Woman's efforts to chronicle Midwest's history bring presidential honor
DAVID MIRHADI Star-Tribune staff writer | Posted: Saturday, November 24, 2007 12:00 am
MIDWEST - It began with a simple inkwell.
That inkwell, taken from an elementary school classroom attended by Pauline Schultz in the days when this oil patch was bustling as thousands of grimy, starstruck men in coveralls dug holes in search of black gold, has now caught the eye of the president of the United States.
The inkwell sits on a table inside a building that once housed a doctor's office. It's a place full of history - of history captured in yellowed newspaper clippings, laminated and faded deeds to prospective drilling claims, squeaky lockers from the old high school and photographs of men lining up in rows dozens of feet deep just to get a meal.
The building is so crammed with donated scraps, photos and artifacts, there's seemingly not even a place for a common housefly to land, lest it be on a piece of the town's past.
"This place is overwhelming," said longtime Midwest resident Sandra Schutte, who has taken over for Pauline Schultz as the Salt Creek Museum's part-time caretaker. "Pauline must have a photographic memory. …I couldn't even come close to the knowledge that she has."
That encyclopedic knowledge, and Schultz's yearslong quest to chronicle the history of the Salt Creek Oil Field from which Midwest sprang near the turn of the 20th century, has led to perhaps Pauline Schultz's greatest honor to date.
On Nov. 15, in an East Room ceremony at the White House, President Bush presented Schultz, now 92, with a 2007 National Humanities Medal. The award, which is part of the National Endowment for the Humanities, celebrates, in the president's words, someone who "has been a collector and curator of facts and artifacts that capture a century of human experience on Wyoming's high plains."
Schultz's grandfather played a part in the drilling of the first commercially successful oil well in the United States at Titusville County, Pa. She moved to Midwest in 1923 and the following year to the Salt Creek field, where her husband, Walter, worked.
The museum opened in a single room at the Midwest Town Hall in 1980 and has been in its current location, which is bursting at the rafters, since 1994.
The museum is home to more than 4,000 pictures, dozens and dozens of three-ring binders crammed with pictures, clippings and artifacts that don't fit in any of the rooms. The place has more than a few references to Lynne Cheney, whose family grew up in the area. The vice president's wife has spent numerous afternoons at the museum, including a stint in 2003 for genealogy research.
"This is my dream come true," Pauline Schultz said in an interview this week from her home in Hixson, Tenn., where she moved earlier this year to live with her daughter. "All I wanted to do was leave footprints in the sand at Salt Creek."
Schultz spent Nov. 14 and 15 in Washington, D.C., to accept her award, sharing the East Room with such recognizable names as electric guitar pioneer Les Paul, and Henry Steinway, whose family created the famous pianos.
"I was just on cloud nine," Schultz said. "It was a thrill."
How it was
The museum began rather innocuously, Schultz said, with drawings her husband lent of the oil field that was first drilled in 1886. Soon, people began bringing in pieces of history, without much fanfare or coaxing on her part.
There's a 1925 picture of the first lighted football field at the old Midwest High - "we beat Casper," Schutte noted - a 1924 vintage barber chair, blue Midwest High lockers, a photograph dating from 1925 showing hundreds of students in front of the school and pictures of buses from 1925 showing "Salt Creek Transportation," where converted Model Ts would shuttle young men to and from the oil field.
It was a time when the town bustled with as many as 25,000 residents. So packed was the town, photos at the museum show the earliest versions of what many 21st century natural-gas boom towns in Wyoming now know as man camps.
In Midwest in the 1920s, photos depict "The Boarding House" at the Midwest Hotel, a place that fed 900 men an hour. A 1916 menu at the hotel lists pork tenderloin available for 45 cents, apple pie for a dime, and 15 cents for a pot of coffee.
Though there are active pump jacks in the field outside of town even now - revived because of a technology that uses carbon dioxide to pull the remaining oil out of the 121-year-old field - the museum nearby serves as a reminder for those who don't want to forget how it once was.
Schutte remembers a time when the town was practically owned by the Standard Oil Co., when all the houses were white, all the streets linear.
"It was just generic, but wonderful," said Schutte, 66.
Anadarko Petroleum, which now controls much of the activity at the Salt Creek field, has agreed to preserve and take care of the museum once Schultz or her successors can't, Schutte said.
Preserving a legacy
Today, visitors to the Natrona County Public Library in Casper can check out 16 hours of video Schultz made about the history of the oil field.
Bill Nelson, director of the Natrona County Library, said the videos and the museum "are a labor of love that Pauline invested her life in. I'm glad that people are recognizing it now."
The tapes were assembled in 2003 and paid for by a grant from the McMurry Foundation.
Schutte said people are still donating artifacts to the museum even now, several generations after the first wildcatters set foot in the area.
"It doesn't matter how many times I've come in here and walked around, there's always something that I miss," she said.
As for the museum's future, Schutte sounds optimistic.
"I'll do the very best I can. There's no way I can hold a candle to Pauline, nor will I even try. But if I can just preserve her legacy, and make sure that this stays like Pauline wanted it to stay, I'll be happy."
Contact acting city editor David Mirhadi at (307) 266-0616 or david.mirhadi@trib.com