Today In Wyoming's History: Tumble Inn Powder River, Wyoming

Today In Wyoming's History: Tumble Inn Powder River, Wyoming: 

Tumble Inn Powder River, Wyoming

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A familiar Natrona County landmark's history.

As noted on this entry, this is a familiar Natrona County landmark.

As also noted in the comments to this video, it may contain some errors.  One definite error is the attribution of its decline to the Interstate Highway.  That's not the case.  In Wyoming, I80 goes on the path of the old Lincoln Highway which, while it does bypass some towns the Lincoln Highway went through, doesn't run anywhere near Power River.  Nor does I25 or I90.  So whatever the source of the demise may be, that isn't it.

One of the commentors on the video is, moreover, well situated to know the history of the Tumble Inn and if that person feels there are errors, there most probably are.

It's still pretty good, however.

One thing I would note is that the story isn't completed.  Rather, the story runs through one of the last owners.  After they left it, it did continue on, but it went rapidly downhill.  The facility converted into a strip bar, an odd choice for an establishment in a small, unincorporated town some 40 miles away from Casper.  As heavy drinking is a factor in any such establishment, the trouble having a distant "boobie bar", as my wife calls them, in the county is obvious.  Particularly when the nearest competitor at the time was ten miles out of town and on a divided highway.  It doesn't seem like a sound economic choice.

Then the Inn lost its liquor license.  The allure of youthful partially clad dancers aside (the one time they were the subject of a news story a dancer looked suspiciously underage), such establishments are apparently too tied to alcohol to do without it, and it closed for good.

I was in the Tumble Inn twice, both well before the strip club era, and most likely during the era that the video closes out with.  We stopped in for dinner with in laws.  I recall rattlesnake was on the menu, as were Rocky Mountain Oysters, but they were out.

The second time was after that, when my father-in-law and I stopped to buy beer there for some function, although I don't recall what it was.  I do recall it was in the winter, as it was good and cold. The bar was crowded, full of locals, and a couple of guys somewhere between 40 and 70 who looked like they lived at the bar.

And that gets to another aspect of its decline and fall.  Having a small rural restaurant and bar is hard enough in the Wyoming of our current era.  But once you lose the locals, you're done for.

The establishment apparently dates back to the 1920s, although I couldn't find any references to it from that time period.  It turns out the name "Tumble Inn" was popular at the time, and there was another bar in the Salt Creek oilfield in the 1920s called that.  In addition, somebody's house in Casper was referred to that way, being the property of an oilman who had a lot of social events there.  The video says the restaurant/bar in Powder River dates back to the 1920s, and it might, but as noted, the only references from the 20s I could find were to the two other Tumble Inns.

At any rate, in the 1920s Powder River's 40 miles from Casper was a longer distance, in real terms, than it is now.  And Power River went through some oil booms, including one about that time, and again in the 1940s.  Indeed, at one time the town was on both sides of the highway and was actually an incorporated town, which it isn't now.

For that matter, Natrona County had several locations that were much more viable towns than the are now.  Arminto Wyoming, which is off the main highway but not far from Powder River, was a thriving sheep shipping point and railroad town.  It had a legendary bar in a hotel located there, and the bar still existed into my adult years, before a fire took the building down.  Locals attempted to drag the bar out of the burning building, but failed.

Waltman and Hiland were two other such tiny, but real towns.  They're still there, but they're shadows of their former selves.  Waltman is really a small oilfield camp south of the highway and south of the old townsite now.  Again, into my adult years, its gas station, which is now a residence, was in business, and it had a small café in it.  Hiland's gas station still operates as does its store, café, hotel and bar, its business probably saved by the fact that it's on the highway, but so distant from anything, there's nothing else nearby.

The Salt Creek Tumble Inn was in a town called Snyder, I've never even heard of.  At some point, Salt Creek itself was a small town, and no longer is.  Both would have been in the eastern part of the county.

North of Casper, there's Midwest and Edgerton, which are still there. They were much more substantial towns in their day, and in the 1920s Midwest, a Standard Oil town, very much was.  Both towns are still oilfield towns today, but they've likewise declined as oil facilities near them shut down or automated, and the U.S. Navy moved out of the former strategic reserve near there.

Of course, as automobiles and highways improved, the communities around Casper boomed and grew, and today that's where the county's population is.

Still, even as late as the 1950s, it seems that Wyomingites were willing to drive huge distances for a dinner.  Driving to Power River from Casper was no big deal to eat, it seems. And I recall people talking about going to the Little Bear Inn near Cheyenne on dinner dates, which means that the drove something like 140 miles to do that.  Likewise, people used to drive to El Torro and Svilars in Hudson, in Fremont County, to do the same, which is about the same distance.  

Nobody does that now.

Today In Wyoming's History: January 1. New Years Day

Today In Wyoming's History: January 1. New Years Day:

1918  Oil and gas pipeline commences operation from the Salt Creek field to Casper.  The first such pipeline in the Casper region.  Attribution:  On This Day .com

I've been told, and indeed I've seen the photos, that my father in law's great grandfather worked on hauling material to the Salt Creek fields during their construction. And this by mule team.  Photographs of locals hauling equipment from Casper to Salt Creek by mule are really impressive.  It's interesting to note that early on, it was mule power, not heavy truck power, that supported the petroleum industry.

The Salt Creek field remains in production today.

Boom

The Casper Star Tribune has an article in today's paper about the dedication of the dedication of a historic byway near the old Salt Creek oilfield in Natrona County.  Apparently two more such byways are in the works, one near Green River, and another near Sheridan, under the legislature's recently approved Historic Mine Trail and Byway Program.  In reading the article, what struck me as really remarkable was the impact the Salt Creek field had on the county and the town, in terms of population.

 Casper in 1893, from Wyoming Tales and Trails.

The Salt Creek field was, apparently, first exploited in 1908.  I'd actually thought it somewhat earlier, as there was oil exploration in the county prior to that time.  I've seen, for example, articles in the Natrona County Tribune concerning oil finds dating all the way back to the early 1890s.  Indeed, quite a  few such articles ran in that paper at that time.  However, as noted in a recent book on the history of Natrona County, it wasn't a truly economic resource at the time, as transportation costs were simply too expensive.  By the early 1900s, however, with rail lines fairly well developed, that apparently had changed.

 Casper in 1903, from Wyoming Tales and Trails.  Of interest to locals, this depicts the town as being exclusively on the south side of the North Platte River, which was undoubtedly correct, and mostly north of the railroad.

Anyhow, the Salt Creek field apparently had its first oil find in 1908.  Prior to that find, the Tribune states, the oil production for the county was a surprisingly low 50 barrels a day.  According to the article in today's Tribune, the population of Casper was about 2,000 people at the time.  The oil strike changes all of that.  The boom hit, the paper relates, in 1912, and the paper ran its story out through 1914, although in my view it would have made more sense to run it out through 1919.  Anyhow, the paper cites oil production in the country as climbing to 100,000 barrels a day in the 1912 to 1914 time frame, and the population of the county as having rising from the 2,000 above noted up to 20,000 by 1914, a stunning climb.  It should be noted, for what its worth, that another source claims the population of the county was 1,000 persons in 1906, which doesn't preclude the population of Casper being 2,000 by 1908.  That source also claims that the population of the county was about 25,000 by 1924, which might also be consistent with Casper's being 20,000 in 1914, given the ongoing boom, and the post World War One economic collapse. 

Downtown Casper in 1907, the year prior to the year the Star Tribune claims as the start of the boom.  From Wyoming Tales and Trails.  Note the very heavy presence of early overhead wire lines.

Nobody was native to Casper at that time, of course, but it must have basically converted the town from a very small ranching hub, albeit one that had extractive industry dreams from the start, into what was a regional oil and agricultural hub, but one with its eyes on oil.

What this must have meant in terms of living in the area is almost unimaginable.  Even today, areas that experience booms have quite a bit of difficulty adjusting to them. This has been the case, for example, in western North Dakota, which s undergoing a boom right now.  But in the era we're talking about, transportation was relatively primitive, social services virtually non existent, and the area still largely a frontier, even if the U.S. Census had proclaimed the frontier closed.

 Casper in 1912, from Wyoming Tales and Trails.  Some of the buildings depicted here are still there, notably the Wyoming National Bank Building, later the Tribune Building, which is only barely visible.  The church depicted in the foreground was an Episcopal Church which was subsequently torn down when the new St. Mark's Episcopal Church was built in 1924.  Many downtown Casper Churches were built in the late teens and early 1920s.

Some of the impact of that boom is fairly easy to find by reading histories of the locality, or biographies of Wyoming figures, from that time.  Money was being made hand over fist due to oil, and at the same time, partially due to national economic conditions, and partially due to World War One, the agricultural sector, which had dominated the region prior to oil, was booming itself.  We were in one of our full employment eras, with agriculture and mineral exploration doing very well.  People moved in and made fortunes.  Indeed, some of what we regard as "early" Wyoming figures that created economic dynasties in that era did so in this era.  While their industry cannot be begrudged, it can't help but be noted that they were coming in during a period in which the economic winds were blowing so favorably that their industry and enterprise found unnaturally favorable conditions to an extent. 

 Casper in the 1920s, from Wyoming Tales and Trails.  While quite a few of these buildings are no longer present, a large number of them are.  By this time, in spite of later changes, Casper had basically taken on a form that is presently recognizable.

Well, of course, it all slowed up after World War One.  The huge demand for oil, horses, and wool that had caused the boom dried up, as the U.S. economy slowed, and the nations of the industrial world stopped tearing themselves apart in Europe.  But the region was forever impacted, indeed forever changed.

As a side note to all of this, my wife's family, which was in the county already at this time, participated in the Salt Creek story, in that one of them was a freighter at that time.  That is, he operated his own freight wagons as a teamster, using large mule teams for that enterprise.  He hauled oilfield supplies and equipment to the Salt Creek field.