Salt Creek: Wyoming's Black Gold Rush

The Salt Creek Oil Field north of Casper, Wyoming became the most productive oil field in the Rocky Mountain region. Production began in the eighteen eighties after surface seeps were noticed by ranchers, but the major development came after the nineteen ten boomtown explosion that turned Casper from a small river crossing into a full-scale oil city. In the nineteen twenties, Salt Creek was among the most productive fields in the country.

It sits on the same anticline as Teapot Dome, which became the center of the Teapot Dome Scandal: a portion of Naval Petroleum Reserve Number Three, the so-called Teapot Dome, was secretly leased by Interior Secretary Albert Fall to private oil companies in exchange for bribes. The scandal sent Fall to federal prison and became the defining government corruption case of the nineteen twenties.