by Bruce Wells | Sep 29, 2022 | Petroleum Companies
Elk Basin United Oil Company incorporated in 1917 seeking oil riches in Wyoming’s booming Elk Basin oilfield. Oilfields found in North Texas, including a 1911 gusher at Electra, already had resulted in a rush of new exploration ventures – and created boom towns like Burkburnett.
Wherever found, America’s newly discovered oilfields led to the founding of many exploration ventures that competed against more established companies.
Newly formed companies frequently struggled to survive as competition for financing, leases, and drilling equipment intensified, especially as exploration moved westward.
Wyoming Oilfields
In a remote, scenic valley on the border of Wyoming and Montana, a discovery well opened Wyoming’s Elk Basin oilfield on October 8, 1915. Wyoming’s earliest oil wells had produced quality, easily refined oil as early as 1890.
Drilled by the Midwest Refining Company, the wildcat well produced up to 150 barrels of oil a day of a high-grade, “light oil.” Credit for oil discovery is given to geologist George Ketchum, who first recognized the Elk Basin as a likely source of oil.
“Gusher coming in, south rim of the Elk Basin Field, 1917.” Photo courtesy American Heritage Center.Ketchum, a farmer from Cowly, Wyoming, in 1906 had explored the area with C.A. Fisher, who had been the first geologist to map a region within the Bighorn Basin southeast of Cody, Wyoming, where oil seeps were discovered in 1883.
The Elk Basin, which extends from Carbon County, Montana, into northeastern Park County, Wyoming, attracted further exploration after the 1915 well. More successful wells followed.
Once again, petroleum discoveries in unproved territory attracted speculators, investors, and new companies – including the Elk Basin United Oil Company.
Established petroleum companies like Midwest Refining — and the Ohio Oil Company, which would become Marathon Oil — came to the Elk Basin. These oil companies had the financial resources to survive a run of dry holes or other exploration hazards.
The exploration industry’s many smaller and under-capitalized companies would prove especially vulnerable.
Audacious advertising claims helped Elk Basin United Oil Company compete for investors.
Is My Old Oil Stock Worth Anything features several such small players in Wyoming’s petroleum history, including the notorious Dr. Frederick Albert Cook (Arctic Explorer turns Oil Promoter). Even Wyoming’s famous showman, Col. William F. Cody, got caught up in the state’s oil fever (Buffalo Bill Shoshone Oil Company).
Elk Basin United Oil Company
Elk Basin United Oil Company of Salt Lake City, Utah, incorporated on July 30, 1917, and acquired a lease of 120 acres in Wyoming’s Elk Basin oilfield. By February 1918, company stock sold for 12 cents a share.
Enthusiastic newspaper ads promoted its “6 properties in 3 different fields…A 6 to 1 shot!” Twenty producing wells were reputed to be within one mile of Elk Basin United Oil’s Wyoming well site.
Meanwhile, Elk Basin United Oil reported expansion plans underway in a growing Kansas Mid-Continent oilfield. The company secured leases near Garnett and completed four producing oil wells, yielding a total of about 500 barrels of oil a month. It added an additional 112 acres and planned a fifth well.
Prairie Pipe Line Company (later Sinclair Consolidated) completed pipelines into the Garnett field through which several companies looked to transport their oil production.
However, growing competition from better funded exploration ventures and low crude oil prices ranging between $1.10 and $1.98 per barrel of oil in 1917 and 1918 drove many small companies into consolidations, mergers or bankruptcy.
Elk Basin United Oil, exploring back in Wyoming by March 1919, sought a lease on the property of the First Ward Pasture Company bordering the Utah line, “with a view of prospecting the property declare the surface showing to be very favorable for an oil deposit.” But financial issues continued to burden the company.
In December 1919, Oil Distribution News reported Basin United Oil Company was negotiating mergers with the Anderson Oil Company and the Kansas-United Oil Company, with a proposed capitalization of $1 million. With no results of the planned combination documented, Elk Basin United Oil Company disappeared from financial records soon thereafter.
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The stories of exploration and production companies joining petroleum booms (and avoiding busts) can be found updated in Is my Old Oil Stock worth Anything? Become an AOGHS annual supporting member and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2022 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
Citation Information – Article Title: “Elk Basin United Oil Company.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/old-oil-stocks/elk-basin-united-oil-company. Last Updated: September 29, 2022. Original Published Date: October 1, 2021.
by Bruce Wells | Jul 29, 2022 | Petroleum Companies
In October 1917, Wyoming Peerless Oil Company stock promotions first appeared in the pages of the Cheyenne State Leader, Laramie Republican and Wyoming Tribune newspapers.
Oil investment ads in Milwaukee Journal on June 2, 1918.
Within a year the new exploration company’s advertisements appeared in newspapers as far away as Milwaukee, Wisconsin: “Action Not Promises Our Motto,” noted one placed in the June 2, 1918, Milwaukee Journal (above).
Many U.S. newspapers at the time included similar promotions as oilfield discoveries proliferated from California to Kansas.
Peerless Oil Company promotions appeared in Wyoming newspapers.
Demand for gasoline was skyrocketing, both for Model T Fords and World War I, which the United States would soon join. Oil companies proliferated.
Some used questionable claims to keep investors unaware of how risky and expensive the business finding and producing oil truly was. Nine out of 10 exploratory well attempts proved to be dry holes – and drilling was expensive in such remote areas.
The Big Muddy
The Wyoming Peerless Oil Company set its sights on drilling a well six miles from the nearest producer in the Big Muddy oilfield east of Casper.
Peerless Oil stock was initially offered at three cents per share. “Don’t wait for our first well to come in. You might not be able to get this stock then for less than 25-cents or 50-cents per share.”
Wyoming Big Muddy Oilfield Marker
The Big Muddy oilfield, located about four miles west of Glenrock in Converse County, was discovered in 1916, a discovery that touched off widespread drilling and brought about one of Wyoming’s famous oil booms. Today, a marker on the south side of Hwy. 230 at the junction with County Road 33 describes the historic field:
Big Muddy oil field is a typical Wyoming oil producing structure. The field, discovered in 1916, has produced over 30 million barrels of high quality oil.
Strata here were arched upward at the time the Rocky Mountains originated over 60 million years ago, to form anticline, or dome. Because oil is lighter than water, it rose to the crest of the dome where it was trapped in pore spaces between sand grains. The Wall Creek sand lies at a depth of near 3,000 feet and the Dakota sand at about 4,000 feet. The first oil well in Wyoming was drilled in 1884. There are now about 100 oil fields in the state.
Seeking more investors, advertisements reported Wyoming Peerless Oil ‘s drilling progress on its Big Muddy exploratory well: Down 1,475 feet by June of 1918; down 1,675 feet by July and down to 3,315 feet by August of 1919.
Although rumors of a dry hole began to circulate, the company continued to solicit more investors to fund deeper drilling. But after reaching 4,050 feet without finding oil, company officer Charles Straub announced the well would be abandoned.
If more funds could be secured, Wyoming Peerless Oil would drill a second well, Straub added.
“Efforts have been made to extend the limits of the (Big Muddy) field in every direction, but these efforts have all been failures and the area of the field is plainly marked,” reported the Oil and Gas News reported (this would change in 1950 with a discovery to the east of the field).
Failed Well
By February 1920, stockholders from Denver had petitioned a court to put the Wyoming Peerless Oil Company into receivership, alleging mismanagement by Straub and other company officers. Straub responded with a $50,000 libel suit, reported by the Casper Daily Tribune on March 5, 1920.
The results are obscured, but Wyoming Peerless Oil never drilled a second well and the company disappeared from newspaper accounts.
The Big Muddy oilfield now has produced more than 300 million barrels of oil and wells are still pumping.
The first record of oil in Wyoming came in 1832. An expedition led by Captain B.L.E. Bonneville took the first wagons through South Pass. Fifty years later, prospector Mike Murphy, bought an oil lease on the site of Capt. Bonneville’s “great tar spring” southeast of Lander.
Learn more in First Wyoming Oil Wells.
The stories of exploration and production companies joining petroleum booms (and avoiding busts) can be found updated in Is my Old Oil Stock worth Anything?
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Recommended Reading: William F. Cody’s Wyoming Empire: The Buffalo Bill Nobody Knows (2007); The Salt Creek Oil Field: Natrona County, Wyo., 1912
(reprint, 2017); Kettles and Crackers – A History of Wyoming Oil Refineries
(2016). Your Amazon purchases benefit the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.
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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society preserves U.S. petroleum history. Become an AOGHS annual supporting member and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2023 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
Citation Information – Article Title: “Wyoming Peerless Oil Company.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/oil-almanac/buffalo-bill-oil-company. Last Updated: January 27, 2023. Original Published Date: July 29, 2013.
by Bruce Wells | May 23, 2015 | Petroleum Companies
Roughnecks after capping an oil well in Wyoming’s Salt Creek field, circa 1920s. American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.
Petroleum exploration in Wyoming had gone on since reports of oil seeps in 1832 when Wyoming Prairie Oil & Gas Company joined the search in 1917.
Fur trappers in Wyoming Territory first reported finding oil seeps near Salt Creek. Tales of a “Great Tar Spring” had led to the earliest hand-dug oil wells there during the Civil War.
“The first recorded oil sale in Wyoming occurred along the Oregon Trail when, in 1863, enterprising entrepreneurs sold oil as a lubricant to wagon-train travelers” explains Wyohistory.org. “The oil came from Oil Mountain Springs some 20 miles west of present-day Casper.”
By 1884, six years before statehood, Mike Murphy, an oilman from Pennsylvania, used a steam-powered cable-tool rig to drill 300 feet deep and complete Wyoming’s first official oil well. Read more in First Wyoming Oil Wells.
With modest capitalization of $36,000 in 1917, Wyoming Prairie Oil & Gas Company incorporated in Cheyenne, Wyoming. The company soon had 640 acres under lease in the state’s Big Muddy oilfield. (more…)
by Bruce Wells | Apr 11, 2015 | Petroleum Companies
Women entrepreneurs have been part of America’s petroleum industry since the earliest Pennsylvania oil wells.
In Bradford, Pennsylvania, home of the first “billion dollar oilfield,” a leading service company was run by a woman as early as 1884. Read about her in Mrs. Alford’s Nitro Factory.
Although Texas oilfields fueled the Allies to victory in World War I, Wyoming discoveries also played a part. The state’s drilling boom had begun in 1908 with the No. 1 Salt Creek well. It revealed a giant, often shallow oilfield. One well produced oil from 22 feet deep.
The Salt Creek field in the Powder River Basin proved to be one of the most significant in the Rocky Mountains (learn more in First Wyoming Oil Wells). Maybell B. Remore was among the “wildcatters” there. Her Women’s National Oil & Development Company incorporated in 1917. (more…)
