Reliving the booms

Her program was part of the Saturday University program at Gillette College, “Please Give Us One More Boom: Oil and Gas in Wyoming,” was reflected in a bumper sticker that appeared on cars and trucks in Wyoming and Campbell County in the late 1980s: “Please God, give us another oil boom, we promise not to p--- it away this time.”

While the description of her presentation said she’d offer suggestions for “One More Boom” based on her oral history projects and research, Waggener also admitted she didn’t feel right doing that for an audience that has experienced more than one.

“I think what I would say is don’t underestimate what’s coming your way,” said the associate archivist in the University of Wyoming’s American Heritage Center.

Energy Capital of the world

Campbell County may be one of only two boom towns in Wyoming that are still sustaining their communities, Waggener said. The other may be Rock Springs.

“Gillette is remarkable. I would say Gillette has really capitalized on the dollars more than any town in Wyoming,” Waggener said.

In the 1970s when Sen. Mike Enzi, R-Wyo., served as Gillette’s mayor, the community’s population started out at about 6,000, she said. By the time his eight-year period as mayor ended in 1982, the population was about 24,000 with 28 years being the average age of residents.

“Growth came so rapidly that it was not until 2000 that frame homes outnumbered trailer homes in Gillette,” Waggener said.

It was also a time when a medical condition, coined the Gillette Syndrome, was identified.

Steve Gardiner, a schoolteacher in Gillette, assembled 29 oral history interviews and then transcribed them for a self-published book entitled “Rumblings from Razor City.”

Among those interviewed was a newspaper editor who spoke about the great energy, youth and zeal in Gillette.

A 27-year-old police sergeant who had worked in the community for five years in 1981 talked about the costs of alcohol or drug use in the community. He noted it didn’t come with the crime or burglaries that were seen in other cities to pay for drug habits.

“This is one of the few places on earth where you can be stoned out of your mind and earn $20 an hour in a job,” he noted.

Another resident, a wildlife biologist, said too many paid attention to oil, gas and coal, instead of the quality of wildlife and outdoors in Gillette and how that had been impacted.

“So there’s myriad views when it comes to something like this in a community,” Waggener said, who also spoke briefly about the coal bed methane boom that hit Campbell County a few years ago.

Salt Creek Oil Field

Wyoming’s first boom came in 1890, one month after statehood, when Phillip Shannon drilled the first well in the Salt Creek Oil Field near Midwest, 45 miles north of Casper.

At the time, that town was called Home Camp and several other small communities also grew. But Home Camp, later called Midwest, is the only town still existing today.

In 1895, there were no pipelines to deliver oil. So Shannon delivered his barrels driving a string of 14 horses over rough, dirt roads to reach the refinery in Casper that opened in 1894. It took him five days.

But Shannon’s investment “was a money loser” and he sold the business, Waggener said.

The first “gusher” in Wyoming was 1908 with Dutch Well No. 1 drilled in December of that year. It was drilled 22 feet deep in the Salt Creek Oil Field and produced 600 barrels of oil a day. The first oil pipeline built in Wyoming was in 1912.

The early 1920s, Waggener said, was the “heyday of oil in Wyoming.”

By 1921, there were 362 oil wells in the Salt Creek field. At one time, 5,616 wells were predicted to be drilled there, but the number only topped about 1,200.

Still, one-fifth of all the oil produced in the United States was from Wyoming at that time, Waggener said.

She also discovered some oral histories from the 1950s given by workers in those early days of Wyoming who later traveled to Texas to work in the industry there.

In one, Fred Jennings said the oil workers had 12-hour shifts seven days a week. He worked a year and one day before he got time off.

She showed photographs of the dangerous work on wooden derricks and the town of Lavoye, Wyo., in 1922 in the Salt Creek Oil Field.

“The towns that grew up in Wyoming were the epitome of a Wyoming boom town,” she said.

On Oct. 20, 1922, Salt Creek had no banks, Waggener said, pointing to a photograph of a street scene. By the next day, when the photograph was taken, there were two banks in business. “Things were moving.”

But by 1928, that boom came to an end. There were only 100 oil wells operating and workers drifted from Wyoming to Texas and Montana.

Then came the Great Depression and those boom towns collapsed and were abandoned — except for Midwest — and the land and buildings were sold or torn down.

Oral histories

Other booms Waggener has researched and gathered oral histories for includes:

In 2010: Jonah Field and the Pinedale Anticline in Sublette County. It’s a natural gas boom that started in 1998 with the advent of hydraulic fracturing technology. Residents refer to the boom as “like the gold rush” or define it as “how do you stop a train?”

In 2011: The Niobrara oil plain project, with oral histories from Laramie, Platte, Goshen and Converse counties done at the behest of the university’s school of energy resources.

How you feel about a boom “depends on where you live and depends on what you see,” she said.

She also applauded the men and women who work in the energy industry in Campbell County for “working in an industry that means so much in Wyoming.”