To some “South Park” means the long-running cartoon sitcom on Comedy Central with characters who are children but whose humor is anything but childlike. The real South Park is a huge intermontane basin in Park County, Colo., surrounded by snow-capped peaks reaching over 14,000 feet in the sky.
But there would be no Park County today if a 1936 plan had gone through. Most of the land would have been converted into the South Park Game Preserve. The governor gave his approval. Discovery of oil near the town of Hartsel stopped it.
South Park is an asymmetric, fault-bounded syncline located between the Front Range’s mostly Precambrian igneous rocks to the east and the Sawatch Uplift and Mosquito Range to the west. Paleozoic and Mesozoic sediments are overlain by thin younger deposits. Oil exploration since the 1930s has focused mostly on the Cretaceous Pierre Shale and Dakota Sandstone, key pays in the Denver basin, some 100 miles to the northeast.
The South Park Game Preserve
On Feb. 28, 1936, Governor Edwin C. Johnson first heard the proposal to turn nearly 1.3 million acres of Park County land into the South Park Game Preserve. Eight days later he gave his endorsement, saying the preserve would be a vital asset to Colorado.
Promoters said Park County would go back to its natural state before its lush pastures were overgrazed and its water was wasted on hayfield irrigation. A small sliver – 157,000 acres along the county’s northern boundary, between the towns of Fairplay and Estabrook – was to be spared from the preserve and absorbed into nearby counties. Mining claims would be the only private property within the preserve. The rest of the county, about 630,000 acres of private, federal, state and county-owned land and 644,000 acres of the Pike National Forest, would become the South Park Game Preserve.
Park County would have ceased to exist had the plan been finalized. Its land would have belonged to no county, and its inhabitants would have been encouraged to sell out and move away. The region would have been overrun with up to 60,000 head of imported big game animals and hundreds of thousands of fish, birds and smaller animals. The region was slated to have become a paradise for hunters, anglers and recreationists and a huge tourist attraction, billed as the largest of its kind in the United States.
Once its residents heard the details of the plan, they would be pleased, said a story in the March 27, 1936, Park County Republican and Fairplay Flume newspaper. The opinion was attributed to County Commissioner Harry Bishop. In a later edition, he said the County government would not oppose the plan, and he believed there would be very little opposition from its residents. But Bishop’s comments were made before he had talked to his constituents, who, not surprisingly, were opposed to selling out their homes and livelihood to the government.
In the end, it didn’t matter that residents weren’t consulted by the commissioner or the governor. Preservation of the land in pristine condition didn’t matter either, because in April 1936, oil was discovered north of Hartsel, near today’s James Mark Jones State Wildlife Area. The well was reported to be a gusher, and that discovery put the game preserve plans on hold while oil exploration continued.
“Naturally, if there is an oil field there, we must either abandon the game preserve plan or change it considerably,” said Edward D. Foster, State Planning Commission director, in a story in the April 24, 1936, Steamboat (Springs) Pilot. “We can do nothing but wait until the extent of the discovery is determined.”
The article didn’t mention why the game preserve plan should “naturally” be abandoned or changed, but it was implied. Even though the purpose of the game preserve was to conserve water, to preserve the beauty of the area, to provide a sanctuary for animals, birds and fish, and to become a haven of recreation for the entire United States, the plan couldn’t hold a candle to the huge monetary profits the oil discovery promised.
In 1936, newspapers, of course, were filled with reports of the activities of Adolf Hitler as World War II loomed on the horizon. The country and the world were in the grip of the Great Depression, which lasted until 1939. The “promise of one of the most important developments in the petroleum industry of Colorado ever reported,” as the discovery was called in the April 17, 1936, Republican, was welcome news throughout the state. It was envisioned that both Hartsel and Fairplay would grow tremendously by the predicted windfall of 10,000 barrels of oil per day.
The Plan’s Presenters
It wasn’t a fly-by-night plan presented to Governor Johnson. Respected representatives of the U.S. Biological Survey (now U.S. Fish and Wildlife), the Colorado State Conservation Council (state affiliate to the National Wildlife Federation), and Park County’s own Kenneth W. Chalmers, state coordinator of the Soil Conservation Service (now the Natural Resources Conservation Service), approached the governor.
Chalmers was born in Colorado Springs in 1899 and lived in South Park as early as 1905 at the age of six. He left the county to attend high school at the Episcopalian College in Salina, Kan., and continued his education at Colorado A&M in Fort Collins (now Colorado State University), where he was on the debate team, worked on the yearbook staff, and was a member of Alpha Zeta fraternity (an organization for students in agriculture and natural resources fields). A World War I draft notice interrupted college, but Chalmers returned to Fort Collins after the war to earn a degree in animal husbandry in 1922.
After his college graduation, Chalmers lived in Park County at the EM Ranch (in 2023, it’s the Santa Maria Ranch, a cancer-survivors retreat on the National Register of Historic Places) near Hartsel. He served on the boards of several agricultural groups and began his career at the Soil Conservation Service in 1935. Chalmers worked there for 27 years, leaving in March 1962 due to ill health. He died of heart disease a month later at age 63.
Explaining the Plan
Residents of Park County gathered to discuss the plan with Chalmers at a March 28, 1936, Lions Club meeting in the Fairplay Hotel. Attendees were representative of some of the county’s most recognized families. The Republican’s editor, John Leuthold, was there and wrote a front-page story about the meeting, where Chalmers was introduced as the man most familiar with the pending game preserve.
Chalmers said that dryland homesteading in Park County, and especially South Park, was a complete failure. It destroyed the natural range and too much water was used to irrigate hay. He said South Park water would be better used if it was allowed to flow downstream to other locales where the earning potential of the water would be half a million dollars more per year.
Chalmers’s enthusiastic talk focused on money – specifically, how much the County could save by eliminating certain services that would no longer be needed, such as the County’s eleven schools, maintenance on roads and most of the County government. He talked about the considerable earning potential there was in surcharging the cost of hunting in the new game preserve and charging a 25-percent fee on profits from beaver pelts. He said the County would reap increased taxes and fees from hotels, summer homes and dude ranches.
In fact, he spent considerable time emphasizing increased revenue and decreased costs for Park County when, according to the plan, there would be no Park County. Residents would be encouraged to sell their land and move away, although, Chalmers said, nobody would be forced to sell. He mentioned tracts of privately-held land within national forests and said private land within the game preserve would be handled in the same way.
Chalmers had an answer for just about every contingency brought up by members of the audience. When a spectator questioned how 15,000 head of big game could be shot in one hunting season, Chalmers said perhaps hunting would be allowed year-round. But neither Chalmers nor anyone else involved in the plan anticipated the discovery of oil in South Park.
Oil and Gas Exploration
The South Park Oil Company had been drilling at a site northwest of Hartsel for nearly two years when news broke in April 1936 that oil was struck at 4,000 feet below the surface. Within a few days “excited onlookers from Fairplay and Alma . . . even from Denver” were on the scene, said the April 17, 1936, Steamboat Pilot.
The Republican’s headline covered the full width of its April 17 edition: “South Park’s Oil Fountain is a Gusher,” and above the masthead, “Oil not only quiets troubled waters, but has just demonstrated that it can also put a quietus on a fool game-refuge scheme.” It was evident the editor thought little of the South Park Game Preserve.
As the months flew by, nothing but good news came from the drill site dubbed State No. 1. Oil gushed at a reported thousand barrels a day. It was predicted that daily production would soon be 10,000 barrels. Natural gas was present, coming out of the well with a “deafening hiss and roar” when uncapped. Plans were made to immediately sink four more wells on the 2,700-acre site.
Presumably, it would be great news for the narrow-gauge Colorado and Southern Railroad (successor of the Denver, South Park and Pacific). The nearest track to the oil wells was five miles west at Garo. The convenience of the track in transporting oil might have been all the incentive the failing railroad needed to stay alive. But as it happened, rail traffic was discontinued in April 1937, about a year after the pipe dream of South Park oil riches died.
The Republican never reported that the wells were declining, but the stories. were shorter with every edition; sometimes weeks would go by with no mention of the Hartsel oil. A search of the Republican issues through the middle of 1937 indicated that the last mention of the wells was on Sept 18, 1936, when the State No. 1 well was down to 5,000 feet and was pulling up “considerable lime and sand with oil saturation.”
The State No. 1 produced about 5,000 barrels of oil from the Pierre Formation’s shales and sandstones. A deeper zone tested 5 million cubic feet of gas after being shot with nitroglycerine. The well was abandoned at 5,705 feet, still in the Pierre.
A second well, the Lemarr No. 1 had some trouble with “infirm ground” and had shows of oil from fractured shale, thin sandstones and a zone called “volcanic ash” in the Pierre Formation. It reached a total depth of 7,725 feet in steep dips in the Pierre and was plugged.
The End and the Future
Even as the oil wells were not mentioned again in the Republican, neither was the game preserve. After almost seven months of ups and downs and an uncertain future for residents and property owners of Park County, the year 1936 ended with the status quo preserved. There was no longer any threat of losing land to the game preserve or to oilfield development.
As for the future, 23 oil wells were drilled in South Park between 1893 and 1970 and all failed to produce in the long term. The few wells drilled after 1970 were also unsuccessful. In 2015, the Bureau of Land Management invited public comment and opinions on future oil and gas drilling leases on BLM-owned land and BLM-managed oil resources in South Park.
As a result of those comments, the BLM began consideration of four plans to limit drilling in its Eastern Colorado Resource Management Area, which includes South Park. Although not yet finalized, the draft plan for South Park recognizes the need to protect cutthroat trout, a threatened species under the Federal Endangered Species Act, and other aquatic creatures, as well as the water supplies for Denver and Aurora. To that end, the draft requires setbacks and prohibits surface occupancy on the South Platte River and gold medal streams feeding into it and drilling within five miles of Eleven Mile, Antero and Spinney Mountain reservoirs. It also prohibits oil and gas drilling on Reinecker Ridge, a 4,300-acre roadless area and prime big game habitat. The draft plan allows for up to 80 acres under oil and gas development at a time.
Coincidently, the major arguments offered by the public in 2015 against oil and gas drilling are eerily familiar: to protect South Park’s pristine environment and wildlife; to preserve its hunting, fishing and recreation opportunities and continue the benefits of the money they bring to the county; and to keep its rivers and reservoirs pure for their use as drinking water for municipalities downstream.
The reasons sound somewhat like the motives behind the “fool game-refuge scheme.”
(Historical Highlights is an EXPLORER series that focuses on the history of petroleum exploration and production. Topics broadly related to our work in the geosciences, the critical advances of science and technology, the key discoveries and the saints and sinners among our colleagues are all welcome. Narratives that illuminate the E&P process or its context in geopolitics and energy economics are encouraged. If you have such a story or know someone who does, please contact Matt Silverman, the series editor, at [email protected].)