 The oil industry has been part of Wyoming's history since statehood. In fact, many explorers reported seeing oil seeps in the early 19th century before Wyoming joined the Union. One of those explorers, Captain Benjamin Bonneville, traveled into the Winterver Valley to trade for beaver pelts with the Shoshone Indians who lived in the area. Around 1832, Bonneville stumbled upon an oil seep near present-day lander that eventually became the site of Wyoming's first oil field. Fifty years later, Mike Murphy returned to the area, which was still a wild, undeveloped land and sank a wild catwell, creating Wyoming's first known oil field, Dallas Dome. Murphy struck black gold at 300 feet in the Chugwater formation. Unfortunately for him, uses for oil were limited in 1883, and he primarily marketed his oil to Tanners in Utah, who used the product to prepare hides and to the Union Pacific Railroad for use as axle grease. Native people used oil in their everyday life before white men began to mine it. They used the greasy residue for war paint, decoration on hides and tepees, as horse and human liniments, and for medications. Dallas Dome has been producing oil for more than a hundred years, and visitors can still see pumpjacks rhythmically rising and falling near the junction of highways 287 and 28 just south of lander. From the University of Wyoming Cooperative Extension Service, I'm Tina Russell, exploring the nature of Wyoming.