Salt Creek and the World's Largest Refinery
Near Casper, Wyoming
The railroad arrived in eighteen eighty-eight and gave Casper a reason to exist as a commercial town. What gave it a reason to explode was oil.
In eighteen eighty-nine, Philip Shannon drilled the first successful well in the Salt Creek field, about forty miles north of here in the sagebrush flats of Natrona County. The first refinery went up in Casper in eighteen ninety-five, right next to the railroad tracks where crude could be loaded onto tank cars and moved east. The industry grew steadily for a decade and then, in the years following the First World War, the word boom is the only word that fits.
By nineteen twenty-two, Casper's Midwest Refinery was, by volume of gasoline production, the largest refinery in the world. Let that settle for a moment. The largest refinery on earth was operating in a Wyoming city of about twelve thousand people, processing crude from a field forty miles away, and shipping petroleum products east and west by rail.
The city's population nearly quadrupled between nineteen ten and nineteen twenty, going from about twenty-six hundred people to more than eleven thousand. Casper was a boomtown in the fullest sense: rough, transient, flush with money, and utterly dependent on a commodity whose price the town could not control.
The Salt Creek field was prolific enough that by the nineteen seventies it had produced more oil than any other field in the entire Rocky Mountain region. The boom and bust cycles that followed, the Teapot Dome scandal in the nineteen twenties, the Depression, the mid-century stabilization, and the energy shocks of the seventies and eighties, all played out against a backdrop of infrastructure that the first generation of Casper oilmen built when this was still a frontier city measuring its age in decades rather than centuries.
