Ah, Wamsutter, WY, land of the Red Desert and Continental Divide. I spent six years (1980-86) there as a Marathon Oil Co supervisor, before getting transferred to Bakersfield, CA.
There were more murders in the tiny town during that six years than I can recall. When I first got there, all the pumpers were carrying weapons in the company vehicles, which I decided to stop. Within just a few weeks, I ate crow and told the pumpers they could get their guns back in the co. trucks.
Sweetwater County sheriff’s dept. told me that stretch of I-80 was the most dangerous piece of highway in the nation, said the prairie around there was full of unmarked graves. In winter when the lease roads would often drift shut, one pumper would take a ridge route to reach some wells. He remarked one day that he had hit a bump he never had before, spring revealed he had been driving over a body for most of the winter. The sheep herder who found the body was Basque and spoke no English, he was half insane trying to describe what he had found.
Happiness for me was seeing Wamsutter in the rear view mirror the day got transferred.
I was there in 1948, when the initial drilling was getting underway (my step-dad was a roughneck on a wildcat rig).
I don't recall any murders at the time. But there was a lot of drinking -- there being, literally, nothing else to do. You could work in Wamsutter...and you could sleep. And you could drink. But there was no movie, no TV, no shopping, no fishing, not even any grass to mow.