The Big Horn Basin’s forgotten ‘Killer Well’

How a little-known 1935 Byron oil well became one of America’s biggest engineering battles

One of the best parts of writing local history is discovering stories you never knew existed. Sometimes they’re hiding in an old newspaper. Sometimes someone hands you a faded photograph. And sometimes a yellowed, typewritten article from 1938 completely changes what you thought you knew.

That’s exactly when my friends Denny and Linda NeVille told me about the Byron oil field fire.

I assumed it was just another oil well blowout. Big fire. Big smoke. A few exciting photographs. Interesting, but probably not something for the history books.

I couldn’t have been more wrong.

As I dug deeper, I realized the Byron blowout wasn’t just a local accident. It became one of the oil industry’s biggest oil well control battles of the 1930s. Engineers spent nearly a year fighting it. National petroleum journals followed every development. Legendary well-control experts were called in. Relief wells were drilled. Underground craters formed. Millions of cubic feet of natural gas escaped every day. A young oil worker lost his life. By the time it was finally controlled, the cost was approaching a million dollars, an astonishing amount during the depths of the Great Depression.

It even earned a nickname.

They called it the “Killer Well.”

The story began on a hot August day in 1935 at the No. 1 Allen well, west of Byron. Drilling superintendent H.P. McKay and his crew believed they were on the verge of another productive oil well. They were drilling toward a proven oil-producing formation about 4,100 feet underground.

Everything had gone according to plan until the drill bit became stuck at roughly 3,800 feet.

At first, nobody panicked. A stuck drill pipe wasn’t uncommon. The crew stopped circulation, poured oil into the hole to loosen the bit and closed the blowout preventer while they worked.

That simple decision triggered a nightmare.

Instead of remaining in the well, enormous pressure found another path. Gas forced its way sideways through porous rock until it reached an old abandoned well nearby. Suddenly the ground began to bulge. Gas erupted from the earth, creating what witnesses described as an expanding crater that looked like a miniature volcano.

Crews desperately tried to fill the crater with cement.

The gas simply found another route.

Day after day the crater grew larger, creeping closer to the drilling derrick. Before long, engineers feared the entire drilling rig would collapse into the widening hole.

There was only one option. They reopened the well.

An estimated 60 million cubic feet of natural gas every day roared into the Wyoming sky. The decision relieved enough underground pressure to stop the crater from growing, but now they faced a different problem. The gas escaping from the well could ignite at any moment. Eventually, it did.

The well erupted into a towering column of flame visible for miles across the Big Horn Basin. The roar could reportedly be heard from great distances. The intense heat prevented anyone from getting close enough to work safely.

The fight to save the well had become something much bigger than anyone imagined.

For weeks crews tried every trick they knew. Heavy drilling mud was pumped into the well to force the gas back underground. When colder weather arrived, the mud froze before it could be used. Work stopped while crews waited for temperatures to rise.

When they resumed, another setback appeared.

The escaping gas had blasted rock fragments through the drill pipe with such force that the pipe had been cut in two. Workers now faced one of the most difficult jobs in oil drilling, known as “fishing,” trying to retrieve broken pieces of steel from thousands of feet underground.

They worked slowly, lowering specialized hooks and grappling tools into the well.

Just when it seemed progress was finally being made, disaster struck again. A spark ignited the escaping gas.

Within moments the hundred-foot derrick twisted into scrap steel as flames shot more than 200 feet into the air. The battle had to begin all over again.

This time the company called one of the most famous names in the oil business. If there were rock stars in the oil fields during the 1930s, Lesh was one of them. He had built a national reputation extinguishing runaway oil well fires that other experts couldn’t control.

Even Lesh struggled with the Byron well.

The fire burned so intensely that he couldn’t use the standard method of blowing out the flames with nitroglycerin. Instead, he designed what became known as a “pipe cannon,” a remarkable invention that allowed explosives to be pushed beneath the flames through a water-cooled steel pipe before being detonated.

It worked. For a short time. The fire was extinguished, and crews rushed back to work before the gas could reignite.

Then tragedy struck.

According to the 1938 account, the poisonous hydrogen sulfide gas, also know as sour gas or rotten egg gas had been silently seeping into the work area. McKay’s 19-year-old son Leslie, who was part of the crew, inhaled the gas and collapsed. He was rushed to a hospital but did not survive.

The article’s author wrote that from that day forward the battle became personal. “The Well had become a killer.”

As remarkable as that story sounds, the engineering battle itself is no exaggeration.

Industry publications from the time confirm that the Stock Oil Company’s No. 1 Allen remained out of control for nearly a year. They describe burning craters around the well, relief wells drilled nearby and water being pumped underground in an effort to control gas moving through the surrounding rock formations.

Finally, after months of frustration, engineers decided to try brute force.

Special pumps from around the region were assembled into what was described as the greatest collection of mud pumps ever gathered for a single well. The machines, nicknamed “Mud Hogs,” forced enormous quantities of specially prepared drilling mud into the well.

Drilling mud, a heavy mixture of water and clay, derives much of its weight and thickness from bentonite, another natural resource found in abundance in the Big Horn Basin. The dense mud was pumped into the well to create enough downward pressure to overcome the escaping gas and force it back underground. Wyoming bentonite has long been prized for this purpose because it swells in water, forming a thick, gel-like fluid ideal for drilling operations.

Pump after pump came online. The pressure climbed. The workers watched their gauges while wondering whether the gas would once again blow everything back out.

Minute after minute passed. The mud kept going down. According to the 1938 article, after 10 minutes and 46 seconds, the pressure finally broke.

The well had been beaten.

The Byron Oil Field helped fuel the growth of the Big Horn Basin and continues to produce oil today, but the saga of the Killer Well stands apart even within Wyoming’s rich petroleum history. What began as a routine drilling operation turned into one of the nation’s greatest well-control battles, drawing legendary engineers to Wyoming and pushing the limits of the technology available at the time. It wasn’t just one of the Basin’s biggest oil stories. It was one of America’s biggest oil stories.

It also serves as a reminder that behind every dramatic story is a human story and too often a human tragedy. The spectacular flames made headlines, but the real story was about the men, who returned to work day after day, knowing that a single spark, a pocket of poisonous gas or one wrong decision could cost them their lives.

Sometimes local history surprises you.

I started looking for information about an old oil field fire near Byron.

Instead, I stumbled onto one of the greatest engineering battles ever fought in the Big Horn Basin, a story that deserves to be remembered right alongside the Basin’s better-known tales of irrigation, railroads, wild horses and Buffalo Bill.

For a story I had never heard before, it turned out to be one I won’t soon forget.