Coal, Oil, and the Ground Beneath Wyoming

Wyoming sits on one of the most extraordinary concentrations of fossil fuel in North America. This was not obvious to the first Europeans who crossed the territory. The emigrants on the Oregon Trail walked over coal seams thick enough to heat a city, over oil sands that seeped to the surface, over natural gas fields that would not be tapped for another century.

The railroad changed everything. Coal mines opened in the eighteen sixties and eighteen seventies along the Union Pacific line to fuel the locomotives. By the eighteen eighties Rock Springs and Carbon were shipping coal east and west in volume.

The Union Pacific owned or controlled many of the mines, a vertical integration that made the railroad one of the dominant economic forces in the territory. Oil followed. The first commercial well in Wyoming was drilled in eighteen eighty-three near Lander in the Wind River Basin.

Larger fields followed in the Bighorn Basin and on the Salt Creek anticline north of Casper. By the nineteen twenties Wyoming was producing more oil per capita than almost anywhere in the country. The Salt Creek field became a flashpoint for one of the most consequential political scandals in American history.

In nineteen twenty-two, President Warren Harding's Interior Secretary Albert Fall secretly leased the Teapot Dome federal oil reserve near Casper to a private oil company in exchange for bribes. When the arrangement was discovered, Fall became the first cabinet officer in American history to be convicted of a felony committed while in office. Today Wyoming is the largest coal-producing state in the country, with the Powder River Basin supplying roughly forty percent of all coal burned in American power plants in recent years.

It is also a major oil and natural gas producer. The mineral royalties from federal lands pay for much of the state's government, making Wyoming uniquely dependent on the continued extraction of what lies beneath the surface.