Boomtown: Rock Springs in the Nineteen Seventies
Near Rock Springs, Wyoming
If the coal era made Rock Springs notorious, the energy boom of the nineteen seventies made it infamous.
The Arab oil embargo of nineteen seventy-three sent energy prices surging and triggered a scramble across the American West for domestic fossil fuels. Wyoming had plenty: coal, natural gas, and the massive trona deposits in the Green River basin, the largest known in the world, which feed a huge soda ash industry. Within a few years, Rock Springs was at the center of one of the largest energy development surges in American history. The Jim Bridger Power Plant, one of the largest coal-fired generating stations in the country, came online nearby. Thousands of construction and extraction workers poured into a town whose infrastructure was built for far fewer people.
The results were predictable and wild. Trailer parks spread across every flat piece of ground. Housing costs tripled. Bars, liquor stores, and strip joints opened on every block of the commercial corridor. Crime rates climbed. The permanent population resented the transient workers. The transient workers had money and few community ties and little incentive to behave. Prostitution operated openly. Corruption reached into local government.
By the late nineteen seventies, the national press was paying attention. Reader's Digest published an article that called Rock Springs the most corrupt and lawless city in America. Sixty Minutes ran a segment. The town's mayor was eventually convicted on federal charges. A reform coalition swept into power and began cleaning up city government, but the Wild West image stuck for a generation.
The boom eventually moderated, as booms always do. The population stabilized. The rougher element moved on to the next extraction frontier. What remained was a town that had absorbed that surge, survived it, and was left with a story it is still deciding how to tell.
