Wyoming Prairie Oil & Gas Company
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…)
