Inventing the Petroleum Cowboy: Right-Wing Mobilization and the Rocky Mountain Oil Boom

• In Event: Fighting the Green Tyrants: Anti-Environmentalism in the Late Twentieth-Century American West

Abstract

Following the 1973 Oil Embargo, the American Rocky Mountains’ oil reserves became a symbol of hope for energy-independence, an economic bedrock in the face of national instability, and a critical site for political consolidation grounded in anti-statism. Oil executives and industrial owners who developed its extraction, transportation, and refinement flocked to Denver, Laramie, and Casper. Together with Western landowners and urban developers, these executives united in opposition to federal land regulations and environmental conservation efforts between 1973 and 1989. Reinvigorating and reimagining the cowboy myth, Western anti-statists contrasted an imagined past devoid of federal intervention with contemporary land regulations. In this reconfiguration, federal regulation obstructed Western land’s potential to restore national glory by curbing foreign oil dependence and the specter of stagflation.
The growing nexus of political and economic power dependent on oil and gas undergirded the Heritage Foundation, Free Congress Foundation, Mountain States Legal Foundation, and Leadership Institute. The Western aesthetic and myth attached to anti-statism endured even after the Rocky Mountain region’s economy crashed and oil shale extraction became untenable, allowing Americans to air their grievances about federal power far beyond land regulation. The Rocky Mountain region, moreover, remained a metropole for oil executives’ conventions and offices, becoming a modern cradle of right-wing, anti-environmental thought and mobilization.

Author

• Caroline Johnson, Vanderbilt University