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Show New 'Gold Rush' On in Colorado It's Hottest Oil Strike in History of the Rocky Mountain Region. DENVER. A new gold rush Is in full swing in Colorado. For excitement ex-citement and get-rich-quick possibilities possibil-ities it is reminiscent of the famous stampede to Cripple Creek in the 90s. Rich oil seeps out of the sandstone sand-stone and bubbles over the surface of the basin, nestling between lofty plateaus not far from the Utah-Colorado Utah-Colorado border, according to -the Chicago Tribune. The Rangely oil field is a brand new baby, but geologists already are comparing it with the Oklahoma City pool, which roared into existence exist-ence with 25,OO0-barrels-a-day gushers gush-ers in the 20s, petroleum's flush and fabulous era. It's the hottest strike in the history his-tory of the Rocky mountain region. Only a few score wells have been . completed to date but the United States geological survey estimates there will be at least 800, one well to each 40 acres, and adds that the limits of the field still have not been defined. Speaking conservatively, major companies with a stake in Rangely predict that the field ultimately will produce 418.000.000 barrels of oil The Salt Creek field in Wyoming, previously the biggest in the Rockies, had produced 281,500,000 barrels at the start of this year. Wide Spot in Road. Before last summer, when the oil industry began sending in thousands of men and huge quantities of drilling drill-ing equipment, the Rangely basin was a quiet, sparsely settled region where herds of fat cattle and sheep grazed with wild deer on purple sagebrush-covered mountainsides. The town of Rangely was just a wide spot in the road that meanders across the basin, with a post office, school, general store, and half a dozen scattered dwellings. A few weeks later heavy oil field trucks had churned the main street into a sea of mud. Frame business : buildings of every description sprang up overnight. J. W. Hays came to Rangely to open a liquor store and "started doing do-ing a land-office business right away." ' The lumber used in the flooring of his shop was green, and it kind of shrunk, Hays said. "I had to put linoleum on it so the boys wouldn't drop any thousand thou-sand dollar bills between the cracks. I never saw anything like this before," be-fore," he said. High Rent on Prairie. Out on a bald prairie far from town, the owner of a dilapidated one room log and mud cabin rented it to a desperate house-hunter for $75 a month. At the junction where U. S. highway high-way 40 turns onto the Rangely road an entirely new town Artesian blossomed like magic on a few acres of sagebrush, boasting two theaters, stores, pool halls and the inevitable liquor dispensaries and beer emporiums. em-poriums. On up highway 40 a couple of miles toward the Utah line lies Wiley's resort, the property of Wiley Wi-ley Baucum, whose real bonanza is an artesian water well, from which flows the only pure drinking water in this arid territory. Wiley's water supplies the oil field and the town of Rangely for a price and it's generally understood that his water well is more valuable than any oil well around. But Wiley isn't just standing waiting wait-ing for the profits. He's building a $75,000 night club which he says will be the finest "between Denver and the West coast." The boom has echoed all the way to Craig, an established town 110 miles southeast of the field which had 2,000 satisfied souls before the upheaval and now has about twice that many. Craig is the nearest railroad rail-road point to Rangely and the funnel fun-nel through which flows all the massive quantities of drilling equipment equip-ment headed for the field. |