Dallas Dome: Wyoming’s First Oil Field

Just past Little Dallas, I spotted this sign.

In 1832, Captain Benjamin Bonneville with a troop of nearly 100 men traveled into the Wind River Valley to trade for beaver pelts with the Shoshone Indians who lived in the area.

Bonneville, a West Point graduate and career military officer, was part of the wave of men lured to the West to capitalize on the European fashion craze for beaver-felt top hats. He spent several years roaming the interior Rocky Mountain West and in his wanderings, stumbled upon an oil seep near present-day Lander that eventually became the site of Wyoming’s first oil field.Native Americans had used such natural oil seeps or tar pits for thousands of years for a variety of purposes ranging from face paint to liniment for humans and horses. Bonneville also used the oily residue, greasing wagon axles and taking advantage of the oil’s purported medicinal purposes. He became famous after author Washington Irving wrote a book—The Adventures of Captain Benjamin Bonneville—celebrating Bonneville’s western explorations.

Wind River Country’s tar sands were part of the colorful picture Irving painted of the areas Bonneville visited. These stories included dramatic descriptions of the Wind River Mountains, great herds of bison, “white bears,” tumbling waterfalls and rugged alpine terrain. Irving depicted Bonneville as a hero, although his reputation among his contemporaries was more ambiguous. Some called his trading post near present-day Green River, Wyoming “Fort Nonsense” because the brutal winters left the area uninhabitable most of the year. But Bonneville did produce one of the most accurate early maps of the Rocky Mountain region and the tar sands he identified near Lander eventually did become lucrative.

Fifty years after Bonneville stumbled upon the oil spring in Wind River Country, Mike Murphy returned to the area, which was still a wild, undeveloped land, and sank a wildcat well, creating the first of Wyoming’s many oil fields, Dallas Dome. Murphy struck black gold at 300 feet; unfortunately for him uses for oil were limited in 1883. The primary markets for his oil were tanners in Utah who used the product to prepare hides and to the Union Pacific Railroad for use as axle grease. Dallas Dome has continued to produce oil for more than 100 years.