The Energy Capital of the World: A History of Grass, Oil, and Coal in the Powder River Basin

Abstract

From coal to oil, from wind to uranium, the American West has long been an important node of American energy extraction. This has become increasingly true over the last few decades, as thermodynamic havens such as the Bakken oil fields and the Gillette area coal mines have entered onto the global stage. Nevertheless, there has been little scholarship on the role that such energy production has played in the history of the region. This dissertation addresses this absence by taking one small slice of the West—the Powder River Basin, a geological declivity that spans across parts of northeastern Wyoming and southeastern Montana—and using it as a spatial lens through which to examine the region’s thermodynamic past. Employing a bioregional framework, it examines the basin through a deep time scale, homing on particular energy sources and transitional moments. Each chapter takes as its subject a formative event in the history of the American West and the basin more specifically. It begins with the rise and fall of the nineteenth-century Crow, examining the tribe’s unrecognized role as protectors and benefactors of a thermodynamic utopia in the midst of one of the most unforgiving environments on the continent. It then moves to the paradigmatic range conflict of western lore, the Johnson County War, revealing the deep energetic roots of the quarrel. Next, it analyzes the greatest political scandal in American history, the Teapot Dome affair, showing its complex imbrication in the region’s early oil industry and its broader thermodynamic past. Finally, it addresses the modern Gillette coal empire—since the 1970s the largest energy producer in the world—unearthing a history of attempts to market the region’s unique low-sulfur coal that reaches back to the early-twentieth century. By analyzing diaries, newspaper articles, oral histories, company records, environmental reports, and government documents, this work challenges current beliefs about the role of energy in the history of the region. Using a thermodynamic lens through which to view that past, it overturns the long-accepted paradigm of boom and bust as a model for understanding historical development in the American West, replacing it with one of continuity and cyclical change. Instead of a region of aridity and romanticized conflicts, it presents the West as one of the energy capitals of the world, thereby establishing a new paradigm for its place in American history.