Wamsutter, Wyo., population
all of 261, is the poster child for Western boomtowns, though if
you Google it, the computer asks, “Are you sure you don’t mean
hamster?”
Wamsutter used to be a rough-and-tumble
railroad town, named in 1884 for an obscure Union Pacific bridge
engineer. The promise of the railroad first brought surveyors,
tunnelers, bridgers, followed by grading crews and tie-layers. They
moved on, but Wamsutter survived. It had just enough in the way of
railroad business, highway travelers, winter sheepmen and
summertime cowboys to stay alive. The oil patch of the 1970s and
1980s came and went, and with it came waves of prosperity and
desertion.
Wamsutter lies along Interstate 80 and calls
itself the “Gateway to the Red Desert.” It is the only town in
Wyoming’s vast Great Basin, so called because the Continental
Divide separates, forms a closed watershed, then comes together
again at the Haystacks, a tumbled up rock formation south of town.
From any direction, oil-storage tanks rise up like Oz. At night,
the lighted-up tanks are a magical sight. In the Red Desert, all
roads lead to Wamsutter.
Before the latest oil and gas
boom, Wamsutter had a hard-core population of a couple of hundred
independent souls. You’d meet a few desert rats, some who never
figured out how to leave, some who’d never want to, some first-year
schoolteachers, a few business owners and their fewer employees.
The town supported two cafes, known generally as the good
restaurant and the bad restaurant, although the “bad one” at the
gas station was still pretty good. The good one, the Broadway Cafe,
closed on Sundays, with management deciding which day was Sunday.
One of Wamsutter’s gas stations is owned by devout
Christians. In an act of charity, they gave an itinerant Ogallala
Sioux work for a few months. He took all their odd bits of house
paint and created gallery-quality murals of Wyoming in the
restrooms. They’re worth a stop.
I’ve known Wamsutter for
years, since our outfit trails sheep into the Red Desert every
winter and out again in the spring. Our sheep were the last to
cross the tracks at Wamsutter — the last of hundreds of
thousands that once came through. A new overpass makes it safer for
the sheep, but less colorful. In the early 1990s, drought forced us
to haul water to the sheep every day as we trailed. My elderly
father and his partner, the one who could see to drive, decided to
stay in Wamsutter’s motel and haul the water from there. The boss
of the oilfield service business that donated the water told us,
“Hell, we spill more than that every day.”
The motel was
built before the last oil and gas boom. An eclectic set of
buildings offered patched sheets and uncertain floors. It was run
by Rose, who also tended bar at the Desert Bar, where getting 86’ed
was to be avoided at all costs. To rent a room in those days, you
found Rose, usually at the bar, got a room number, and returned to
the motel office to take out a key and fill out a registration on
the honor system.
These days, a new boom is under way
— oil, deep gas and coalbed methane — in the name of
“domestic energy independence.” It’s déjà vu for a town
that’s boomed before. We hear some 5,000 jobs will be created in
the surrounding desert in the next few years, and already, a
1,000-employee “man camp” is going up on the outskirts of town,
courtesy of British Petroleum.
Scores of “belly dumps”
hauling gravel leave Wamsutter every morning, intent on
crisscrossing the desert with roads. The tire-fixing business is
the steadiest in town, next to the bar. If a guy can meet any one
of the few single women around, she will be bound to be a hard
worker.
Here’s what else is new: A Subway sandwich shop,
in the new truck stop, boasts that it’s the busiest in the United
States. The ex-con, self-tattooed owner of the Broadway Café
closed his doors and moved on. The Desert Bar is still the only bar
in town, and getting 86’d is still to be avoided. Outside town, the
desert seems to roll on forever.
Sharon
Salisbury O’Toole is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a
service of High Country News (hcn.org). She is a
rancher, writer and poet from the Little Snake River Valley near
Savery, Wyoming.
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