of the seep and the oil-bearing structure. Apparently the name Oil Mountain was replacing the previously used label, Seminoe Mountain, at the time of his report. Aughey wrote of “the Seminoe or Oil Mountain, as it has been named” and “the Seminoe ridge (Oil Mountain) is itself an anticlinal fold.” Therefore, the region was linked to the Lajeunesses as late as the 1880s.

Aughey found the petroleum in the region to be suitable for production of illuminating oil. He predicted that it was “very probable, that beneath the fault at [a place on Oil Mountain east of the seep] oil in quantity will be eventually found.”

The ground near the historic oil seep was perforated with oil wells between Aughey’s time and at least as late as 1958, but no one ever found a significant source of oil coupled with the seep. However, Aughey’s Seminole Oil Basin has produced much oil and gas. New wells are operating on and near Oil Mountain today. The Iron Creek oil field, on the anticline and in Aughey’s basin, has operated for about a century.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Aughey, Samuel. Report of the Territorial Geologist. In Message of Francis E. Warren, Governor, to the Legislature of Wyoming, Ninth Assembly. Laramie, Wyo.: Boomerang Printing, 1886, 148-152.
• Hunton, John (as told by). Early Oil Discovery in Wyoming. Proceedings and Collections of the Wyoming State Historical Department 1919-1920, First Biennial Report of the State Historian. Laramie, Wyo.: Laramie Printing Company, 1920, 149.
• Lee, W.T., R.W. Stone, H.S. Gale, et al. Guidebook to the Western United States, Part B, The Overland Route. United States Geological Survey Bulletin 612 (1915), 62.
• Morris, Robert C. Sketch of Wyoming. Collections of the Wyoming Historical Society, vol.1, Cheyenne Wyo: Sun-Leader Publishing House, 1897, 37.
• Pennock, Isaac B. “Diary of Jake Pennock.” Annals of Wyoming Vol. 23, No. 2 (1951): 7, accessed April 14, 2015 at https://archive.org/stream/annalsofwyom23121951wyom#page/n127/mode/2up/search/Pennock.

Secondary Sources

• Cram, G.F. Cram’s Rail Road and Township Map of Wyoming. Chicago, Ill.: Geo. F. Cram. 1882.
• David, E.C. Map of Township No. 33 North, Range No. 82. Surveyor General’s Office, Cheyenne, Wyo.. 1883.
• Espach, Ralph H. and W. Dale Nichols. Petroleum and Natural Gas Fields in Wyoming. United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines Bulletin 418, (1942).
• Glass, Jefferson. Reshaw: The Life and Times of John Baptiste Richard. Glendo, Wyo.: High Plains Press. 2014.
• Hares, C. J. Anticlines in Central Wyoming. In Contributions to Economic Geology, United States Geological Survey Bulletin 641 (1916), 239.
• Knight W.C. and E.E. Slosson. Petroleum Series-Bulletin No. 4, The Dutton, Rattlesnake, Arago, Oil Mountain and Powder River Oil Fields. Laramie Wyo.: School of Mines, University of Wyoming. 1901, 32.
• Love, J. D. “Annotated Photographs and Significance of Oil Seeps, Tar Sands, and Pioneer Drilling in the Wind River Basin, Central Wyoming.” In Boyd, Richard G., George M. Olson, and Walter W. Boberg, eds. Wyoming Geological Association Guidebook, 1978: Resources of the Wind River Basin: Casper, Wyo.: Wyoming Geological Association, 1978.
• Rea, Tom. Devil’s Gate: Owning the Land, Owning the Story. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006, 64-77.
• Roberts, Phil. “History of Oil in Wyoming.” In A New History of Wyoming. University of Wyoming. Accessed April 8, 2015, at http://www.uwyo.edu/robertshistory/history_of_oil_in_wyoming.htm.

Illustrations

• Reproduction of part of Map of Township No, 33 North, Range No. 82 West…. Surveyor General’s Office, Cheyenne, Wyo., Feb. 23, 1883. Thanks to Reid Miller of the Bureau of Land Management for this image.
• The I.N. Knapp’s photograph of Oil Mountain Seep, Aug. 4, 1899 was originally commissioned by the U.S. Geological Survey and reproduced on p. 64 off the 1978 Wyoming Geological Association Guidebook, Wind River Basin.

Henry Jensen, 1909-2002 was past president of the Wyoming State Historical Society, the Wyoming Archeological Society and the Fremont County Historical Society, and was a founder of the Wyoming Historical Foundation.

He grew up in eastern Fremont County, attended schools in Lost Cabin and Lysite, Wyo., graduated from high school in Thermopolis in 1926, and later continued his education at the University of Wyoming. In his long career he worked as a sheepherder, sheep camp tender, railroad section hand, foreman of the Sullivan Ranch, now part of the Q Creek Ranch in Shirley Basin, schoolteacher, school administrator, newspaper editor and longtime board member of the Hot Springs Rural Electrification Association (REA). In 1940 he married the former Clara Patterson, when both were teaching at one-room schools in western Natrona and eastern Fremont County. She died on Christmas Day, 1994.

This interview was conducted in the early 1990s by longtime Casper, Wyo. science teachers Dana Van Burgh, Jr. and Terry Logue, as the three men drove about 60 miles on state Highway 220 southwest through central Wyoming from Casper to Devil’s Gate near Martin’s Cove. On the way they pass near Government Bridge, Alcova Dam and reservoir, cross the main ditch of the Kendrick project, and pass near Pathfinder Reservoir. Van Burgh co-authored the Field Guide to the Alcova Area, Natrona County, Wyoming, (Casper: 1974; Laramie, Wyo.: Wyoming State Geological Survey, 2004). This is the “guide” the men talk about from time to time during the interview. Due to the age of the tape and background noise evident, transcription was difficult.

Transcribed by Edna Garrett, Casper College Western History Center, March 2011. We are grateful to the center for preserving and transcribing the oral history, and providing it to WyoHistory.org.

Editor’s transcription notes: In most cases I have deleted redundant ands, ers, uhs, buts, false starts, etc. If I deleted an entire phrase, I have inserted ellipses … Where you find brackets [ ] I have added words for explanation or to complete an awkward sentence. Parentheses ( ) are used for incidental non-verbal sounds, like laughter.
~Lori Van Pelt, assistant editor, WyoHistory.org June 23, 2015

Henry Jensen: Anytime you want to stop or make any comments why, uh, don't hesitate to tap me on the shoulders, and I will stop.

Dana Van Burgh, Jr.: OK. Hey, been one of those days.

Jensen: Ha! You two are the head honchos here.

Van Burgh.: You just tell us about it and we'll listen.

Jensen: I suppose that you have noticed a number of times that the so-called "Red Buttes Fight" was pretty much misnamed. Because the Red Buttes happens to be a good many miles away from where the fight took place. I don't know just how many miles, but several miles.

Terry Logue [unclear]

Van Burgh: Yeah. Right.

Jensen: If you will notice that place where the [land slipped], I don't recall if you noted in your thing this place where they had the slippage up here.

Van Burgh: Yes.

Jensen: … I really don't know if it has anything to do with what we're talking about, but this whole area along this mountain is just as unstable as it is possible to be, and there is no way that I would ever want to build up a home anywhere in that area. It might be a thousand years, but [might be] tomorrow when the whole thing might slip.

Van Burgh: Yup.

…

Jensen: That's your Jackson Canyon, isn't it?

Van Burgh: Yes, pretty much, yes.

Jensen: I always had an idea that he was talking about Poison Spider. In his journal and that house or hut that they built, was down near the mouth of Poison Spider. But in recent years, now this is just my own particular theory, I don't believe it was down here at all. Because at the time of the year that [Robert Stuart, with the returning Astorians in 1812] was here, Poison Spider would be dry. It is nothing but a dry wash most of the year. And the only place where there is any kind of water, and good water that is potable, and he spoke of water, was over here at Speas Springs and I think that, and his daughter thinks that, his habitation, if you can call it that, is down on this end, rather than down at the mouth of Poison Spider, ’cause there is where the water is, and there is where the good supply of fuel would be. They're [the trees nearby are] mostly junipers and the cottonwood.

[speaker unclear] You are not gonna tell me who?

Jensen: I am sure that you mention in there, as I recall it about that, this was about where Robert Stuart… [Unclear]

[speaker unclear]

Jensen: Have you mentioned in there, I said, I think North of [?] Goose Egg. Have you mentioned John Wayne's picture? [“Hellfighters,” 1968.] John Wayne made this picture of the firefighting.

Van Burgh: Uh-uh. Yeah.

Logue:"The Hellfighters ?"

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: You see, that was filmed right over on that slide right over there. A good portion of it. I had a girlfriend who was going to summer school in Laramie [Wyoming]. And I had the weekend off and they [weren't for it]. I decided the only way I could go see my girlfriend was to cut across country, and so I decided to cut across this roadway and there really weren't any roads here in those days, you know, and so I came to Casper and then came down here. I don't know if you will remember [unclear] I don't even remember the name of this, but down here, about a half a mile, there is an old road that takes off, and that was the road that led to Medicine Bow in those days.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: Pretty well kept now, it is right here.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: I went down and saw my girlfriend and that's it, right there, and here, this one on the left .I can't place exactly to the year, but it was some where between 1946 and 1950, that that slipped. We went to town on one weekend, and when we came back, that Sunday, that had just slipped at that time. And you can see where the whole thing over the years geologically, has done this innumerable times. You can see the bumpy plain all along there where they (long pause) but it's a formation.

Logue: Frontier?

Van Burgh: There's a plain right there. 5240 Road.

Jensen: It doesn't have much to do with your guide… . Did you mention this old ox bow here?

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: You did? OK. Yeah, you see you're way ahead of me.

Logue: Do you have a good photo of that?

Van Burgh: Yes, I have an aerial and ground.

Logue: [unclear]

Jensen: Pedro Mountains. I recall the first time I ever saw this, it was in 1946, I had … Who's place is that? Yeah, now that's the Bates Creek coming in from the left. Bates Creek, of course, heads way back up in the Laramie Range. Oh, that's forty or fifty miles up there to the head of it, have you ever been up to the head?

Van Burgh: Yep.

Jensen: When I was growing up, there were no--absolutely no--beaver, and I never saw a beaver and never saw a beaver dam. The beaver had been virtually eliminated from Wyoming by 1900. They just didn't exist; there were maybe a few in the high mountains.

And another animal that was virtually gone … I was born and raised in the country, and I never saw an antelope ’til I was sixteen years old. There were just no antelope, there were a few … there was a little bunch out oh, just about the exact geographic center of Wyoming, south of Moneta, in that area. There was another little bunch in eastern Fremont County, near Bates Battleground, up near Bates Battleground, for all intent and purposes, all the antelope had been wiped out. [Bates Battleground is located in Washakie County, Wyoming, and was the site of an 1874 conflict. U.S. cavalry aided by Shoshone Chief Washakie and 100 of his warriors attacked an Arapaho village, which was defeated.] … literally thousands of antelope, here. [laugh]

And there are also, all along the river here, there are still beaver all along the river here, they are all [bank beavers] but there are beaver all along the river. I wouldn't be surprised but what there's some right in the city limits of Casper. I don't know that there are, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Jensen: You have a comment about the Government Bridge, [where Wyoming Highway 220 crosses the North Platte about 22 miles south of Casper. The old bridge remains nect to the modern highway bridge.]

Van Burgh: OK.

Jensen: Has this been made into a National Historical Site?

Van Burgh: Not that I know of.

Jensen: Should it be?

Van Burgh: [both talk at same time].

Jensen: You could go to work on it and get a job. (Laughing.)

When was it built?

Van Burgh: 1905.

Jensen: That is what I thought. I was thinking it was 1905. Now the old road, you know, followed the river. In a way it used to be a much more interesting road to follow. Because, the geese in the fall of the year used to come in and feed on those fields down there. I have seen times when there would be hundreds and hundreds of Canadian geese on the fields down here along the river.

Logue: You all know anything about this oil field?

Jensen: You can't tell now, but off on the left of the river a few miles up the ...

Van Burgh: Ninety-three.

Jensen: On the river is one of the early oil fields. Do you have it mentioned?

Van Burgh: Which one?

Jensen: Isn't it Little Spindle Top? Is it mentioned? Do you have it mentioned?

Van Burgh: I haven't added it, but I am going to.

Jensen: And it is still producing, I think mostly stripper wells now, but it is still producing.

Logue: Do you have photos of the angular unconformity for me?

Van Burgh: Yes, aerial and ground.

Jensen: Yes, [unclear] right now. I don't know, if you have mentioned it, … but what we are passing through here now, is a part of the Kendrick Project. The water comes from Alcova Dam and is part of the Kendrick Project, which was one of the dreams of Wyoming Senator Kendrick.

The word alcova is Spanish, and this area was given its name by the early Spanish, or Mexican—was it Mexican sheepherders?—who came in here to bed their sheep in the area, which was a perfect, a perfect shelter for bedding sheep and they called it Alcova, which means bedroom. Alcova is Spanish for bedroom.

Van Burgh: Huh!

Jensen: And that's where the name Alcova came from, and that is where it got its name originally. Back up in these hills is almost perfect shelter for protecting a bunch of sheep. When they are in storms, and this sort of thing, so that they could be protected. But Spanish is their origin.

Have you read the book by Preuss, Exploring with Fremont? [Exploring with Frémont : the Private Diaries of Charles Preuss, Cartographer for John C. Frémont on His First, Second, and Fourth Expeditions to the Far West, by Charles Preuss, published 1958 by the University of Oklahoma Press.]

Van Burgh: Yes.

Jensen: Preuss hated Frémont with a passion, [little laugh] and he certainly wasn't complimentary, but I have often wondered ... we are coming to Alcova now, and of course, the Fremont Canyon is above there, and the reason it got the name of Fremont, is because of the misfortune that happened there, when Frémont lost most of the oil of his scientific equipment when the boats upset--you know, the inflatable boats upset going over some rapids in Fremont Canyon. And, I have often wondered if, when that water is shut off, if you go up to those rapids, if you couldn't find in that riverbed some of that equipment that Frémont lost. It could be there. I have been tempted a number of times to go up there sometime when they had the river shut off, and see if there was any of that material in that river bottom.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: Because there was a lot of it—metal material, compasses and all this sort of thing. Brass.

Van Burgh: Do you want to stop here?

Logue: I haven't any reason to.

Jensen: What comment do you have about the dam? We have a lot of that in the Alcova guide.

Van Burgh: Let me pull off up here.

Jensen: It is served by the Hot Springs REA [Rural Electric Association], which seems a little bit unusual when you consider where Thermopolis is, in relation to this area. [Thermopolis is a town located in Hot Springs County, Wyoming.]

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: The Hot Springs REA also serves Medicine Bow.

Van Burgh: Huh.

Jensen: Did you know that?

Van Burgh: Hu-huh.

Jensen: The Hot Springs REA serves Medicine Bow, the Shirley Basin and that whole area down in there is served by the Hot Springs REA. It's interesting to follow this canal out, it goes through a half a dozen tunnels to get water over into the area along [U.S.] Highway 20-26 [west of Casper], in that area. Some of those ... There is one of those tunnels where it takes it through a ridge in south of 20-26, and I think that tunnel is well over a mile long …(Long pause.)

Logue: Oh, good.

Jensen: Juniper.

Van Burgh: Yes.

Jensen: Which is one of the typical types of vegetation in western ... [lots of noise on transmitter] and obviously, I don't know where the name Seminoe came from, it isn't Seminole, for the Indians. It's Seminoe, and I don't know what the origin of that name is. It apparently has its roots back somewhere in the very early white contact period, but I don't have any idea. I have never been able to find out. Maybe you have.

Van Burgh: No.

Jensen: But Seminoe, when I was growing up, I thought it was Seminole for the Indian tribe, but apparently it isn't. It is Seminoe rather than Seminole. Did you know the Bundys? They had a homestead out here too, you know.

Van Burgh: Which Bundy?

Jensen: Well, I guess they're related to the people [who have] the boat business there in Casper, I think that's the same family …They were early settlers. They had a place pretty close by the Pathfinder Lake on the west side of Seminoe [Reservoir]? … (cough) I am trying to think of something here for ranchers, the Irenes,, but that wouldn't make any ... most tourists wouldn't be interested in those people …

The Miles family was prominent, of course, all of them in this country ran sheep and cattle out there (cough). They are among the early day ranchers.

Logue: What about artifacts?

Jensen: Wait a minute. I really can't think of anything very interesting.

Logue: What about Indian artifacts out in that country? Do you find arrowheads?

Jensen: Well, of course this is a comment that might fit in anything, over the course of twelve thousand years and it has been at least twelve thousand years [since people were first in the area]. You can find artifacts anywhere (laugh). They are everywhere, and particularly along—you will find where there is water and the possibility of game—you are going to find artifacts. And, there are places out in there where it is just fantastic (cough). I am sure that you could go out there and find sites that are ten thousand years old, out in this area south here. Maybe even older … these people … Well, you know this Casper site is almost eleven thousand years old. Were you ever up at the Casper site when they were digging it? [The Casper Site, an ancient bison-kill site roughly where the Natrona County School District headquarters is now on North Glenn Road in Casper, was excavated by archeologists in 1974.]

Van Burgh: No.

Jensen: Well, … there they were dealing with bison antiquus, but I am sure you would find the same thing out here, where you will find the conditions right with water and grazing. You would find artifacts there of that age probably—Hells Gap and Agate Basin [archeological sites in Goshen and Niobrara counties, respectively]—artifacts out there. They are not easy to find, and incidentally, it's against the law to pick them up now. I never could quite understand the theory in back of this, because people who don't pick them up--what happens to them then? If, if ... what good are they to anybody?

Logue: Yeah.

Jensen: If, they are just left? What good are they?

Logue: I don't know.

Jensen: I understand how the BLM [U.S. Bureau of Land Management] people feel about it, they are protecting them, but, if they just lay there, what's the purpose of it? And you know it doesn't make much sense …

I'd like to go back off to the right here over on ...where we went over to that volcano. That's up to you though, and that's something you probably don't have any mention of it either, that there is a cluster of volcanoes. When we get down here a little farther off to the right down here, you might want to mention that somewhere, but there is a cluster of volcanoes. I would like to go where that fault line is. Fault line runs up here east of there. See where that fault line runs through where all those springs are? I just would give anything if I could get out there sometime and take my little Roto Hoe [a rototiller brand] and just make about two shallow passes along through some of that dirt and see what I uncover, because, it is almost certain that with those springs and that water with the game there that were inevitably there, that that was a campsite there.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: I don't need to just go dig something up, but I would sure like to make a pass at it sometime.

Logue: Uh-huh. I bet you would find something.

Jensen: Oh, I am sure you would. But, you see, I am not really interested in the artifacts particularly, but I would like to find out if there were some sites there that might be interesting to enter. You know where I am talking about?

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: There is a big fault line runs through there, east of that, where all the springs are. The springs are all caused by that fault line. In that area east of those volcanoes. There probably should be some comments made about [unclear].When we get up here, maybe we can talk about them a little bit. If you, I don't know what you've got about them already. Although I have read all that. [unclear]

The Oregon Trail is north of us, and I suppose you will notice that. Not too far, actually two or three miles, maybe three miles north of here, but the Oregon Trail runs parallel to it through this area all the way along here.

Van Burgh: Just before it said parking area.

Jensen: It runs down over there, it is running down what they call Fish Creek, and there again, I've often wondered why that is called Fish Creek. ’Cause I don't know how any fish ever got in to it in those early days, although it is perfectly possible, because there are some alkali streams in Wyoming, which has a variety of fish in them that aren't found anywhere else in the world, and this may be some of those fish. Poison Creek, for example, has some minnows, yet oh about a tenth of the way down Poison Creek over in Natrona and Fremont County, they are about three inches long and they are not found anywhere else in the world and nobody knows exactly how they got there. I guess they are still there. They may be something like the snail darter and be eliminated, but they were there many years ago. I remember seeing lots of them. (Long pause).

Those hills in front of us there, I'm asking now, are a part of the Sweetwater Rocks, aren't they?

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: Northward extension of the Sweetwater Rocks. And the Sweetwater Rocks are a granite uplift, aren't they?

Van Burgh: Yes.

Jensen: From pre-Indian times? If that means they are historic or not, I don't know. Over this … I don't know again, I would be guessing, But, I don't know how many tourists would be interested in this. But you can stand on the end of … and now just a second, I have to get myself lined up here. On the end of Ferris Mountain, on the east end of Ferris Mountain there is a basaltic dike? Oh, it must be forty feet wide that runs right straight through the mountain. And if you face towards the Pedros across Pathfinder Reservoir you can look out fifteen miles or maybe more, maybe twenty miles to the south and see exactly the same dike striking right straight through the Pedros.

Van Burgh: Huh.

Jensen: And if you go on the hollow in between where it is all eroded away, you will come to a place where there is the float. It's all basaltic rocks of one sort or another.

So that dike has gone right straight across, clear from the top of the Ferrises right across through the Pedros, and how far it runs from there I don't know. I know some places where those dikes on further down this way run for thirty miles, just for the basaltic excluded I guess, and you find lots of dikes down here.

Logue: How wide?

Jensen: Oh that must be at least, … well, it’s wide enough that you can stand on that point, stand over in the Ferrises and see it in the Pedros so it must be thirty or forty feet wide and black,black basalt. I don't know how far that runs, but as I say I know in some cases they run for thirty miles across country. What they call Black Rock, which is the exact center of geographical center of Wyoming, it will be off in this area. It is south of Moneta and between Moneta and Jeffrey City is a basaltic dike, a part of a basaltic dike that runs through that country for miles and miles. ... You two are both knowledgeable geologists. But the other type of dike that you are seeing all through here is quartz, of course.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: But, I don't think I have ever known of one of the quartz that extends as far through the country as the basalt, the basaltic dike.

Logue: Wonder if there is evidence that those happened at the same time.

Van Burgh: I don't know. Might have.

Jensen: Bates Creek [Most likely here he is actually referring to Horse Creek]--that's looking ahead here now, down where the trees are ahead of us—was another one of the Sanford Ranches. Now we are getting down in the area where you can see the backwaters of the Pathfinder, extending up the Sweetwater River, and it is at this point, down from below the ranch, which we see off to our left and in front of it, where Bothwell and the Suns and a group of ranchers along the Sweetwater killed—hung Jim Averell and Cattle Kate. The place where they were hung is now under the waters of Pathfinder, but it was just down along Highway towards Rawlins—75 Burtch Ranch that you see right in front of us to the left. And some thought that whether Cattle Kate and Jim Averell were really ever guilty of anything was never proven. Nobody ever proved that they were guilty of anything. Except maybe she was sleeping with him.

Van Burgh: Milepost 75.

Jensen: Which was quite common among men and women, even in those days. But they have never proved that they had ever stolen anything. And I think, and you can correct me on this, but I think this is about the only example in American history of a woman literally being hung. Although they did burn some witches, I think, didn't they?

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: But it was a case of a group of people taking the law into their own hands.

You don't need too much editorial comment anyway. (Laugh).

Jensen: And the Suns are still a very prominent family in this area. Did you know old Tom Sun?

Van Burgh: No.

Jensen: Over the years, we got to be pretty good friends. They were nice people.

Have you been out to that volcano since the abortive attempt that we made … I'd like to go up there again sometime. Now, you have got to comment about this Oregon Trail coming in here. Coming down Horse Creek and coming in to the area here. Do you know who owned this ranch at the time they hung Cattle Kate?

Van Burgh: No.

Jensen: I'm going to see if I can find out, I don't know either who owned it right at that time. And, I am sure that it was a ranch. Because there isn't this much hay land that they would let sit here and not be used. But, in my life, the Sanfords were the owners for the biggest part of the time that I knew.

Logue: Bothwell was back down in here someplace?

Jensen: Huh?

Logue(?): Bothwell--was that back down here?

Jensen: I'm not sure it coulda been Bothwell that owned it. I don't know who owned it. It could very well could be Bothwell's ranch, but I say, I don't know, I am going to see if I can find out. Well, actually Bothwell was an absentee owner. He only came here probably during the summertime most of the time, for awhile. And a lot of those people though, were the most violent. That was true here, in the Johnson County War, too. Some of the absentee owners were the most violent against the homesteaders and the so-called nesters. And, I think that was probably true of Bothwell. He basically was not a native, well, as a matter of fact, I don't know any people who were really natives. But, I don't know--this may have been his ranch. I don't know for sure. I am not much help to you because I don't know for sure. [Logue is correct. Albert Bothwell, one of the lynchers of Ella Watson [Cattle Kate] and Jim Averell, owned the ranch nearby. Sanfords bought the ranch from Bothwell in 1916.]

[unclear]

Jensen: Did you ever go to the county records to see? We are still in Natrona County now.

Logue: Yeah.

Jensen: Was Natrona County established early enough, when was it established? South of us also, there is lots of Wyoming jade [that] has been found out in this country and south over …

Van Burgh: Sixty-nine. [What was the]

Jensen: … the Seminoes and along the foot of the Ferris Mountains. There has all kinds of jade been found there. Halsey Kortes found mostly all of his jade in that area and bearing from almost coal black to some of the prettiest apple green you ever saw, all through these areas. You know Halsey Kortes? Well, Halsey Kortes got into the rock- cutting business and became good friends of J.O. Pratt. Was one of the biggest jade factories they ever had in America. J.O. Pratt would come out here every summer, and would spend … oh … Sometimes he would spend a month in the summer. “Working with J,", is cutting jade, hunting jade. He just loved jade. He had one of the finest collections of jade in the world. It's in a museum back in Chicago, but I can't tell you which one. But the whole country has jade in it.

Do you wanna go up to the volcanoes this morning? (everyone laughs). The volcano north of us here is only one of a whole cluster of volcanoes that is out in this area.

Logue: If you fly over them you can see them.

Jensen: If you fly over them you can see them? That is what he told me a number of, or several years ago, after we were up there. That was only one of several volcanoes that was in the area here. Of course, I know you have comments about Devil's Gate, so there ain't much to say about that.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: My grandfather as a seven-year-old boy came over the Oregon Trail, over the Mormon Trail rather, and they stopped at Independence Rock on the way. That was one of those ancestor brigades [apparently a reference to the well-organized Mormon wagon trains of the 1850s and ’60s].

Logue: When was that?

Jensen: That was, I believe, the summer of 1858. He and his family. brother and sister, and mother and father left Benson at Omaha and came over the Mormon Trail on their way to Utah. I have often wondered how much of that motivation was religious and how much of it was economic. I know that my grandparents’ people were peasants and I know they didn't have anything in Denmark, and I think that they did that all for their security. [unclear]

Tom Sun told me that when he was growing up that there was practically no trees anywhere on the Sweetwater. He said that there were two factors that caused that. First of all you had the spring floods every year, and mid-summer floods, cloudbursts, which washed trees away. And then in addition, he said in the winter the elk moved in onto the Sweetwater, migrated to the winter feeding grounds by the thousands. There were thousands of elk along the Sweetwater in the winter and if any cottonwood sapling got started it never survived the winter. That they were eaten up by the elk.

And you see then, now the people coming over the Oregon Trail never saw those elk, cause this happened in the wintertime. The elk moved in the winter and then in the summertime they were going back to their summer ranges, so that they were never hunted to any great extent by the people traveling the Oregon Trail because those people were here at a different time of the year. But he said the elk came in along the river, literally by the thousands, in the early days. In his father's time. You see in later years though, those migration routes were cut off by means of fences and just people so that the elk no longer moved into this area and into the area on the desert south of the Seminoes, and the Ferris' and in that area. There are no elk at all on the desert, anymore you see.

Now you can look up there in front of us, now and see evidence of several of those dikes, some of them quartz. This one right straight in front of us, I think, just off a little bit to the right, there is probably quartz. If you go up and examine it at the foot of it there is quartz all over there ... But you can see the black ones which are basaltic, you see there's a half a dozen of them just right there in a short space on that granite hillside there. I have often thought I would like to get one of these modern metal detectors and go up to the remains of one of those quartz dikes and see if it might be mineralized. When do you want to go with me? (Laugh).

Van Burgh: He's the prospector.

Jensen: Well, I'm not sure but what there might be some mineralized quartz dikes.

Van Burgh: Could be.

Jensen: You commented on that Dumbell; it is one of the early day ranches, Grieves owned it. (Long Pause). [The Dumbell Ranch is at the northeast opening of Devil’s Gate.]

But, in the United States at least it's been eliminated it doesn't even exist anymore. But strangely enough the cholera along the Oregon Trail, which killed literally thousands of people began to abate from the time they hit the Sweetwater and by the time they left what is now Wyoming just practically was gone. I suppose due to the fact that they had better water, and I don't know what else, but any rate the cholera just quit. About the last known cholera death that I know of, where there are graves that are known, is in south, or ... north of Kemmerer where this a ... oh ... there's a grave there upon the Hams Fork where a girl died of cholera, and that is about one of the last graves that you will find. For some reason or another, when they got over this far, the cholera just quit. Of course, most of your tourists never get down this far.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: Some of the buildings, one of the buildings right in the middle of that structure,

is one of the original parts of the original Tom Sun Ranch which was established in the [18]70s, and it is still in use every day. I think as a matter of fact I think it's a dining room for the ranch. The original buildings were built of logs down here, as I say a part of that original building, is still, have you ever been in the museum? It's closed up. [The Sun Ranch, headquartered at the southwest opening of Devil’s Gate, was owned and run by the Sun family from the early 1870s until 1995, when it was sold to the Mormon Church. The former ranch headquarters is now the Mormon Handcart Visitors Center.]

Van Burgh: Huh.

Jensen: It's closed. Yeah. Thomas died. After Thomas died, why they closed the museum up. Were you ever in it?

Van Burgh: No.

Jensen: Probably, sometime Bernard would probably take you, let you go in there sometime. Thomas, you've got comments about the old man the original Tom Sun.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: That was a good deal for work of Thomas he was the third, the third Tom Sun. And when Tom, Thomas died, why that kinda ... Bernard got tabs. Bernard's a rancher and he doesn't particularly have that much interest in it. Now old Tom Sun told me that he had, back around here, where these people all froze to death, now he told me he had been up there a half a dozen times with the Mormon people, and they have never been able to find the exact site of those burials.

Van Burgh: Huh.

Jensen: Even with metal detectors, because when most of the people when they buried them they didn't have any metal on them, they just ... but they buried them as quickly as they could. It's all they could do. But, old man Sun also told me that there was some exaggeration about the exact number of people who died at this cove. He said they had been dying before, and they died afterwards. So that the total number was right, but the complete number that died right in that cove at Martin's Cove was a little bit exaggerated, somewhat exaggerated. Now that was just his comment. The old man Sun and his wife, you know, they lived in this house down here and I believe died there, both of them, I think. That's Bernard's house up there not very far. If you want to, tourists aren't going to be getting down here for any reason to see this anyway. Have you ever walked around the overlook up here?

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: I think it is a good idea. They've done a good job. You have permits over on the overlook on this so people will stop?

Van Burgh: Yes.

Jensen: (long noisy pause) I wish I was at home [unclear] in front of us. (Van Burgh speaking in the back ground at the same time unclear.)

[Logue?]: You don't see that very often anymore.

Jensen: That's pretty good shape.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: I have at home and I can't recall the man's name, but I could look this up, a proposal that a man, I think he lives in Canada now, but, he sent this proposal to me to present to the Historical Society, and I presented it at a meeting in Green River quite a number of years ago, and what he proposed--when I get up here on the highway I can tell you what I am talking about. He was proposing a bas relief statuary of somewhat similar to Mount Rushmore, and--I need to get up here so I can show you what he is talking about. But you see the Oregon Trail went right up the Sweetwater here.

Van Burgh: Yeah. (long pause).

Jensen: Is there a turn off up here?

Van Burgh: Yep.

Jensen: Now Martin's Cove, a lot of people think that just right up in there is Martin’s Cove, but, actually it's Martin's Cove, there. Martin's Cove is another little cove off of this road where these people had taken shelter. It's off to the right of ... this just this opening out here isn't Martin's Cove.

[Logue?]: On the east side?

Jensen: I think maybe when we get right up here, I can point out what this fellow's proposal was. What he was talking about doing was having on one of these bare rocks, and I will point it out to you up here. A couple in bas relief, in deep relief, a couple of Conestoga wagons with oxen headed towards the west with human figures, and these were to be gigantic in size, these wagons would be fifty to seventy-five feet tall so that they would show up from a long distance away. I'll tell you what his burning proposal was in just a minute. What he proposed to do was to excavate the rock and make a bench straight up and down and then have these figures carved into the tall granite. And they would be, he proposed, at least two of these wagons with oxen and human figures and so on.

Now you understand this would cost you money to do this, and what he proposes on this bare rock right over here, would be where the emigrant train would be. And then on the rock off to the … there is another bare rock off to the west there, from coming down from that carved the same way ... would be a group of Indians coming on their horses as a wild ride, to attack the wagon train. I have ... He actually sent me blueprints and then drawings of the whole thing, course I have them all at home. But, you see, you would be able to see that work the minute that you came into the gap up here, and I suppose probably it would cost now a days, it would cost fifty million dollars to do it. But, I made the proposal to the Historical Society as he had asked me to do. And there was a good deal of discussion about it, no hurry at this session but, just talking about it, but it would make rather an outstanding display.

Logue: Martin's cove is back up in there?

Jensen: Martin's Cove is back up in there.

Logue: To the east?

Jensen: Yeah.

Logue: OK.

Jensen: [unclear] [conversation unclear].

Jensen: Yeah. Got a bank of sand here.

[End of Tape and Transcription]

Illustration

• Irving Garbutt’s Casper Journal photo of Henry Jensen and Floyd Widmer is from Garbutt’s article "Hole in the Wall Still Great Cattle Country," August 22, 1992, in the collections of the Casper College Western History Center. Used with permission and thanks.

The earliest people appear to have come to Wyoming from Asia, about 11,000 years ago. For thousands of years, they roamed the plains hunting big game on foot. Some of the animals were enormous—mammoths and giant bison, for example. Such others as camels and horses were about the size they are now. Probably the people worked in small groups, ambushing prey at springs or streams, preferring the younger and smaller mammoths and butchering two or three at a time. Many of the big mammals went extinct eleven or ten thousand years ago. About 7,000 years ago, a drought began that lasted 2,000 years. Bison and people seem to have disappeared from the plains altogether. In Wyoming, the people moved up into the mountains where it was cooler, and where there was water.

By 4,500 years ago, people had returned to the plains. Sometimes they stayed in caves and rock shelters. They gathered plants and ground the seeds, they fished, and they hunted and ate small mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. By that time the giant bison had been replaced by the modern Bison bison — what we call buffalo.

Around 500 A.D., people began using bows and arrows. In Wyoming they left rings of stones where they had pitched their tipis, and much larger stone circles oriented to the sun and stars. And they left pictures and carvings on rocks.
When we look at those carvings now, we can’t help but wonder about the ancient people who made them. Who were they? What was important to them? How did they make these pictures? And why?

Archaeologists now think there’s a good chance the people were direct ancestors of Shoshone people who live in Wyoming now, many of them on the Wind River Indian Reservation. And in recent years, the mostly white archaeologists have realized it makes sense to ask Shoshone people for help understanding the pictures and carvings their ancestors left on the rocks. Take, for example, the water ghost woman, whose image is on a rock face in Hot Springs County, near Thermopolis.

She may be Pa waip, a spirit woman of Shoshone stories. She’s definitely female, as can be seen from her breasts — a detail omitted from most rock images. Pa waip lives in watery places — rivers, lakes, hot springs. If you look closely you can see what may be streaks of tears below her eyes. She was known to cry and wail to trick men to come into the water to get to know her better. Then she would drown them. In her left hand she may be holding a turtle. You can see the roundish shape of the shell, and the four feet. Because she couldn’t leave the water, Pa waip depended on turtles to travel out on land to do favors for her. But if we look closely we see the turtle has no head. So perhaps it’s not a turtle. Perhaps it’s a child and those four turtle feet are actually two human hands and two human feet. Sometimes Pa waip would grab children, and bite their heads off.

But she wasn’t only bad. Pa waip wasn’t only a threat. She could also help people learn to help and heal each other. Her powers were particularly helpful against diseases like epilepsy, which can cause seizures in people.

These images are called pictographs if they are painted on the rocks, or petroglyphs if they are pecked or carved into the rocks. For a long time, white people thought of them as art. That is, they assumed the people who made them did so for the same reason Europeans and Euro-Americans paint, draw, or sculpt—to make beautiful things that last, and that may be returned to when a person wants to feel the pleasures of beauty.
But archaeologists now understand the rock pictures have for a long time been used as sources of spiritual power, and are still used that way now. This allows us to think of the images as windows connecting past and present, and connecting the spiritual world with the material world at hand. Like churches, temples, or cathedrals of Europeans and Euro-Americans, they may be ancient, but they can still be used for their original purposes. This is different from simply admiring them for their beauty.

People went to the pictographs and the petroglyphs seeking the power they need for a successful life. Take for example the winged figure from the canyon of Torrey Creek, a tributary of the Wind River in central Wyoming. Before approaching a picture like this, the people would bathe in a stream or lake. Then they would wait in front of it, perhaps for days, without food or water, waiting and praying for a vision or a dream that would show them their power. (Vision seeking is common to all tribes, not just Shoshones.) If the vision instructed them to do so, they would make a new image on the rock to record what they had seen. The details would be useful for future visions—both for the original dreamer and for later vision seekers. Archaeologists and anthropologists more or less agree that image making of all kinds in Plains Indian cultures—on rocks, on clothing, on tipis and household goods — is connected with this same kind of vision seeking. (See Francis & Loendorf, pp. 24-26.)

The spear points the ancient people left behind them, and the arrow heads, or even the big nets used to trap wild sheep, show how they managed to survive in the material world, where people get hungry and need to eat every day. In the same way, the rock pictures are tools they used to help maintain a strong and confident sense of the world and their part in it. Confidence is as important to survival as eating. White people have been curious for some time about the rock images and their makers. In 1873, Captain William A. Jones of the U.S. Army led an expedition north from Fort Bridger on the new transcontinental railroad to Yellowstone Park. On the way he passed the Wind River and its tributaries in what’s now Fremont County, near Lander. He noticed rock images at four different places and reported on them in detail. Jones speculated that the first of these places “may have been used as a place of incantation by some Indian medicine-man.” But he was convinced Shoshone people did not make the images. To him they were only signs of the past — not places that had a spiritual purpose in the present. (Francis and Loendorf, 33-34)

In the late 1920s, an alert teenager named David Love left his family ranch on Muskrat Creek in a dry, remote part of Fremont County to attend the University of Wyoming. There he learned that a French archaeologist, Etienne Renaud, from the University of Denver, was surveying pictograph and petroglyph sites all over the high plains. Renaud had studied the ancient cave paintings of France and Spain, and was eager to see how ancient American images compared. Love knew of a spot packed full of Indian images. It was near his family’s ranch and called Castle Gardens, because its sandstone cliffs and cedar trees reminded people of castles with gardens growing on tops of the walls. Love wrote Renaud several times, and finally persuaded the archaeologist to come have a look. Renaud arrived in 1931 and returned the next year. He was so impressed by Love’s knowledge that he included Love’s descriptions in his own report.

Love’s favorite among the huge variety of images was a big, brightly colored turtle.

It was a foot high, nine inches across, with a circle drawn around it. The shell was divided into sections by incised lines, that is, lines cut deeply into the rock. The criss-crossing lines divided the turtle shell into about 50 different sections, each colored differently from the one next to it. Each of the turtle’s four legs was also divided by incised lines into sections — scales, they looked like. Each leg, Love noticed, had the same number of scales, and the corresponding scale on each leg was the same color. And each foot had five claws. The sections were green, yellow, or a reddish purple. The head was triangular, and red.

The length of the tail and the triangular head convinced Love the person who made the image knew turtles well, though turtles are rare in such dry country. The triangular head made Renaud believe it was a snapping turtle. He knew that snapping turtles along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers can grow to 120 pounds, and that turtles show up in many ancient Indian images in those valleys. (Love 690-692; Renaud, 9-16). Turtles show up too in ancient rock images throughout the high plains of the West. Clearly they’ve been important to people for thousands of years. Like people who become skilled in moving between the spiritual and material worlds, turtles move easily between water and land.

Renaud published his report in 1936. A few years later, Ted Sowers, an archaeologist working for the State of Wyoming, returned to Castle Gardens to photograph the turtle. He found the image gone, and only a hole in the rock left to show where it had been. Vandals had stolen it. What happened next is unclear, but the story goes that word went out among the people of Fremont county that the turtle had better turn up again if no one wanted their legs broken. The turtle did resurface, and was donated to the Wyoming State Museum in Cheyenne on Sept. 20, 1941. There it may still be seen. Its colors have dulled since Love first described it, but it’s well worth the trip.

For Love and Renaud, however, all these rock images were pictures of a past culture, made by the imaginations of people no longer among us. But in 1983, Mary Helen Hendry, a central Wyoming rancher, artist, and anthropologist (and longtime member of the Natrona County School Board) published a book, full of photos and descriptions of pictographs and petroglyphs in Wyoming. She photographed a site that had first been sketched by an army officer in 1882. But she noticed the headdress of one of the figures had been added to. Clearly, Indians were continuing to use the images in the late 1800s and early 1900s, perhaps down to the present. (Hendry, 12-14, cited in Francis & Loendorf, 34.)

Resources

Books and websites where you can learn more about Wyoming’s ancient people and the images they left behind them are listed below. Better, however, would be to visit the state museum for a look at the great turtle, and better still would be to visit the sites themselves. The three best are best are Castle Gardens, the Legend Rock Petroglyph Site, and the Medicine Lodge State Archaeological Site.

Field Trips

Northwest Wyoming

• Medicine Lodge State Archaeological Site near Hyattville.
• Legend Rock State Petroglyph Site, northwest of Thermopolis.
• Mummy Cave, west of Cody.

Northern Wyoming

• The Medicine Wheel, on US 14A between Lovell and Burgess Junction.

Northeast Wyoming

• Pictographs near Outlaw Canyon, west of Kaycee.

Central Wyoming

• Castle Gardens, 28 miles south of Moneta.

Southern Wyoming

• Saratoga Museum buffalo-kill diorama and related artifacts. 
And check at your own county museum for more information on local sites and ancient artifacts.

Secondary Sources

• Francis, Julie E. and Lawrence Loendorf. Ancient Visions: Petroglyphs and Pictographs of the Wind River and Bighorn Country, Wyoming and Montana. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 2002. An excellent and up-to-date scholarly overview, with many color photos and good black-and-white drawings of the rock pictures.
• Hendry, Mary Helen. Indian Rock Art in Wyoming. Lysite, Wyoming: privately published, 1983. Numerous black and white photos, and good drawings.
  Love, J. D. “Petroglyphs of Central Wyoming.” Annals of Wyoming vol. 9 number 2 (1932): pp. 690-693. This is an excerpt of a paper Love first wrote when he was a student at Lander High School.
• Jones, William A. Report on the Reconnaissance of Northwestern Wyoming Made in the Summer of 1873. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1874. His report, plus cool old fold-out maps. This book is in many Wyoming libraries.
• Renaud, E. B. [Etienne Bernardeau, born 1880] “Pictographs and Petroglyphs of the High Western Plains.” Archaeological Survey of the High Western Plains, Eighth Report. Denver: University of Denver Department of Anthropology, 1936. See pages 9-16 for his description of Castle Gardens, which relies heavily on Love’s.
• Check online for books in all Wyoming libraries including the one closest to you.

Online

• The Bureau of Land Management has a good overview of rock-picture sites on federal land in Wyoming on its page on Resources at Risk. This site is well maintained and up to date.
• For more on understanding and preserving ancient rock pictures, see a description of a summer course that Lawrence Loendorf offered a few years ago at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody.
• See also the Chief Washakie Foundation’s excellent overview of rock images in central Wyoming, taken from American Rock Art Research Association’s (ARARA) Exhibition Catalog from a conference in Wyoming in 2002. The images of the water-ghost woman and the winged figure are among ten shown and discussed in detail on this site. There’s lots of other good stuff on Wyoming’s Indians, especially Shoshones, on the Chief Washakie Foundation web site as well.

Nov. 19, 1925, was a cold night for football in the oil boomtown of Midwest, Wyo. “Don’t Miss It,” the Casper Herald had advised the day before. “Something New, Football at Night, Casper vs. Midwest.”

“Floodlights,” the advertisement continued, would be “assisted by open gas flares for light and warmth—the roads are fine …” Fine perhaps, but still dirt in 1925. Midwest is 40 miles north of Casper.

For the football game, Midwest Refinery Company electricians set up 12 floodlights of 1,000 candlepower each around the field, four more of 2,000 candlepower, and from the top of an oil derrick near the field, a huge searchlight swung its beam over the players and the crowd. Electricity had come to the oil fields around Midwest earlier that year, when the company built an electric plant to power thousands of oil-well pumps.

The football was white. The spectators jumped and hopped to stay warm in the frosty air. More than 1,000 people turned out for the game, most of them from Midwest and the other oil camps nearby. A few drove out from Casper on the dirt roads. People in the crowd “were stirred with the giant outdoor overhead lighted drama,” the company magazine noted, “with every play and every player brought out in cameo clearness, reminding all of nothing ever witnessed before.”

It was not the first lighted football game ever. But most likely it was the first night football game ever played in the West, and the first ever played between high school teams. The company cooperated with Midwest High School so oilfield workers could see a game. Working all the time, they generally couldn’t make it to games played in daylight. Casper won, 20-0.

The Salt Creek Oil Field

Midwest sits on high ground above Salt Creek, in the middle of the Salt Creek Oil Field, an oval-shaped piece of central Wyoming 10 miles long and five miles wide. People had been extracting oil from the ground there since 1889: a trickle at first, and then a river, and now a flood. Midwest was booming. The crude oil was pumped out of the ground and piped to Casper, where it was refined into gasoline and other products. Then the oil was shipped out on the railroad.

No one knew it at the football game, but the flood of oil would gradually subside. In the mid-1920s there may have been as many as 10,000 people living in the orderly company town of Midwest and in the messier oil camps scattered nearby. Hard to imagine now, when Midwest has fewer than 500 people.

Like so many oil fields, gas fields and mines in Wyoming, the Salt Creek field boomed, then busted. The bust was never complete, though. For 117 years, the oil has kept right on coming out of the ground. The Salt Creek field is one of the longest continually producing oil fields in the world.

Early discoveries

Salt Creek starts about 20 miles north of Casper and runs forty miles farther north, where it flows into the Powder River near Sussex, Wyo. Indians knew for a long time that black oil could be found floating on the surface of the creek at several spots, especially a place called Jackass Springs.

White people may first have learned of the oil when American Indians brought some to Fort Fetterman, on the North Platte River 50 miles east of what’s now Casper, to sell for horse ointment and wagon grease. A Laramie lawyer named Stephen Downey filed some mineral claims around Jackass Springs in 1883, on Salt Creek, a mile or two north of what’s now Midwest. In 1886, Wyoming’s territorial geologist, Samuel Aughey, filed a geological report.

Aughey noticed that the layers of rock around Salt Creek formed an anticline, a place where the layers bend upward, then down again. The layers had been deposited millions of years ago as sand or mud, then hardened into rock. Other pressures in the earth’s crust later bent the layers.

Oil, Aughey knew, is often trapped underground in space left by the up-bent rock. Aughey’s report included a sketch of these layers. It showed that some of the top layers, near the middle of the anticline, were missing. Wind, water and weather had eroded them away. These missing layers explain why the oil, once far underground, was now at the surface.

Cy Iba, a prospector with experience in California and the Black Hills of Dakota, began filing mineral claims along Salt Creek in 1887 and returning every summer to do the required annual work to keep his claims legal. Downey’s claims were absorbed by another group of investors, and they and Iba kept constant watch on each other to make sure the claims stayed up to date. If $100 worth of work wasn’t done on each 20-acre claim each year, another person could legally “jump” the claim—take it over for himself.

Finally, Phillip Shannon, who had learned the drilling business in the oil fields of Pennsylvania, drilled an oil well three miles down Salt Creek from Jackass Springs. It took months. In August 1890, Shannon struck oil when the hole was about 1,000 feet deep. He drilled a few more wells in the next few years.

String teams—teams of 12 to 18 horses or mules pulling a train, or string, of several wagons--freighted the oil to Casper. Each wagon had an oil tank on it. Shannon sold the oil to the railroad for lubricant. By 1895, he had built a small refinery at Casper that produced 15 different kinds of lubricants.

There was not a huge demand for oil yet. It was used mostly to lubricate all kinds of machines or to refine into kerosene, which was used in lamps.

A gusher and a boom

Shannon sold out in 1904 to a group of English, French and Belgian investors. They drilled a well 900 feet deep but the cable broke and the drill bits were lost. In 1907, another group of investors bought all the Iba claims. These ended up in the hands of a Dutch company. The Dutch hit some oil at a depth of 1,050 feet. At 1,092 feet they hit a lot more. A column of oil 100 feet high gushed up from the hole.

With the Dutch gusher, the boom was on. Oil was becoming big business. Automobiles, more popular all the time, ran on gasoline, which was refined from oil. And oceangoing ships were starting to shift from coal to oil-based fuels. Prospectors and investors swarmed to Salt Creek, eager to own all or part of a well that would make them rich.

But the law, written originally to regulate mining of metals like gold, silver and copper, made little sense when applied to oil and led to disputes and confusion. Any group of eight investors could partner up to claim 160 acres, with a different partner’s name attached to each 20-acre piece. Each piece could be held indefinitely, as long as $100 worth of work was done on it each year. Claims were often held for years before the original claimants found investors with enough money and boldness to drill a well—an expensive proposition.

This meant busy work had to be done each year to hold the claim. For example, a pit 10 feet square and five feet deep could count as $100 worth of work, as could a 2-inch hole drilled to a depth of 65 feet. Claimants who failed to do the work risked having the claim jumped. Once oil was struck in moneymaking quantities, claimants could buy the land outright from the government for a price that was low even then--$2.50 per acre.

Then in 1909, the U.S. government’s Department of Interior declared that all unclaimed land around the Salt Creek field would be withdrawn—that is, no new land would be available for claims.

By 1910, some order was beginning to replace the freewheeling confusion. Two main companies emerged. By 1912, the Wyoming Oil Fields Company and the Midwest Oil Company had each built a new refinery in Casper and had laid pipe from the wells on Salt Creek to the new refineries. There were still plenty of smaller outfits around, but the government’s earlier withdrawal meant that there would be no new lands to claim at Salt Creek.

By the end of 1913, the Midwest Refining Company had bought, swapped for or absorbed enough of the other interests that it became the biggest company on Salt Creek. It owned mineral claims, producing wells, pumping stations, pipelines, storage tanks and refineries. Most of its workers lived at the biggest of the camps along Salt Creek—for now still called Home Camp—the town that later would become Midwest.

Tom Wall’s jobs

Tom Wall grew up around horses on ranches, but for better wages went to work in the oil field in 1917. His job was to protect Midwest Refining Company claims from claim jumpers. The country was rough. The simplest way to do the job was on horseback. Riders were not allowed to carry guns. No one wanted the conflict to get too serious. Often, it was good natured. Once, Wall remembered later, a company sent 30 men to jump a claim. They found another large group for another company was protecting it. Instead of fighting, the men on both sides slept on the claim, ate, played cards together and drew company wages for several more days.

Wall’s next job was as a tank gauger, measuring or gauging the levels of oil in storage tanks. At the time, oil from various pumping stations around the field was pumped to a central station—Station One. There, it was stored in tanks big enough to hold 65,000 barrels of oil. The oil was then pumped to storage tanks in Casper’s so-called tank farm. The “farm” was an entire hillside south of the North Platte River. In the coming decades it would hold hundreds of oil tanks.

Every hour the men at Station One telephoned Casper to tell how much oil they’d pumped. The men in Casper would reply with how much oil they’d received. This was a way to check for leaks: If no oil was missing, none had leaked.

World War I came along then. Wall was drafted into the U.S. Army. But he never got sent to France. When he returned to Wyoming, he went back to cowboying on the Spectacle Ranch north of the oilfields near Sussex, Wyo., where he’d worked years before. It was a bad time. The summer of 1919 was very dry, leaving the range without much grass. The next winter was very cold. Cattle suffered and died in droves. Ranches went out of business. Discouraged, Wall went back to Salt Creek.

People were now flocking to the oil fields, where the jobs were—not just from Wyoming but from all over the nation and from foreign countries, too. The field was booming.

Order in the oil field

In 1920, Congress changed the law to allow the modern system of leasing oil on government land. Companies could now bid on oil leases for specific tracts of government land. The leases would go to the highest bidder. Companies could count on holding the leases for as long as the oil lasted. The business steadied into a more even kind of growth.

Wall, meanwhile, landed another horseback job—riding lines. The oil field was webbed by a network of small pipes, or lines, two inches in diameter. The oil ran from wells to storage tanks and pumping stations. Water that came up out of the ground with the oil ran to tanks and reservoirs. Natural gas ran through lines to fire the boilers that ran the steam engines that powered the drilling rigs. The alkaline soil corroded the pipes, and they sprang leaks. Trucks drove over the pipes, and they broke. Everyone was in such a hurry that no one bothered to take up the pipes once they were no longer needed. Many ran to dead ends. Wall’s job was to ride the field full time, looking for leaks and taking up dead-end lines.

He had a grandstand seat for the oil field. Turning in his saddle, on any clear morning, he saw cars, trucks and horse-drawn wagons coming and going. He saw work crews building derricks, drilling crews drilling wells, gangs of men connecting the lines that seemed to run everywhere. On any given day another well was likely to strike oil. A gusher would spout sometimes higher than the derrick, and the land downwind would turn brown from the oil spray carried on the breeze. He held the job for eight years.

Life in a company town

During that time, the Midwest Oil Company built the company town. No more tents and tarpaper shacks. Single men working for the company could live in six-man bunkhouses, or 50-man boarding houses. Men with families were offered three- or four-room cottages. All were welcome to eat at the Midwest Hotel. Its dining hall routinely served 500 people, three meals a day. Rent and the cost of meals were taken out of the workers’ paychecks.

The company built a movie theatre, a two-story clubhouse and a two-story office building. Several of the companies jointly built a hospital. The Midwest company supplied gas, electricity, good water and incinerators. The company laid in irrigation lines so people could water their lawns, began contests for the most beautiful yards and offered free cottonwood saplings for anyone who wanted to plant trees. In photographs the streets look straight, and the identical houses look freshly painted. Home Camp changed its name to Midwest in 1923. It made sense, as the company owned the town.

At first, families were rare and most men were single. Children were scarce. The one-room school at Home Camp in 1913 averaged only 20 students. Within ten years, the schools were bursting. A four-room school built in 1922 held 160 students. Two years later a two-story frame high school was built big enough for 200 students. In 1925, students from many of the little schoolhouses in the outlying camps began being bussed in to Midwest. A photo from that year shows about 500 students in front of the Midwest school. A teacherage—a boarding house that could hold 16 single teachers—was finished in 1923.

Wall’s recollections make it seem as though there was an official social life in the company town, and a rougher one in the smaller, outlying camps. The official social life centered on churches, schools and the company clubhouse and dining hall. Prohibition was on, so drinking alcohol was illegal. Company rules forbade drinking and gambling in any case. But both went on in cafes and speakeasies in the smaller camps. And in the hills around the oil field, bootleggers kept stills, made plenty of illegal whiskey and sold it to the men.

Wall felt lucky all the rest of his life to fall into a friendship with Helen Clarke, one of the teachers who lived at the teacherage. She spent winters in Midwest and returned to her family in Missouri when school let out each summer. One October day in 1928, they traveled together to Casper. Wall bought a Chevrolet, and bought Helen a new diamond ring. “I felt jubilant, but broke,” he remembered. They were married a few weeks later.

A long, slow bust

By that time, drilling of new wells had about ceased in the Salt Creek Field. There were thousands of wells, and the pressure that pushed the oil out of the ground was falling. More and more of the wells needed pumps to keep them flowing. Men began leaving for newer, bigger fields in places like Texas and Montana. The Midwest Refinery Company was bought out by Standard Oil of Indiana. Operating as Stanolind Oil and Gas, the company had taken over all of Midwest’s operations in the field by the end of 1932.

The stock market, meanwhile, crashed in 1929, and the nation slid into the deepest depression it has ever known. Wages fell very low. Job after job disappeared. In 1932, the company stables were torn down, and all its draft teams and saddle horses were sold. Wall moved indoors to a series of clerking jobs, and then, in 1935, back outside to various jobs maintaining the wells and pumps. He felt lucky to have a job at all, “wearing overalls and getting a little grease smeared on me.”

The numbers of barrels of oil produced each year in the Salt Creek field clearly show the boom-bust patterns. In 1922, after the new leasing system came in, and after a new oil-bearing layer had been discovered deeper underground, the field produced 19 million barrels of oil. In 1923, the biggest year, 35.3 million barrels of oil came out of the field. By 1930, production was down to 10.5 million barrels and by 1945, 4.5 million barrels.

As for the town of Midwest, workers were allowed to buy the houses and own them outright beginning in the 1960s, and in 1975, the town, at last, incorporated. People finally could elect their own mayor and town council to govern them.

Still more oil

New laws in the 1930s allowed companies to pool their interests and hire a single company to operate—that is, drill, pump and maintain—an oil field. This made for much more efficient oil production. Stanolind was hired to run the entire field after 1933. Amoco eventually followed Stanolind. In 1997, the Howell Oil Company bought out Amoco’s interests, and in 2002, Anadarko bought out the Howell interests in the field.

The Salt Creek field has produced about 650 million barrels of oil over the last century or more. Anadarko analysts figured there might be 1 billion barrels left in the ground there—but the oil won’t flow under old methods. Instead, Anadarko injected carbon dioxide into the ground. The added pressure from the new gas keeps the oil flowing.

In the spring of 2015, Anadarko sold the field to Texas-based Fleur de Lis energy and its financial partner, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. for an undisclosed amount. Oil prices at the time had fallen precipitously in the previous six months. Company officials said they were glad to acquire “long-lived assets we look to own and operate.” 

Resources

Primary Sources

• Wall, J. Tom. Life in the Shannon and Salt Creek Oil Fields. Philadelphia: Dorrance & Company, 1973. Though he never says anything critical about the Midwest Oil Company or the Midwest Refining Company, Wall’s memory is long, clear and affectionate. This book is the main source for this account.
• Bille, Ed. Early Days at Salt Creek and Teapot Dome. Edited by Arlene Larson. Artwork by Bill Dickerson. Casper, Wyo.: Mountain States Lithographing, 1978. This book is packed with great photographs. See p. 91 for photos of the night-football teams.
• Prior, F.O. “The Salt Creek Electric Plant.” The Midwest Review, 6, no. 4 (April 1925). A long article on the engineering and construction of the electric plant. The Midwest Review was the company magazine. See back issues at the Casper College Western History Center.
• “Night Football Game in Salt Creek.” The Midwest Review, 6, no. 12, (December 1925).
• Bleizeffer, Dustin. “New Life for Old Field.” Casper Star-Tribune, Jan. 16, 2010. Accessed Jan. 10, 2014 at http://trib.com/news/local/article_16691a67-fff0-5cd9-b61d-3e2dac6bfa50.html.
• Storrow, Benjamin. "Anadarko sells Salt Creek oil field." Casper Star-Tribune, April 2, 2016. Accessed July 28, 2016 at http://trib.com/business/energy/anadarko-sells-salt-creek-oil-field/article_8ac6ddbd-7810-5cac-8ab9-d5d4b0887d68.html. 

Secondary Sources

• Mackey, Mike. Black Gold: Patterns in the Development of Wyoming’s Oil Industry. Powell, Wyo.: Western History Publications, 1997.
• “Oil Camp Photos.” Wyoming Tales and Trails, accessed Jan. 10, 2014 at http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/oilcamp.html.
• Roberts, Harold D. Salt Creek, Wyoming: the Story of a Great Oil Field. Denver: Midwest Oil Corporation, 1956.
• Rosenberg Historical Consultants. Tour Guide: Salt Creek Oil Field, Natrona County, Wyoming. Casper, Wyo.: Natrona County Commission, 2003.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. "Follow the Black Gold Byway," a brochure with historical information on the Shannon, Salt Creek and Teapot Dome oilfields and maps directing drivers to historical markers in Casper, Midwest and Edgerton, Wyo. that deal with the Salt Creek Field and the early oil booms. Accessed March 31, 2014 at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/pdf/BlackGoldByway.pdf.

Illustrations

The color postcards of the Salt Creek field and of Midwest, the diagram of the anticline, the photos of the tank truck, the Midwest theatre and downtown Lavoye are all from Wyoming Tales and Trails, with thanks. The black and white photo of the Salt Creek field looking east is by Bell’s Studio, from the Amoco Refining Co. collection, Casper College Western History Center, with permission and thanks. The photo of the old Midwest electric plant is by the author.

As travelers on the Oregon Trail made their way west up the Sweetwater River valley, they found the grade even, but the road was often sandy and the winding river required many crossings.

Thirty miles or so before the trail left the valley to climb steeper stretches toward South Pass, emigrants forded the river yet another time, crossed a sandy, five-mile stretch and then came to a place many seem to have heard about in advance, though some doubted its existence.

This was Ice Slough, better known in the 1840s, 1850s and 1860s as Ice Springs.

“We were told we would come to ice spring this evening,” California-bound Thomas Eastin wrote July 14, 1849. “[W]e were told that we would find it in a low swampy place and that by digging a little below the surface we would find plenty of ice. The story appeared incredible and we paid no attention to it …”

But when Eastin’s party arrived they found other travelers already camped there—and, in fact, one or two were eating ice. “They took us to the place where they got it and with a spade we dug down about 12 inches beneath the surface and there sure enough found as pure ice as I ever saw about 10 inches thick,“ he wrote.

“We took up a bucket full. The story I fear will hardly be believed but it is nevertheless true.”

The Ice Slough is actually a small, subsurface tributary that drains into the Sweetwater. A variety of marsh grasses and related tufted marsh plants, known as sedges, form a patchwork of surface plant life. Water flowing underneath this peat-like vegetation freezes solid in the winter and remains frozen during the spring and early summer, thanks to the insulating peat.

Longtime trails historian Gregory Franzwa called the slough "one of those absolutely delightful interludes that somehow seemed to crop up just as the incessant slogging west was putting emigrants in the lowest of spirits."

“Here we found a great curiosity,” Mormon pioneer Norton Jacob wrote June 24, 1847. “[It] would seem that Vegetation & Frost had agreed to operate in copartnership, for in digging through a grassy turf to open a Spring we found plenty of Ice!”

Some travelers were prepared for a treat. “[W]e gathered several buckets full [of ice], Dr. William Thomas noted on June 16, 1849, “from which we have had mint julips in abundance.” Others could only remember past pleasures. “[W]ere it not for the absence of Brandy and mint, we might have had a beautiful Julep,” Henry Mann wrote when he passed Ice Slough two weeks later.

Because the place was such a novelty, many, many diarists wrote about it. In spring and early summer, some described a layer of peaty plant life floating on a layer of heavily alkaline water, under which lay the ice—clear, sweet, thick and good tasting.

“The Ice is found from 8 to 10 inches beneath the surface,” James Pritchard wrote on June 16, 1849. “There is from 4 to 6 inches of water above the Ice, and a turf or sod of grass apparently flo[at]ing on the water, upon which you can walk all over it. You can stand and Shake for 2 or 3 rods Square.” Many emigrants noted this shaking ground as they passed; some seemed to have seen similar shaking in bogs elsewhere.

“The water above the Ice is pretty strongly impregnated with Alkali,” Pritchard continued. “To get to the Ice you take a spade or Ax & cut away the sod & then strike down & cut it out in Square blocks. The Ice is clear & pure entirely free from any Alkali or other unpleasant taste. It is from 4 to 10 inches thick, and as good as any I ever cut from the streams in Kentucky,” he concluded.

As the summer weeks passed, emigrants described a layer between the ice and the peaty plant layer that was more and more like mud and less like clear--if alkaline--water. By late summer, many were unable to find any ice at all.

Steady use of the trail over three decades by what eventually totaled hundreds of thousands of people and millions of head of livestock seems to have changed the place as well.

In early July 1862, Oregon-bound Aaron Clough found a company of around 40 soldiers camped near the slough, and most likely near what had been a Pony Express station the year before until that operation was abandoned on completion of the transcontinental telegraph. The troops were probably members of the Ohio cavalry regiment that had arrived in the area a few weeks earlier to protect white travelers from raids by Indian warriors.

The place seemed less charming to Clough than it had to earlier diarists. “The slough at Ice springs is a spouty, swampy place, and is a dangerous place for stock. You can shake the ground for rods around by jumping up and down. If an ox gets stuck in the slough, it is almost impossible to get him out. … The water has a bad taste, a kind of sulphury or stone coal taste, like the water in the wells down on the Platte.”

Two weeks later, Randall Hewitt found the place littered with the carcasses of dead animals, killed, apparently, by the bad water. Buzzards were preying on the carrion. “It was a dirty, sandy, pestilential hole,” he wrote.

And the Army’s horses and mules had eaten nearly all the grass. “This escort had so far succeeded in just about denuding the country of what little feed there was, and was always sure to locate and occupy the best spots,” Hewitt wrote.

He felt tricked; it made him angry. “This delectable spot is named ‘Ice Spring’ by the guide books,” he noted. “It was said ice could be found by digging down about two feet. All traces of ice, if there had ever been any in the summer season, had disappeared before we got there. That ice story was a cold-blooded romance, put in the guide books to deceive.”

Today, the place is accessible only by crossing private land. Little ice is left, according to the National Park Service, since well over a century of trampling by wild horses and season-long grazing by livestock has so damaged the peaty layer that it offers no insulation to protect ice from melting.

Resources

Primary sources

• Clough, Aaron. Diary. Aaron Clough Papers, 1860–1862. Microfilm 81, Oregon Historical Society of originals in possession of Mrs. J. M. Stamps, Portland, 1950. Richard Rieck transcription.
• Eastin, Thomas N. Journal, 1 May to 19 August 1849. Manuscript, Filson Club, The Filson Historical Society, Louisville, Kentucky. Typescript.
• Hewitt, Randall Henry. Across the Plains and Over the Divide: A Mule Train Journey East to West in 1862. New York: Argosy-Antiquarian, 1964.
• Jacob, Norton. The Mormon Vanguard Brigade of 1847: Norton Jacob’s Record. Ed. by Ronald O. Barney. Logan, Utah: Utah State University Press, 2005.
• Mann, Henry C. Diary. MSS C-F 130, Bancroft Library. Transcription by Richard L. Rieck.
• Pritchard, James A. The Overland Diary of James A. Pritchard, from Kentucky to California in 1849. Ed. by Dale L. Morgan. Denver, Colo: Fred A. Rosenstock and The Old West Publishing Company, 1959.
• Thomas, Dr. William L. Diary. Mss. CB 383:1, Bancroft Library. Transcription by Richard L. Rieck.

Secondary sources

• Brown, Randy. Oregon-California Trails Association. WyoHistory.org offers special thanks to this historian for providing the diary entries used in this article.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. “Ice Slough.” Emigrant Trails Throughout Wyoming. Accessed Feb. 16, 2017, at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/trailsdemo/iceslough256k.htm. The Franzwa quote and the Park Service information about the present lack of ice are from this article.

Illustrations

• The photo of Ice Slough in summer is by Jonathan Wheeler, from Panoramio. Used with thanks. The winter photo is by Randy Brown, used with permission and thanks. The aerial photo is from Wyoming Tales and Trails. Used with thanks.

The earliest people appear to have come to Wyoming from Asia, about 11,000 years ago. For thousands of years, they roamed the plains hunting big game on foot. Some of the animals were enormous—mammoths and giant bison, for example. Such others as camels and horses were about the size they are now. Probably the people worked in small groups, ambushing prey at springs or streams, preferring the younger and smaller mammoths and butchering two or three at a time. Many of the big mammals went extinct eleven or ten thousand years ago. About 7,000 years ago, a drought began that lasted 2,000 years. Bison and people seem to have disappeared from the plains altogether. In Wyoming, the people moved up into the mountains where it was cooler, and where there was water.

By 4,500 years ago, people had returned to the plains. Sometimes they stayed in caves and rock shelters. They gathered plants and ground the seeds, they fished, and they hunted and ate small mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. By that time the giant bison had been replaced by the modern Bison bison — what we call buffalo.

Around 500 A.D., people began using bows and arrows. In Wyoming they left rings of stones where they had pitched their tipis, and much larger stone circles oriented to the sun and stars. And they left pictures and carvings on rocks.
When we look at those carvings now, we can’t help but wonder about the ancient people who made them. Who were they? What was important to them? How did they make these pictures? And why?

Archaeologists now think there’s a good chance the people were direct ancestors of Shoshone people who live in Wyoming now, many of them on the Wind River Indian Reservation. And in recent years, the mostly white archaeologists have realized it makes sense to ask Shoshone people for help understanding the pictures and carvings their ancestors left on the rocks. Take, for example, the water ghost woman, whose image is on a rock face in Hot Springs County, near Thermopolis.

She may be Pa waip, a spirit woman of Shoshone stories. She’s definitely female, as can be seen from her breasts — a detail omitted from most rock images. Pa waip lives in watery places — rivers, lakes, hot springs. If you look closely you can see what may be streaks of tears below her eyes. She was known to cry and wail to trick men to come into the water to get to know her better. Then she would drown them. In her left hand she may be holding a turtle. You can see the roundish shape of the shell, and the four feet. Because she couldn’t leave the water, Pa waip depended on turtles to travel out on land to do favors for her. But if we look closely we see the turtle has no head. So perhaps it’s not a turtle. Perhaps it’s a child and those four turtle feet are actually two human hands and two human feet. Sometimes Pa waip would grab children, and bite their heads off.

But she wasn’t only bad. Pa waip wasn’t only a threat. She could also help people learn to help and heal each other. Her powers were particularly helpful against diseases like epilepsy, which can cause seizures in people.

These images are called pictographs if they are painted on the rocks, or petroglyphs if they are pecked or carved into the rocks. For a long time, white people thought of them as art. That is, they assumed the people who made them did so for the same reason Europeans and Euro-Americans paint, draw, or sculpt—to make beautiful things that last, and that may be returned to when a person wants to feel the pleasures of beauty.
But archaeologists now understand the rock pictures have for a long time been used as sources of spiritual power, and are still used that way now. This allows us to think of the images as windows connecting past and present, and connecting the spiritual world with the material world at hand. Like churches, temples, or cathedrals of Europeans and Euro-Americans, they may be ancient, but they can still be used for their original purposes. This is different from simply admiring them for their beauty.

People went to the pictographs and the petroglyphs seeking the power they need for a successful life. Take for example the winged figure from the canyon of Torrey Creek, a tributary of the Wind River in central Wyoming. Before approaching a picture like this, the people would bathe in a stream or lake. Then they would wait in front of it, perhaps for days, without food or water, waiting and praying for a vision or a dream that would show them their power. (Vision seeking is common to all tribes, not just Shoshones.) If the vision instructed them to do so, they would make a new image on the rock to record what they had seen. The details would be useful for future visions—both for the original dreamer and for later vision seekers. Archaeologists and anthropologists more or less agree that image making of all kinds in Plains Indian cultures—on rocks, on clothing, on tipis and household goods — is connected with this same kind of vision seeking. (See Francis & Loendorf, pp. 24-26.)

The spear points the ancient people left behind them, and the arrow heads, or even the big nets used to trap wild sheep, show how they managed to survive in the material world, where people get hungry and need to eat every day. In the same way, the rock pictures are tools they used to help maintain a strong and confident sense of the world and their part in it. Confidence is as important to survival as eating. White people have been curious for some time about the rock images and their makers. In 1873, Captain William A. Jones of the U.S. Army led an expedition north from Fort Bridger on the new transcontinental railroad to Yellowstone Park. On the way he passed the Wind River and its tributaries in what’s now Fremont County, near Lander. He noticed rock images at four different places and reported on them in detail. Jones speculated that the first of these places “may have been used as a place of incantation by some Indian medicine-man.” But he was convinced Shoshone people did not make the images. To him they were only signs of the past — not places that had a spiritual purpose in the present. (Francis and Loendorf, 33-34)

In the late 1920s, an alert teenager named David Love left his family ranch on Muskrat Creek in a dry, remote part of Fremont County to attend the University of Wyoming. There he learned that a French archaeologist, Etienne Renaud, from the University of Denver, was surveying pictograph and petroglyph sites all over the high plains. Renaud had studied the ancient cave paintings of France and Spain, and was eager to see how ancient American images compared. Love knew of a spot packed full of Indian images. It was near his family’s ranch and called Castle Gardens, because its sandstone cliffs and cedar trees reminded people of castles with gardens growing on tops of the walls. Love wrote Renaud several times, and finally persuaded the archaeologist to come have a look. Renaud arrived in 1931 and returned the next year. He was so impressed by Love’s knowledge that he included Love’s descriptions in his own report.

Love’s favorite among the huge variety of images was a big, brightly colored turtle.

It was a foot high, nine inches across, with a circle drawn around it. The shell was divided into sections by incised lines, that is, lines cut deeply into the rock. The criss-crossing lines divided the turtle shell into about 50 different sections, each colored differently from the one next to it. Each of the turtle’s four legs was also divided by incised lines into sections — scales, they looked like. Each leg, Love noticed, had the same number of scales, and the corresponding scale on each leg was the same color. And each foot had five claws. The sections were green, yellow, or a reddish purple. The head was triangular, and red.

The length of the tail and the triangular head convinced Love the person who made the image knew turtles well, though turtles are rare in such dry country. The triangular head made Renaud believe it was a snapping turtle. He knew that snapping turtles along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers can grow to 120 pounds, and that turtles show up in many ancient Indian images in those valleys. (Love 690-692; Renaud, 9-16). Turtles show up too in ancient rock images throughout the high plains of the West. Clearly they’ve been important to people for thousands of years. Like people who become skilled in moving between the spiritual and material worlds, turtles move easily between water and land.

Renaud published his report in 1936. A few years later, Ted Sowers, an archaeologist working for the State of Wyoming, returned to Castle Gardens to photograph the turtle. He found the image gone, and only a hole in the rock left to show where it had been. Vandals had stolen it. What happened next is unclear, but the story goes that word went out among the people of Fremont county that the turtle had better turn up again if no one wanted their legs broken. The turtle did resurface, and was donated to the Wyoming State Museum in Cheyenne on Sept. 20, 1941. There it may still be seen. Its colors have dulled since Love first described it, but it’s well worth the trip.

For Love and Renaud, however, all these rock images were pictures of a past culture, made by the imaginations of people no longer among us. But in 1983, Mary Helen Hendry, a central Wyoming rancher, artist, and anthropologist (and longtime member of the Natrona County School Board) published a book, full of photos and descriptions of pictographs and petroglyphs in Wyoming. She photographed a site that had first been sketched by an army officer in 1882. But she noticed the headdress of one of the figures had been added to. Clearly, Indians were continuing to use the images in the late 1800s and early 1900s, perhaps down to the present. (Hendry, 12-14, cited in Francis & Loendorf, 34.)

Resources

Books and websites where you can learn more about Wyoming’s ancient people and the images they left behind them are listed below. Better, however, would be to visit the state museum for a look at the great turtle, and better still would be to visit the sites themselves. The three best are best are Castle Gardens, the Legend Rock Petroglyph Site, and the Medicine Lodge State Archaeological Site.

Field Trips

Northwest Wyoming

• Medicine Lodge State Archaeological Site near Hyattville.
• Legend Rock State Petroglyph Site, northwest of Thermopolis.
• Mummy Cave, west of Cody.

Northern Wyoming

• The Medicine Wheel, on US 14A between Lovell and Burgess Junction.

Northeast Wyoming

• Pictographs near Outlaw Canyon, west of Kaycee.

Central Wyoming

• Castle Gardens, 28 miles south of Moneta.

Southern Wyoming

• Saratoga Museum buffalo-kill diorama and related artifacts. 
And check at your own county museum for more information on local sites and ancient artifacts.

Secondary Sources

• Francis, Julie E. and Lawrence Loendorf. Ancient Visions: Petroglyphs and Pictographs of the Wind River and Bighorn Country, Wyoming and Montana. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 2002. An excellent and up-to-date scholarly overview, with many color photos and good black-and-white drawings of the rock pictures.
• Hendry, Mary Helen. Indian Rock Art in Wyoming. Lysite, Wyoming: privately published, 1983. Numerous black and white photos, and good drawings.
  Love, J. D. “Petroglyphs of Central Wyoming.” Annals of Wyoming vol. 9 number 2 (1932): pp. 690-693. This is an excerpt of a paper Love first wrote when he was a student at Lander High School.
• Jones, William A. Report on the Reconnaissance of Northwestern Wyoming Made in the Summer of 1873. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1874. His report, plus cool old fold-out maps. This book is in many Wyoming libraries.
• Renaud, E. B. [Etienne Bernardeau, born 1880] “Pictographs and Petroglyphs of the High Western Plains.” Archaeological Survey of the High Western Plains, Eighth Report. Denver: University of Denver Department of Anthropology, 1936. See pages 9-16 for his description of Castle Gardens, which relies heavily on Love’s.
• Check online for books in all Wyoming libraries including the one closest to you.

Online

• The Bureau of Land Management has a good overview of rock-picture sites on federal land in Wyoming on its page on Resources at Risk. This site is well maintained and up to date.
• For more on understanding and preserving ancient rock pictures, see a description of a summer course that Lawrence Loendorf offered a few years ago at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody.
• See also the Chief Washakie Foundation’s excellent overview of rock images in central Wyoming, taken from American Rock Art Research Association’s (ARARA) Exhibition Catalog from a conference in Wyoming in 2002. The images of the water-ghost woman and the winged figure are among ten shown and discussed in detail on this site. There’s lots of other good stuff on Wyoming’s Indians, especially Shoshones, on the Chief Washakie Foundation web site as well.

Throughout the 1990s, natural gas began flowing in steadily increasing quantities from two big fields southwest of Pinedale, in western Wyoming. The resulting boom has been hard on local wildlife and air quality, and has industrialized a local ranching and tourist economy, perhaps forever. At the same time, the production has brought millions in tax and royalty revenues to federal, state, and Sublette County coffers, and has brought millions of dollars in profits to the companies that developed the fields.

It all came about because a father, his son, and their partner in a little oil company in Casper, Wyoming, thought to try drilling the area another time, and the business sense to know when and how to go about it. The story goes to the heart of Wyoming’s oil and gas culture, and raises important questions about energy production’s long-term costs and benefits.

The Pinedale Anticline Project Area (PAPA) is located in central Sublette County, Wyoming, on a narrow, diagonal 30-mile swath of land that stretches from just outside the Pinedale town limits south along U.S. Highway 191 to about 70 miles north of Rock Springs. It consists of 197,345 acres, 80 percent surface of which is federal, operated by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), five percent is State of Wyoming, and 15 percent is owned privately. By 2000, the PAPA was one of the newest and most productive gas fields in the continental United States. Gas reserves are estimated at up to 40 trillion cubic feet. That’s enough to serve the nation’s entire natural gas demand for 22 months.

The Jonah Field is located south of the Pinedale Anticline and also in Sublette County. It is approximately 35 miles south of Pinedale and about 70 miles north of Rock Springs. After being rediscovered in the early 1990s, Jonah Field was heralded as one of the most significant on-shore natural gas discoveries in the second half of the 20th century. The field has a productive area of 21,000 acres and is estimated to contain 10.5 trillion cubic feet (297 billion cubic meters) of natural gas. The National Petroleum Council, in its 2007 report “Facing the Hard Truths about Energy,” estimated total traditional natural gas resources in the Lower 48 States to be 764 trillion cubic feet. Ninety-eight percent of this field is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, with two state sections of one square mile each, and one private section of land.

Early attempts

California Oil Company, later named Chevron, first drilled on the Pinedale Anticline in 1939 using rotary tools, state-of-the-art drilling equipment at the time. Working only from the geological clues visible on the earth’s surface, these early oilmen had correctly figured out where to drill. But after drilling 10,000 feet into the earth, they found very little of what they were after — oil. They did, however, find plenty of natural gas. Unfortunately, there was no market for the gas and the company plugged and abandoned the site.

El Paso Gas Company purchased the well but with hopes to drill for gas. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the company drilled a total of seven wells in the area, all producing limited gas, making the venture an economic failure.

But El Paso made plans to return to the Pinedale Anticline in a big way in 1969, to experiment with detonating nuclear devices to assist with natural gas extraction. This attempt, Project Wagon Wheel, was designed to study the effectiveness of nuclear power to mine natural gas. El Paso geologists knew there was plenty of gas below the anticline, but it was locked tightly in sandstone rock formations that resisted conventional drilling methods. Radioactivity, according to a company report, was not expected to be a problem.

When the citizens of Sublette County learned of the planned nuclear detonation, several of them formed the Wagon Wheel Information Committee to learn more about the project. The group soon committed to educating people and stopping the project. Eventually they succeeded. Determined citizens prevented big industry and the federal government from detonating nuclear devices in their county.

Meridian Oil Company drilled next for gas on the Pinedale Anticline. But this company had similar problems. Its results were hampered by traditional drilling methods which did not work well in the Anticline’s tight sandstones. And there still was no good market for natural gas.

Meanwhile, new pollution-control laws were changing the business. The Clean Air Act of 1970 was amended in 1977 and again in 1990 to specify new strategies for cleaning up the air. Most of the nation’s electrical plants had been powered by coal, which emits high levels of ash, sulfur dioxide and mercury. The new strategies led companies to look for cleaner energy, including natural gas.

The Jonah Field

Recognizing the changing demand for energy the men at a small company in Casper, Wyoming, thought that natural gas would be a good investment. This was the McMurry Oil Company, started by W.M. “Neil” McMurry, with his son Neil “Mick” McMurry and John Martin as partners. With great foresight, they identified natural gas as a “clean fuel,” because, when burned, it emits nowhere near the toxins produced by a fuel like coal. (Since then, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has noted that greenhouse gas emissions from the production and transportation side of the natural gas industry are cause for concern). At the same time, the price of natural gas was low–and gas leases were therefore inexpensive.

“There were a lot of opportunities in [natural gas] and no one else believed in it,” recalls Mick. John and Mick looked for natural gas prospects “that we could believe in and afford,” says Mick. “We looked up in Canada, Nebraska, and Kansas — fortunately, none of those came together.” Then they found something right in Wyoming. It was called the Jonah Prospect, next to the Pinedale Anticline.

In 1991, McMurry Oil Company (MOC) purchased three wells in the Jonah Field from the Presidio Oil Company, which had shown unpromising early results. Along with the three wells the McMurrys purchased mineral leases on 25,000 acres of BLM land in the Jonah area.

Making the prospective investment more attractive to MOC was a new, efficient way to get natural gas out of Wyoming. The Kern River Pipeline was then under construction, with political support from Wyoming GovernorMike Sullivan and financial support from the state legislature. Built by the Williams Companies, Inc. and Tenneco Gas Company in a 50/50 joint venture, the 926-mile pipeline would extend from Opal, Wyoming, about forty miles south of the Jonah Field, to the San Joaquin Valley near Bakersfield, California. It was operational by February 1992 with a capacity of 700 million cubic feet per day.

The abandoned Jonah wells were located approximately ten miles from the old Meridian Pipeline, built years before to serve a few other unproductive wells on the Pinedale Anticline. They had never been hooked up. The Meridian line connected to the processing plant at Opal, and thus would connect to the new Kern River system.

Wardell Federal #1, the first of the three gas wells that would end up in the McMurrys’ hands was drilled in 1975 by Marvin Davis of Denver and his Davis Oil Company. That well produced too little gas to be economical. Ten years later, Canada’s Home Petroleum acquired Davis Oil and drilled two more wells a mile north of Davis’ well. Home’s first well, the Jonah #1-4, tested more than two million cubic feet of gas per day, but during the drilling process the formation was damaged, impairing gas flow. Home Petroleum drilled second well in 1987. That well fell victim to falling natural gas prices and was completed in only one formation. During the industry downturn of the late 1980s, Home Petroleum sold the wells and their leases to Presidio.

Fracking

Natural gas in the Jonah Field is “locked” in tight rock formations. To extract the gas, first the well is drilled, and then the formations must be broken down, creating channels for gas to flow. This is accomplished by fracturing (fracking) a formation, when fluid and/or compressed gas is forced at high pressure down the well fracturing the gas-bearing rocks, creating cracks and fissures. These fissures become conduits for gas to flow out of the formation and up the steel pipe set in the well. To keep the formation from closing back on the fissures and resealing the rock, solid material is mixed in the “frack fluid” to prop the channels open. The most commonly used “propant” is sand, or “frack sand.”

McMurry Oil Company recognized that the only way to successfully draw the gas through the well-bores was to develop new drilling and fracturing technology that would allow free flow of the gas through the formation. The company sought advice from the best consultants in the gas industry. Petroleum engineer James Shaw greatly assisted in developing a whole new system – and it worked.

It had been the hope of the McMurry Oil Company and its partners that the wells would produce one million cubic feet per day. To everyone’s great surprise and pleasure, the three wells produced two million. McMurry Oil Company reported its first production of gas in the Jonah Field to the Wyoming Oil and Gas Commission in September 1992.

The success of its first Jonah Field wells encouraged the company to keep drilling in the area. Over the next few years the company picked up additional BLM gas lease sales. To cover the additional costs of more drilling, the small company took on partners.

Next, McMurry Oil Company moved north to the Pinedale Anticline when it acquired an interest in partnership with Meridian Oil Company. The partnership’s first well, the New Fork Federal #11-8 was sunk to 11,587 feet. Unfortunately, it was “non-commercial,” or not economically viable. MOC moved back to the Jonah Field and did not return to the Pinedale Anticline until late 1995. In the meantime, Meridian sold its interest to Ultra Petroleum.

In 1996, drilling expanded significantly when Snyder and Amoco Corporation moved into the Jonah Field. They brought 3-D seismic survey equipment, instrumental in delineating the field’s key boundaries. The 3-D surveys allowed Amoco and Snyder to drill wells within 500 feet of faults and to know exactly where they were going in the formation. The new data helped pinpoint the areas of highest production. “That’s what made Jonah successful,” observes Mick McMurry.

More pipelines, more drilling, more wells

Initially hampering production, however, were limited pipelines, as well as a scarcity of compression facilities, which increase the pressure of gas in pipelines and enable the gas to flow properly. Four-inch pipelines were soon replaced with eight-inch surface pipeline. Then in 1996, a twelve-inch gas line was constructed with a capacity of 100 million cubic feet per day. The following year, a twenty-three-mile, sixteen-inch pipeline was added to connect Williams Field Services, Questar (after 2011, QEP in this area), Western Gas Resources, and FMC pipelines from the Jonah Field to processing facilities at Opal, Granger, and Black Fork, Wyoming. This line increased the daily transportation capacity to 175 million cubic feet.

On September 1, 1999, the Jonah Gas Gathering Company, a Wyoming partnership operated and partially owned by McMurry Oil Company, opened a new 50.5-mile, twenty-inch pipeline. The new line would transport the majority of the gas from the Jonah Field to Opal, where it connected with the Williams Field Services gas process facility. From Opal, the gas was marketed into three different pipelines: Kern River, Northwest, and Colorado Interstate Gas. Completion of the Jonah Gas Gathering pipeline increased gathering capacity on the Jonah Field from 175 to 320 million cubic feet per day.

The increased pipeline capacity enabled drilling in the Jonah Field and the Pinedale Anticline to grow at a remarkable pace. In December 1997, the BLM reported 58 wells in place. By December 1999, there were more than 150 wells in both fields. By July 2001, the well count reached 300.

This rapid expansion was permitted by the BLM. In April 1998, the agency formally allowed full-field development. The operators believed at this time they would need 497 wells to fully extract natural gas from the Jonah Field, though the report noted that between 300 and 350 wells was “most probably” the number.

By late 1998, it was clear both estimates were low. The companies began what’s called infill drilling — drilling new wells among producing wells in a developed field, to yield more gas faster. Infill drilling would nearly triple the number of well pads that had been considered adequate by operators and the BLM in 1998. By December 2000, the well count had jumped from 497 to 1,347. The total projected lifetime of the field had accordingly dropped to twenty-five years, half of the original estimate.

In June 2000, Alberta Energy Company bought McMurry Oil Company and became a major interest holder in the Jonah Field with a 35 percent interest. In 2002, Alberta Energy changed its name to EnCana, and become North America’s top independent natural gas producer.

In November 2001, McMurry Energy, created after the MOC sold its Jonah interest, sold its Pinedale Anticline holdings to Shell, formally known as the Royal Dutch/Shell Group’s Energy and Production Company. This was the international company’s first foray into Rocky Mountain natural gas in nearly two decades. Other major companies soon followed.

After 2000, drilling in the Jonah Field and Pinedale Anticline continued, spurred by high natural gas prices. In March 2003, the BLM reported that operators had requested permission for an infill drilling program that would add up to 1,250 new wells to replace their earlier request for 850 new pads. Surface well spacing would decrease to sixteen acres, or forty pads per square mile. The BLM raised its estimate of surface disturbance for wells and associated infrastructure by more than 40 percent, from 2,927 acres to 4,225 acres.

The Casper Star-Tribune reported in August 2003 that a total of 3,100 wells might ultimately be drilled in the Jonah Field — 1,300 more than had been requested in the March 2003 infill proposal. The recession in 2008 brought a drop in natural gas prices, resulting in a sudden reduction in drilling in the Jonah Field and the Pinedale Anticline. Drilling and production never stopped, but as of early 2011 was continuing at a slower pace. Drilling is likely to pick up again when the price of natural gas returns to a more profitable level.

Impacts

The Jonah Field rediscovery and successful extraction of natural gas initiated by McMurry Oil Company is heralded as one of the most significant natural gas developments in continental North America in the second half of the twentieth century. Jonah represents a turning point because of the enormous amount of production opened up by the new technologies. McMurry Oil Company’s technical advances in the early 1990s, coupled with higher gas prices and a quick boom in pipeline capacity, allowed it and other companies to lucratively produce gas from a previously inaccessible source. This success led to McMurry Oil Company’s expansion of the nearby Pinedale Anticline field a few years later.

Impacts brought on from drilling in the Jonah Field and Pinedale Anticline were not always welcomed, however, in the small Wyoming communities surrounding the area, notably Boulder, Pinedale, Big Piney, Marbleton, and La Barge, and the bigger towns of Rock Springs and Green River. The boom strained community housing, schools, and such services as law enforcement and health care.

A 2005 study of Pinedale residents conducted by sociologists from the University of Wyoming found that the newcomers brought many new “social impacts,” and that longtime residents found it “increasingly commonplace not to recognize someone while going to the bank or buying groceries.” Services were harder to get. A quick stop in the store was no longer quick, with long lines at the checkout. It took a longer wait to see a local doctor. For the first time, it was hard to find a parking spot. Perhaps most noticeable was how difficult it became to cross Pine Street, Highway 191, Pinedale’s main drag, with the constant traffic of heavily loaded semi trucks.

Concerns were raised, too, about the industry’s impact on wildlife, particularly sage grouse, pygmy rabbits, pronghorn antelope, and mule deer. The Sublette mule deer herd, one of the biggest in the state, winters on the Mesa – the northern portion of the Pinedale Anticline. To protect the deer, the BLM restricted drilling during critical winter months until 2008, when a new plan was developed that allows for year-round drilling if the herd population can be maintained. Mule deer numbers have declined significantly, though. A 2010 BLM report shows a decline in 60 percent in deer populations from 2001 to 2009, based on annual estimates. The report blames energy development disturbance. On the Mesa, deer have also lost nearly 2,000 acres of habitat over the past decade, with the majority, 85 percent, of the habitat loss attributed to well pads and the rest to road construction.

Measures have been taken to try to reduce impacts to wildlife and the environment in the Pinedale Anticline. Gas companies are coordinating their drilling efforts into designated areas for year-round development. These Development Areas (DAs) allow the companies to concentrate their activities and timing in specified areas leaving large blocks of contiguous habitat undisturbed and available to big game and their migration corridors and sage grouse habitat. In an effort to reduce the amount of area disturbed, companies have been clustering their wells onto a single pad and then using directional drilling from the pad, resulting in fewer pads and roads needed for drilling activity. By 2010, this method had allowed 100 fewer needed well pads in the Pinedale Anticline Project Area and 70 percent fewer roads to fully develop the field, leading to less habitat disturbance.

Sublette County citizens are concerned about the increased water and air pollution connected with the development. Long-time residents noticed a decline in year-round air quality starting in 2000. Air pollution is now a way of life. The situation became dire in 2008 when the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality began issuing “Ozone Alerts.” Ground-level ozone results from chemical reactions between oxides of nitrogen and volatile organic compounds in the presence of sunlight. Ozone levels get too high when too many engines, from all sources, are pumping dangerous emissions into the atmosphere that are then “cooked” by the sun, often when there is a snow cover to intensify the sunlight. High ozone levels can be particularly dangerous to people with compromised immune systems and respiratory problems. Air quality monitoring is now required, with ongoing steps taking place to alleviate the potentially dangerous situation, though “Ozone Alerts” continue.

At the same time, positive impacts from the successful drilling in the Jonah Field and Pinedale Anticline were immediate and far reaching. Millions of tax dollars have been collected as a result of the natural gas production in Sublette County, which have been used for improved infrastructure and community resources. Thousands of jobs have been created for local residents and for those willing to relocate to the area. Industry has also been very generous in volunteering time and donating money to organizations that serve the community. Industry operators have also worked with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to implement innovative technologies and operational practices that lessen the effect of natural gas operations on the environment.

Natural gas production continues in 2011, and so too, do many of the problems that came with it. Population growth has slowed somewhat since 2008, however, and the newcomers continue to be served reasonably well by private-sector housing and other services. At the same time, increased tax revenues have allowed local governments to be proactive in building infrastructure, and industry is working to alleviate the problems brought on by the drilling activity. Pipelines, for example, are being built to carry out the condensate now carried by large, dust-raising semi trucks. The BLM and Wyoming Game and Fish monitor the area, and face continued challenges.

Since 2010, additional natural gas fields in Wyoming and throughout the West have been located and development plans are underway. Citizens from Sublette County have been invited to these areas to discuss ways those communities can learn from Pinedale. These could be valuable lessons.

Resources

Primary Sources

• “Balancing Resources on the Pinedale Anticline.” The PAPA operators’ website, accessed Feb. 15, 2011 at http://www.papaoperators.com/.
• Ballou, Dawn. “Preserving Wildlife in the PAPA.” Pinedale Online! Jan. 18, 2010. Accessed Feb. 15, 2011 at http://www.pinedaleonline.com/news/2010/01/PreservingWildlifean1.htm.
• Ecosystem Research Group. “Sublette County Socioeconomic Impact Study, Phase II – Final Report.” September 28, 2009. Prepared for Sublette County Commissioners. Accessed Feb. 15, 2011 at http://www.sublettewyo.com/DocumentView.aspx?DID=392.
• Ostlind, Emilene. “Fox Guarding Pinedale Henhouse? Critics Call Wildlife Count ‘Unsound Science.’” WyoFile.com, July 12, 2010. Accessed Feb. 15, 2011 at http://wyofile.com/2010/07/fox-guarding-pinedale-henhouse-critics-call-wildlife-count-unsound-science/.
• “PAPA SEIS ROD Implementation.” Includes the Bureau of Land Management’s Record of Decision (ROD) for the Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) in the Pinedale Anticline Project Area (PAPA), with related links. Accessed Feb. 15, 2011 at http://www.blm.gov/wy/st/en/field_offices/Pinedale/anticline.html.
• Sawyer, Hall and Ryan Nielson. “Mule Deer Monitoring in the Pinedale Anticline Project Area: 2010 Annual Report.” Prepared for the Pinedale Anticline Planning Office of the BLM, Sept. 14, 2010. Accessed Feb. 15, 2011 at http://www.wy.blm.gov/jio-papo/papo/reports/2010annualreport_muledeer.pdf.

Secondary Sources

• Lederer, Adam. “Project Wagon Wheel: A Nuclear Plowshare for Wyoming,” Readings in Wyoming History: Issues in the History of the Equality State, fourth edition, edited by Phil Roberts. Laramie: Skyline Press, 2004, 214-227.
• Noble, Ann Chambers. Hurry McMurry: W.N. “Neil” McMurry, Wyoming Entrepreneur. (Casper, Wyo.: VLM Publishing LLC, 2010.) Includes more on the McMurry Oil Company and on fracking on the Jonah Field and Pinedale Anticline.
• __________________. Pinedale, Wyoming: A Centennial History 1904 – 200. (Pinedale, Wyo.: Sublette County Historical Society, 20005.) Includes more on Project Wagon Wheel and the Wagon Wheel Information Committee.

Illustrations

• The photo of the Pinedale Anticline from the air, 2009 is courtesy of the field’s current operators: Ultra/Shell/QEP.
• The photos of the founders of the McMurry Oil Company, Halliburton pumping the frack on the company’s first wildcat well, and of the pipeline construction are all courtesy of MOC.
• The photo of the working drill rig on the Pinedale Anticline is by Jonathan Selkowitz, from SkyTruth, used by permission.

Wyoming's fossils have been important to science since the 1870s and continue to be useful today. Remains of Triceratops, Diplodocus, Tyrannosaurus and others have helped answer—and raise—many questions about the ancient history of the planet and have captured popular imagination with their size or fierce appearance. The scientific value of these fossils and the public interest in them has brought many different collectors to the state who excavate fossils for shipment to museums all over the country. However, only a few major finds from Wyoming have remained in the state.

In 1877, employees of the Union Pacific Railroad found large bones weathering out of the hills at Como Bluff near Medicine Bow, Wyo., and wrote to paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh of Yale College, in Connecticut. Within a year, diggers hired by Marsh and teams working for paleontologist Edward D. Cope, of Philadelphia were excavating tons of fossil bones for shipment east. Marsh and Cope were bitter professional rivals, and the same spirit infected their employees.

Diggers smashed bones in the quarries of the other teams and even in their own to avoid thefts. No one will ever know what valuable specimens were lost to this rivalry, but the ones which were gained include Dryolestes, the first Jurassic mammal discovered in North America; large pieces of Apatosaurus, then known as Brontosaurus; several Baptanodons—marine reptiles; and many others. Specimens collected for Marsh went to the Peabody Museum at Yale; those gathered for Cope went mostly to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

Museums closer to the fossil locations also acquired specimens. In the 1890s, the University of Wyoming accumulated a large collection of Jurassic fossils (unfortunately, most of this collection was lost to flooding in the 1920s), and in 1895 Prof. Samuel Williston of the University of Kansas traveled to Lusk, Wyo., to collect for the university’s museum the first Triceratops skull ever to go on display.

The best and most scientifically important fossils, however, left the region in large part because the expert collectors, the most eminent scientists and the best museum facilities—where specimens could be safely preserved for future examination by scientists—were on the East Coast.

In 1898, the American Museum of Natural History discovered the Bone Cabin Quarry north of Medicine Bow, where fossil bones were so plentiful that a local resident built his cabin’s foundation entirely with bone chunks. (This structure no longer exists, and is a different structure from the so-called fossil cabin, a roadside attraction on U.S. 30 just south of Como Bluff built entirely of fossil bones in the 1930s.)

In the five years following 1898, the Bone Cabin Quarry was worked nearly to exhaustion, yielding parts of many large Jurassic dinosaurs in the process. Additionally, AMNH crews explored other areas of the state, discovering a duck-billed dinosaur of the hadrosaur family near Lusk that retained extensive skin impressions surrounding the body.

On July 2, 1899, a Diplodocus was found at Sheep Creek about 25 miles north of Como Bluff. This fossil was one of the first large specimens collected for the budding Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh, Pa. When Andrew Carnegie paid to have the skeleton replicated and copies sent to museums in Britain, Europe and Argentina, he made it perhaps the most famous dinosaur ever to come from Wyoming. Millions of people first heard of dinosaurs and paleontology by seeing a mount of Diplodocus carnegii.

A second dinosaur from the Sheep Creek quarry was an Apatosaurus excavated in 1901. It also was dug for the Carnegie Museum, but never mounted. In 1955, the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Wyo. acquired this specimen for its Geological museum, where it is still on display.

In 1975, numerous tracks of pterosaurs—flying reptiles—were discovered near Alcova Lake. At that time, only one set of tracks was known; with the evidence provided by the Alcova fossils, some long‑standing assumptions about the behavior and environment of pterosaurs were revised.

In 1991, a private collector found an Allosaurus near Shell, Wyo., on the west flank of the Bighorn Mountains. The fossil was eventually determined to lie on public land and was collected by the Bureau of Land Management, the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., and the University of Wyoming. The Museum of the Rockies retained the bones and made casts, now on display in Bozeman and Laramie. This discovery of "Big Al" and associated fossils helped prompt an effort to revise fossil law and limit commercial collecting on public land.

In 1997, the Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite, the largest in Wyoming, was discovered in the Sundance Formation southwest of Shell, the tracks apparently representing a large herd of dinosaurs moving along a beach. Scientists had previously thought that the entire Sundance Formation was marine—that is, that its sediments were laid down under water—but these tracks showed that a large dry area must have been present to support such numbers of land dwellers.

In 2006, "Apollo," one of the most complete diplodocid skeletons, retaining 83 percent of the original bones, was dug at Tensleep, Wyo., by a private firm. This specimen was discovered with others in a world‑class assemblage of numerous nearly complete skeletons, and the new material is already stirring debates over the habits and relationships of sauropods, the long-tailed, long-necked, elephant-legged plant eaters, including Diplodocus, Apatosaurus and Superasaurus.

In recent years, museums in Wyoming, such as the private Wyoming Dinosaur Center of Thermopolis and the Tate Museum of Casper College, have been expanding and acquiring more, more complete and more intact specimens. "Jimbo," the Supersaurus vivianae at the Dinosaur Center, was discovered near Douglas in 1995 and, as the second specimen of one of the biggest sauropod species known, has been exhibited internationally. Current research on this fossil may help scientists reclassify the sauropod family.

"Dee," the largest mounted Columbian mammoth in North America, was found in 2006 on a ranch north of Casper, Wyo. and is now on display at the Tate Museum. The Tate has also recently collected a Tyrannosaurus rex north of Lusk, Wyo.; this specimen is the first found in Wyoming to stay in the state.

Wyoming's fossils have contributed to cultural and scientific development across much of the world and will probably continue to do so. Although the supply of world-class specimens is limited, it is not yet exhausted. Many in Wyoming hope that as its scientific institutions mature, the state will be able and qualified to retain some of these finds.

Resources

• "Apollo, the most complete Diplodocus ever discovered…" Accessed 9/3/11 at www.washakiemuseum.org/doc/apollo_til_Oct1.pdf
• Bennette, S. Christopher. "Terrestrial Locomotion of Pterosaurs: a Reconstruction Based on Pteraichnus Trackways."Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 17, no. 1, (1997): 104-113.
• "Casper College Announces Discovery of T. Rex." Casper College News Release, February 23, 2011. Accessed 9/3/2011 at www.tatetrex.com/press/downloads/DiscoveryAnnouncement-0211.doc
• Colbert, Edwin. The Great Dinosaur Hunters and Their Discoveries. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co, 1968, 151-154, 195-196.
• "Dee the Mammoth and the Pleistocene Exhibit." Accessed 9/3/2011 at www.caspercollege.edu/tate
• "Discovery/Background" [of the Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite] Accessed 9/3/2011 at http://www.blm.gov/wy/st/en/field_offices/Worland/Tracksite/discovery.html
• "Discovery of Rare Fossil in Wyoming Sparks Protection Bill for Dinosaur Bones and Fish," The Sheridan Press, 11 July 1992, 13.
• Galliano, Henry and Raimund Albersdorfer, “A New Basal Diplodocid Species …” Tensleep, Wyo.: Dinosauria International, 2010. Accessed Aug. 29, 2010 at http://dinosauriainternational.com/downloads/Amphicoelias.pdf.
• "Jimbo the Supersaurus."Casper Star-Tribune, 4 June 2007.
• Kohl, Michael, Larry Martin and Paul Brinkman, eds. A Triceratops Hunt in Pioneer Wyoming. Glendo, Wyo.: High Plains Press, 2004, 14-24.
• Logue, Terrence. "Preliminary Investigation of Pterodactyl Tracks at Alcova, Wyoming."The Wyoming Geological Association Earth Science Bulletin, 10, no. 2, 29-30 (1977).
• "Major Dinosaur Find at Shell."Casper Star-Tribune, n.d., August 1992.
• Ostrom, John and John McIntosh. Marsh's Dinosaurs: The Collections from Como Bluff. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966, 1-47.
• Rea, Tom. Bone Wars: The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie's Dinosaur. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press: 2001, 18-19, 87-90, 158-178, 249.
• Rea, Tom. "Dinosaur Find Near Greybull Highlights Contrasting Motives for Bone Digging,"Casper Star-Tribune, 6 October 1991, B1.
• "Science" [relating to the Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite] Accessed 9/3/2011 at http:www.blm.gov/wy/st/en/field_offices/Worland/Tracksite/science.html
• Vergano, Dan. "Dinosaur Discoveries Shake Up Sauropod Story,"USA Today, 11 October 2010. Accessed 9/18.11 at http://m.usatoday.com/article/tech/danvergano/40539416.

Field Trips

Warning: While fossil-bearing rocks are present around Wyoming, it is illegal to collect on private land without permission of the landowner or to collect fossils of vertebrates on public land without a permit. It is the collector's responsibility to be aware of the land boundaries and the regulations. Consult the nearest geological museum for advice on sites and collecting.

Illustrations

• The photo of north face of Como Bluff, looking southwest toward Elk Mountain beyond, is by longtime Casper Star-Tribune photographer Zbigniew Bzdak. Casper Star-Tribune collection, Casper College Western History Center. Used with thanks.
• The image of the observation platform at the Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite is a UW Geological Museum photo from the photo gallery at BLM’s website. Used with thanks.

Nov. 19, 1925, was a cold night for football in the oil boomtown of Midwest, Wyo. “Don’t Miss It,” the Casper Herald had advised the day before. “Something New, Football at Night, Casper vs. Midwest.”

“Floodlights,” the advertisement continued, would be “assisted by open gas flares for light and warmth—the roads are fine …” Fine perhaps, but still dirt in 1925. Midwest is 40 miles north of Casper.

For the football game, Midwest Refinery Company electricians set up 12 floodlights of 1,000 candlepower each around the field, four more of 2,000 candlepower, and from the top of an oil derrick near the field, a huge searchlight swung its beam over the players and the crowd. Electricity had come to the oil fields around Midwest earlier that year, when the company built an electric plant to power thousands of oil-well pumps.

The football was white. The spectators jumped and hopped to stay warm in the frosty air. More than 1,000 people turned out for the game, most of them from Midwest and the other oil camps nearby. A few drove out from Casper on the dirt roads. People in the crowd “were stirred with the giant outdoor overhead lighted drama,” the company magazine noted, “with every play and every player brought out in cameo clearness, reminding all of nothing ever witnessed before.”

It was not the first lighted football game ever. But most likely it was the first night football game ever played in the West, and the first ever played between high school teams. The company cooperated with Midwest High School so oilfield workers could see a game. Working all the time, they generally couldn’t make it to games played in daylight. Casper won, 20-0.

The Salt Creek Oil Field

Midwest sits on high ground above Salt Creek, in the middle of the Salt Creek Oil Field, an oval-shaped piece of central Wyoming 10 miles long and five miles wide. People had been extracting oil from the ground there since 1889: a trickle at first, and then a river, and now a flood. Midwest was booming. The crude oil was pumped out of the ground and piped to Casper, where it was refined into gasoline and other products. Then the oil was shipped out on the railroad.

No one knew it at the football game, but the flood of oil would gradually subside. In the mid-1920s there may have been as many as 10,000 people living in the orderly company town of Midwest and in the messier oil camps scattered nearby. Hard to imagine now, when Midwest has fewer than 500 people.

Like so many oil fields, gas fields and mines in Wyoming, the Salt Creek field boomed, then busted. The bust was never complete, though. For 117 years, the oil has kept right on coming out of the ground. The Salt Creek field is one of the longest continually producing oil fields in the world.

Early discoveries

Salt Creek starts about 20 miles north of Casper and runs forty miles farther north, where it flows into the Powder River near Sussex, Wyo. Indians knew for a long time that black oil could be found floating on the surface of the creek at several spots, especially a place called Jackass Springs.

White people may first have learned of the oil when American Indians brought some to Fort Fetterman, on the North Platte River 50 miles east of what’s now Casper, to sell for horse ointment and wagon grease. A Laramie lawyer named Stephen Downey filed some mineral claims around Jackass Springs in 1883, on Salt Creek, a mile or two north of what’s now Midwest. In 1886, Wyoming’s territorial geologist, Samuel Aughey, filed a geological report.

Aughey noticed that the layers of rock around Salt Creek formed an anticline, a place where the layers bend upward, then down again. The layers had been deposited millions of years ago as sand or mud, then hardened into rock. Other pressures in the earth’s crust later bent the layers.

Oil, Aughey knew, is often trapped underground in space left by the up-bent rock. Aughey’s report included a sketch of these layers. It showed that some of the top layers, near the middle of the anticline, were missing. Wind, water and weather had eroded them away. These missing layers explain why the oil, once far underground, was now at the surface.

Cy Iba, a prospector with experience in California and the Black Hills of Dakota, began filing mineral claims along Salt Creek in 1887 and returning every summer to do the required annual work to keep his claims legal. Downey’s claims were absorbed by another group of investors, and they and Iba kept constant watch on each other to make sure the claims stayed up to date. If $100 worth of work wasn’t done on each 20-acre claim each year, another person could legally “jump” the claim—take it over for himself.

Finally, Phillip Shannon, who had learned the drilling business in the oil fields of Pennsylvania, drilled an oil well three miles down Salt Creek from Jackass Springs. It took months. In August 1890, Shannon struck oil when the hole was about 1,000 feet deep. He drilled a few more wells in the next few years.

String teams—teams of 12 to 18 horses or mules pulling a train, or string, of several wagons--freighted the oil to Casper. Each wagon had an oil tank on it. Shannon sold the oil to the railroad for lubricant. By 1895, he had built a small refinery at Casper that produced 15 different kinds of lubricants.

There was not a huge demand for oil yet. It was used mostly to lubricate all kinds of machines or to refine into kerosene, which was used in lamps.

A gusher and a boom

Shannon sold out in 1904 to a group of English, French and Belgian investors. They drilled a well 900 feet deep but the cable broke and the drill bits were lost. In 1907, another group of investors bought all the Iba claims. These ended up in the hands of a Dutch company. The Dutch hit some oil at a depth of 1,050 feet. At 1,092 feet they hit a lot more. A column of oil 100 feet high gushed up from the hole.

With the Dutch gusher, the boom was on. Oil was becoming big business. Automobiles, more popular all the time, ran on gasoline, which was refined from oil. And oceangoing ships were starting to shift from coal to oil-based fuels. Prospectors and investors swarmed to Salt Creek, eager to own all or part of a well that would make them rich.

But the law, written originally to regulate mining of metals like gold, silver and copper, made little sense when applied to oil and led to disputes and confusion. Any group of eight investors could partner up to claim 160 acres, with a different partner’s name attached to each 20-acre piece. Each piece could be held indefinitely, as long as $100 worth of work was done on it each year. Claims were often held for years before the original claimants found investors with enough money and boldness to drill a well—an expensive proposition.

This meant busy work had to be done each year to hold the claim. For example, a pit 10 feet square and five feet deep could count as $100 worth of work, as could a 2-inch hole drilled to a depth of 65 feet. Claimants who failed to do the work risked having the claim jumped. Once oil was struck in moneymaking quantities, claimants could buy the land outright from the government for a price that was low even then--$2.50 per acre.

Then in 1909, the U.S. government’s Department of Interior declared that all unclaimed land around the Salt Creek field would be withdrawn—that is, no new land would be available for claims.

By 1910, some order was beginning to replace the freewheeling confusion. Two main companies emerged. By 1912, the Wyoming Oil Fields Company and the Midwest Oil Company had each built a new refinery in Casper and had laid pipe from the wells on Salt Creek to the new refineries. There were still plenty of smaller outfits around, but the government’s earlier withdrawal meant that there would be no new lands to claim at Salt Creek.

By the end of 1913, the Midwest Refining Company had bought, swapped for or absorbed enough of the other interests that it became the biggest company on Salt Creek. It owned mineral claims, producing wells, pumping stations, pipelines, storage tanks and refineries. Most of its workers lived at the biggest of the camps along Salt Creek—for now still called Home Camp—the town that later would become Midwest.

Tom Wall’s jobs

Tom Wall grew up around horses on ranches, but for better wages went to work in the oil field in 1917. His job was to protect Midwest Refining Company claims from claim jumpers. The country was rough. The simplest way to do the job was on horseback. Riders were not allowed to carry guns. No one wanted the conflict to get too serious. Often, it was good natured. Once, Wall remembered later, a company sent 30 men to jump a claim. They found another large group for another company was protecting it. Instead of fighting, the men on both sides slept on the claim, ate, played cards together and drew company wages for several more days.

Wall’s next job was as a tank gauger, measuring or gauging the levels of oil in storage tanks. At the time, oil from various pumping stations around the field was pumped to a central station—Station One. There, it was stored in tanks big enough to hold 65,000 barrels of oil. The oil was then pumped to storage tanks in Casper’s so-called tank farm. The “farm” was an entire hillside south of the North Platte River. In the coming decades it would hold hundreds of oil tanks.

Every hour the men at Station One telephoned Casper to tell how much oil they’d pumped. The men in Casper would reply with how much oil they’d received. This was a way to check for leaks: If no oil was missing, none had leaked.

World War I came along then. Wall was drafted into the U.S. Army. But he never got sent to France. When he returned to Wyoming, he went back to cowboying on the Spectacle Ranch north of the oilfields near Sussex, Wyo., where he’d worked years before. It was a bad time. The summer of 1919 was very dry, leaving the range without much grass. The next winter was very cold. Cattle suffered and died in droves. Ranches went out of business. Discouraged, Wall went back to Salt Creek.

People were now flocking to the oil fields, where the jobs were—not just from Wyoming but from all over the nation and from foreign countries, too. The field was booming.

Order in the oil field

In 1920, Congress changed the law to allow the modern system of leasing oil on government land. Companies could now bid on oil leases for specific tracts of government land. The leases would go to the highest bidder. Companies could count on holding the leases for as long as the oil lasted. The business steadied into a more even kind of growth.

Wall, meanwhile, landed another horseback job—riding lines. The oil field was webbed by a network of small pipes, or lines, two inches in diameter. The oil ran from wells to storage tanks and pumping stations. Water that came up out of the ground with the oil ran to tanks and reservoirs. Natural gas ran through lines to fire the boilers that ran the steam engines that powered the drilling rigs. The alkaline soil corroded the pipes, and they sprang leaks. Trucks drove over the pipes, and they broke. Everyone was in such a hurry that no one bothered to take up the pipes once they were no longer needed. Many ran to dead ends. Wall’s job was to ride the field full time, looking for leaks and taking up dead-end lines.

He had a grandstand seat for the oil field. Turning in his saddle, on any clear morning, he saw cars, trucks and horse-drawn wagons coming and going. He saw work crews building derricks, drilling crews drilling wells, gangs of men connecting the lines that seemed to run everywhere. On any given day another well was likely to strike oil. A gusher would spout sometimes higher than the derrick, and the land downwind would turn brown from the oil spray carried on the breeze. He held the job for eight years.

Life in a company town

During that time, the Midwest Oil Company built the company town. No more tents and tarpaper shacks. Single men working for the company could live in six-man bunkhouses, or 50-man boarding houses. Men with families were offered three- or four-room cottages. All were welcome to eat at the Midwest Hotel. Its dining hall routinely served 500 people, three meals a day. Rent and the cost of meals were taken out of the workers’ paychecks.

The company built a movie theatre, a two-story clubhouse and a two-story office building. Several of the companies jointly built a hospital. The Midwest company supplied gas, electricity, good water and incinerators. The company laid in irrigation lines so people could water their lawns, began contests for the most beautiful yards and offered free cottonwood saplings for anyone who wanted to plant trees. In photographs the streets look straight, and the identical houses look freshly painted. Home Camp changed its name to Midwest in 1923. It made sense, as the company owned the town.

At first, families were rare and most men were single. Children were scarce. The one-room school at Home Camp in 1913 averaged only 20 students. Within ten years, the schools were bursting. A four-room school built in 1922 held 160 students. Two years later a two-story frame high school was built big enough for 200 students. In 1925, students from many of the little schoolhouses in the outlying camps began being bussed in to Midwest. A photo from that year shows about 500 students in front of the Midwest school. A teacherage—a boarding house that could hold 16 single teachers—was finished in 1923.

Wall’s recollections make it seem as though there was an official social life in the company town, and a rougher one in the smaller, outlying camps. The official social life centered on churches, schools and the company clubhouse and dining hall. Prohibition was on, so drinking alcohol was illegal. Company rules forbade drinking and gambling in any case. But both went on in cafes and speakeasies in the smaller camps. And in the hills around the oil field, bootleggers kept stills, made plenty of illegal whiskey and sold it to the men.

Wall felt lucky all the rest of his life to fall into a friendship with Helen Clarke, one of the teachers who lived at the teacherage. She spent winters in Midwest and returned to her family in Missouri when school let out each summer. One October day in 1928, they traveled together to Casper. Wall bought a Chevrolet, and bought Helen a new diamond ring. “I felt jubilant, but broke,” he remembered. They were married a few weeks later.

A long, slow bust

By that time, drilling of new wells had about ceased in the Salt Creek Field. There were thousands of wells, and the pressure that pushed the oil out of the ground was falling. More and more of the wells needed pumps to keep them flowing. Men began leaving for newer, bigger fields in places like Texas and Montana. The Midwest Refinery Company was bought out by Standard Oil of Indiana. Operating as Stanolind Oil and Gas, the company had taken over all of Midwest’s operations in the field by the end of 1932.

The stock market, meanwhile, crashed in 1929, and the nation slid into the deepest depression it has ever known. Wages fell very low. Job after job disappeared. In 1932, the company stables were torn down, and all its draft teams and saddle horses were sold. Wall moved indoors to a series of clerking jobs, and then, in 1935, back outside to various jobs maintaining the wells and pumps. He felt lucky to have a job at all, “wearing overalls and getting a little grease smeared on me.”

The numbers of barrels of oil produced each year in the Salt Creek field clearly show the boom-bust patterns. In 1922, after the new leasing system came in, and after a new oil-bearing layer had been discovered deeper underground, the field produced 19 million barrels of oil. In 1923, the biggest year, 35.3 million barrels of oil came out of the field. By 1930, production was down to 10.5 million barrels and by 1945, 4.5 million barrels.

As for the town of Midwest, workers were allowed to buy the houses and own them outright beginning in the 1960s, and in 1975, the town, at last, incorporated. People finally could elect their own mayor and town council to govern them.

Still more oil

New laws in the 1930s allowed companies to pool their interests and hire a single company to operate—that is, drill, pump and maintain—an oil field. This made for much more efficient oil production. Stanolind was hired to run the entire field after 1933. Amoco eventually followed Stanolind. In 1997, the Howell Oil Company bought out Amoco’s interests, and in 2002, Anadarko bought out the Howell interests in the field.

The Salt Creek field has produced about 650 million barrels of oil over the last century or more. Anadarko analysts figured there might be 1 billion barrels left in the ground there—but the oil won’t flow under old methods. Instead, Anadarko injected carbon dioxide into the ground. The added pressure from the new gas keeps the oil flowing.

In the spring of 2015, Anadarko sold the field to Texas-based Fleur de Lis energy and its financial partner, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. for an undisclosed amount. Oil prices at the time had fallen precipitously in the previous six months. Company officials said they were glad to acquire “long-lived assets we look to own and operate.” 

Resources

Primary Sources

• Wall, J. Tom. Life in the Shannon and Salt Creek Oil Fields. Philadelphia: Dorrance & Company, 1973. Though he never says anything critical about the Midwest Oil Company or the Midwest Refining Company, Wall’s memory is long, clear and affectionate. This book is the main source for this account.
• Bille, Ed. Early Days at Salt Creek and Teapot Dome. Edited by Arlene Larson. Artwork by Bill Dickerson. Casper, Wyo.: Mountain States Lithographing, 1978. This book is packed with great photographs. See p. 91 for photos of the night-football teams.
• Prior, F.O. “The Salt Creek Electric Plant.” The Midwest Review, 6, no. 4 (April 1925). A long article on the engineering and construction of the electric plant. The Midwest Review was the company magazine. See back issues at the Casper College Western History Center.
• “Night Football Game in Salt Creek.” The Midwest Review, 6, no. 12, (December 1925).
• Bleizeffer, Dustin. “New Life for Old Field.” Casper Star-Tribune, Jan. 16, 2010. Accessed Jan. 10, 2014 at http://trib.com/news/local/article_16691a67-fff0-5cd9-b61d-3e2dac6bfa50.html.
• Storrow, Benjamin. "Anadarko sells Salt Creek oil field." Casper Star-Tribune, April 2, 2016. Accessed July 28, 2016 at http://trib.com/business/energy/anadarko-sells-salt-creek-oil-field/article_8ac6ddbd-7810-5cac-8ab9-d5d4b0887d68.html. 

Secondary Sources

• Mackey, Mike. Black Gold: Patterns in the Development of Wyoming’s Oil Industry. Powell, Wyo.: Western History Publications, 1997.
• “Oil Camp Photos.” Wyoming Tales and Trails, accessed Jan. 10, 2014 at http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/oilcamp.html.
• Roberts, Harold D. Salt Creek, Wyoming: the Story of a Great Oil Field. Denver: Midwest Oil Corporation, 1956.
• Rosenberg Historical Consultants. Tour Guide: Salt Creek Oil Field, Natrona County, Wyoming. Casper, Wyo.: Natrona County Commission, 2003.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. "Follow the Black Gold Byway," a brochure with historical information on the Shannon, Salt Creek and Teapot Dome oilfields and maps directing drivers to historical markers in Casper, Midwest and Edgerton, Wyo. that deal with the Salt Creek Field and the early oil booms. Accessed March 31, 2014 at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/pdf/BlackGoldByway.pdf.

Illustrations

The color postcards of the Salt Creek field and of Midwest, the diagram of the anticline, the photos of the tank truck, the Midwest theatre and downtown Lavoye are all from Wyoming Tales and Trails, with thanks. The black and white photo of the Salt Creek field looking east is by Bell’s Studio, from the Amoco Refining Co. collection, Casper College Western History Center, with permission and thanks. The photo of the old Midwest electric plant is by the author.

No logging, no grazing—even no trespassing? The Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve, the first land to be set aside in what evolved into today’s National Forest system, had a distinctly different character from its successors. Here’s why.​

In 1883, when Arnold Hague arrived in Yellowstone, the 11-year-old national park was at a crossroads. The Northern Pacific Railroad had just completed its tracks across southern Montana, and railroad officials intended to market Yellowstone as a tourist pleasure resort. The conflict inherent in the national park idea—between promoting the enjoyment of natural wonders today and preserving them for tomorrow—was about to get its first big test.

Arnold Hague in Yellowstone

The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) appointed Hague to head its efforts to study geysers, especially their relation to ancient volcanoes. Hague knew the subject well, having studied volcanoes in the Pacific states and Guatemala. He’d graduated from Yale, studied in Germany and worked in China. The son of a Baptist clergyman from an old New England family, Hague had become a scientist at an exciting time: Charles Darwin’s theories were expanding the frontiers of science just as European cultures were expanding to little-known lands.

Hague returned to the Yellowstone area for seven straight summers, with a growing field of study. He was well-traveled, with far-ranging interests. For example, he was the first to chronicle flecks of gold in the Stinkingwater Mining Region, at the confluence of Needle Creek and the South Fork of the Shoshone River southwest of present Cody, Wyo.

William F. “Buffalo Bill” Cody then patented these claims, and with Eastern investors sought for 20 years to develop mines in the district. The USGS in 1899 published Hague’s study—it covered more than 3,000 square miles—as a book and atlas titled “Geology of the Yellowstone National Park,” still praised by geologists almost a century later as one of the most in-depth Yellowstone studies ever performed.

But Hague’s interests extended beyond geology. In particular, he was concerned about protecting and preserving Yellowstone at a time when the park was threatened by expanding concessionaires, big-game hunters and railroads.

When these special interests sought inappropriate uses—hotels too close to natural features, lax enforcement of hunting regulations, or a railroad through the Lamar Valley—Hague fought against them. To influence federal policies, he was often joined by William Hallett Phillips, a Washington, D.C., lawyer appointed as a “special agent” for Yellowstone by the Interior Department.

Hague loved Yellowstone’s scenery: mountains, sunsets and wild animals. Having frequently followed elk trails, he believed that elk “have an appreciation of the picturesque and the grand.” But he rarely couched conservation arguments in sentimental terms. He frequently spoke of how both the Missouri and the Columbia river systems had their sources in Yellowstone National Park.

Pushing for an expanded Yellowstone

In an 1883 letter to U.S. Sen. George Graham Vest of Missouri, Hague noted that New York State’s quest to provide uniform water flow in the Hudson River necessitated complicated and expensive efforts to buy or control the Adirondack forests where the streams began. He suggested expanding Yellowstone’s borders to secure similar protections before private settlers arrived.

The idea of expanded park borders was not new. In 1882 Gen. Phillip Sheridan had proposed expanding the park 40 miles east and 10 miles south. George Bird Grinnell, the famed writer and conservation activist, highlighted the plan in his Forest and Stream magazine. Early in 1883, Sen. Vest sponsored an extension bill, which failed to pass. (A revised, successful bill improved park protections without changing its boundaries.) Hague’s scientific credentials and vast onsite knowledge could aid the cause.

Hague proposed expanding southward by eight rather than 10 miles (to the 44^th parallel, near the north end of today’s Jackson Lake, thus excluding the Tetons) to avoid conflicts with potential mines or summer grazing lands. For similar reasons, his proposal for expansion went only 30 miles east. Briefly, he even flirted with rationalizing the park’s northern and western boundaries to match those of the Wyoming Territory.

Vest included Hague’s recommendations in four bills through the 1880s. They all failed, largely due to opposition from railroads wanting to build across the park’s northeast corner from Gardiner to Cooke City. But during the debates, Hague, Phillips of the Interior Department, Grinnell the conservationist writer and others also highlighted the wildlife benefits of an expanded preserve. These benefits took on increasing importance as concern rose through the 1880s about disappearing wildlife populations elsewhere in the West.

Advocates of expansion also started collecting their arguments about watersheds and habitat under the category of protecting forests. Forests, which provided the wildlife habitat and watershed protection, were at risk of being cleared for agriculture or cut down to provide timber for mines or charcoal for kilns. Without better protections for Yellowstone and its environs, Grinnell wrote, “Anyone was at liberty to cut down the forest, kill the game or carry away natural curiosities.”

Because of their work on behalf of Yellowstone, Hague and Phillips became the only two non-hunters ever elected full members of the influential Boone and Crockett Club. The elite sportsmen’s club, brainchild of Grinnell and Theodore Roosevelt, sought to influence federal policy on behalf of wildlife the same way the Audubon Society did for birds. The club represented the seed of Roosevelt’s conservation philosophy, which was to sprout so effectively during his presidency. In the club’s early days, one of the conservation leaders its members most admired was Arnold Hague.

Creation of the Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve

Other leaders at the time highlighted the nationwide benefits of forests, and the risks of wantonly cutting them down. Given how the clearcut forests of northern Wisconsin and Michigan had soon fallen prey to erosion and fire, should some forested lands in the West be held as public reservations?

Although in general the U.S. government wanted to give away the public domain to homesteaders, many congressmen at the time feared large corporations would assemble timber monopolies from formerly public lands. In this line of thinking, forest reserves could represent a Jeffersonian ideal. They could aid homesteaders by making small-scale timber cutting available to middle-class settlers, while ensuring watershed health.

Although bills with this goal failed in the 1880s, one did succeed in 1891. The key passage, known as Section 24, was a last-minute rider attached to a bill making broad reforms in public-land law.

Section 24 permitted the president to set aside timbered portions of the public domain as public reservations. However, it didn’t indicate what the purpose of these reservations should be, nor how they should be used, administered or funded.

President Benjamin Harrison signed the bill on March 3, 1891. Late the following week, Hague and Phillips discovered Section 24. Hague realized that it could accomplish his aims of expanding Yellowstone’s boundaries. On March 16, he took the idea to Secretary of the Interior John W. Noble. Noble asked Hague and Phillips to draft a proclamation to create the first Forest Reserve with the exact same boundaries Hague had proposed to Sen. Vest eight years earlier. President Harrison signed the proclamation on March 30, 1891, creating the 1.2-million-acre Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve.

Why isn’t Hague better known as its creator? Because he understood politics and was more interested in results than fame. On April 4, he wrote to Grinnell with information to be used in a Forest and Stream editorial lauding what would become known as the Forest Reserve Act of 1891. Hague wrote, “[Y]ou had better give the Secretary of the Interior a little taffy for his seeing the necessity for this thing.” Grinnell obliged; although his article mentioned Hague, it concluded that “too much credit cannot be given” to Noble.

This was the world’s first forest reserve to be set aside by a democratic government. But it wasn’t really a victory for “forestry” as we know it today. Instead, Hague and his allies often described the reserve as, effectively, an adjunct to the world’s first national park.

As Grinnell wrote, since people would be prohibited from living there, it would be easy later to transfer these lands to the park. In an 1898 essay (reprinted in the 1903 book Our National Parks), famed naturalist John Muir wrote that Yellowstone “was to all intents and purposes enlarged” by the reserve. His interpretation, however, proved overly optimistic.

Failures of the early forest reserves

In the same way that the U.S. Constitution arose out of years of frustration with the Articles of Confederation—an early attempt to translate idealistic principles to governance, with numerous practical failures—so too did the U.S. Forest Service arise out of the Forest Reserves. The period 1891–1905 saw a long struggle to effectively articulate a vision and management philosophy for administering federal forest lands.

After creating the Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve, President Harrison established additional forest reserves in Colorado, New Mexico and Oregon. He eventually preserved 13 million acres, and his successor, Grover Cleveland, added 25 million more.

But though Congress, perhaps unintentionally, had ceded to the president the authority to create reserves, it refused to decide how to manage them. And without guidance from Congress, no activity was allowed at all in the reserves. No homesteading, no logging, no mining, no grazing, no hunting—no trespassing! “Trespassing on the public lands within these forest reserves will not be tolerated under any pretext,” read one government communication. These lands were reserved from use, and so nobody was allowed onto them.

Unsurprisingly, the Forest Reserve Act didn’t provide any budget to manage the reserves, or suggest any penalties for trespass or depredations, so in most reserves the regulations were toothless. But the Yellowstone reserve was placed under the authority of the Army, which was then managing the adjacent national park, and Army officials could extend ranger patrols to the east and south.

The following year the Army built a ranger cabin at Polecat Creek, near today’s Flagg Ranch south of the park’s boundary. But by 1894 the superintendent was complaining that the added regions were too remote, too large, too rugged, and too frequented by hunting parties to be effectively policed with his limited manpower. Likewise, an official report in 1897 noted that at least 100 prospectors and 25 ranchers were spending the summer in the forest reserve, all of them hunting, in areas too remote to patrol without increased budgets.

In other regions, clashes over forest reserve policies were more severe. In Colorado, homesteaders and stockgrowers expressed outrage at the loss of their “rights.” They also feared that the far-off Interior Department might sell off timber to an Eastern monopolist, a result that would have been the opposite of the law’s intention.

In Oregon, opposition to the vast Cascade Range Forest Reserve arose primarily from sheep ranchers and miners denied access to grazing or mining on public lands. Ironically, the fate of timber in the reserves was a lesser issue—perhaps because the remote, high-elevation stands were not seen as commercially viable, or perhaps because large timber companies hoped that federal regulation would stabilize the market and reduce competition.

In a further irony, the authors of Section 24 had likely intended to permit grazing and small-scale logging on the reserves. But the section’s confusing language and lack of follow-up led to public opposition to the law.

The National Forest Commission

To remedy the stalemate, federal leaders asked the National Academy of Sciences to appoint a blue-ribbon commission to help resolve the fate of the reserves. Critics of the commission—such as Bernhard Fernow, who ran the advisory-only Division of Forestry in the federal Department of Agriculture—said that its summer-long tour of Western forests would be little more than a junket. But its fans hoped that it could do what Congress had yet failed to: figure out a policy for forest conservation, and spur legislation accomplishing that policy.

The commission’s chair was botanist Charles Sprague Sargent, head of Harvard University’s Arnold Arboretum and publisher of Garden and Forest magazine. Its secretary was a young forestry graduate—at 31, half the average age of the other commissioners—named Gifford Pinchot. Also on board: Gen. Henry L. Abbot of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, a veteran of Western railroad surveys; Alexander Agassiz, curator at the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology; Yale professor William H. Brewer, who was also California’s state botanist; John Muir, in an unofficial advisory capacity since he wasn’t the sort of person to join committees; and Arnold Hague.

Hague’s reputation and experience made him one of the nation’s leading experts on forest reserves. In fact, Hague and Pinchot were assigned to make a preliminary report and recommendation before the commission began its tour.

In 1896, the commissioners toured the Black Hills, Yellowstone, northwestern Montana, Oregon’s Cascades, California’s Sierra, the Grand Canyon, New Mexico and Colorado. They traveled mostly by train, and not always together: Pinchot took a side-trip to examine Montana’s Bitterroot Range, and Muir took a long break to visit Alaska. They returned to the East with numerous recommendations for new forest reserves.

But they still had little agreement on how to manage the reserves. For example, Pinchot believed in the emerging discipline of forestry, maximizing the efficiency of timber production as if trees were agricultural crops capable of a sustained yield. In contrast to that resource-based approach, Sargent and Muir tended to think of trees and forests in more holistic, perhaps more sentimental, terms. Sargent and Abbot favored military management; Pinchot, Brewer and Hague argued for civilian control.

Muir was fanatically opposed to sheep grazing (he memorably referred to sheep as “hoofed locusts”). Sargent expected political opposition to whatever they recommended; Pinchot fulminated at Sargent’s lack of political will.

The result: The commission recommended 13 new reserves totaling 21 million acres. They hurried through the recommendation process so that President Cleveland could create the reserves in the month before he left office. Cleveland issued the proclamation creating the new reserves on Washington’s Birthday, February 22, 1897.

Among the newly set-aside lands was the 892,440-acre Teton Forest Reserve south of Yellowstone. Hague’s original Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve remained intact, with its lands 30 miles east and eight miles south of the park boundary. But the Teton Reserve added another 15–20 miles southward, including the Teton Range and the northern half of Jackson Hole.

Problems and promise

That recommendation demonstrated both the problems and the promise of the Forest Reserve system. The problems: Hague had withheld the Teton Reserve lands from the original Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve because he knew that demands for grazing and mineral development made them poor candidates to become part of Yellowstone National Park. Furthermore, given the combination of the open lands of Jackson Hole, the effects of past forest fires and the lands above timberline, perhaps only 40 percent of the Teton Forest Reserve was actually forested.

Worst of all, as of the proclamation, the commission still had not decided the purpose of forest reserves. So these lands, like the 12 other new reserves, became off limits to use. As a result, Cleveland’s proclamation created a serious backlash in Western states.

Congressmen quickly drafted language restoring all forest reserves to the public domain—and attached it as a rider to the basic bill funding the entire government. Cleveland, on his last day in office, used a pocket veto to kill the bill, threatening a government shutdown. The new president, William McKinley, had to call an extra session of Congress. Now the entire forest movement was in jeopardy.

Amid intense lobbying on all sides, Congress found a compromise. First, it suspended the 13 new reserves for nine months, allowing thousands of acres to be transferred to private ownership. Second, it established purposes for the reserves, and gave the Interior Department authority to regulate their use, in a law now often known as the Forest Management Act (or Organic Act) of 1897.

As interpreted by the increasingly powerful Gifford Pinchot, permissible uses included timber harvests, dams, and grazing by cattle and (much to Muir’s dissatisfaction) sheep. With uses permitted, Western commercial interests became increasingly willing to accept new reserve acreages.

In 1902, the Yellowstone and Teton Reserves were greatly expanded. (They were also reorganized, with lands south of the park consolidated in the Teton Forest Reserve and lands east of the park renamed the Yellowstone Forest Reserve. In subsequent years, the lands would be repeatedly reorganized and renamed.)

Yet the fact that reserves were no longer extensions of national parks also demonstrated their potential. Through the first decade of the new century, after Roosevelt ascended to the presidency in 1901, Roosevelt and Pinchot continued to clarify the utilitarian philosophy of the “multiple use” system—and greatly expanded the nationwide scope of protected lands.

In 1907, to reflect the fact that these lands were no longer “reserved” from use, the reserves were renamed national forests. America found a vital role for these forests, complementary to that of national parks.

In today’s Shoshone and Bridger-Teton National Forests, which administer the lands Hague once arranged to be set aside, tourist demands are much reduced compared to the adjacent national park—and so are regulations on hunting, fishing, camping, hiking, grazing, and logging. But they remain public lands, protected from residential or commercial development, regulated to promote watershed and ecosystem health, and accessible to all.

They play essential roles in the lives of Wyomingites and in the ecosystem of greater Yellowstone. The process of fleshing out those roles began with Arnold Hague.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Grinnell, George Bird. “A New Forest Reserve,” unsigned editorial, Forest and Stream, April 9, 1891, p. 1. Vol 36, p. 225, accessed May 22, 2017 at https://books.google.com/books?id=XkghAQAAMAAJ&pg=PA225&dq=“A+New+Forest+Reserve,”+Forest+and+Stream,+April+9,+1891,&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiEl5ueqrbTAhVY-GMKHaChDVcQ6AEIIjAA#v=onepage&q=“A%20New%20Forest%20Reserve%2C”%20Forest%20and%20Stream%2C%20April%209%2C%201891%2C&f=false.
• Hague, Arnold et. al. "Geology of the Yellowstone National Park,"USGS Monograph 32, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1899–1904.
• Iddings, Joseph P. “Biographical Memoir of Arnold Hague.” National Academy of Sciences Biographical Memoirs 9 (1920): 21-38, accessed May 22, 2017 at http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/h....
• Muir, John. Our National Parks. Boston: Houghton, Mifflin and Company, 1903, p. 39.
• “Report of the Secretary of the Interior.” Congressional Serial Set, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1897, p. 796, accessed May 22, 2017 at https://books.google.com/books?id=q1IrAAAAYAAJ&pg=PA796&lpg=PA796&dq=stinking+water+mining+region&source=bl&ots=8p7WtBG89k&sig=7T1q3cnHezeh2qJ2CTHkHsxhVL8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwje0fbIw7PTAhWCqlQKHaraCwQQ6AEIPDAH#v=onepage&q=stinking%20water%20mining%20region&f=false.

Secondary Sources

• “Arnold Hague.” American National Biography Online. February 2000. Accessed May 22, 2017 at http://www.anb.org/articles/13/13-00675.html.
• Bartlett, Richard A. Yellowstone: A Wilderness Besieged (Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1985), p. 142.
• Daugherty, John et. al. A Place Called Jackson Hole: A Historic Resource Study of Grand Teton National Park. Chapter 17: Conservationists.  Grand Teton National Park and Grand Teton Natural History Association, 1999, accessed May 22, 2017 at https://www.nps.gov/parkhistory/online_books/grte2/hrs17.htm.
• Ellis, Richard J. The Development of the American Presidency. New York: Routledge, 2012, p. 295, accessed May 23, 2017 at https://books.google.com/books?id=BcYBCgAAQBAJ&pg=PA295&lpg=PA295&dq=washington%27s+birthday+reserves+pocket&source=bl&ots=bTX6k7F_Lw&sig=Pcv2C3jS3o7EVIT2VuLwc4DsWxo&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiUlJ62_4TUAhXHlFQKHVIzCXcQ6AEIKDAC#v=onepage&q=washington's%20birthday%20reserves%20pocket&f=false.
• Haines, Aubrey L. The Yellowstone Story. Vol. 2. University Press of Colorado, 1977. pp. 94–99
• Rydell, Kiki Leigh, and Mary Shivers Culpin. Managing the “Matchless Wonders”: A History of Administrative Development in Yellowstone National Park, 1872–1965. Yellowstone National Park, Wyoming: National Park Service, Yellowstone Center for Resources, YCR-2006-03, 2006, pp. 36-37.
• Rakestraw, Lawrence. A History of Forest Conservation in the Pacific Northwest, 1891-1913. New York: Arno Press, 1979; Forest History Society, 2009, accessed May 22, 2017 at http://www.foresthistory.org/aspnet/publications/region/6/rakestraw_thesis/contents.htm.  See especially Section 2.
• Steen, Harold K., ed. The Origins of the National Forests: A Centennial Symposium.  The Origins of the National Forests: A Centennial Symposium, Forest History Society, 1992. Accessed May 22, 2017 at http://www.foresthistory.org/Publications/Books/Origins_National_Forests/contents.htm. This comprehensive collection, especially sections 8, 18, 20 and 21, provides the major source for this article.
• Williams, Gerald W., and Char Miller. “At the Creation: The National Forest Commission of 1896-97.” Forest History Today, Spring/Fall 2005, pp. 32-40.

Archives and collections

• The Park County Historical Archives in Cody has a Shoshone National Forest History file with several clippings and memoirs, including a discussion of Arnold Hague on the Stinkingwater.
• Hague and others were mentioned in Wyoming newspapers; you can search on their names at http://newspapers.wyo.gov/.

For further reading

• “A Plan to Save the Forests.” The Century Illustrated Monthly Magazine. Volume 49, pp. 626-634. An 1895 symposium on the reserves, with contributions from Sargent, Pinchot, Muir, Roosevelt, Yellowstone superintendent George Anderson, and others.
• Allan, Esther B. “History of Teton National Forest.” Jackson, Wyo.: Bridger-Teton National Forest, 1973, pp. 107-120, accessed May 22, 2017 at https://www.fs.usda.gov/Internet/FSE_DOCUMENTS/fseprd534131.pdf. Many great details and reminiscences of Jackson Hole and the Teton Forest Reserve, although weak on context.
• Brandegee, Townshend Stith. The Teton and Yellowstone Park (southern Part) Forest Reserves, U.S. Government Printing Office, 1899. A descriptive account, by a botanist assessing timber.
• Cleveland, Grover. "Proclamation 394—Withdrawl [sic] of Lands for the Teton Forest Reserve, Wyoming." February 22, 1897. Online by Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley, The American Presidency Project, accessed May 22, 2017 at http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ws/?pid=70861.
• Ise, John. The United States Forest Policy. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1920.
• Miller, Char. Gifford Pinchot and the Making of Modern Environmentalism. Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 2001.
• Steen, Harold K.. The U.S. Forest Service: A History, Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2004.
• Worster, Donald. A Passion for Nature: The Life of John Muir. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Illustrations

• The photo of Eagle Creek Meadows in the Shoshone National Forest is by Ralph Maughan, from Panoramio. Used with thanks.
• The photo of U.S. Senator George Vest is from the Biographical Directory of the US Congress. Used with thanks.
• The 1892 General Land Office map of the Yellowstone Timber Land Reserve is from Wyoming Places. Used with permission and thanks.
• The drawing of Arnold Hague, originally published in Appletons' Cyclopædia of American Biography, 1892, is from Wikimedia. Used with thanks.
• The photo of Charles Sprague Sargent, first published in The World’s Work, 1901, is from Wikimedia. Used with thanks.
• The 1900 GLO map of the Teton Forest Preserve is from Wyoming Places. Used with permission and thanks.
• The 1902 photo of John Muir is from the Library of Congress. Used with thanks.
• The 1907 photo of President Theodore Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot on the steamer Mississippi is from the Library of Congress. Used with thanks.

In the summer of 1878, William O. “Billy” Owen was working with a surveying crew high in the Medicine Bow Mountains, about 36 miles west of Laramie, Wyoming Territory. “Over that vast forest,” he later wrote, “the moon’s shadow was advancing with a speed and rush that almost took one’s breath.” This was the total solar eclipse of July 29, 1878.

“It was terrifying, appalling,” Owen’s account continues, “and yet possessed a majestic grandeur and fascination that only one who has seen it can appreciate.”

Worldwide, solar eclipses occur relatively often, at a rate of two to five per year. In a solar eclipse, the moon passes between the earth and the sun, sometimes blocking part of its light and at other times, all. A complete blockage is a total eclipse, and the zone of the earth traversed by the moon’s shadow is called the path of totality. The width, length and route of the path all differ from one eclipse to the next.

“Totality” is the brief period of darkness on Earth when the sun is completely obscured. Totality can last less than one minute or more than seven. During totality, astronomers have a unique opportunity to study the “night” sky around the sun. Because the light of the sun itself is blocked, they can also observe the corona—the sun’s outer atmosphere—otherwise invisible.

Besides the 1878 eclipse observed by Owen and his party, two other total solar eclipses since territorial times crossed present Wyoming before 2017—in 1889 and 1918. These were important opportunities for astronomers with enough personal or institutional means to travel to a choice location and to pay for shipping the necessary equipment. In two of the three eclipses, the totality paths crossed the line of the Union Pacific railroad in Wyoming, greatly simplifying all logistics.

The 1878 eclipse

The path of totality of the July 29, 1878, eclipse crossed most of Wyoming Territory in a swath from northwest to southeast. It was 191 kilometers wide—about 118 miles. Darkness on the centerline of the path lasted three minutes, 11 seconds.

Wyoming residents watched the eclipse through smoked glass, as did Owen and his companions. They also viewed part of the eclipse using their Burt’s solar compass, a large brass surveyor’s device with a mirror and other attachments that allow the user to find true north using the angle of the sun, instead of magnetism.

Such a simple setup was not sufficient for the professional astronomers who spent ten days or more in Wyoming Territory, however. They were there to gather data available only during totality and had to work fast and with the best possible tools.

The inventor Thomas Edison traveled with a party that set up a temporary observatory near Rawlins, Wyo., attracting substantial local publicity. Edison was eager to test his new tasimeter, a highly sensitive heat-measuring device. The July 30, 1878, Laramie Daily Sentinel reported that seven experts, some with their wives as assistants, were working at the observatory. Henry Draper of New York, director of the Rawlins observatory, was the most eminent astronomer in the party.

Draper was a pioneer, perhaps the first, in the young science of astrophotography. He planned to photograph the corona, and delegated other important observations to his colleagues. Draper reported their findings in the September 1878 American Journal of Science and Arts.

The scientists hauled nearly a ton of equipment, including at least four telescopes and accessories plus chemicals needed for the wet-plate collodion photographic process. The best system available at the time, it required the glass plate to be coated, exposed and developed, usually in a portable darkroom, all within about 15 minutes.

At Separation, a railroad station 14 miles west of Rawlins, the Canadian-American astronomer, Simon Newcomb, was in charge of a small party, one of two from the U.S. Naval Observatory in Washington, D.C. Newcomb was director of the Nautical Almanac, which provides astronomical data for celestial navigation and is still published by the U.S. Navy.

There was nowhere to sleep at Separation except in tents; the stationmaster’s wife cooked for the party. On July 24, Newcomb traveled to Rawlins to meet British astronomer J. Norman Lockyer, founding editor of the prestigious science journal, Nature. Lockyer had led eclipse expeditions to Sicily in 1870 and India in 1871, but this time was traveling alone and intended to assist Newcomb and the other American astronomers. After spending a night in the Separation depot, Lockyer returned to Rawlins to stay at the Railroad Hotel, quarters for the Draper expedition.

At Creston, the station 12 miles west of Separation, the second party from the U.S. Naval Observatory, led by William Harkness, enjoyed more conveniences than did Newcomb and his assistants.

Harkness, Otis F. Robinson, Alvan G. Clark and a few others slept in the railroad car that had delivered their equipment, and enjoyed the cooking services of soldiers sent from Fort Steele, where the railroad crossed the North Platte River, 41 miles to the east. The Harkness party’s temporary observatory had a canvas roof for quick removal before observations.

Harkness and his party spent the days leading up to the eclipse rehearsing, and testing equipment for the big event, down to the tiniest details. To establish their precise latitude, Harkness used a sextant and artificial horizon—a basin of mercury under glass. To find their longitude, Harkness received telegraph signals at the Creston station, helping him compare local time with the time at locations where longitude was already known, in Utah, Pennsylvania and Washington D.C.

At the observation point of an eclipse, knowledge of the exact latitude and longitude enabled astronomers to compare the predicted path of the moon’s orbit with its actual path, and therefore to make needed corrections.

Alvan Clark was a maker of fine scientific instruments. The company Alvan Clark and Sons had received a medal from the French Academy of Sciences for making huge telescope lenses, many of which had been installed in the best American telescopes, including some shipped to Wyoming for the eclipse.

At Creston, Alvan Clark was to photograph the corona. During the party’s many drills, Clark inserted a plate into his camera, exposed it, removed it and inserted a new plate. Otis Robinson tested a polariscope, which might offer clues to the nature of the corona—did it shine by its own light, or was it just reflected somehow from the sun? To study the chemical composition of the corona, Harkness practiced with his spectroscope, which, by isolating different parts of a star’s spectrum, made it possible to determine the different chemical elements in the star.

The men drilled from 7:30 a.m. until 10:00 p.m., with breaks for lunch, supper and an evening walk. All the expeditions performed similar drills, day after day, to perfect their routine so no time would be wasted during the brief totality.

Another American astronomer, James C. Watson from the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, traveled with his wife and set up a Clark and Sons telescope near Rawlins. Like Lockyer, Watson and his wife stayed at the Railroad Hotel.

Watson had high hopes that during totality he would be able to see Vulcan, supposedly a new planet orbiting between the sun and Mercury. The existence of Vulcan had been proposed to account for a known disturbance in Mercury’s motions.

The Sentinel captured the excitement of the scene near Rawlins in the days leading up to the eclipse. The visiting astronomers, the Sentinel reported, were kind and courteous. They “furnished a rare opportunity to us frontier residents to enjoy some of the wonders of science … and they never tired of showing and explaining … the use of the instruments, and showing [curious citizens] the wonders of the heavens through their glasses.”

The visitors, too, appreciated the treatment they received. Draper later wrote, “Of the citizens of Rawlins it is only necessary to say that we never even put the lock on the door of the Observatory, and not a thing was disturbed or misplaced during our ten days of residence, though we had many visitors.”

Lockyer, Newcomb and others reported their findings in or were interviewed by The British Journal of Photography, Scientific American, The Washington Post, the Courier-Journal of Louisville, Ky., the New-York Tribune, the New-York Daily Tribune and the American Catholic Quarterly Review.

Lockyer reported that he was convinced that Watson had, in fact, seen Vulcan. It would be nearly 37 years before Albert Einstein’s general theory of relativity would account for this disturbance, and rule out the existence of Vulcan.

The weather was clear for all observers.

The 1889 eclipse

The path of the total eclipse of Jan. 1, 1889, crossed just a small piece of Wyoming—across the far northwest corner of Yellowstone Park. Totality on the centerline lasted two minutes, 17 seconds, and was 175 kilometers, or about 108 miles, wide.

Apparently, few astronomers visited Wyoming Territory for this eclipse, probably because transportation to Yellowstone was still difficult. Besides, there were plenty of other good locations in the country for viewing totality.

The Cheyenne Daily Leader reported on Jan. 6, 1889, “The eclipse was seven eighths total here. The sky was perfectly clear and darkness settled down as on a cloudy day. The air became decidedly cooler. Observations were taken by Prof. Garrard of Kentucky and Prof. John Harrington and Dr. Glover of the Thirty Society of this city.”

“Hundreds of Laramie people viewed the eclipse through smoked glass,” reported TheLaramie Boomerang on Jan. 2, 1889. “During the [partial] obscuration Venus could be plainly seen.”

The 1918 eclipse

Totality for the June 8, 1918, eclipse lasted two minutes, 23 seconds, and the path was 112 kilometers (about 69 miles) wide, crossing the southeast corner of Wyoming, including Rock Springs and Green River.

At least six well-known astronomers visited Wyoming for this eclipse. The Green River Star reported on June 14, 1918, that the town “probably never again will … see so many great astronomers at any one time. Professors Frost, Hale, Barnard, Ellerman, Parkhurst, Anderson and many others have been located here for some time.”

The Star goes on to describe the “wonderful clock-driven heliostat” owned by the Yerkes Observatory, of the University of Chicago. The heliostat—a mirror geared to a clock in order to continue reflecting the sun’s light at a single target as the sun moves through the day—threw the sun’s rays into a horizontal telescope and kept the light “steadily in one direction, without deviation for any length of time,” The Star reported.

Complete with “gigantic cameras and spectrographs,” the Yerkes telescope was set up near a local outcrop known as Teapot Rock—not to be confused with the better-known rock in central Wyoming that gave its name to the Teapot Dome oilfield.

The Yerkes party, a total of 16 observers, included Edwin Brant Frost, co-editor of the international Astrophysical Journal and professor of astrophysics at the Yerkes Observatory, as well as Edward Emerson Barnard, whom Isaac Asimov described in 1975 as “perhaps the keenest-eyed astronomer in history.”

The September 1918 Monthly Evening Sky Map published a photograph taken by Barnard of solar prominences, one of them more than 47,000 miles high. A solar prominence is an incandescent stream of protons, extending beyond the corona’s normal edge.

A party from the Mount Wilson Solar Observatory near Los Angeles, Calif., was led by George Ellery Hale. Hale was a graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and established the Astrophysical Journal in 1895. He had been associate professor of astrophysics at the University of Chicago and had obtained all the funding for the Yerkes Observatory. In 1904, Hale founded and also raised money for the Mount Wilson observatory, and became its director.

Like the Yerkes party, the Mount Wilson expedition set up its temporary base near Green River. In addition to hauling the 30-inch mirror from their prized Snow telescope—a permanent fixture at Mount Wilson—the scientists brought three cameras and three spectrographs. A spectrograph is a device for isolating a portion of a star’s spectrum, and recording this data with a camera.

Clearer skies than in Illinois

Jacob Kunz and Joel Stebbins, a two-man expedition from the University of Illinois Observatory at Urbana, set up their equipment about two miles south of Rock Springs, Wyo. Their account of the expedition and its results, published in the December 1918 Popular Astronomy, is the most extensive and least technical of all the visiting astronomers’ reports.

To measure the brightness of the corona, Kunz and Stebbins hauled more than 400 pounds of equipment, including electric lamps, batteries and galvanometers. A galvanometer measures or detects a small electric current by movements of a coil or a magnetic needle. Kunz and Stebbins achieved their goal of comparing the corona with light sources of known strength, including a candle and an electric light bulb.

“Before leaving Urbana where smoke has been a nuisance for a dozen years,” Kunz and Stebbins reported, “we vowed that with several hundred miles of eclipse track to choose from we would make sure that this trouble at least would be left at home.” Except for two coal mines about a mile away, in Wyoming they were “as secluded as though we had been far from any town.”

A local contractor, Mr. Kellogg, built the shelter that was their temporary observatory, and Kunz and Stebbins also recruited two local assistants, “Messrs. Homer Coté and Paul Freeman, two mining surveyors.”

The performance of their equipment was superb. “Being far from traffic, the galvanometers were perfectly steady, and the dry air of Wyoming eliminated troubles with electrical insulation.” Their report continues, “Neither of us had ever seen anything like it before, and it remained for our cozy little hut in the desert to demonstrate what a model laboratory should be.”

They described in detail the partly cloudy sky, and the suspense they endured right up until two minutes before totality. They were the luckiest of the 1918 parties: At the critical time, thin clouds had covered the eclipse near the Green River observatories.

The June 8, 1918, Laramie Republican noted, “[O]ne may look at … [the eclipse] through a pinhole in a piece of paper or through a dark glass … easily smoked by a candle or oil lamp.” The Republican cautioned, “One must be very careful to have the glass so dark that the sun does not dazzle the eye at all.”

Kunz and Stebbins noted in their Popular Astronomy article that although Stebbins had witnessed two other total eclipses, he “was quite unprepared for the weird effect of the ashy light on the desert landscape shortly before totality, and for the spectrum colors in the clouds about the sun as they were breaking at the last minute.”

As in 1878, visitors were pleased to find the inhabitants so friendly. “We received uniform courtesy and aid from the people of Rock Springs,” wrote Kunz and Stebbins, “and in particular enjoyed the hospitality of the mayor, Dr. E. S. Lauzer.”

Except for the wind, which can disturb the precision of astronomical instruments, Wyoming is an ideal place to observe a solar eclipse. High altitude, fair weather and clear air, far from polluting population centers yet near sources of food, shelter and building services, attracted experts to these early eclipses from the United States, Great Britain and Europe. In turn, their discoveries advanced the science of astronomy worldwide.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Anderson, J.A. “The Expedition of the Mount Wilson Observatory to the Solar Eclipse of June 8, 1918.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 58:4, 1919, 255-258. Accessed April 27, 2017, at http://www.jstor.org/stable/984401.
• Barker, George F. “On the Total Solar Eclipse of July 29^th, 1878.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 18:102, July-December 1878, 103-114. Accessed May 23, 2017, at http://www.jstor.org/stable/982766.
• Barnard, E.E. “The Large Prominences on the Sun’s Western Limb at the Total Eclipse of the Sun, June 8, 1918.” The Monthly Evening Sky Map, XII: 41, September 1918. Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://books.google.com/books?id=pmxCAQAAMAAJ&pg=PT130&lpg=PT130&dq=parkhurst+wyoming+eclipse+1918&source=bl&ots=OjY_f6CeA9&sig=FxVdO30uLmhm8Qnz2zsYmpbusD8&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwis2rvsysXTAhWrwlQKHRn0AygQ6AEINzAF#v=onepage&q=parkhurst%20wyoming%20eclipse%201918&f=false.
• Draper, Henry, M.D. “The Solar Eclipse of July 29^th, 1878.” American Journal of Science and Arts, September 1878, 227-230. Accessed May 23, 2017, at http://www.biodiversitylibrary.org/item/113467#page/1/mode/1up.
• “The Eclipse.” New-York Tribune, July 31, 1878. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at www.proquest.com.
• “The Eclipse of the Sun, July 29, 1878.” Scientific American, XXIX: 7, Aug. 17, 1878, 96. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at https://archive.org/details/scientific-american-1878-08-17.
• Frost, Edwin B. “Results of Observations of the Eclipse by the Expedition from the Yerkes Observatory.” Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, LVIII, 1919, 282-288. Accessed May 24, 2017, at http://scans.library.utoronto.ca/pdf/4/33/proceedingsofame58ameruoft/proceedingsofame58ameruoft.pdf.
• ———. “Total Solar Eclipse, June 8, 1918.” Popular Astronomy, Vol. 26, 458-461. Accessed May 24, 2017, at http://adsabs.harvard.edu/full/1918PA.....26..458F.
• Kunz, Jacob, and Joel Stebbins. “The Illinois Eclipse Expedition to Rock Springs, Wyoming.” Popular Astronomy, XXVI: 10, December 1918, 665-676. Accessed May 24, 2017, at https://books.google.com/books?id=o8EzAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA665&lpg=PA665&dq=parkhurst+wyoming+eclipse+1918&source=bl&ots=GrAQkGfR4b&sig=v6SbLnpnxPHEUWCnPYC4wPoo27g&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwis2rvsysXTAhWrwlQKHRn0AygQ6AEIMzAD#v=onepage&q=parkhurst%20wyoming%20eclipse%201918&f=false.
• Lockyer, J. Norman. “The Recent Eclipse.” The British Journal of Photography, Aug. 30, 1878, 412-414. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at www.proquest.com.
• “The New Planet: Professor Watson’s Report of His Observations During the Eclipse—Mr. Swift’s Observations.” Courier-Journal [Louisville, Ky.], Aug. 25, 1878. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at www.proquest.com.
• Owen, William O. Unpublished autobiography, c.a. 1930, 28. American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming, William O. Owen collection, #84, Box 1.
• “Professor Lockyer’s Idea. A Conversation with the Great English Scientist.” The Washington Post, Aug. 9, 1878. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at www.proquest.com.
• Rae, W. Fraser. “With the Astronomers.” New-York Daily Tribune, Aug. 13, 1878. ProQuest Historical Newspapers. Accessed Feb. 8, 2017, at www.proquest.com.
• “The Total Solar Eclipse of July 29^th, 1878.” The American Catholic Quarterly Review, October 1878. Accessed Feb. 9, 2017, at https://archive.org/details/AmeriCatholicQRevV03.
• Wyoming Newspapers. Accessed Dec. 19, 2016, Dec. 20, 2016, May 17, 2017, at http://newspapers.wyo.gov:
  • The Carbon County Journal, Jan. 5, 1889.
  • The Cheyenne Daily Leader, July 27, 1878, July 31, 1878, Jan. 2, 1889, Jan. 6, 1889.
  • The Cheyenne Daily Sun, July 29, 1878, Aug. 1, 1878.
  • Cheyenne State Leader, June 8, 1918.
  • Cheyenne Weekly Leader, Aug. 8, 1878.
  • The Green River Star, June 7, 1918, June 14, 1918.
  • The Laramie Boomerang, Dec. 31, 1888, Jan. 2, 1889.
  • Laramie Daily Sentinel, July 30, 1878.
  • The Laramie Republican, June 8, 1918.
  • Laramie Weekly Sentinel, July 20, 1878.
  • Riverton Chronicle, June 14, 1918.
  • Rock Springs Miner, June 14, 1918.
  • The Sheridan Enterprise, June 9, 1918.
  • Wyoming State Tribune, June 10, 1918.

Secondary Sources

• Asimov, Isaac. Eyes on the Universe: A History of the Telescope. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1975, 91-94, 110-117, 122-159, 181-182.
• Baron, David. American Eclipse: A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World. New York, NY: Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton and Company, 2017, 105-118, 133-149.
• “Five Millennium Catalog of Solar Eclipses -1999 to +3000 (2000 BCE to 3000 CE).” National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Accessed May 23, 2017, at
• https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/Secat5/Secatalog.html#cattab.
• “Five Millennium Catalog of Solar Eclipses 1801 to 1900 (1801 CE to 1900 CE).” NASA. Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/SEcat5/SE1801-1900.html.
• "Five Millennium Catalog of Solar Eclipses 1901 to 2000 (1901 CE to 2000 CE)." Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/Secat5/SE1901-2000.html.
• "George Ellery Hale." Accessed May 18, 2017, at https://www.lib.uchicago.edu/projects/centcat/fac/facch04_01.html.
• "Golden Era of Refractors." American Institute of Physics. Accessed May 24, 2017, at http://history.aip.org/history/exhibits/cosmology/tools/tools-refractors....
• “The Nautical Almanac.” Accessed June 12, 2017, at http://aa.usno.navy.mil/publications/docs/na.php.
• Rea, Tom. "A Kid in Hell on Wheels: Laramie as the Railroad Arrived." WyoHistory.org. Accessed May 23, 2017, at www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/kid-hell-wheels-laramie-railroad-arrived.
• Roberts, Phil. "Edison, the Electric Light and the Eclipse."Annals of Wyoming, 53:1, Spring 1981, 54-62. Accessed May 3, 2017, at https://archive.org/details/annalsofwyom53121981wyom.
• ———. "Edison, the Light Bulb and the Eclipse of 1878." WyoHistory.org. Accessed May 3, 2017, at www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/edison-light-bulb-and-eclipse-1878.
• Sheehan, William, and Richard Baum. "Vulcan Chasers."Astronomy, December 1997, 42-47. Accessed May 23, 2017, at http://burro.case.edu/Academics/USNA229/vulcan.pdf.
• “Simon Newcomb (1835-1909).” From a St. John’s University astronomy course, accessed June 27, 2017 at http://www.physics.csbsju.edu/astro/newcomb/SNewcomb.html.
• “Spectroscopy and the Birth of Astrophysics.” American Institute of Physics. Accessed May 24, 2017, at http://history.aip.org/history/exhibits/cosmology/tools/tools-spectroscopy.htm.
• Struve, Otto. "Biographical Memoir of Edwin Brant Frost."National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America: Biographical Memoirs, Vol. XIX, 25-51. Accessed May 18, 2017, at http://www.nasonline.org/publications/biographical-memoirs/memoir-pdfs/frost-edwin.pdf.
• "Total Solar Eclipse of 1878 July 29". NASA. Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sesearch/Sesearchmap.php?Ecl=18780729.
• "Total Solar Eclipse of 1889 January 01." NASA. Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sesearch/Sesearchmap.php?Ecl=18890101.
• "Total Solar Eclipse of 1918 June 08." NASA. Accessed May 23, 2017, at https://eclipse.gsfc.nasa.gov/Sesearch/Sesearchmap.php?Ecl=19180608.
• “What does a spectroscope do?” Telescopes from the Ground Up, accessed June 27, 2017 at https://amazing-space.stsci.edu/resources/explorations/groundup/lesson/basics/g23/.

Illustrations

• The photo of Billy Owen is from the American Heritage Center. Used with permission and thanks.
• The color maps of the paths of the totality of the solar eclipses of 1878 and 1889 are from NASA. Used with thanks.
• Étienne Léopold Trouvelot’s image of the 1878 eclipse and the photos of Henry Draper and George Ellery Hale are from Wikipedia. Used with thanks.
• The image of Henry Draper’s phototelespectroscope is from his report in The Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, Jul.-Dec. 1878, p. 105. Used with thanks.
• Edward Emerson Barnard’s 1918 photo of the sun's corona is from The Monthly Evening Sky Map, September 1918.
• The image of part of the front page of the June 18, 1879 Cheyenne State Leader is from Wyoming Newspapers. Used with thanks.
• The image of Kunz and Stebbins’ 1918 temporary observatory is from their report in Popular Astronomy, December 1918.

The earliest people appear to have come to Wyoming from Asia, about 11,000 years ago. For thousands of years, they roamed the plains hunting big game on foot. Some of the animals were enormous—mammoths and giant bison, for example. Such others as camels and horses were about the size they are now. Probably the people worked in small groups, ambushing prey at springs or streams, preferring the younger and smaller mammoths and butchering two or three at a time. Many of the big mammals went extinct eleven or ten thousand years ago. About 7,000 years ago, a drought began that lasted 2,000 years. Bison and people seem to have disappeared from the plains altogether. In Wyoming, the people moved up into the mountains where it was cooler, and where there was water.

By 4,500 years ago, people had returned to the plains. Sometimes they stayed in caves and rock shelters. They gathered plants and ground the seeds, they fished, and they hunted and ate small mammals, reptiles, and amphibians. By that time the giant bison had been replaced by the modern Bison bison — what we call buffalo.

Around 500 A.D., people began using bows and arrows. In Wyoming they left rings of stones where they had pitched their tipis, and much larger stone circles oriented to the sun and stars. And they left pictures and carvings on rocks.
When we look at those carvings now, we can’t help but wonder about the ancient people who made them. Who were they? What was important to them? How did they make these pictures? And why?

Archaeologists now think there’s a good chance the people were direct ancestors of Shoshone people who live in Wyoming now, many of them on the Wind River Indian Reservation. And in recent years, the mostly white archaeologists have realized it makes sense to ask Shoshone people for help understanding the pictures and carvings their ancestors left on the rocks. Take, for example, the water ghost woman, whose image is on a rock face in Hot Springs County, near Thermopolis.

She may be Pa waip, a spirit woman of Shoshone stories. She’s definitely female, as can be seen from her breasts — a detail omitted from most rock images. Pa waip lives in watery places — rivers, lakes, hot springs. If you look closely you can see what may be streaks of tears below her eyes. She was known to cry and wail to trick men to come into the water to get to know her better. Then she would drown them. In her left hand she may be holding a turtle. You can see the roundish shape of the shell, and the four feet. Because she couldn’t leave the water, Pa waip depended on turtles to travel out on land to do favors for her. But if we look closely we see the turtle has no head. So perhaps it’s not a turtle. Perhaps it’s a child and those four turtle feet are actually two human hands and two human feet. Sometimes Pa waip would grab children, and bite their heads off.

But she wasn’t only bad. Pa waip wasn’t only a threat. She could also help people learn to help and heal each other. Her powers were particularly helpful against diseases like epilepsy, which can cause seizures in people.

These images are called pictographs if they are painted on the rocks, or petroglyphs if they are pecked or carved into the rocks. For a long time, white people thought of them as art. That is, they assumed the people who made them did so for the same reason Europeans and Euro-Americans paint, draw, or sculpt—to make beautiful things that last, and that may be returned to when a person wants to feel the pleasures of beauty.
But archaeologists now understand the rock pictures have for a long time been used as sources of spiritual power, and are still used that way now. This allows us to think of the images as windows connecting past and present, and connecting the spiritual world with the material world at hand. Like churches, temples, or cathedrals of Europeans and Euro-Americans, they may be ancient, but they can still be used for their original purposes. This is different from simply admiring them for their beauty.

People went to the pictographs and the petroglyphs seeking the power they need for a successful life. Take for example the winged figure from the canyon of Torrey Creek, a tributary of the Wind River in central Wyoming. Before approaching a picture like this, the people would bathe in a stream or lake. Then they would wait in front of it, perhaps for days, without food or water, waiting and praying for a vision or a dream that would show them their power. (Vision seeking is common to all tribes, not just Shoshones.) If the vision instructed them to do so, they would make a new image on the rock to record what they had seen. The details would be useful for future visions—both for the original dreamer and for later vision seekers. Archaeologists and anthropologists more or less agree that image making of all kinds in Plains Indian cultures—on rocks, on clothing, on tipis and household goods — is connected with this same kind of vision seeking. (See Francis & Loendorf, pp. 24-26.)

The spear points the ancient people left behind them, and the arrow heads, or even the big nets used to trap wild sheep, show how they managed to survive in the material world, where people get hungry and need to eat every day. In the same way, the rock pictures are tools they used to help maintain a strong and confident sense of the world and their part in it. Confidence is as important to survival as eating. White people have been curious for some time about the rock images and their makers. In 1873, Captain William A. Jones of the U.S. Army led an expedition north from Fort Bridger on the new transcontinental railroad to Yellowstone Park. On the way he passed the Wind River and its tributaries in what’s now Fremont County, near Lander. He noticed rock images at four different places and reported on them in detail. Jones speculated that the first of these places “may have been used as a place of incantation by some Indian medicine-man.” But he was convinced Shoshone people did not make the images. To him they were only signs of the past — not places that had a spiritual purpose in the present. (Francis and Loendorf, 33-34)

In the late 1920s, an alert teenager named David Love left his family ranch on Muskrat Creek in a dry, remote part of Fremont County to attend the University of Wyoming. There he learned that a French archaeologist, Etienne Renaud, from the University of Denver, was surveying pictograph and petroglyph sites all over the high plains. Renaud had studied the ancient cave paintings of France and Spain, and was eager to see how ancient American images compared. Love knew of a spot packed full of Indian images. It was near his family’s ranch and called Castle Gardens, because its sandstone cliffs and cedar trees reminded people of castles with gardens growing on tops of the walls. Love wrote Renaud several times, and finally persuaded the archaeologist to come have a look. Renaud arrived in 1931 and returned the next year. He was so impressed by Love’s knowledge that he included Love’s descriptions in his own report.

Love’s favorite among the huge variety of images was a big, brightly colored turtle.

It was a foot high, nine inches across, with a circle drawn around it. The shell was divided into sections by incised lines, that is, lines cut deeply into the rock. The criss-crossing lines divided the turtle shell into about 50 different sections, each colored differently from the one next to it. Each of the turtle’s four legs was also divided by incised lines into sections — scales, they looked like. Each leg, Love noticed, had the same number of scales, and the corresponding scale on each leg was the same color. And each foot had five claws. The sections were green, yellow, or a reddish purple. The head was triangular, and red.

The length of the tail and the triangular head convinced Love the person who made the image knew turtles well, though turtles are rare in such dry country. The triangular head made Renaud believe it was a snapping turtle. He knew that snapping turtles along the Mississippi and Missouri rivers can grow to 120 pounds, and that turtles show up in many ancient Indian images in those valleys. (Love 690-692; Renaud, 9-16). Turtles show up too in ancient rock images throughout the high plains of the West. Clearly they’ve been important to people for thousands of years. Like people who become skilled in moving between the spiritual and material worlds, turtles move easily between water and land.

Renaud published his report in 1936. A few years later, Ted Sowers, an archaeologist working for the State of Wyoming, returned to Castle Gardens to photograph the turtle. He found the image gone, and only a hole in the rock left to show where it had been. Vandals had stolen it. What happened next is unclear, but the story goes that word went out among the people of Fremont county that the turtle had better turn up again if no one wanted their legs broken. The turtle did resurface, and was donated to the Wyoming State Museum in Cheyenne on Sept. 20, 1941. There it may still be seen. Its colors have dulled since Love first described it, but it’s well worth the trip.

For Love and Renaud, however, all these rock images were pictures of a past culture, made by the imaginations of people no longer among us. But in 1983, Mary Helen Hendry, a central Wyoming rancher, artist, and anthropologist (and longtime member of the Natrona County School Board) published a book, full of photos and descriptions of pictographs and petroglyphs in Wyoming. She photographed a site that had first been sketched by an army officer in 1882. But she noticed the headdress of one of the figures had been added to. Clearly, Indians were continuing to use the images in the late 1800s and early 1900s, perhaps down to the present. (Hendry, 12-14, cited in Francis & Loendorf, 34.)

Resources

Books and websites where you can learn more about Wyoming’s ancient people and the images they left behind them are listed below. Better, however, would be to visit the state museum for a look at the great turtle, and better still would be to visit the sites themselves. The three best are best are Castle Gardens, the Legend Rock Petroglyph Site, and the Medicine Lodge State Archaeological Site.

Field Trips

Northwest Wyoming

• Medicine Lodge State Archaeological Site near Hyattville.
• Legend Rock State Petroglyph Site, northwest of Thermopolis.
• Mummy Cave, west of Cody.

Northern Wyoming

• The Medicine Wheel, on US 14A between Lovell and Burgess Junction.

Northeast Wyoming

• Pictographs near Outlaw Canyon, west of Kaycee.

Central Wyoming

• Castle Gardens, 28 miles south of Moneta.

Southern Wyoming

• Saratoga Museum buffalo-kill diorama and related artifacts. 
And check at your own county museum for more information on local sites and ancient artifacts.

Secondary Sources

• Francis, Julie E. and Lawrence Loendorf. Ancient Visions: Petroglyphs and Pictographs of the Wind River and Bighorn Country, Wyoming and Montana. Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press 2002. An excellent and up-to-date scholarly overview, with many color photos and good black-and-white drawings of the rock pictures.
• Hendry, Mary Helen. Indian Rock Art in Wyoming. Lysite, Wyoming: privately published, 1983. Numerous black and white photos, and good drawings.
  Love, J. D. “Petroglyphs of Central Wyoming.” Annals of Wyoming vol. 9 number 2 (1932): pp. 690-693. This is an excerpt of a paper Love first wrote when he was a student at Lander High School.
• Jones, William A. Report on the Reconnaissance of Northwestern Wyoming Made in the Summer of 1873. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1874. His report, plus cool old fold-out maps. This book is in many Wyoming libraries.
• Renaud, E. B. [Etienne Bernardeau, born 1880] “Pictographs and Petroglyphs of the High Western Plains.” Archaeological Survey of the High Western Plains, Eighth Report. Denver: University of Denver Department of Anthropology, 1936. See pages 9-16 for his description of Castle Gardens, which relies heavily on Love’s.
• Check online for books in all Wyoming libraries including the one closest to you.

Online

• The Bureau of Land Management has a good overview of rock-picture sites on federal land in Wyoming on its page on Resources at Risk. This site is well maintained and up to date.
• For more on understanding and preserving ancient rock pictures, see a description of a summer course that Lawrence Loendorf offered a few years ago at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody.
• See also the Chief Washakie Foundation’s excellent overview of rock images in central Wyoming, taken from American Rock Art Research Association’s (ARARA) Exhibition Catalog from a conference in Wyoming in 2002. The images of the water-ghost woman and the winged figure are among ten shown and discussed in detail on this site. There’s lots of other good stuff on Wyoming’s Indians, especially Shoshones, on the Chief Washakie Foundation web site as well.

Throughout the 1990s, natural gas began flowing in steadily increasing quantities from two big fields southwest of Pinedale, in western Wyoming. The resulting boom has been hard on local wildlife and air quality, and has industrialized a local ranching and tourist economy, perhaps forever. At the same time, the production has brought millions in tax and royalty revenues to federal, state, and Sublette County coffers, and has brought millions of dollars in profits to the companies that developed the fields.

It all came about because a father, his son, and their partner in a little oil company in Casper, Wyoming, thought to try drilling the area another time, and the business sense to know when and how to go about it. The story goes to the heart of Wyoming’s oil and gas culture, and raises important questions about energy production’s long-term costs and benefits.

The Pinedale Anticline Project Area (PAPA) is located in central Sublette County, Wyoming, on a narrow, diagonal 30-mile swath of land that stretches from just outside the Pinedale town limits south along U.S. Highway 191 to about 70 miles north of Rock Springs. It consists of 197,345 acres, 80 percent surface of which is federal, operated by the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), five percent is State of Wyoming, and 15 percent is owned privately. By 2000, the PAPA was one of the newest and most productive gas fields in the continental United States. Gas reserves are estimated at up to 40 trillion cubic feet. That’s enough to serve the nation’s entire natural gas demand for 22 months.

The Jonah Field is located south of the Pinedale Anticline and also in Sublette County. It is approximately 35 miles south of Pinedale and about 70 miles north of Rock Springs. After being rediscovered in the early 1990s, Jonah Field was heralded as one of the most significant on-shore natural gas discoveries in the second half of the 20th century. The field has a productive area of 21,000 acres and is estimated to contain 10.5 trillion cubic feet (297 billion cubic meters) of natural gas. The National Petroleum Council, in its 2007 report “Facing the Hard Truths about Energy,” estimated total traditional natural gas resources in the Lower 48 States to be 764 trillion cubic feet. Ninety-eight percent of this field is managed by the Bureau of Land Management, with two state sections of one square mile each, and one private section of land.

Early attempts

California Oil Company, later named Chevron, first drilled on the Pinedale Anticline in 1939 using rotary tools, state-of-the-art drilling equipment at the time. Working only from the geological clues visible on the earth’s surface, these early oilmen had correctly figured out where to drill. But after drilling 10,000 feet into the earth, they found very little of what they were after — oil. They did, however, find plenty of natural gas. Unfortunately, there was no market for the gas and the company plugged and abandoned the site.

El Paso Gas Company purchased the well but with hopes to drill for gas. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, the company drilled a total of seven wells in the area, all producing limited gas, making the venture an economic failure.

But El Paso made plans to return to the Pinedale Anticline in a big way in 1969, to experiment with detonating nuclear devices to assist with natural gas extraction. This attempt, Project Wagon Wheel, was designed to study the effectiveness of nuclear power to mine natural gas. El Paso geologists knew there was plenty of gas below the anticline, but it was locked tightly in sandstone rock formations that resisted conventional drilling methods. Radioactivity, according to a company report, was not expected to be a problem.

When the citizens of Sublette County learned of the planned nuclear detonation, several of them formed the Wagon Wheel Information Committee to learn more about the project. The group soon committed to educating people and stopping the project. Eventually they succeeded. Determined citizens prevented big industry and the federal government from detonating nuclear devices in their county.

Meridian Oil Company drilled next for gas on the Pinedale Anticline. But this company had similar problems. Its results were hampered by traditional drilling methods which did not work well in the Anticline’s tight sandstones. And there still was no good market for natural gas.

Meanwhile, new pollution-control laws were changing the business. The Clean Air Act of 1970 was amended in 1977 and again in 1990 to specify new strategies for cleaning up the air. Most of the nation’s electrical plants had been powered by coal, which emits high levels of ash, sulfur dioxide and mercury. The new strategies led companies to look for cleaner energy, including natural gas.

The Jonah Field

Recognizing the changing demand for energy the men at a small company in Casper, Wyoming, thought that natural gas would be a good investment. This was the McMurry Oil Company, started by W.M. “Neil” McMurry, with his son Neil “Mick” McMurry and John Martin as partners. With great foresight, they identified natural gas as a “clean fuel,” because, when burned, it emits nowhere near the toxins produced by a fuel like coal. (Since then, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has noted that greenhouse gas emissions from the production and transportation side of the natural gas industry are cause for concern). At the same time, the price of natural gas was low–and gas leases were therefore inexpensive.

“There were a lot of opportunities in [natural gas] and no one else believed in it,” recalls Mick. John and Mick looked for natural gas prospects “that we could believe in and afford,” says Mick. “We looked up in Canada, Nebraska, and Kansas — fortunately, none of those came together.” Then they found something right in Wyoming. It was called the Jonah Prospect, next to the Pinedale Anticline.

In 1991, McMurry Oil Company (MOC) purchased three wells in the Jonah Field from the Presidio Oil Company, which had shown unpromising early results. Along with the three wells the McMurrys purchased mineral leases on 25,000 acres of BLM land in the Jonah area.

Making the prospective investment more attractive to MOC was a new, efficient way to get natural gas out of Wyoming. The Kern River Pipeline was then under construction, with political support from Wyoming GovernorMike Sullivan and financial support from the state legislature. Built by the Williams Companies, Inc. and Tenneco Gas Company in a 50/50 joint venture, the 926-mile pipeline would extend from Opal, Wyoming, about forty miles south of the Jonah Field, to the San Joaquin Valley near Bakersfield, California. It was operational by February 1992 with a capacity of 700 million cubic feet per day.

The abandoned Jonah wells were located approximately ten miles from the old Meridian Pipeline, built years before to serve a few other unproductive wells on the Pinedale Anticline. They had never been hooked up. The Meridian line connected to the processing plant at Opal, and thus would connect to the new Kern River system.

Wardell Federal #1, the first of the three gas wells that would end up in the McMurrys’ hands was drilled in 1975 by Marvin Davis of Denver and his Davis Oil Company. That well produced too little gas to be economical. Ten years later, Canada’s Home Petroleum acquired Davis Oil and drilled two more wells a mile north of Davis’ well. Home’s first well, the Jonah #1-4, tested more than two million cubic feet of gas per day, but during the drilling process the formation was damaged, impairing gas flow. Home Petroleum drilled second well in 1987. That well fell victim to falling natural gas prices and was completed in only one formation. During the industry downturn of the late 1980s, Home Petroleum sold the wells and their leases to Presidio.

Fracking

Natural gas in the Jonah Field is “locked” in tight rock formations. To extract the gas, first the well is drilled, and then the formations must be broken down, creating channels for gas to flow. This is accomplished by fracturing (fracking) a formation, when fluid and/or compressed gas is forced at high pressure down the well fracturing the gas-bearing rocks, creating cracks and fissures. These fissures become conduits for gas to flow out of the formation and up the steel pipe set in the well. To keep the formation from closing back on the fissures and resealing the rock, solid material is mixed in the “frack fluid” to prop the channels open. The most commonly used “propant” is sand, or “frack sand.”

McMurry Oil Company recognized that the only way to successfully draw the gas through the well-bores was to develop new drilling and fracturing technology that would allow free flow of the gas through the formation. The company sought advice from the best consultants in the gas industry. Petroleum engineer James Shaw greatly assisted in developing a whole new system – and it worked.

It had been the hope of the McMurry Oil Company and its partners that the wells would produce one million cubic feet per day. To everyone’s great surprise and pleasure, the three wells produced two million. McMurry Oil Company reported its first production of gas in the Jonah Field to the Wyoming Oil and Gas Commission in September 1992.

The success of its first Jonah Field wells encouraged the company to keep drilling in the area. Over the next few years the company picked up additional BLM gas lease sales. To cover the additional costs of more drilling, the small company took on partners.

Next, McMurry Oil Company moved north to the Pinedale Anticline when it acquired an interest in partnership with Meridian Oil Company. The partnership’s first well, the New Fork Federal #11-8 was sunk to 11,587 feet. Unfortunately, it was “non-commercial,” or not economically viable. MOC moved back to the Jonah Field and did not return to the Pinedale Anticline until late 1995. In the meantime, Meridian sold its interest to Ultra Petroleum.

In 1996, drilling expanded significantly when Snyder and Amoco Corporation moved into the Jonah Field. They brought 3-D seismic survey equipment, instrumental in delineating the field’s key boundaries. The 3-D surveys allowed Amoco and Snyder to drill wells within 500 feet of faults and to know exactly where they were going in the formation. The new data helped pinpoint the areas of highest production. “That’s what made Jonah successful,” observes Mick McMurry.

More pipelines, more drilling, more wells

Initially hampering production, however, were limited pipelines, as well as a scarcity of compression facilities, which increase the pressure of gas in pipelines and enable the gas to flow properly. Four-inch pipelines were soon replaced with eight-inch surface pipeline. Then in 1996, a twelve-inch gas line was constructed with a capacity of 100 million cubic feet per day. The following year, a twenty-three-mile, sixteen-inch pipeline was added to connect Williams Field Services, Questar (after 2011, QEP in this area), Western Gas Resources, and FMC pipelines from the Jonah Field to processing facilities at Opal, Granger, and Black Fork, Wyoming. This line increased the daily transportation capacity to 175 million cubic feet.

On September 1, 1999, the Jonah Gas Gathering Company, a Wyoming partnership operated and partially owned by McMurry Oil Company, opened a new 50.5-mile, twenty-inch pipeline. The new line would transport the majority of the gas from the Jonah Field to Opal, where it connected with the Williams Field Services gas process facility. From Opal, the gas was marketed into three different pipelines: Kern River, Northwest, and Colorado Interstate Gas. Completion of the Jonah Gas Gathering pipeline increased gathering capacity on the Jonah Field from 175 to 320 million cubic feet per day.

The increased pipeline capacity enabled drilling in the Jonah Field and the Pinedale Anticline to grow at a remarkable pace. In December 1997, the BLM reported 58 wells in place. By December 1999, there were more than 150 wells in both fields. By July 2001, the well count reached 300.

This rapid expansion was permitted by the BLM. In April 1998, the agency formally allowed full-field development. The operators believed at this time they would need 497 wells to fully extract natural gas from the Jonah Field, though the report noted that between 300 and 350 wells was “most probably” the number.

By late 1998, it was clear both estimates were low. The companies began what’s called infill drilling — drilling new wells among producing wells in a developed field, to yield more gas faster. Infill drilling would nearly triple the number of well pads that had been considered adequate by operators and the BLM in 1998. By December 2000, the well count had jumped from 497 to 1,347. The total projected lifetime of the field had accordingly dropped to twenty-five years, half of the original estimate.

In June 2000, Alberta Energy Company bought McMurry Oil Company and became a major interest holder in the Jonah Field with a 35 percent interest. In 2002, Alberta Energy changed its name to EnCana, and become North America’s top independent natural gas producer.

In November 2001, McMurry Energy, created after the MOC sold its Jonah interest, sold its Pinedale Anticline holdings to Shell, formally known as the Royal Dutch/Shell Group’s Energy and Production Company. This was the international company’s first foray into Rocky Mountain natural gas in nearly two decades. Other major companies soon followed.

After 2000, drilling in the Jonah Field and Pinedale Anticline continued, spurred by high natural gas prices. In March 2003, the BLM reported that operators had requested permission for an infill drilling program that would add up to 1,250 new wells to replace their earlier request for 850 new pads. Surface well spacing would decrease to sixteen acres, or forty pads per square mile. The BLM raised its estimate of surface disturbance for wells and associated infrastructure by more than 40 percent, from 2,927 acres to 4,225 acres.

The Casper Star-Tribune reported in August 2003 that a total of 3,100 wells might ultimately be drilled in the Jonah Field — 1,300 more than had been requested in the March 2003 infill proposal. The recession in 2008 brought a drop in natural gas prices, resulting in a sudden reduction in drilling in the Jonah Field and the Pinedale Anticline. Drilling and production never stopped, but as of early 2011 was continuing at a slower pace. Drilling is likely to pick up again when the price of natural gas returns to a more profitable level.

Impacts

The Jonah Field rediscovery and successful extraction of natural gas initiated by McMurry Oil Company is heralded as one of the most significant natural gas developments in continental North America in the second half of the twentieth century. Jonah represents a turning point because of the enormous amount of production opened up by the new technologies. McMurry Oil Company’s technical advances in the early 1990s, coupled with higher gas prices and a quick boom in pipeline capacity, allowed it and other companies to lucratively produce gas from a previously inaccessible source. This success led to McMurry Oil Company’s expansion of the nearby Pinedale Anticline field a few years later.

Impacts brought on from drilling in the Jonah Field and Pinedale Anticline were not always welcomed, however, in the small Wyoming communities surrounding the area, notably Boulder, Pinedale, Big Piney, Marbleton, and La Barge, and the bigger towns of Rock Springs and Green River. The boom strained community housing, schools, and such services as law enforcement and health care.

A 2005 study of Pinedale residents conducted by sociologists from the University of Wyoming found that the newcomers brought many new “social impacts,” and that longtime residents found it “increasingly commonplace not to recognize someone while going to the bank or buying groceries.” Services were harder to get. A quick stop in the store was no longer quick, with long lines at the checkout. It took a longer wait to see a local doctor. For the first time, it was hard to find a parking spot. Perhaps most noticeable was how difficult it became to cross Pine Street, Highway 191, Pinedale’s main drag, with the constant traffic of heavily loaded semi trucks.

Concerns were raised, too, about the industry’s impact on wildlife, particularly sage grouse, pygmy rabbits, pronghorn antelope, and mule deer. The Sublette mule deer herd, one of the biggest in the state, winters on the Mesa – the northern portion of the Pinedale Anticline. To protect the deer, the BLM restricted drilling during critical winter months until 2008, when a new plan was developed that allows for year-round drilling if the herd population can be maintained. Mule deer numbers have declined significantly, though. A 2010 BLM report shows a decline in 60 percent in deer populations from 2001 to 2009, based on annual estimates. The report blames energy development disturbance. On the Mesa, deer have also lost nearly 2,000 acres of habitat over the past decade, with the majority, 85 percent, of the habitat loss attributed to well pads and the rest to road construction.

Measures have been taken to try to reduce impacts to wildlife and the environment in the Pinedale Anticline. Gas companies are coordinating their drilling efforts into designated areas for year-round development. These Development Areas (DAs) allow the companies to concentrate their activities and timing in specified areas leaving large blocks of contiguous habitat undisturbed and available to big game and their migration corridors and sage grouse habitat. In an effort to reduce the amount of area disturbed, companies have been clustering their wells onto a single pad and then using directional drilling from the pad, resulting in fewer pads and roads needed for drilling activity. By 2010, this method had allowed 100 fewer needed well pads in the Pinedale Anticline Project Area and 70 percent fewer roads to fully develop the field, leading to less habitat disturbance.

Sublette County citizens are concerned about the increased water and air pollution connected with the development. Long-time residents noticed a decline in year-round air quality starting in 2000. Air pollution is now a way of life. The situation became dire in 2008 when the Wyoming Department of Environmental Quality began issuing “Ozone Alerts.” Ground-level ozone results from chemical reactions between oxides of nitrogen and volatile organic compounds in the presence of sunlight. Ozone levels get too high when too many engines, from all sources, are pumping dangerous emissions into the atmosphere that are then “cooked” by the sun, often when there is a snow cover to intensify the sunlight. High ozone levels can be particularly dangerous to people with compromised immune systems and respiratory problems. Air quality monitoring is now required, with ongoing steps taking place to alleviate the potentially dangerous situation, though “Ozone Alerts” continue.

At the same time, positive impacts from the successful drilling in the Jonah Field and Pinedale Anticline were immediate and far reaching. Millions of tax dollars have been collected as a result of the natural gas production in Sublette County, which have been used for improved infrastructure and community resources. Thousands of jobs have been created for local residents and for those willing to relocate to the area. Industry has also been very generous in volunteering time and donating money to organizations that serve the community. Industry operators have also worked with the Wyoming Game and Fish Department to implement innovative technologies and operational practices that lessen the effect of natural gas operations on the environment.

Natural gas production continues in 2011, and so too, do many of the problems that came with it. Population growth has slowed somewhat since 2008, however, and the newcomers continue to be served reasonably well by private-sector housing and other services. At the same time, increased tax revenues have allowed local governments to be proactive in building infrastructure, and industry is working to alleviate the problems brought on by the drilling activity. Pipelines, for example, are being built to carry out the condensate now carried by large, dust-raising semi trucks. The BLM and Wyoming Game and Fish monitor the area, and face continued challenges.

Since 2010, additional natural gas fields in Wyoming and throughout the West have been located and development plans are underway. Citizens from Sublette County have been invited to these areas to discuss ways those communities can learn from Pinedale. These could be valuable lessons.

Resources

Primary Sources

• “Balancing Resources on the Pinedale Anticline.” The PAPA operators’ website, accessed Feb. 15, 2011 at http://www.papaoperators.com/.
• Ballou, Dawn. “Preserving Wildlife in the PAPA.” Pinedale Online! Jan. 18, 2010. Accessed Feb. 15, 2011 at http://www.pinedaleonline.com/news/2010/01/PreservingWildlifean1.htm.
• Ecosystem Research Group. “Sublette County Socioeconomic Impact Study, Phase II – Final Report.” September 28, 2009. Prepared for Sublette County Commissioners. Accessed Feb. 15, 2011 at http://www.sublettewyo.com/DocumentView.aspx?DID=392.
• Ostlind, Emilene. “Fox Guarding Pinedale Henhouse? Critics Call Wildlife Count ‘Unsound Science.’” WyoFile.com, July 12, 2010. Accessed Feb. 15, 2011 at http://wyofile.com/2010/07/fox-guarding-pinedale-henhouse-critics-call-wildlife-count-unsound-science/.
• “PAPA SEIS ROD Implementation.” Includes the Bureau of Land Management’s Record of Decision (ROD) for the Final Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement (SEIS) in the Pinedale Anticline Project Area (PAPA), with related links. Accessed Feb. 15, 2011 at http://www.blm.gov/wy/st/en/field_offices/Pinedale/anticline.html.
• Sawyer, Hall and Ryan Nielson. “Mule Deer Monitoring in the Pinedale Anticline Project Area: 2010 Annual Report.” Prepared for the Pinedale Anticline Planning Office of the BLM, Sept. 14, 2010. Accessed Feb. 15, 2011 at http://www.wy.blm.gov/jio-papo/papo/reports/2010annualreport_muledeer.pdf.

Secondary Sources

• Lederer, Adam. “Project Wagon Wheel: A Nuclear Plowshare for Wyoming,” Readings in Wyoming History: Issues in the History of the Equality State, fourth edition, edited by Phil Roberts. Laramie: Skyline Press, 2004, 214-227.
• Noble, Ann Chambers. Hurry McMurry: W.N. “Neil” McMurry, Wyoming Entrepreneur. (Casper, Wyo.: VLM Publishing LLC, 2010.) Includes more on the McMurry Oil Company and on fracking on the Jonah Field and Pinedale Anticline.
• __________________. Pinedale, Wyoming: A Centennial History 1904 – 200. (Pinedale, Wyo.: Sublette County Historical Society, 20005.) Includes more on Project Wagon Wheel and the Wagon Wheel Information Committee.

Illustrations

• The photo of the Pinedale Anticline from the air, 2009 is courtesy of the field’s current operators: Ultra/Shell/QEP.
• The photos of the founders of the McMurry Oil Company, Halliburton pumping the frack on the company’s first wildcat well, and of the pipeline construction are all courtesy of MOC.
• The photo of the working drill rig on the Pinedale Anticline is by Jonathan Selkowitz, from SkyTruth, used by permission.

Wyoming's fossils have been important to science since the 1870s and continue to be useful today. Remains of Triceratops, Diplodocus, Tyrannosaurus and others have helped answer—and raise—many questions about the ancient history of the planet and have captured popular imagination with their size or fierce appearance. The scientific value of these fossils and the public interest in them has brought many different collectors to the state who excavate fossils for shipment to museums all over the country. However, only a few major finds from Wyoming have remained in the state.

In 1877, employees of the Union Pacific Railroad found large bones weathering out of the hills at Como Bluff near Medicine Bow, Wyo., and wrote to paleontologist Othniel C. Marsh of Yale College, in Connecticut. Within a year, diggers hired by Marsh and teams working for paleontologist Edward D. Cope, of Philadelphia were excavating tons of fossil bones for shipment east. Marsh and Cope were bitter professional rivals, and the same spirit infected their employees.

Diggers smashed bones in the quarries of the other teams and even in their own to avoid thefts. No one will ever know what valuable specimens were lost to this rivalry, but the ones which were gained include Dryolestes, the first Jurassic mammal discovered in North America; large pieces of Apatosaurus, then known as Brontosaurus; several Baptanodons—marine reptiles; and many others. Specimens collected for Marsh went to the Peabody Museum at Yale; those gathered for Cope went mostly to the Academy of Natural Sciences in Philadelphia.

Museums closer to the fossil locations also acquired specimens. In the 1890s, the University of Wyoming accumulated a large collection of Jurassic fossils (unfortunately, most of this collection was lost to flooding in the 1920s), and in 1895 Prof. Samuel Williston of the University of Kansas traveled to Lusk, Wyo., to collect for the university’s museum the first Triceratops skull ever to go on display.

The best and most scientifically important fossils, however, left the region in large part because the expert collectors, the most eminent scientists and the best museum facilities—where specimens could be safely preserved for future examination by scientists—were on the East Coast.

In 1898, the American Museum of Natural History discovered the Bone Cabin Quarry north of Medicine Bow, where fossil bones were so plentiful that a local resident built his cabin’s foundation entirely with bone chunks. (This structure no longer exists, and is a different structure from the so-called fossil cabin, a roadside attraction on U.S. 30 just south of Como Bluff built entirely of fossil bones in the 1930s.)

In the five years following 1898, the Bone Cabin Quarry was worked nearly to exhaustion, yielding parts of many large Jurassic dinosaurs in the process. Additionally, AMNH crews explored other areas of the state, discovering a duck-billed dinosaur of the hadrosaur family near Lusk that retained extensive skin impressions surrounding the body.

On July 2, 1899, a Diplodocus was found at Sheep Creek about 25 miles north of Como Bluff. This fossil was one of the first large specimens collected for the budding Carnegie Museum of Pittsburgh, Pa. When Andrew Carnegie paid to have the skeleton replicated and copies sent to museums in Britain, Europe and Argentina, he made it perhaps the most famous dinosaur ever to come from Wyoming. Millions of people first heard of dinosaurs and paleontology by seeing a mount of Diplodocus carnegii.

A second dinosaur from the Sheep Creek quarry was an Apatosaurus excavated in 1901. It also was dug for the Carnegie Museum, but never mounted. In 1955, the University of Wyoming in Laramie, Wyo. acquired this specimen for its Geological museum, where it is still on display.

In 1975, numerous tracks of pterosaurs—flying reptiles—were discovered near Alcova Lake. At that time, only one set of tracks was known; with the evidence provided by the Alcova fossils, some long‑standing assumptions about the behavior and environment of pterosaurs were revised.

In 1991, a private collector found an Allosaurus near Shell, Wyo., on the west flank of the Bighorn Mountains. The fossil was eventually determined to lie on public land and was collected by the Bureau of Land Management, the Museum of the Rockies in Bozeman, Mont., and the University of Wyoming. The Museum of the Rockies retained the bones and made casts, now on display in Bozeman and Laramie. This discovery of "Big Al" and associated fossils helped prompt an effort to revise fossil law and limit commercial collecting on public land.

In 1997, the Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite, the largest in Wyoming, was discovered in the Sundance Formation southwest of Shell, the tracks apparently representing a large herd of dinosaurs moving along a beach. Scientists had previously thought that the entire Sundance Formation was marine—that is, that its sediments were laid down under water—but these tracks showed that a large dry area must have been present to support such numbers of land dwellers.

In 2006, "Apollo," one of the most complete diplodocid skeletons, retaining 83 percent of the original bones, was dug at Tensleep, Wyo., by a private firm. This specimen was discovered with others in a world‑class assemblage of numerous nearly complete skeletons, and the new material is already stirring debates over the habits and relationships of sauropods, the long-tailed, long-necked, elephant-legged plant eaters, including Diplodocus, Apatosaurus and Superasaurus.

In recent years, museums in Wyoming, such as the private Wyoming Dinosaur Center of Thermopolis and the Tate Museum of Casper College, have been expanding and acquiring more, more complete and more intact specimens. "Jimbo," the Supersaurus vivianae at the Dinosaur Center, was discovered near Douglas in 1995 and, as the second specimen of one of the biggest sauropod species known, has been exhibited internationally. Current research on this fossil may help scientists reclassify the sauropod family.

"Dee," the largest mounted Columbian mammoth in North America, was found in 2006 on a ranch north of Casper, Wyo. and is now on display at the Tate Museum. The Tate has also recently collected a Tyrannosaurus rex north of Lusk, Wyo.; this specimen is the first found in Wyoming to stay in the state.

Wyoming's fossils have contributed to cultural and scientific development across much of the world and will probably continue to do so. Although the supply of world-class specimens is limited, it is not yet exhausted. Many in Wyoming hope that as its scientific institutions mature, the state will be able and qualified to retain some of these finds.

Resources

• "Apollo, the most complete Diplodocus ever discovered…" Accessed 9/3/11 at www.washakiemuseum.org/doc/apollo_til_Oct1.pdf
• Bennette, S. Christopher. "Terrestrial Locomotion of Pterosaurs: a Reconstruction Based on Pteraichnus Trackways."Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology 17, no. 1, (1997): 104-113.
• "Casper College Announces Discovery of T. Rex." Casper College News Release, February 23, 2011. Accessed 9/3/2011 at www.tatetrex.com/press/downloads/DiscoveryAnnouncement-0211.doc
• Colbert, Edwin. The Great Dinosaur Hunters and Their Discoveries. New York: E. P. Dutton and Co, 1968, 151-154, 195-196.
• "Dee the Mammoth and the Pleistocene Exhibit." Accessed 9/3/2011 at www.caspercollege.edu/tate
• "Discovery/Background" [of the Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite] Accessed 9/3/2011 at http://www.blm.gov/wy/st/en/field_offices/Worland/Tracksite/discovery.html
• "Discovery of Rare Fossil in Wyoming Sparks Protection Bill for Dinosaur Bones and Fish," The Sheridan Press, 11 July 1992, 13.
• Galliano, Henry and Raimund Albersdorfer, “A New Basal Diplodocid Species …” Tensleep, Wyo.: Dinosauria International, 2010. Accessed Aug. 29, 2010 at http://dinosauriainternational.com/downloads/Amphicoelias.pdf.
• "Jimbo the Supersaurus."Casper Star-Tribune, 4 June 2007.
• Kohl, Michael, Larry Martin and Paul Brinkman, eds. A Triceratops Hunt in Pioneer Wyoming. Glendo, Wyo.: High Plains Press, 2004, 14-24.
• Logue, Terrence. "Preliminary Investigation of Pterodactyl Tracks at Alcova, Wyoming."The Wyoming Geological Association Earth Science Bulletin, 10, no. 2, 29-30 (1977).
• "Major Dinosaur Find at Shell."Casper Star-Tribune, n.d., August 1992.
• Ostrom, John and John McIntosh. Marsh's Dinosaurs: The Collections from Como Bluff. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1966, 1-47.
• Rea, Tom. Bone Wars: The Excavation and Celebrity of Andrew Carnegie's Dinosaur. Pittsburgh, University of Pittsburgh Press: 2001, 18-19, 87-90, 158-178, 249.
• Rea, Tom. "Dinosaur Find Near Greybull Highlights Contrasting Motives for Bone Digging,"Casper Star-Tribune, 6 October 1991, B1.
• "Science" [relating to the Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite] Accessed 9/3/2011 at http:www.blm.gov/wy/st/en/field_offices/Worland/Tracksite/science.html
• Vergano, Dan. "Dinosaur Discoveries Shake Up Sauropod Story,"USA Today, 11 October 2010. Accessed 9/18.11 at http://m.usatoday.com/article/tech/danvergano/40539416.

Field Trips

Warning: While fossil-bearing rocks are present around Wyoming, it is illegal to collect on private land without permission of the landowner or to collect fossils of vertebrates on public land without a permit. It is the collector's responsibility to be aware of the land boundaries and the regulations. Consult the nearest geological museum for advice on sites and collecting.

Illustrations

• The photo of north face of Como Bluff, looking southwest toward Elk Mountain beyond, is by longtime Casper Star-Tribune photographer Zbigniew Bzdak. Casper Star-Tribune collection, Casper College Western History Center. Used with thanks.
• The image of the observation platform at the Red Gulch Dinosaur Tracksite is a UW Geological Museum photo from the photo gallery at BLM’s website. Used with thanks.

Nov. 19, 1925, was a cold night for football in the oil boomtown of Midwest, Wyo. “Don’t Miss It,” the Casper Herald had advised the day before. “Something New, Football at Night, Casper vs. Midwest.”

“Floodlights,” the advertisement continued, would be “assisted by open gas flares for light and warmth—the roads are fine …” Fine perhaps, but still dirt in 1925. Midwest is 40 miles north of Casper.

For the football game, Midwest Refinery Company electricians set up 12 floodlights of 1,000 candlepower each around the field, four more of 2,000 candlepower, and from the top of an oil derrick near the field, a huge searchlight swung its beam over the players and the crowd. Electricity had come to the oil fields around Midwest earlier that year, when the company built an electric plant to power thousands of oil-well pumps.

The football was white. The spectators jumped and hopped to stay warm in the frosty air. More than 1,000 people turned out for the game, most of them from Midwest and the other oil camps nearby. A few drove out from Casper on the dirt roads. People in the crowd “were stirred with the giant outdoor overhead lighted drama,” the company magazine noted, “with every play and every player brought out in cameo clearness, reminding all of nothing ever witnessed before.”

It was not the first lighted football game ever. But most likely it was the first night football game ever played in the West, and the first ever played between high school teams. The company cooperated with Midwest High School so oilfield workers could see a game. Working all the time, they generally couldn’t make it to games played in daylight. Casper won, 20-0.

The Salt Creek Oil Field

Midwest sits on high ground above Salt Creek, in the middle of the Salt Creek Oil Field, an oval-shaped piece of central Wyoming 10 miles long and five miles wide. People had been extracting oil from the ground there since 1889: a trickle at first, and then a river, and now a flood. Midwest was booming. The crude oil was pumped out of the ground and piped to Casper, where it was refined into gasoline and other products. Then the oil was shipped out on the railroad.

No one knew it at the football game, but the flood of oil would gradually subside. In the mid-1920s there may have been as many as 10,000 people living in the orderly company town of Midwest and in the messier oil camps scattered nearby. Hard to imagine now, when Midwest has fewer than 500 people.

Like so many oil fields, gas fields and mines in Wyoming, the Salt Creek field boomed, then busted. The bust was never complete, though. For 117 years, the oil has kept right on coming out of the ground. The Salt Creek field is one of the longest continually producing oil fields in the world.

Early discoveries

Salt Creek starts about 20 miles north of Casper and runs forty miles farther north, where it flows into the Powder River near Sussex, Wyo. Indians knew for a long time that black oil could be found floating on the surface of the creek at several spots, especially a place called Jackass Springs.

White people may first have learned of the oil when American Indians brought some to Fort Fetterman, on the North Platte River 50 miles east of what’s now Casper, to sell for horse ointment and wagon grease. A Laramie lawyer named Stephen Downey filed some mineral claims around Jackass Springs in 1883, on Salt Creek, a mile or two north of what’s now Midwest. In 1886, Wyoming’s territorial geologist, Samuel Aughey, filed a geological report.

Aughey noticed that the layers of rock around Salt Creek formed an anticline, a place where the layers bend upward, then down again. The layers had been deposited millions of years ago as sand or mud, then hardened into rock. Other pressures in the earth’s crust later bent the layers.

Oil, Aughey knew, is often trapped underground in space left by the up-bent rock. Aughey’s report included a sketch of these layers. It showed that some of the top layers, near the middle of the anticline, were missing. Wind, water and weather had eroded them away. These missing layers explain why the oil, once far underground, was now at the surface.

Cy Iba, a prospector with experience in California and the Black Hills of Dakota, began filing mineral claims along Salt Creek in 1887 and returning every summer to do the required annual work to keep his claims legal. Downey’s claims were absorbed by another group of investors, and they and Iba kept constant watch on each other to make sure the claims stayed up to date. If $100 worth of work wasn’t done on each 20-acre claim each year, another person could legally “jump” the claim—take it over for himself.

Finally, Phillip Shannon, who had learned the drilling business in the oil fields of Pennsylvania, drilled an oil well three miles down Salt Creek from Jackass Springs. It took months. In August 1890, Shannon struck oil when the hole was about 1,000 feet deep. He drilled a few more wells in the next few years.

String teams—teams of 12 to 18 horses or mules pulling a train, or string, of several wagons--freighted the oil to Casper. Each wagon had an oil tank on it. Shannon sold the oil to the railroad for lubricant. By 1895, he had built a small refinery at Casper that produced 15 different kinds of lubricants.

There was not a huge demand for oil yet. It was used mostly to lubricate all kinds of machines or to refine into kerosene, which was used in lamps.

A gusher and a boom

Shannon sold out in 1904 to a group of English, French and Belgian investors. They drilled a well 900 feet deep but the cable broke and the drill bits were lost. In 1907, another group of investors bought all the Iba claims. These ended up in the hands of a Dutch company. The Dutch hit some oil at a depth of 1,050 feet. At 1,092 feet they hit a lot more. A column of oil 100 feet high gushed up from the hole.

With the Dutch gusher, the boom was on. Oil was becoming big business. Automobiles, more popular all the time, ran on gasoline, which was refined from oil. And oceangoing ships were starting to shift from coal to oil-based fuels. Prospectors and investors swarmed to Salt Creek, eager to own all or part of a well that would make them rich.

But the law, written originally to regulate mining of metals like gold, silver and copper, made little sense when applied to oil and led to disputes and confusion. Any group of eight investors could partner up to claim 160 acres, with a different partner’s name attached to each 20-acre piece. Each piece could be held indefinitely, as long as $100 worth of work was done on it each year. Claims were often held for years before the original claimants found investors with enough money and boldness to drill a well—an expensive proposition.

This meant busy work had to be done each year to hold the claim. For example, a pit 10 feet square and five feet deep could count as $100 worth of work, as could a 2-inch hole drilled to a depth of 65 feet. Claimants who failed to do the work risked having the claim jumped. Once oil was struck in moneymaking quantities, claimants could buy the land outright from the government for a price that was low even then--$2.50 per acre.

Then in 1909, the U.S. government’s Department of Interior declared that all unclaimed land around the Salt Creek field would be withdrawn—that is, no new land would be available for claims.

By 1910, some order was beginning to replace the freewheeling confusion. Two main companies emerged. By 1912, the Wyoming Oil Fields Company and the Midwest Oil Company had each built a new refinery in Casper and had laid pipe from the wells on Salt Creek to the new refineries. There were still plenty of smaller outfits around, but the government’s earlier withdrawal meant that there would be no new lands to claim at Salt Creek.

By the end of 1913, the Midwest Refining Company had bought, swapped for or absorbed enough of the other interests that it became the biggest company on Salt Creek. It owned mineral claims, producing wells, pumping stations, pipelines, storage tanks and refineries. Most of its workers lived at the biggest of the camps along Salt Creek—for now still called Home Camp—the town that later would become Midwest.

Tom Wall’s jobs

Tom Wall grew up around horses on ranches, but for better wages went to work in the oil field in 1917. His job was to protect Midwest Refining Company claims from claim jumpers. The country was rough. The simplest way to do the job was on horseback. Riders were not allowed to carry guns. No one wanted the conflict to get too serious. Often, it was good natured. Once, Wall remembered later, a company sent 30 men to jump a claim. They found another large group for another company was protecting it. Instead of fighting, the men on both sides slept on the claim, ate, played cards together and drew company wages for several more days.

Wall’s next job was as a tank gauger, measuring or gauging the levels of oil in storage tanks. At the time, oil from various pumping stations around the field was pumped to a central station—Station One. There, it was stored in tanks big enough to hold 65,000 barrels of oil. The oil was then pumped to storage tanks in Casper’s so-called tank farm. The “farm” was an entire hillside south of the North Platte River. In the coming decades it would hold hundreds of oil tanks.

Every hour the men at Station One telephoned Casper to tell how much oil they’d pumped. The men in Casper would reply with how much oil they’d received. This was a way to check for leaks: If no oil was missing, none had leaked.

World War I came along then. Wall was drafted into the U.S. Army. But he never got sent to France. When he returned to Wyoming, he went back to cowboying on the Spectacle Ranch north of the oilfields near Sussex, Wyo., where he’d worked years before. It was a bad time. The summer of 1919 was very dry, leaving the range without much grass. The next winter was very cold. Cattle suffered and died in droves. Ranches went out of business. Discouraged, Wall went back to Salt Creek.

People were now flocking to the oil fields, where the jobs were—not just from Wyoming but from all over the nation and from foreign countries, too. The field was booming.

Order in the oil field

In 1920, Congress changed the law to allow the modern system of leasing oil on government land. Companies could now bid on oil leases for specific tracts of government land. The leases would go to the highest bidder. Companies could count on holding the leases for as long as the oil lasted. The business steadied into a more even kind of growth.

Wall, meanwhile, landed another horseback job—riding lines. The oil field was webbed by a network of small pipes, or lines, two inches in diameter. The oil ran from wells to storage tanks and pumping stations. Water that came up out of the ground with the oil ran to tanks and reservoirs. Natural gas ran through lines to fire the boilers that ran the steam engines that powered the drilling rigs. The alkaline soil corroded the pipes, and they sprang leaks. Trucks drove over the pipes, and they broke. Everyone was in such a hurry that no one bothered to take up the pipes once they were no longer needed. Many ran to dead ends. Wall’s job was to ride the field full time, looking for leaks and taking up dead-end lines.

He had a grandstand seat for the oil field. Turning in his saddle, on any clear morning, he saw cars, trucks and horse-drawn wagons coming and going. He saw work crews building derricks, drilling crews drilling wells, gangs of men connecting the lines that seemed to run everywhere. On any given day another well was likely to strike oil. A gusher would spout sometimes higher than the derrick, and the land downwind would turn brown from the oil spray carried on the breeze. He held the job for eight years.

Life in a company town

During that time, the Midwest Oil Company built the company town. No more tents and tarpaper shacks. Single men working for the company could live in six-man bunkhouses, or 50-man boarding houses. Men with families were offered three- or four-room cottages. All were welcome to eat at the Midwest Hotel. Its dining hall routinely served 500 people, three meals a day. Rent and the cost of meals were taken out of the workers’ paychecks.

The company built a movie theatre, a two-story clubhouse and a two-story office building. Several of the companies jointly built a hospital. The Midwest company supplied gas, electricity, good water and incinerators. The company laid in irrigation lines so people could water their lawns, began contests for the most beautiful yards and offered free cottonwood saplings for anyone who wanted to plant trees. In photographs the streets look straight, and the identical houses look freshly painted. Home Camp changed its name to Midwest in 1923. It made sense, as the company owned the town.

At first, families were rare and most men were single. Children were scarce. The one-room school at Home Camp in 1913 averaged only 20 students. Within ten years, the schools were bursting. A four-room school built in 1922 held 160 students. Two years later a two-story frame high school was built big enough for 200 students. In 1925, students from many of the little schoolhouses in the outlying camps began being bussed in to Midwest. A photo from that year shows about 500 students in front of the Midwest school. A teacherage—a boarding house that could hold 16 single teachers—was finished in 1923.

Wall’s recollections make it seem as though there was an official social life in the company town, and a rougher one in the smaller, outlying camps. The official social life centered on churches, schools and the company clubhouse and dining hall. Prohibition was on, so drinking alcohol was illegal. Company rules forbade drinking and gambling in any case. But both went on in cafes and speakeasies in the smaller camps. And in the hills around the oil field, bootleggers kept stills, made plenty of illegal whiskey and sold it to the men.

Wall felt lucky all the rest of his life to fall into a friendship with Helen Clarke, one of the teachers who lived at the teacherage. She spent winters in Midwest and returned to her family in Missouri when school let out each summer. One October day in 1928, they traveled together to Casper. Wall bought a Chevrolet, and bought Helen a new diamond ring. “I felt jubilant, but broke,” he remembered. They were married a few weeks later.

A long, slow bust

By that time, drilling of new wells had about ceased in the Salt Creek Field. There were thousands of wells, and the pressure that pushed the oil out of the ground was falling. More and more of the wells needed pumps to keep them flowing. Men began leaving for newer, bigger fields in places like Texas and Montana. The Midwest Refinery Company was bought out by Standard Oil of Indiana. Operating as Stanolind Oil and Gas, the company had taken over all of Midwest’s operations in the field by the end of 1932.

The stock market, meanwhile, crashed in 1929, and the nation slid into the deepest depression it has ever known. Wages fell very low. Job after job disappeared. In 1932, the company stables were torn down, and all its draft teams and saddle horses were sold. Wall moved indoors to a series of clerking jobs, and then, in 1935, back outside to various jobs maintaining the wells and pumps. He felt lucky to have a job at all, “wearing overalls and getting a little grease smeared on me.”

The numbers of barrels of oil produced each year in the Salt Creek field clearly show the boom-bust patterns. In 1922, after the new leasing system came in, and after a new oil-bearing layer had been discovered deeper underground, the field produced 19 million barrels of oil. In 1923, the biggest year, 35.3 million barrels of oil came out of the field. By 1930, production was down to 10.5 million barrels and by 1945, 4.5 million barrels.

As for the town of Midwest, workers were allowed to buy the houses and own them outright beginning in the 1960s, and in 1975, the town, at last, incorporated. People finally could elect their own mayor and town council to govern them.

Still more oil

New laws in the 1930s allowed companies to pool their interests and hire a single company to operate—that is, drill, pump and maintain—an oil field. This made for much more efficient oil production. Stanolind was hired to run the entire field after 1933. Amoco eventually followed Stanolind. In 1997, the Howell Oil Company bought out Amoco’s interests, and in 2002, Anadarko bought out the Howell interests in the field.

The Salt Creek field has produced about 650 million barrels of oil over the last century or more. Anadarko analysts figured there might be 1 billion barrels left in the ground there—but the oil won’t flow under old methods. Instead, Anadarko injected carbon dioxide into the ground. The added pressure from the new gas keeps the oil flowing.

In the spring of 2015, Anadarko sold the field to Texas-based Fleur de Lis energy and its financial partner, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts & Co. for an undisclosed amount. Oil prices at the time had fallen precipitously in the previous six months. Company officials said they were glad to acquire “long-lived assets we look to own and operate.” 

Resources

Primary Sources

• Wall, J. Tom. Life in the Shannon and Salt Creek Oil Fields. Philadelphia: Dorrance & Company, 1973. Though he never says anything critical about the Midwest Oil Company or the Midwest Refining Company, Wall’s memory is long, clear and affectionate. This book is the main source for this account.
• Bille, Ed. Early Days at Salt Creek and Teapot Dome. Edited by Arlene Larson. Artwork by Bill Dickerson. Casper, Wyo.: Mountain States Lithographing, 1978. This book is packed with great photographs. See p. 91 for photos of the night-football teams.
• Prior, F.O. “The Salt Creek Electric Plant.” The Midwest Review, 6, no. 4 (April 1925). A long article on the engineering and construction of the electric plant. The Midwest Review was the company magazine. See back issues at the Casper College Western History Center.
• “Night Football Game in Salt Creek.” The Midwest Review, 6, no. 12, (December 1925).
• Bleizeffer, Dustin. “New Life for Old Field.” Casper Star-Tribune, Jan. 16, 2010. Accessed Jan. 10, 2014 at http://trib.com/news/local/article_16691a67-fff0-5cd9-b61d-3e2dac6bfa50.html.
• Storrow, Benjamin. "Anadarko sells Salt Creek oil field." Casper Star-Tribune, April 2, 2016. Accessed July 28, 2016 at http://trib.com/business/energy/anadarko-sells-salt-creek-oil-field/article_8ac6ddbd-7810-5cac-8ab9-d5d4b0887d68.html. 

Secondary Sources

• Mackey, Mike. Black Gold: Patterns in the Development of Wyoming’s Oil Industry. Powell, Wyo.: Western History Publications, 1997.
• “Oil Camp Photos.” Wyoming Tales and Trails, accessed Jan. 10, 2014 at http://www.wyomingtalesandtrails.com/oilcamp.html.
• Roberts, Harold D. Salt Creek, Wyoming: the Story of a Great Oil Field. Denver: Midwest Oil Corporation, 1956.
• Rosenberg Historical Consultants. Tour Guide: Salt Creek Oil Field, Natrona County, Wyoming. Casper, Wyo.: Natrona County Commission, 2003.
• Wyoming State Historic Preservation Office. "Follow the Black Gold Byway," a brochure with historical information on the Shannon, Salt Creek and Teapot Dome oilfields and maps directing drivers to historical markers in Casper, Midwest and Edgerton, Wyo. that deal with the Salt Creek Field and the early oil booms. Accessed March 31, 2014 at http://wyoshpo.state.wy.us/pdf/BlackGoldByway.pdf.

Illustrations

The color postcards of the Salt Creek field and of Midwest, the diagram of the anticline, the photos of the tank truck, the Midwest theatre and downtown Lavoye are all from Wyoming Tales and Trails, with thanks. The black and white photo of the Salt Creek field looking east is by Bell’s Studio, from the Amoco Refining Co. collection, Casper College Western History Center, with permission and thanks. The photo of the old Midwest electric plant is by the author.

The story of Wyoming in the 20th century is the story of a shift from a ranching and farming economy to an industrial one, dominated by the extraction of oil, gas and coal.

Part of that story is contained in the history of five of the state’s major oil fields—the Lance Creek, Elk Basin, Oregon Basin, Grass Creek and Big Muddy fields. The Lance Creek Field in Niobrara County was the most productive of the five by the end of 1956, followed by the Elk Basin and Oregon Basin fields in Park County; Grass Creek in Hot Springs County; and the Big Muddy Field in Converse County. All were early large producers, sparking the development of roads, pipelines and refineries as the market for oil grew.

By the early 1920s, the Salt Creek Oil Field in Natrona County was one of the most productive in the nation. But the business was growing fast across the state; these other fields, less well known now, contributed substantially to Wyoming’s wealth and to the oil business’s drilling and production knowhow—and spurred the birth and growth of towns in far-flung parts of the state.

Their producers all faced similar problems: dry holes, claim jumpers, how to house workers and how to deal with them when they became stir-crazy living in isolated camps without female company. Later, the few women who braved life with their husbands in the earliest camps might, for months on end, have only one other woman to talk to. Worker safety was also a constant problem, with fires and collapsing derricks the most common hazards. And because it was a long way to railways and refineries, hauling equipment to the field and moving the oil out were often extremely difficult.

Oil was used mostly as a lubricant before 1850 when kerosene began to take over the market for lamp oil, replacing costly whale oil. In 1895 a refinery was built near Casper, but it was the era of the automobile with the resulting demand for gasoline that put oil production in Wyoming into high gear. From 1900 on, an increasing number of Wyoming residents purchased cars, and by 1917, the state had five refineries.

Wyoming's early oil fields were almost always discovered by amateur or professional geologists who noticed the presence of oil seeps or, more often as time went on, anticlines—arched strata that trap oil underground under the crest. As producers and geologists accumulated experience with each discovery, investors became more willing to risk money on drilling, even after a succession of dry holes or shallow wells in a given location. Although the expertise of geologists was not widely accepted at first, by 1915 it was generally known that oil would probably be found where the experts predicted.

For more than 100 years, that persistence plus the lure of big money from ever-increasing demand has pumped a combined total of more than 1.4 billion barrels from the five, although records are sketchy between 1956 and 1978. As of 2013, all these fields were still producing, with Elk Basin in the lead, followed by Oregon Basin, Grass Creek, Lance Creek and Big Muddy. Salt Creek remains the largest, producing 4.5 million barrels in 2013 alone.

Park County: Oregon Basin and Elk Basin

C. A. Fisher was the first geologist to investigate and map a portion of the Oregon Basin, 14 miles southeast of Cody, Wyo. A 1907 bulletin emphasized the likely oil and gas producing properties of the area. In 1908, another geologist, Thomas Harrison, then working for the U.S. Government Land Office in Cheyenne, Wyo., visited the basin—not looking for oil, but inspecting the coal mines and an irrigation project. Harrison compared the geology of the Oregon Basin to that of other Wyoming fields, and moved to take advantage of what he decided was a good opportunity.

In September 1912, Harrison became vice president of Enalpac, a company that included two experienced drillers from the Salt Creek Field. They had already begun drilling in the Oregon Basin that summer, with the first significant well completed on Aug. 24, 1912. Drilling reached 1,322 feet when it penetrated a natural gas-bearing strata and was halted. The enormous pressure from the gas blew dirt and rocks 50 feet into the air, endangering the crew.

A more serious episode occurred the following winter. In early September 1912, Harrison had drilled a second deep well, the Pauline. But it caved in, filled with water, and tools were lost down the hole. In January and February of 1913, at temperatures of 16 degrees below zero and with freezing water spraying on them, Harrison's crew attempted to partially fill in the caved-in, watery hole. Their goal was to pack the hole with rocks and a concrete casing until this artificial bottom reached a level that had previously shown an oil-bearing sand. They finally succeeded in filling the hole to the desired level, but could not pump out any oil. Harrison had nothing to show for all that work.

Another 10 years of off-and-on drilling followed. Enalpac and the Oregon Basin Oil and Gas Company had discovered oil in small quantities, but with additional high-pressure gas wells continuing to cause problems. Exploration, it was becoming clear, was not viable for small companies.

The Ohio Oil Company, which later became Marathon, began drilling in fall 1924 under the able supervision of John "Jack" McFadyen. The Ohio made the first major oil strike in the Oregon Basin on Feb. 1, 1927. The well produced 800 barrels per day. By 1947, the major producers in the field were, in addition to the Ohio, the Texas Company (Texaco), Husky Refining, Pacific Western Oil Corporation and the interests of Casper businessman Fred Goodstein.

The Oregon Basin's cumulative production through 1956 was 76.6 million barrels, a figure that includes the West Oregon Basin Field, discovered in May 1955.

The Elk Basin laps across the border between Carbon County, Montana and northeastern Park County, Wyoming, 20 miles north of Powell. Farmer and geologist George Ketchum, who had a small farm at Cowley, Wyo., is generally credited with first recognizing the Elk Basin as a likely source of oil. Ketchum accompanied C. A. Fisher through Elk Basin in 1906; possibly Fisher was on the same expedition that took him through the Oregon Basin. Eventually, the Utah-Wyoming Oil Company rented a rig for drilling, and a local company, Grub Stake Oil, was organized to finance a well.

In addition, however, another group of Greybull and Basin men had taken out a claim in the same area.

In a fight over drilling rights, there was a confrontation in the field when the Grub Stake men turned back another outfit at gunpoint.

On Oct. 8, 1915, nine years after Ketchum and Fisher first investigated Elk Basin, the Midwest Refining Company, by then well established in the Natrona County fields, drilled the discovery well—the first successful well—in Elk Basin, which produced between 50 and 150 barrels per day.

The Midwest Company was soon joined by Ohio, and eventually the Continental Oil Company as well. As in the Oregon Basin explorations, the small companies, such as Grub Stake, lost out to the larger ones, because drilling was expensive and at least a few dry holes were inevitable. After drilling one well, the Grub Stake men were forced to quit.

By 1916, both the Midwest and Ohio companies had built camps for their workers in Elk Basin. This settlement became a small town with streets and sidewalks, a hotel, community hall, hospital, gas pump, post office and a barber shop. In winter, Anna Haney, whose husband, Oscar, worked in the field, battled foot-high snowdrifts blown into her tin and tarpaper house. In summer, the dust was so thick and the wind blew so hard that food had to be eaten quickly before it got too gritty.

School was conducted in two buildings, one for grades one to six, and the other for grades seven to eight, serving 80 students at its peak. High school students attended classes in Powell, boarding there because roads between Powell and Elk Basin were bad.

The population of Elk Basin peaked at between 800 and 1,000 sometime before the early 1940s when the town had to be moved to Polecat Bench, a few miles south. Poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas, escaping from deeper wells, was endangering the health of the workers and their families. Housing at Polecat Bench was more modern, and roads had improved, siphoning residents away to Powell. In 1955, the town was disbanded along with the company camps, and some residents purchased their houses in Polecat Bench and moved them to Powell.

Elk Basin and the South Elk Basin Field, discovered in June 1945, together produced a cumulative total of 92.8 million barrels by the end of 1956.

Hot Springs County: Grass Creek Field

The first well in the Grass Creek Field, 40 miles northwest of Thermopolis, Wyo., in the foothills of the Absaroka Mountains, seems to have been drilled in 1907 or 1908; sources differ. But all agree it was a chaotic time in the business—and the successful companies were the ones that figured out how to take advantage of the situation. Operating on the principle that where small discoveries had been made, larger ones were likely to follow, the Ohio Company drilled a producing well in 1914, ending the year with 11 producing wells in the field. This proved that it could be simpler and less risky to invest in properties that others had already shown to be productive.

Difficulties were numerous, however. Claims overlapped because of imprecise surveys. Competing parties spied on each other, climbing ridges and watching through binoculars. Once a claim had been staked, rivals came in at night, moved the stakes, and began the process of legitimizing their claims by putting up a building.

Before the Mineral Leasing Act of 1920, land could be legally claimed by persons paying $2.50 per acre and improving the parcel with a building or other improvements. This entitled them to ownership of all oil, coal, and other mineral commodities discovered on that land. After passage of the Act, producers of oil, coal, natural gas and phosphates paid up-front to lease federal land, and then paid the government a one eighth royalty on the mineral revenues from that land. So claim jumpers could no longer simply move in, displace stakes and put up a building.

In addition to the problem of claim jumpers before 1920, the Grass Creek Field was remote. Drill pipe and other equipment was freighted in by mule teams from a distant railroad siding, and transportation costs often totaled more than the $3 per foot it cost to drill.

The early Grass Creek oil camp, established in about 1914 by the Ohio, soon became a town. Along with bunkhouses and a separate cookhouse for the workers, Grass Creek had a post office, hospital, theater, saloon, dance hall and pool hall plus a store, the Wyoming Trading Company. There was also a women's Community Club, Girl and Boy scouts, 4-H Clubs and a Sunday school and church services. The town grew to 500 before the oil camp began to be phased out in the early 1960s.

A murder at the Grass Creek Field made national news. Two oil field workers, Albert Lampitt and Harry Foight, had been vying for the affections of Grace Lee, a housekeeper and cook. When a dynamite-nitroglycerin bomb exploded directly under Foight's bunk at 2:00 a.m. on May 7, 1921, Foight and his roommate, Worely Seaton, were killed. Three other men were severely but not critically injured. Circumstantial evidence pointed to Lampitt, who had purchased a fuse and caps, and had also sought information from the camp's expert on how to rig a dynamite-glycerine charge. In addition, the camp's explosives storehouse had been robbed. Lampitt was convicted and sentenced to life imprisonment, later commuted to 65 years. He was released after serving half his time.

In addition to the Ohio, companies active in the field were Midwest, later absorbed by Standard Oil; Mexico-Wyoming; Exxon; Atlantic Richfield and Amoco. Cumulative production reached 60.7 million barrels by the end of 1956.

Niobrara County: Lance Creek

In the Lance Creek Field, about 22 miles north of Lusk, Wyo., drillers drilled dry holes for five years before oil was finally discovered. It was a cattle ranching area until 1912, when a Dr. J. E. Hawthorne of Lusk tried without success to raise funds for drilling. The Lusk, Wyoming Oil Company incorporated on April 29, 1913, drilled down to 2,250 feet by August of that year but failed to find oil. A lack of money stopped further exploration by that company in June 1914.

Next, four more companies or individuals drilled without success until the Ohio drilled on March 13, 1918. Eighty barrels flowed in the first 24 hours. Seven months later, on Oct. 6, 1918, the Ohio drilled deeper and this time the well flowed at 1,500 barrels in the first 24 hours. This was recorded as the discovery well.

Derricks sprouted everywhere in the instant boom. In four days, 555 tons of freight were hauled from Lusk. At the peak of oil operations in the field, the community of Lance Creek housed 1,500 people, served by cafes, barber shops, beauty parlors, mechanic shops, grocery stores, filling and service stations and many other businesses. Residents could play golf or tennis, shoot at the rifle range, go roller skating, see a movie, go bowling or play pool. Seven civic organizations also served the community, including Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts and a square dance club. By 1986, with the decline of field activity, the population of Lance Creek had dwindled to between 75 and 100; the 2010 census counted 43.

By the end of 1956, the cumulative production of the Lance Creek Field plus the East Lance Creek Field, discovered on Sept. 4, 1919, was 96.4 million barrels.

Converse County: Big Muddy

The Big Muddy Field is located between Casper and Glenrock, Wyo., on the south bank of the North Platte River about two and a half miles east of Glenrock. In 1913, under a directive from the U.S. Department of the Interior, geologist V. H. Barnett conducted a geological and land classification survey in the Big Muddy area. Barnett reported that oil would likely be found in the field, but only drilling could verify this.

The discovery well was drilled in 1916, probably by the Merritt Oil and Gas Company. Initial daily production was 26 barrels per day, and early on, within the first year or two, other wells averaged 35 barrels per day, with a few producing 300 to 400 barrels per day. The usual frenzied development ensued, characteristic of Wyoming's early oil fields after the first significant discovery. Claim jumpers were ready to move in, and McFadyen of the Ohio Company drilled only at night, during the day pretending to be constructing a pipeline camp. He also instructed his men not to talk about their work when they went to town.

Thirteen steam boilers were stolen from one company's stock. As at Oregon Basin, tools were lost down holes. Scotty Yost, a "tool-pusher," was lowered 50 feet down a hole 20 inches in diameter to recover a 15-inch drill. One small outfit, the Green Drilling Company, hit a well that flowed two to three hundred barrels in 15 minutes straight into the Platte River─because the company was unprepared either to store it or to pipe it.

Typical camp conditions prevailed, with cookhouses, bachelor bunkhouses and houses for married workers. In the Ohio camp, a Mrs. Fred E. Smith was for some months the only woman in camp except for a cook and a waitress. One summer day, Mrs. Smith looked out of her house to check on one of her babies, asleep in a playpen. A six-foot rattlesnake, also asleep, lay next to the baby. Mrs. Smith approached the pen, carefully lifted her daughter out and carried her inside.

Settlement proceeded along with development. Parkerton, the community, and the Chicago and Northwestern Railroad’s Parkerton station located at the Big Muddy Field, were named after an early driller, H. Leslie Parker, and sprang up about 1917. Businesses followed, and schools: From 1916 to 1920, three were established, including a high school and a grade school with a gymnasium. The population of Glenrock also mushroomed from 500 to 2,000 by 1918.

By 1923, the population of Parkerton had peaked at 2,500; also in that year, schools were consolidated with the Glenrock district. By 1935, Parkerton had largely been deserted and was occupied by pumpers, well tenders and field supervisors.

By the end of 1956, the cumulative production of Big Muddy was 37.6 million barrels.

Economic benefits for Wyoming

By 1987, Oregon Basin, Elk Basin and Grass Creek were still among the top 25 oil fields in Wyoming. Oregon Basin led the state in 1987 production with 9 million barrels, exceeding even the historic mega-producer, Salt Creek, for that year—ranked third below Hartzog Draw, an oil field about 35 miles southwest of Gillette, Wyo., off Highway 50. Although Salt Creek produced only 5 million barrels in 1987, it still led the list in cumulative production at the end of 1987, at 621.5 million barrels.

Figures from the Wyoming Department of Revenue from the beginning of the four decades from 1940 to 1970 show a steady increase in oil production and valuation for the state as a whole. In 1940, nearly 20.5 million barrels were produced; in 1970, 140.5 million. Valuation in 1940 was approximately $16.5 million; in 1970, $393.5 million.

Holders of oil and gas properties always paid taxes on the value of the properties, but the state did not significantly tax oil and gas revenues until 1969. Historian Samuel Western notes that in 1968, Gov. Stan Hathaway discovered that Wyoming had only $80 in the general fund. The general fund is the state's main bank account, from which state agencies are funded. Revenues to the fund come from taxes on cigarettes and liquor; sales and use taxes; and license and permit fees, among other sources. Hathaway's startling realization led to the creation of the one percent severance tax on oil, gas and coal, which the Legislature passed in 1969.

The tax was increased another two percentage points in 1973, and by then, the general fund had increased to $100 million. The Legislature then established a system whereby the severance tax revenues flow into the Permanent Mineral Trust Fund, which by law protects the capital—the corpus of the fund—allowing spending only of the interest and other revenues generated by the fund.

This increase in revenues from mineral extraction reflects the economic shifts in the relative values of the different sectors of Wyoming’s economy. In 1910, agriculture led the state, with assessed valuations on cattle and sheep at $32.9 million. Output of mines—this included oil and gas—was assessed at $5.2 million. By 1955, at least one sector of recreation had overtaken agriculture: Expenditures for hunting and fishing passed $23.4 million, more than the cash value of all agricultural crops produced statewide. By 1970, mineral valuations had far outstripped agriculture, with minerals at $470.1 million; sheep and cattle at $52.4 million. By 2008, the state’s gross domestic product figures show, mineral production stood at $13.9 billion, leisure and hospitality (forestry and fishing; arts, entertainment and recreation; and accommodation and food services) at $1.4 billion and agriculture at $380 million.

Enhanced oil recovery (EOR)—by the injection of gas, chemicals and steam into old oil fields—began in the late 1960s, and has been widely implemented in Wyoming. Chemical EOR has been done in the Oregon Basin, Elk Basin and Grass Creek fields, and water flooding to increase natural pressure in oil reservoirs has been done in the Lance Creek and Big Muddy fields.

Distributions from mineral revenues, not limited to oil, but also including natural gas, coal, trona, bentonite and other marketable minerals, have benefited every citizen in the state. Thus, however much we think of ourselves as the Cowboy State and cherish our clean air and wide, unspoiled vistas, the mineral extraction industry is the mainstay of Wyoming's economy.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Hernandez, Lollie. "Elk Basin town no longer exists but memories live,"Powell Tribune, Aug. 16, 1979.

Secondary Sources

• Biggs, Paul and Ralph H. Espach. “Petroleum and Natural Gas Fields in Wyoming.” United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines Bulletin 582. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1960, 29-32, 92-99, 115-117, 149-154, 195-198.
• Brubaker, Elbridge Leroy. "The Early History of the Big Muddy Oil Field." Unpublished paper written for University of Wyoming's Field Summer Work Shop, Course 674-M, Resource Development in Oil and Gas. Mr. Ed Swanson, Instructor. July 9, 1962. Casper, Wyo.: Casper College Western History Center, 1962, 4, 9-16, 23-25.
• Cook, Jeannie, et. al. Buffalo Bill's Town in the Rockies: A Pictorial History of Cody, Wyoming. Virginia Beach, Va.: Donning Company Publishers, 1996, 109-110.
• DeBruin, Rodney. “Wyoming's Oil and Gas Industry in the 1980s: A Time of Change.” Public Information Circular No. 28. Laramie, Wyo.: Geological Survey of Wyoming, 1989, 6.
• Hancock, E.T. “The Lance Creek Oil and Gas Field: Niobrara County, Wyoming.” Contributions to Economic Geology, Part II. Bulletin 716-E, United States Geological Survey. Washington, D.C.: GPO, 1920, 91-93.
• Harmston, F.K., et al. A Study of the Resources, People and Economy of the Big Horn Basin, Wyoming, rev. ed. Division of Business and Economic Research, College of Commerce and Industry, University of Wyoming. Laramie, Wyo.: Wyoming Natural Resource Board, 1959, 38.
• Jones, Nick. Personal email to the author, July 22, 2014.
• Larson, T. A. History of Wyoming. 2d. ed., rev. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska Press, 1978, 533.
• Lindsay, Charles. The Big Horn Basin. University Studies of the University of Nebraska, vols. 28-29, 1928-1929. Lincoln, Neb.: University of Nebraska, 1932, 250-252.
• Mackey, Mike. Black Gold: Patterns in the Development of Wyoming's Oil Industry. Powell, Wyo.: Western History Publications, 1997, 33-44.
• Mackey, Mike. Wyoming in the Twentieth Century: Topics in the History of the Cowboy State. Sheridan, Wyo.: Western History Publications, 2011, 78-81.
• Milek, Dorothy B. Hot Springs: A Wyoming County History. Basin, Wyo.: Saddlebag Books, 1986, 197, 261, 268, 270.
• Niobrara Historical Society. "Niobrara Historical Brevity," July 1, 1986. Accessed June 6, 2014, at http://www.niobraracountylibrary.or/history/index.php?id=36.
• Rea, Tom. "Boom, Bust and After: Life in the Salt Creek Oil Field." Accessed June 6, 2014, at http://www.wyohistory.org/essays/boom-bust-and-after-life-salt-creek-oil-field.
• Roberts, Phil. "The Oil Business in Wyoming." Accessed June 6, 2014, at http://www.wyohistory.org/encyclopedia/oil-business-wyoming.
• Spence, Hartzell. Portrait in Oil: How the Ohio Oil Company Grew to Become Marathon. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1962, 50, 72-76, 95-100, 102-104, 189.
• Wasden, David J. From Beaver to Oil: A Century in the Development of Wyoming's Big Horn Basin. Cheyenne, Wyo.: Pioneer Printing and Stationery Co., 1973, 264-267.
• Western, Samuel. "The Mineral Leasing Act of 1920: The Law that Changed Wyoming's Economic Destiny." Accessed July 20, 2014, at http://www.wyohistory.org/essays/mineral-leasing-act-1920.
• Western, Samuel. Pushed Off the Mountain, Sold Down the River: Wyoming's Search for Its Soul. Moose, Wyo.: Homestead Publishing, 2002, 64-66.
• Wyoming Department of Revenue. Annual Report 1939-40, 67. Accessed June 6, 2014, at https://sites.google.com/a/wyo.gov/wy-dor/dor-annual-reports.
• _______________. Annual Report 1969-70, 75. Accessed June 6, 2014, at https://sites.google.com/a/wyo.gov/wy-dor/dor-annual-reports.
• Wyoming Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. Accessed July 9, 2014, at http://wogcc.state.wy.us/. 
• Wyoming State Board of Equalization. Twenty-Sixth Biennial Report of the State Board of Equalization for the State of Wyoming, 1969-70, 75, 84. 
• Wyoming State Tax Commission. First Biennial Report of the Commissioner of Taxation, 1909-1910, 30, 31, 34. 

Illustrations

• The photos of trucks leaving Lusk, derricks near Lusk and the Big Muddy Oil Field are from the Slug Sides and Terra Brown collections at the Niobrara County Library in Lusk. Used with permission and thanks.
• The 1928 photo of the tank cars near Cody is courtesy of the Park County Archives. Used with permission and thanks.
• The rest of the photos are from the American Heritage Center at the University of Wyoming, also used with permission and thanks. The 1917 photo of the gusher coming in at Elk Basin is from the AHC’s Kalstad Collection. The photo of Buffalo Bill Cody and others on the Shoshone anticline is from the George T. Beck Collection.
• The photo of the Star Machine is from the F.E. Smith Collection at the AHC. Star Machines, reports Everett DeWitt, oilfield historian for Anadarko at the Salt Creek Field in Natrona County, were initially pulled from place to place by a team of horses and later by a McCormick tractor. The machines were steam powered with a boiler that was pulled along on another wagon. Finding fuel for the boiler, DeWitt notes, could be tricky in parts of Wyoming where there were few trees and no coal.

Axle bearings on the wagons and carts used on the emigrant trails in 1800s needed regular lubrication. Most wagons carried the grease in a hanging bucket. Dusty conditions or excessive use could deplete the carried grease. This created a demand for axle grease among the travelers. The resulting grease trade is thought to be the first commercial petroleum business in Wyoming.

Sources of the grease

Seeps and pools of oil on the surface were the source of the grease. When fur trader Capt. B. L. E. Bonneville traveled to the Wind River Valley in 1832, he found oil springs southeast of present Lander near Dallas Dome. And an oil spring near Hilliard in present Uinta County was well known by the time Fort Bridger was established nearby in 1842.

In what’s now Natrona County, Wyoming, an anticline—an up-fold in rock layers—now called Oil Mountain has a collapsed region at its northwest end. There was an oil seep at the fault and even today there is evidence of oil still visible at the place where the seep was shown on early maps. The site is now inaccessible without crossing private land. Oil no longer escapes there, but the ground smells like crude oil and is saturated with gummy black petroleum.

In pioneer times, grease merchants skimmed oil at the seep and carried it by pony some four miles to the emigrant trail. The crude oil was mixed with flour to make suitably stiff axle grease.

Although no diaries have yet been found that record a purchase of grease by pioneers near Oil Mountain, numerous geologic documents, all written at least three decades after the fact, mention petroleum commerce with emigrants near the Oil Mountain seep.

In the later documents the trade was variously described as having started shortly after emigrants first began using the trail in the 1840s, or in 1849, 1851 or 1863. The reports usually mention famous English-speakers, including frontiersmen Kit Carson, Jim Bridger, Jim Baker and, in some cases, even 1880s pioneer oil prospector Cy Iba as the principal grease merchants. The sources also allude to the participation of usually nameless “half-breeds,” who were the mixed-race offspring of early trappers or traders and their Indian wives.

Sgt. Isaac Pennock, Company L, 11th Kansas Cavalry, kept a diary in the spring, summer and fall of 1865, which included careful observations at the times of the battles of Red Buttes and Platte Bridge. He also recorded hearsay about an oil spring near the trail, which soldiers and travelers used.

On May 26, Pennock wrote, “South of Willow Springs is an oil spring said to run 50 barrels of petroleum per day.” With two alterations, Pennock’s report would be consistent with the facts of the Oil Mountain seep. Fifty barrels per day of running petroleum is almost certainly an exaggeration; that much oil would make a great mess anywhere. Second, changing “south” to north locates Oil Mountain, which is five miles nearly due north of Willow Springs. Willow Springs is about 25 miles west of present Casper, Wyo.

The seep or well began to appear on maps in the 1880s. G.F. Cram’s 1882 Rail Road and Township Map of Wyoming shows a spring of petroleum at approximately the right place in a region that had not been surveyed by the government. A cadastral survey made in 1882 and published in 1883 shows the oil “well” at its correct position.

Mitchell Lajeunesse, a likely grease merchant

John Hunton, Confederate survivor of Pickett’s charge at Gettysburg and an early stockman and diarist in Wyoming Territory, reported years later in an account published in 1920, “In 1873, Mitchell Lajuenesse, son of Bassell Lajuenesse, advised me that he had found oil in the vicinity of the present town of Casper.”

The Lajeunesse family had been well known for years by that time in central Wyoming. Basil Lajeunesse was a voyageur on the early expeditions of explorer John C. Fremont, and is a vivid figure in Fremont’s reports. He was killed in Oregon in 1846 on Fremont’s third expedition to the West. Basil’s brother Charles was for a time bourgeois or chief trader at Fort Laramie, and later, with his associates, ran a toll bridge at Independence Rock and a trading post at nearby Devil’s Gate, on the emigrant trail on the Sweetwater River. Mitchell—the French name would have been Michel—and his brother Noel had a Shoshone mother and were of the next generation from Basil and Charles.

Charles especially, and other members of the family were also called by the name Cimineau, often rendered by English speakers as Seminoe or Seminole. The Lajeunesse children were bicultural by virtue of their French and American Indian families and continuing contacts with other Europeans and their mothers’ tribes.

Diarist Hunton noted that “Little Bat [Baptiste Pourier, another member of the French-named, mixed-race community of central Wyoming] Lajuenesse and I took supplies and set out for this ‘oil field.’ Arriving upon the spot, we at once began operations by ‘spooning’ up the oil. After working industriously for some time, Little Bat and I had acquired about a quart, while Lajeunesse had succeeded in obtaining a smaller quantity of the crude.”

That night, some Arapaho men visited them as they were gathered around their campfire. The Indians told the prospectors they were not welcome in the area, and told Lajeunesse to make sure the party left in the morning and followed the North Platte 75 miles east down river to Fort Fetterman. Some subsequent historians have assumed Hunton was referring to oil springs at what later became the long-lived Salt Creek Oil Field 45 miles north of present Casper. But his reference to the route the Arapaho told the men to take to Fort Fetterman makes it far more likely he was talking about the seep at Oil Mountain.

The prospectors thought it a good idea to comply promptly. “Upon reaching Fort Fetterman,” Hunton notes, “we placed the oil in a bucket of hot water and I found that I had a pint bottle of crude oil.”

The Indians had been in the area for generations—the Shoshone probably for millennia—and they would have known where many oil seeps were. They used the oil medicinally and in paint. Some of the early state and U.S. government geological reports indicate a specific mixed-race person involved in the grease commerce. Robert Morris, in an 1897 report, wrote, “as early as 1863 Seminole collected the oil and sold it for axle-grease.” W. T. Lee noted in 1915, “It is reported that Cimineau, a French trapper, and others sold lubricants to the caravans from the oil spring at sec. 28, T. 33 N., R. 82 W.”

Connections between Jim Bridger, the Lajeunesse family and Oil Mountain are well known. Bridger bought a trading post near Fort Bridger from Charles Lajeunesse in 1852. Bridger is tied to Oil Mountain and the seep areas by the trail he blazed in 1864 trail from what’s now central Wyoming to Montana, as well as reports that he sold grease. The Bridger Trail and the seep were less than one mile apart.

The distance from Independence Rock to the Oil Mountain seep is 31 miles, and most of that could have been traveled along the emigrant trail. The mixed-race persons involved in the grease trade likely came from the communities near Independence Rock and Devil’s Gate, and very likely involved the young Lajeunesse, Michel “Seminoe.”

Other mixed-race offspring from the area could also have been involved. Louis Guinard, who built the bridge at present-day Casper, also had a Shoshone wife and was associated with the community at the Sweetwater Bridge near Independence Rock. John Richard, known as Reshaw, operated in the 1850s from the bridge that bore his name at present-day Evansville and had an Oglala Lakota wife and mixed-race offspring. There is no evidence that Richard’s family traded grease, although they probably knew of the Oil Mountain region on the trail.

Aughey’s report and modern oil development

By the mid-1880s, oil exploration in Wyoming had a scientific basis. Samuel Aughey, the territorial geologist through 1885, wrote a report that Gov. F.E. Warren released in early 1886. He described, among many other things, the characteristics of eight oil basins. Aughey gave directions by road from Jim Averell’s store and road ranch on the Sweetwater to six contiguous townships that he called the Seminole Oil Basin. The basin included, near its center, the oil seep that was four miles from the Oregon Trail.

Aughey switches between “Seminoe” and “Seminole” in his report. He refers to both “Seminoe Mountain” and “Seminoe Ridge” in specifying the locations of the seep and the oil-bearing structure. Apparently the name Oil Mountain was replacing the previously used label, Seminoe Mountain, at the time of his report. Aughey wrote of “the Seminoe or Oil Mountain, as it has been named” and “the Seminoe ridge (Oil Mountain) is itself an anticlinal fold.” Therefore, the region was linked to the Lajeunesses as late as the 1880s.

Aughey found the petroleum in the region to be suitable for production of illuminating oil. He predicted that it was “very probable, that beneath the fault at [a place on Oil Mountain east of the seep] oil in quantity will be eventually found.”

The ground near the historic oil seep was perforated with oil wells between Aughey’s time and at least as late as 1958, but no one ever found a significant source of oil coupled with the seep. However, Aughey’s Seminole Oil Basin has produced much oil and gas. New wells are operating on and near Oil Mountain today. The Iron Creek oil field, on the anticline and in Aughey’s basin, has operated for about a century.

Resources

Primary Sources

• Aughey, Samuel. Report of the Territorial Geologist. In Message of Francis E. Warren, Governor, to the Legislature of Wyoming, Ninth Assembly. Laramie, Wyo.: Boomerang Printing, 1886, 148-152.
• Hunton, John (as told by). Early Oil Discovery in Wyoming. Proceedings and Collections of the Wyoming State Historical Department 1919-1920, First Biennial Report of the State Historian. Laramie, Wyo.: Laramie Printing Company, 1920, 149.
• Lee, W.T., R.W. Stone, H.S. Gale, et al. Guidebook to the Western United States, Part B, The Overland Route. United States Geological Survey Bulletin 612 (1915), 62.
• Morris, Robert C. Sketch of Wyoming. Collections of the Wyoming Historical Society, vol.1, Cheyenne Wyo: Sun-Leader Publishing House, 1897, 37.
• Pennock, Isaac B. “Diary of Jake Pennock.” Annals of Wyoming Vol. 23, No. 2 (1951): 7, accessed April 14, 2015 at https://archive.org/stream/annalsofwyom23121951wyom#page/n127/mode/2up/search/Pennock.

Secondary Sources

• Cram, G.F. Cram’s Rail Road and Township Map of Wyoming. Chicago, Ill.: Geo. F. Cram. 1882.
• David, E.C. Map of Township No. 33 North, Range No. 82. Surveyor General’s Office, Cheyenne, Wyo.. 1883.
• Espach, Ralph H. and W. Dale Nichols. Petroleum and Natural Gas Fields in Wyoming. United States Department of the Interior, Bureau of Mines Bulletin 418, (1942).
• Glass, Jefferson. Reshaw: The Life and Times of John Baptiste Richard. Glendo, Wyo.: High Plains Press. 2014.
• Hares, C. J. Anticlines in Central Wyoming. In Contributions to Economic Geology, United States Geological Survey Bulletin 641 (1916), 239.
• Knight W.C. and E.E. Slosson. Petroleum Series-Bulletin No. 4, The Dutton, Rattlesnake, Arago, Oil Mountain and Powder River Oil Fields. Laramie Wyo.: School of Mines, University of Wyoming. 1901, 32.
• Love, J. D. “Annotated Photographs and Significance of Oil Seeps, Tar Sands, and Pioneer Drilling in the Wind River Basin, Central Wyoming.” In Boyd, Richard G., George M. Olson, and Walter W. Boberg, eds. Wyoming Geological Association Guidebook, 1978: Resources of the Wind River Basin: Casper, Wyo.: Wyoming Geological Association, 1978.
• Rea, Tom. Devil’s Gate: Owning the Land, Owning the Story. Norman, Okla.: University of Oklahoma Press, 2006, 64-77.
• Roberts, Phil. “History of Oil in Wyoming.” In A New History of Wyoming. University of Wyoming. Accessed April 8, 2015, at http://www.uwyo.edu/robertshistory/history_of_oil_in_wyoming.htm.

Illustrations

• Reproduction of part of Map of Township No, 33 North, Range No. 82 West…. Surveyor General’s Office, Cheyenne, Wyo., Feb. 23, 1883. Thanks to Reid Miller of the Bureau of Land Management for this image.
• The I.N. Knapp’s photograph of Oil Mountain Seep, Aug. 4, 1899 was originally commissioned by the U.S. Geological Survey and reproduced on p. 64 off the 1978 Wyoming Geological Association Guidebook, Wind River Basin.

Henry Jensen, 1909-2002 was past president of the Wyoming State Historical Society, the Wyoming Archeological Society and the Fremont County Historical Society, and was a founder of the Wyoming Historical Foundation.

He grew up in eastern Fremont County, attended schools in Lost Cabin and Lysite, Wyo., graduated from high school in Thermopolis in 1926, and later continued his education at the University of Wyoming. In his long career he worked as a sheepherder, sheep camp tender, railroad section hand, foreman of the Sullivan Ranch, now part of the Q Creek Ranch in Shirley Basin, schoolteacher, school administrator, newspaper editor and longtime board member of the Hot Springs Rural Electrification Association (REA). In 1940 he married the former Clara Patterson, when both were teaching at one-room schools in western Natrona and eastern Fremont County. She died on Christmas Day, 1994.

This interview was conducted in the early 1990s by longtime Casper, Wyo. science teachers Dana Van Burgh, Jr. and Terry Logue, as the three men drove about 60 miles on state Highway 220 southwest through central Wyoming from Casper to Devil’s Gate near Martin’s Cove. On the way they pass near Government Bridge, Alcova Dam and reservoir, cross the main ditch of the Kendrick project, and pass near Pathfinder Reservoir. Van Burgh co-authored the Field Guide to the Alcova Area, Natrona County, Wyoming, (Casper: 1974; Laramie, Wyo.: Wyoming State Geological Survey, 2004). This is the “guide” the men talk about from time to time during the interview. Due to the age of the tape and background noise evident, transcription was difficult.

Transcribed by Edna Garrett, Casper College Western History Center, March 2011. We are grateful to the center for preserving and transcribing the oral history, and providing it to WyoHistory.org.

Editor’s transcription notes: In most cases I have deleted redundant ands, ers, uhs, buts, false starts, etc. If I deleted an entire phrase, I have inserted ellipses … Where you find brackets [ ] I have added words for explanation or to complete an awkward sentence. Parentheses ( ) are used for incidental non-verbal sounds, like laughter.
~Lori Van Pelt, assistant editor, WyoHistory.org June 23, 2015

Henry Jensen: Anytime you want to stop or make any comments why, uh, don't hesitate to tap me on the shoulders, and I will stop.

Dana Van Burgh, Jr.: OK. Hey, been one of those days.

Jensen: Ha! You two are the head honchos here.

Van Burgh.: You just tell us about it and we'll listen.

Jensen: I suppose that you have noticed a number of times that the so-called "Red Buttes Fight" was pretty much misnamed. Because the Red Buttes happens to be a good many miles away from where the fight took place. I don't know just how many miles, but several miles.

Terry Logue [unclear]

Van Burgh: Yeah. Right.

Jensen: If you will notice that place where the [land slipped], I don't recall if you noted in your thing this place where they had the slippage up here.

Van Burgh: Yes.

Jensen: … I really don't know if it has anything to do with what we're talking about, but this whole area along this mountain is just as unstable as it is possible to be, and there is no way that I would ever want to build up a home anywhere in that area. It might be a thousand years, but [might be] tomorrow when the whole thing might slip.

Van Burgh: Yup.

…

Jensen: That's your Jackson Canyon, isn't it?

Van Burgh: Yes, pretty much, yes.

Jensen: I always had an idea that he was talking about Poison Spider. In his journal and that house or hut that they built, was down near the mouth of Poison Spider. But in recent years, now this is just my own particular theory, I don't believe it was down here at all. Because at the time of the year that [Robert Stuart, with the returning Astorians in 1812] was here, Poison Spider would be dry. It is nothing but a dry wash most of the year. And the only place where there is any kind of water, and good water that is potable, and he spoke of water, was over here at Speas Springs and I think that, and his daughter thinks that, his habitation, if you can call it that, is down on this end, rather than down at the mouth of Poison Spider, ’cause there is where the water is, and there is where the good supply of fuel would be. They're [the trees nearby are] mostly junipers and the cottonwood.

[speaker unclear] You are not gonna tell me who?

Jensen: I am sure that you mention in there, as I recall it about that, this was about where Robert Stuart… [Unclear]

[speaker unclear]

Jensen: Have you mentioned in there, I said, I think North of [?] Goose Egg. Have you mentioned John Wayne's picture? [“Hellfighters,” 1968.] John Wayne made this picture of the firefighting.

Van Burgh: Uh-uh. Yeah.

Logue:"The Hellfighters ?"

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: You see, that was filmed right over on that slide right over there. A good portion of it. I had a girlfriend who was going to summer school in Laramie [Wyoming]. And I had the weekend off and they [weren't for it]. I decided the only way I could go see my girlfriend was to cut across country, and so I decided to cut across this roadway and there really weren't any roads here in those days, you know, and so I came to Casper and then came down here. I don't know if you will remember [unclear] I don't even remember the name of this, but down here, about a half a mile, there is an old road that takes off, and that was the road that led to Medicine Bow in those days.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: Pretty well kept now, it is right here.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: I went down and saw my girlfriend and that's it, right there, and here, this one on the left .I can't place exactly to the year, but it was some where between 1946 and 1950, that that slipped. We went to town on one weekend, and when we came back, that Sunday, that had just slipped at that time. And you can see where the whole thing over the years geologically, has done this innumerable times. You can see the bumpy plain all along there where they (long pause) but it's a formation.

Logue: Frontier?

Van Burgh: There's a plain right there. 5240 Road.

Jensen: It doesn't have much to do with your guide… . Did you mention this old ox bow here?

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: You did? OK. Yeah, you see you're way ahead of me.

Logue: Do you have a good photo of that?

Van Burgh: Yes, I have an aerial and ground.

Logue: [unclear]

Jensen: Pedro Mountains. I recall the first time I ever saw this, it was in 1946, I had … Who's place is that? Yeah, now that's the Bates Creek coming in from the left. Bates Creek, of course, heads way back up in the Laramie Range. Oh, that's forty or fifty miles up there to the head of it, have you ever been up to the head?

Van Burgh: Yep.

Jensen: When I was growing up, there were no--absolutely no--beaver, and I never saw a beaver and never saw a beaver dam. The beaver had been virtually eliminated from Wyoming by 1900. They just didn't exist; there were maybe a few in the high mountains.

And another animal that was virtually gone … I was born and raised in the country, and I never saw an antelope ’til I was sixteen years old. There were just no antelope, there were a few … there was a little bunch out oh, just about the exact geographic center of Wyoming, south of Moneta, in that area. There was another little bunch in eastern Fremont County, near Bates Battleground, up near Bates Battleground, for all intent and purposes, all the antelope had been wiped out. [Bates Battleground is located in Washakie County, Wyoming, and was the site of an 1874 conflict. U.S. cavalry aided by Shoshone Chief Washakie and 100 of his warriors attacked an Arapaho village, which was defeated.] … literally thousands of antelope, here. [laugh]

And there are also, all along the river here, there are still beaver all along the river here, they are all [bank beavers] but there are beaver all along the river. I wouldn't be surprised but what there's some right in the city limits of Casper. I don't know that there are, but I wouldn't be surprised.

Jensen: You have a comment about the Government Bridge, [where Wyoming Highway 220 crosses the North Platte about 22 miles south of Casper. The old bridge remains nect to the modern highway bridge.]

Van Burgh: OK.

Jensen: Has this been made into a National Historical Site?

Van Burgh: Not that I know of.

Jensen: Should it be?

Van Burgh: [both talk at same time].

Jensen: You could go to work on it and get a job. (Laughing.)

When was it built?

Van Burgh: 1905.

Jensen: That is what I thought. I was thinking it was 1905. Now the old road, you know, followed the river. In a way it used to be a much more interesting road to follow. Because, the geese in the fall of the year used to come in and feed on those fields down there. I have seen times when there would be hundreds and hundreds of Canadian geese on the fields down here along the river.

Logue: You all know anything about this oil field?

Jensen: You can't tell now, but off on the left of the river a few miles up the ...

Van Burgh: Ninety-three.

Jensen: On the river is one of the early oil fields. Do you have it mentioned?

Van Burgh: Which one?

Jensen: Isn't it Little Spindle Top? Is it mentioned? Do you have it mentioned?

Van Burgh: I haven't added it, but I am going to.

Jensen: And it is still producing, I think mostly stripper wells now, but it is still producing.

Logue: Do you have photos of the angular unconformity for me?

Van Burgh: Yes, aerial and ground.

Jensen: Yes, [unclear] right now. I don't know, if you have mentioned it, … but what we are passing through here now, is a part of the Kendrick Project. The water comes from Alcova Dam and is part of the Kendrick Project, which was one of the dreams of Wyoming Senator Kendrick.

The word alcova is Spanish, and this area was given its name by the early Spanish, or Mexican—was it Mexican sheepherders?—who came in here to bed their sheep in the area, which was a perfect, a perfect shelter for bedding sheep and they called it Alcova, which means bedroom. Alcova is Spanish for bedroom.

Van Burgh: Huh!

Jensen: And that's where the name Alcova came from, and that is where it got its name originally. Back up in these hills is almost perfect shelter for protecting a bunch of sheep. When they are in storms, and this sort of thing, so that they could be protected. But Spanish is their origin.

Have you read the book by Preuss, Exploring with Fremont? [Exploring with Frémont : the Private Diaries of Charles Preuss, Cartographer for John C. Frémont on His First, Second, and Fourth Expeditions to the Far West, by Charles Preuss, published 1958 by the University of Oklahoma Press.]

Van Burgh: Yes.

Jensen: Preuss hated Frémont with a passion, [little laugh] and he certainly wasn't complimentary, but I have often wondered ... we are coming to Alcova now, and of course, the Fremont Canyon is above there, and the reason it got the name of Fremont, is because of the misfortune that happened there, when Frémont lost most of the oil of his scientific equipment when the boats upset--you know, the inflatable boats upset going over some rapids in Fremont Canyon. And, I have often wondered if, when that water is shut off, if you go up to those rapids, if you couldn't find in that riverbed some of that equipment that Frémont lost. It could be there. I have been tempted a number of times to go up there sometime when they had the river shut off, and see if there was any of that material in that river bottom.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: Because there was a lot of it—metal material, compasses and all this sort of thing. Brass.

Van Burgh: Do you want to stop here?

Logue: I haven't any reason to.

Jensen: What comment do you have about the dam? We have a lot of that in the Alcova guide.

Van Burgh: Let me pull off up here.

Jensen: It is served by the Hot Springs REA [Rural Electric Association], which seems a little bit unusual when you consider where Thermopolis is, in relation to this area. [Thermopolis is a town located in Hot Springs County, Wyoming.]

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: The Hot Springs REA also serves Medicine Bow.

Van Burgh: Huh.

Jensen: Did you know that?

Van Burgh: Hu-huh.

Jensen: The Hot Springs REA serves Medicine Bow, the Shirley Basin and that whole area down in there is served by the Hot Springs REA. It's interesting to follow this canal out, it goes through a half a dozen tunnels to get water over into the area along [U.S.] Highway 20-26 [west of Casper], in that area. Some of those ... There is one of those tunnels where it takes it through a ridge in south of 20-26, and I think that tunnel is well over a mile long …(Long pause.)

Logue: Oh, good.

Jensen: Juniper.

Van Burgh: Yes.

Jensen: Which is one of the typical types of vegetation in western ... [lots of noise on transmitter] and obviously, I don't know where the name Seminoe came from, it isn't Seminole, for the Indians. It's Seminoe, and I don't know what the origin of that name is. It apparently has its roots back somewhere in the very early white contact period, but I don't have any idea. I have never been able to find out. Maybe you have.

Van Burgh: No.

Jensen: But Seminoe, when I was growing up, I thought it was Seminole for the Indian tribe, but apparently it isn't. It is Seminoe rather than Seminole. Did you know the Bundys? They had a homestead out here too, you know.

Van Burgh: Which Bundy?

Jensen: Well, I guess they're related to the people [who have] the boat business there in Casper, I think that's the same family …They were early settlers. They had a place pretty close by the Pathfinder Lake on the west side of Seminoe [Reservoir]? … (cough) I am trying to think of something here for ranchers, the Irenes,, but that wouldn't make any ... most tourists wouldn't be interested in those people …

The Miles family was prominent, of course, all of them in this country ran sheep and cattle out there (cough). They are among the early day ranchers.

Logue: What about artifacts?

Jensen: Wait a minute. I really can't think of anything very interesting.

Logue: What about Indian artifacts out in that country? Do you find arrowheads?

Jensen: Well, of course this is a comment that might fit in anything, over the course of twelve thousand years and it has been at least twelve thousand years [since people were first in the area]. You can find artifacts anywhere (laugh). They are everywhere, and particularly along—you will find where there is water and the possibility of game—you are going to find artifacts. And, there are places out in there where it is just fantastic (cough). I am sure that you could go out there and find sites that are ten thousand years old, out in this area south here. Maybe even older … these people … Well, you know this Casper site is almost eleven thousand years old. Were you ever up at the Casper site when they were digging it? [The Casper Site, an ancient bison-kill site roughly where the Natrona County School District headquarters is now on North Glenn Road in Casper, was excavated by archeologists in 1974.]

Van Burgh: No.

Jensen: Well, … there they were dealing with bison antiquus, but I am sure you would find the same thing out here, where you will find the conditions right with water and grazing. You would find artifacts there of that age probably—Hells Gap and Agate Basin [archeological sites in Goshen and Niobrara counties, respectively]—artifacts out there. They are not easy to find, and incidentally, it's against the law to pick them up now. I never could quite understand the theory in back of this, because people who don't pick them up--what happens to them then? If, if ... what good are they to anybody?

Logue: Yeah.

Jensen: If, they are just left? What good are they?

Logue: I don't know.

Jensen: I understand how the BLM [U.S. Bureau of Land Management] people feel about it, they are protecting them, but, if they just lay there, what's the purpose of it? And you know it doesn't make much sense …

I'd like to go back off to the right here over on ...where we went over to that volcano. That's up to you though, and that's something you probably don't have any mention of it either, that there is a cluster of volcanoes. When we get down here a little farther off to the right down here, you might want to mention that somewhere, but there is a cluster of volcanoes. I would like to go where that fault line is. Fault line runs up here east of there. See where that fault line runs through where all those springs are? I just would give anything if I could get out there sometime and take my little Roto Hoe [a rototiller brand] and just make about two shallow passes along through some of that dirt and see what I uncover, because, it is almost certain that with those springs and that water with the game there that were inevitably there, that that was a campsite there.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: I don't need to just go dig something up, but I would sure like to make a pass at it sometime.

Logue: Uh-huh. I bet you would find something.

Jensen: Oh, I am sure you would. But, you see, I am not really interested in the artifacts particularly, but I would like to find out if there were some sites there that might be interesting to enter. You know where I am talking about?

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: There is a big fault line runs through there, east of that, where all the springs are. The springs are all caused by that fault line. In that area east of those volcanoes. There probably should be some comments made about [unclear].When we get up here, maybe we can talk about them a little bit. If you, I don't know what you've got about them already. Although I have read all that. [unclear]

The Oregon Trail is north of us, and I suppose you will notice that. Not too far, actually two or three miles, maybe three miles north of here, but the Oregon Trail runs parallel to it through this area all the way along here.

Van Burgh: Just before it said parking area.

Jensen: It runs down over there, it is running down what they call Fish Creek, and there again, I've often wondered why that is called Fish Creek. ’Cause I don't know how any fish ever got in to it in those early days, although it is perfectly possible, because there are some alkali streams in Wyoming, which has a variety of fish in them that aren't found anywhere else in the world, and this may be some of those fish. Poison Creek, for example, has some minnows, yet oh about a tenth of the way down Poison Creek over in Natrona and Fremont County, they are about three inches long and they are not found anywhere else in the world and nobody knows exactly how they got there. I guess they are still there. They may be something like the snail darter and be eliminated, but they were there many years ago. I remember seeing lots of them. (Long pause).

Those hills in front of us there, I'm asking now, are a part of the Sweetwater Rocks, aren't they?

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: Northward extension of the Sweetwater Rocks. And the Sweetwater Rocks are a granite uplift, aren't they?

Van Burgh: Yes.

Jensen: From pre-Indian times? If that means they are historic or not, I don't know. Over this … I don't know again, I would be guessing, But, I don't know how many tourists would be interested in this. But you can stand on the end of … and now just a second, I have to get myself lined up here. On the end of Ferris Mountain, on the east end of Ferris Mountain there is a basaltic dike? Oh, it must be forty feet wide that runs right straight through the mountain. And if you face towards the Pedros across Pathfinder Reservoir you can look out fifteen miles or maybe more, maybe twenty miles to the south and see exactly the same dike striking right straight through the Pedros.

Van Burgh: Huh.

Jensen: And if you go on the hollow in between where it is all eroded away, you will come to a place where there is the float. It's all basaltic rocks of one sort or another.

So that dike has gone right straight across, clear from the top of the Ferrises right across through the Pedros, and how far it runs from there I don't know. I know some places where those dikes on further down this way run for thirty miles, just for the basaltic excluded I guess, and you find lots of dikes down here.

Logue: How wide?

Jensen: Oh that must be at least, … well, it’s wide enough that you can stand on that point, stand over in the Ferrises and see it in the Pedros so it must be thirty or forty feet wide and black,black basalt. I don't know how far that runs, but as I say I know in some cases they run for thirty miles across country. What they call Black Rock, which is the exact center of geographical center of Wyoming, it will be off in this area. It is south of Moneta and between Moneta and Jeffrey City is a basaltic dike, a part of a basaltic dike that runs through that country for miles and miles. ... You two are both knowledgeable geologists. But the other type of dike that you are seeing all through here is quartz, of course.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: But, I don't think I have ever known of one of the quartz that extends as far through the country as the basalt, the basaltic dike.

Logue: Wonder if there is evidence that those happened at the same time.

Van Burgh: I don't know. Might have.

Jensen: Bates Creek [Most likely here he is actually referring to Horse Creek]--that's looking ahead here now, down where the trees are ahead of us—was another one of the Sanford Ranches. Now we are getting down in the area where you can see the backwaters of the Pathfinder, extending up the Sweetwater River, and it is at this point, down from below the ranch, which we see off to our left and in front of it, where Bothwell and the Suns and a group of ranchers along the Sweetwater killed—hung Jim Averell and Cattle Kate. The place where they were hung is now under the waters of Pathfinder, but it was just down along Highway towards Rawlins—75 Burtch Ranch that you see right in front of us to the left. And some thought that whether Cattle Kate and Jim Averell were really ever guilty of anything was never proven. Nobody ever proved that they were guilty of anything. Except maybe she was sleeping with him.

Van Burgh: Milepost 75.

Jensen: Which was quite common among men and women, even in those days. But they have never proved that they had ever stolen anything. And I think, and you can correct me on this, but I think this is about the only example in American history of a woman literally being hung. Although they did burn some witches, I think, didn't they?

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: But it was a case of a group of people taking the law into their own hands.

You don't need too much editorial comment anyway. (Laugh).

Jensen: And the Suns are still a very prominent family in this area. Did you know old Tom Sun?

Van Burgh: No.

Jensen: Over the years, we got to be pretty good friends. They were nice people.

Have you been out to that volcano since the abortive attempt that we made … I'd like to go up there again sometime. Now, you have got to comment about this Oregon Trail coming in here. Coming down Horse Creek and coming in to the area here. Do you know who owned this ranch at the time they hung Cattle Kate?

Van Burgh: No.

Jensen: I'm going to see if I can find out, I don't know either who owned it right at that time. And, I am sure that it was a ranch. Because there isn't this much hay land that they would let sit here and not be used. But, in my life, the Sanfords were the owners for the biggest part of the time that I knew.

Logue: Bothwell was back down in here someplace?

Jensen: Huh?

Logue(?): Bothwell--was that back down here?

Jensen: I'm not sure it coulda been Bothwell that owned it. I don't know who owned it. It could very well could be Bothwell's ranch, but I say, I don't know, I am going to see if I can find out. Well, actually Bothwell was an absentee owner. He only came here probably during the summertime most of the time, for awhile. And a lot of those people though, were the most violent. That was true here, in the Johnson County War, too. Some of the absentee owners were the most violent against the homesteaders and the so-called nesters. And, I think that was probably true of Bothwell. He basically was not a native, well, as a matter of fact, I don't know any people who were really natives. But, I don't know--this may have been his ranch. I don't know for sure. I am not much help to you because I don't know for sure. [Logue is correct. Albert Bothwell, one of the lynchers of Ella Watson [Cattle Kate] and Jim Averell, owned the ranch nearby. Sanfords bought the ranch from Bothwell in 1916.]

[unclear]

Jensen: Did you ever go to the county records to see? We are still in Natrona County now.

Logue: Yeah.

Jensen: Was Natrona County established early enough, when was it established? South of us also, there is lots of Wyoming jade [that] has been found out in this country and south over …

Van Burgh: Sixty-nine. [What was the]

Jensen: … the Seminoes and along the foot of the Ferris Mountains. There has all kinds of jade been found there. Halsey Kortes found mostly all of his jade in that area and bearing from almost coal black to some of the prettiest apple green you ever saw, all through these areas. You know Halsey Kortes? Well, Halsey Kortes got into the rock- cutting business and became good friends of J.O. Pratt. Was one of the biggest jade factories they ever had in America. J.O. Pratt would come out here every summer, and would spend … oh … Sometimes he would spend a month in the summer. “Working with J,", is cutting jade, hunting jade. He just loved jade. He had one of the finest collections of jade in the world. It's in a museum back in Chicago, but I can't tell you which one. But the whole country has jade in it.

Do you wanna go up to the volcanoes this morning? (everyone laughs). The volcano north of us here is only one of a whole cluster of volcanoes that is out in this area.

Logue: If you fly over them you can see them.

Jensen: If you fly over them you can see them? That is what he told me a number of, or several years ago, after we were up there. That was only one of several volcanoes that was in the area here. Of course, I know you have comments about Devil's Gate, so there ain't much to say about that.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: My grandfather as a seven-year-old boy came over the Oregon Trail, over the Mormon Trail rather, and they stopped at Independence Rock on the way. That was one of those ancestor brigades [apparently a reference to the well-organized Mormon wagon trains of the 1850s and ’60s].

Logue: When was that?

Jensen: That was, I believe, the summer of 1858. He and his family. brother and sister, and mother and father left Benson at Omaha and came over the Mormon Trail on their way to Utah. I have often wondered how much of that motivation was religious and how much of it was economic. I know that my grandparents’ people were peasants and I know they didn't have anything in Denmark, and I think that they did that all for their security. [unclear]

Tom Sun told me that when he was growing up that there was practically no trees anywhere on the Sweetwater. He said that there were two factors that caused that. First of all you had the spring floods every year, and mid-summer floods, cloudbursts, which washed trees away. And then in addition, he said in the winter the elk moved in onto the Sweetwater, migrated to the winter feeding grounds by the thousands. There were thousands of elk along the Sweetwater in the winter and if any cottonwood sapling got started it never survived the winter. That they were eaten up by the elk.

And you see then, now the people coming over the Oregon Trail never saw those elk, cause this happened in the wintertime. The elk moved in the winter and then in the summertime they were going back to their summer ranges, so that they were never hunted to any great extent by the people traveling the Oregon Trail because those people were here at a different time of the year. But he said the elk came in along the river, literally by the thousands, in the early days. In his father's time. You see in later years though, those migration routes were cut off by means of fences and just people so that the elk no longer moved into this area and into the area on the desert south of the Seminoes, and the Ferris' and in that area. There are no elk at all on the desert, anymore you see.

Now you can look up there in front of us, now and see evidence of several of those dikes, some of them quartz. This one right straight in front of us, I think, just off a little bit to the right, there is probably quartz. If you go up and examine it at the foot of it there is quartz all over there ... But you can see the black ones which are basaltic, you see there's a half a dozen of them just right there in a short space on that granite hillside there. I have often thought I would like to get one of these modern metal detectors and go up to the remains of one of those quartz dikes and see if it might be mineralized. When do you want to go with me? (Laugh).

Van Burgh: He's the prospector.

Jensen: Well, I'm not sure but what there might be some mineralized quartz dikes.

Van Burgh: Could be.

Jensen: You commented on that Dumbell; it is one of the early day ranches, Grieves owned it. (Long Pause). [The Dumbell Ranch is at the northeast opening of Devil’s Gate.]

But, in the United States at least it's been eliminated it doesn't even exist anymore. But strangely enough the cholera along the Oregon Trail, which killed literally thousands of people began to abate from the time they hit the Sweetwater and by the time they left what is now Wyoming just practically was gone. I suppose due to the fact that they had better water, and I don't know what else, but any rate the cholera just quit. About the last known cholera death that I know of, where there are graves that are known, is in south, or ... north of Kemmerer where this a ... oh ... there's a grave there upon the Hams Fork where a girl died of cholera, and that is about one of the last graves that you will find. For some reason or another, when they got over this far, the cholera just quit. Of course, most of your tourists never get down this far.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: Some of the buildings, one of the buildings right in the middle of that structure,

is one of the original parts of the original Tom Sun Ranch which was established in the [18]70s, and it is still in use every day. I think as a matter of fact I think it's a dining room for the ranch. The original buildings were built of logs down here, as I say a part of that original building, is still, have you ever been in the museum? It's closed up. [The Sun Ranch, headquartered at the southwest opening of Devil’s Gate, was owned and run by the Sun family from the early 1870s until 1995, when it was sold to the Mormon Church. The former ranch headquarters is now the Mormon Handcart Visitors Center.]

Van Burgh: Huh.

Jensen: It's closed. Yeah. Thomas died. After Thomas died, why they closed the museum up. Were you ever in it?

Van Burgh: No.

Jensen: Probably, sometime Bernard would probably take you, let you go in there sometime. Thomas, you've got comments about the old man the original Tom Sun.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: That was a good deal for work of Thomas he was the third, the third Tom Sun. And when Tom, Thomas died, why that kinda ... Bernard got tabs. Bernard's a rancher and he doesn't particularly have that much interest in it. Now old Tom Sun told me that he had, back around here, where these people all froze to death, now he told me he had been up there a half a dozen times with the Mormon people, and they have never been able to find the exact site of those burials.

Van Burgh: Huh.

Jensen: Even with metal detectors, because when most of the people when they buried them they didn't have any metal on them, they just ... but they buried them as quickly as they could. It's all they could do. But, old man Sun also told me that there was some exaggeration about the exact number of people who died at this cove. He said they had been dying before, and they died afterwards. So that the total number was right, but the complete number that died right in that cove at Martin's Cove was a little bit exaggerated, somewhat exaggerated. Now that was just his comment. The old man Sun and his wife, you know, they lived in this house down here and I believe died there, both of them, I think. That's Bernard's house up there not very far. If you want to, tourists aren't going to be getting down here for any reason to see this anyway. Have you ever walked around the overlook up here?

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: I think it is a good idea. They've done a good job. You have permits over on the overlook on this so people will stop?

Van Burgh: Yes.

Jensen: (long noisy pause) I wish I was at home [unclear] in front of us. (Van Burgh speaking in the back ground at the same time unclear.)

[Logue?]: You don't see that very often anymore.

Jensen: That's pretty good shape.

Van Burgh: Yeah.

Jensen: I have at home and I can't recall the man's name, but I could look this up, a proposal that a man, I think he lives in Canada now, but, he sent this proposal to me to present to the Historical Society, and I presented it at a meeting in Green River quite a number of years ago, and what he proposed--when I get up here on the highway I can tell you what I am talking about. He was proposing a bas relief statuary of somewhat similar to Mount Rushmore, and--I need to get up here so I can show you what he is talking about. But you see the Oregon Trail went right up the Sweetwater here.

Van Burgh: Yeah. (long pause).

Jensen: Is there a turn off up here?

Van Burgh: Yep.

Jensen: Now Martin's Cove, a lot of people think that just right up in there is Martin’s Cove, but, actually it's Martin's Cove, there. Martin's Cove is another little cove off of this road where these people had taken shelter. It's off to the right of ... this just this opening out here isn't Martin's Cove.

[Logue?]: On the east side?

Jensen: I think maybe when we get right up here, I can point out what this fellow's proposal was. What he was talking about doing was having on one of these bare rocks, and I will point it out to you up here. A couple in bas relief, in deep relief, a couple of Conestoga wagons with oxen headed towards the west with human figures, and these were to be gigantic in size, these wagons would be fifty to seventy-five feet tall so that they would show up from a long distance away. I'll tell you what his burning proposal was in just a minute. What he proposed to do was to excavate the rock and make a bench straight up and down and then have these figures carved into the tall granite. And they would be, he proposed, at least two of these wagons with oxen and human figures and so on.

Now you understand this would cost you money to do this, and what he proposes on this bare rock right over here, would be where the emigrant train would be. And then on the rock off to the … there is another bare rock off to the west there, from coming down from that carved the same way ... would be a group of Indians coming on their horses as a wild ride, to attack the wagon train. I have ... He actually sent me blueprints and then drawings of the whole thing, course I have them all at home. But, you see, you would be able to see that work the minute that you came into the gap up here, and I suppose probably it would cost now a days, it would cost fifty million dollars to do it. But, I made the proposal to the Historical Society as he had asked me to do. And there was a good deal of discussion about it, no hurry at this session but, just talking about it, but it would make rather an outstanding display.

Logue: Martin's cove is back up in there?

Jensen: Martin's Cove is back up in there.

Logue: To the east?

Jensen: Yeah.

Logue: OK.

Jensen: [unclear] [conversation unclear].

Jensen: Yeah. Got a bank of sand here.

[End of Tape and Transcription]

Illustration

• Irving Garbutt’s Casper Journal photo of Henry Jensen and Floyd Widmer is from Garbutt’s article "Hole in the Wall Still Great Cattle Country," August 22, 1992, in the collections of the Casper College Western History Center. Used with permission and thanks.