The lively folks who drill in Colorado
May justly be excused for some bravado,
Because their hopes are not based on a shadow.
The Salt-Creek oil-field, the first worked in Wyoming, is in the northern part of Natrona and the southern part of Johnson county, fifty miles north of Caspar, the terminus of the Fremont, Elkhorn & Missouri-Valley Railroad. As known to-day the field is eighteen by thirty miles. It lies along Salt Creek and its tributaries, which drain northward and empty into Powder River, and is a rough country, cut by deep gulches, beneath which there are table-lands of small extent. Vegetation is scanty and timber is found only on the highest bluffs. In 1889 the Pennsylvania Oil-Company, composed of Pennsylvanians and under the management of George B. McCalmont, located on Salt Creek and drilled a well which, early in the spring of 1890, struck oil. Obstacles of no small magnitude were met with. The oil had to be freighted fifty miles by wagon; railroad-freights were controlled by eastern oil producers, rates that would justify shipments seemed almost impossible, and the oil had to be proved before it could be placed upon the market in competition with well-known brands. In the face of these difficulties the company continued work, and in the spring of 1894 succeeded in making arrangements to ship crude-oil. Storage-tanks were erected at the wells and at the railroad, and a refinery is now in operation at Caspar. The wells vary in depth from nine-hundred to fifteen-hundred feet and three companies are operating. The oil is a valuable lubricant. The transportation of the oil to the railroad is effected by freight-wagons of the ordinary sort. Behind them is a fourth wagon, or the freighter’s home, which has wide boards projecting from the sides of the wagon-box over the wheels, making a box of unusual width covered with heavy canvas over the ordinary wagon-bows and provided with a window in the back, a door in front, a bed, cook-stove, table, cupboard and the necessary equipment for keeping house. In this house on wheels the freighter passes the night, and in breaking camp he is not bothered with his camp-outfit. This novelty has been recently introduced by Mr. Johnson, the leading freighter for the Pennsylvania Company. With sixteen mules he draws his four wagons with nine tons of oil, over a very sandy road.
Wyoming oil sells high at Caspar, which is becoming a place of some consequence and may soon figure as the state-metropolis. It was a fort in the days of wild beasts and wilder Indians. Soft rock, with a provoking tendency to cave-in, and artesian water, impregnated with sulphur and found just above the oil-sand, rendered drilling a difficult task. The best well in the bunch produces from a rock five-hundred feet down, while the deepest is sixteen-hundred feet and the sand is fifty feet thick. Oil-basins on Caspar Creek, Powder River, Salt Creek and Poison Spider indicate the existence of petroleum over a wide section of the state. Wells on Salt Creek resemble those in Russia. True-blue Wyomingites proudly anticipate the day when their gilt-edged basin will hit the Baku mastodons a Fitzsimmons sock-dolager in the solar-plexus.
My! Won’t the Czar feel like the deuceovitch
When the Wyoming wells cut looseovitch
And Baku spouters must vamooseovitch?
TWELVE HORSES AND THREE WAGONS FOR HAULING OIL, AT CASPAR, WYOMING, WITH “BARNEY” M’CALMONT IN THE FOREGROUND.