Boom and Bust: Utah's First Oil Rush
Near Mexican Hat, Utah
The oil well that the prospector E. L. Goodridge drilled at Mexican Hat in nineteen oh eight triggered something no one expected: one of the earliest oil rushes in Utah.
Within a year or two, several companies had drilled wells around the San Juan River crossing. Workers, speculators, and camp followers poured into a country that had previously been visited only by prospectors and Navajo traders. The population briefly swelled, with people living in tents and rough board buildings near the river.
The boom collapsed almost as fast as it had arrived. The Mexican Hat field proved modest in scale, and never produced anywhere near the fortune investors had imagined. By the nineteen-teens the companies had pulled out and the population had cratered.
The rough boomtown buildings rotted in the desert sun. A few stubborn residents stayed on, running a trading post and a small lodge for travelers passing through. The name Goodridge, which the prospector had given the settlement, gave way to the name of the rock formation visible from every direction.
What the oil rush left behind was not wealth but roads. The tracks that prospectors cut through the mesa country to haul in equipment and haul out oil became, over time, the routes that travelers now follow toward Monument Valley and the Navajo Nation. The boom had failed, but in failing it had opened the country.
