Nettie's Homestead

For more than 20 years tough old Nettie Thompson, a revolver strung from her neck--to use on interlopers--stuck to her barren cattle land on Wyoming's Polecat Bench. She had homesteaded there in 1913 after hearing tales of a ranch hand who traced a suspicious smell to a prairiedog hole, lit his pipe as he peered into it--and woke up in the hospital. He had smelled natural gas.

There was oil around Polecat Bench all right: the Wyoming-Montana Elk Basin Field, that was first opened up by Ohio Oil in 1915, has produced some oil and gas every year since. Oldtimers say the gassers used to "roar so damn much you couldn't talk to your wife in bed without yelling." But Nettie never struck enough to keep body & soul together: in 1935, hounded by creditors, she gave up and disappeared from Elk Basin.* No one knows what became of her, but if she could see her homestead today she would feel like shooting herself with her own revolver.

Smack on the spot where Nettie's cabin stood, a big rotary rig is drilling toward a great new oil-producing level some 4.000 ft. below the original "Frontier" sands.

Across 6,000 acres 19 deep wells are already flowing with black oil from the newly discovered Tensleep sands; eight more are drilling and another two dozen are waiting their turn with the rotary rigs. At night great gas flares light the skies from Polecat Bench to West Squaw Tit at the Montana end of the field. The Tensleep sands, first proved to be oil-bearing last December, still represent the only major producing field opened up in the U.S.

since 1940, with possible reserves of 300,000,000 bbl.

Led by Ohio Oil, the big U.S. oil companies swarmed over Polecat Bench. Last August Phillips Petroleum and Standard of Indiana's Stanolind paid the U.S. Government $1.407,500 for drilling rights on 262 1/2acres of Federal land in Elk Basin--the highest price ever bid for the privilege of putting a drill bit into the ground. Last month Carter Oil, subsidiary of Standard Oil of New Jersey, bought out Denver's Minnelusa Oil Corp., the original discoverer of the Tensleep sands.

The big news at Elk Basin last week was Harold Ickes. The Basin's swelling stream of oil has been pinched down to 14,000 bbl. a day for lack of adequate pipelines. The lines were approved by WPB, but frantically opposed by local truckers. Last week Oil Czar Ickes stepped into the fracas, recommended immediate construction of two new pipelines (one to Billings and Laurel refineries in Montana, the other to connect with Stanolind's big line to Salt Lake). When the new lines are pushed through next year, Nettie's homestead will really begin to pay off.

* Not to be confused with California's Elk Hills Field.

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