Today In Wyoming's History: November 11. Veterans Day

On Today In Wyoming's History: November 11. Veterans Day: we take a look at various things that World War One caused to occur globally, and locally, some of them relate closely to the theme of this page. Particularly those items that discuss the massive expansion of the state's oil industry, and the agricultural boom that World War One caused in the state and nation.

I don't want to really repeat those themes in their entirety here, but anyone who has lived in Casper Wyoming for example, or indeed Wyoming in general, has to be aware of the very significant presence of the oil and gas industry in the state. It's been a fairly significant factor from some point early in the 20th Century, and oil exploration was going on around Casper as early as the 1890s. Oil refining had made its appearance prior to World War One.

But World War One caused oil to be significant in a way it never had been before. The United States was an oil exporter in that era. Mechanization had started to make its appearance in various armies about this time, but it was navies that really used the oil in that period. The Royal Navy, for instance, converted from coal to oil just prior to the war.

Oil production received a huge boost due to the war, resulting in a boom in Wyoming's oil provinces of that era. Casper, for example, saw the construction of its first "skyscraper", the Oil Exchange Building, in 1917.
The building is still there, still in use, as the Consolidated Royalty Building. It was oil, as the name would imply, that caused it to be constructed as the headquarters for a local oil exploration and production company.

It wasn't just oil, however, that was booming in Wyoming. Agriculture was as well. A boom in the horse market had started in 1914, as British remount agents combed the United States for military horses. Wyoming provided a fair number of remounts to the British in that era, as did the other Western states. When the United States began to prepare for war horse production switched over to American needs. The boom lasted throughout the war.

Agriculture of other types also boomed in these years. Food production was a desperate matter during the First World War, and Wyoming was primarily agricultural in those days. The era was good for farmers, and the largest single year for homesteading in the United States came just at the end of the war, 1919, which was also the last year in US history in which farmers had economic parity with city dwellers.


Indeed, post war the state would see a new influx of homesteading that was directly the result of the war. The government operated to create some special homesteading programs for returning veterans, to help them get a start in farming or ranching, and have a place of their own. I personally knew one such homesteader many years ago.