Black Gold on the High Plains:

The Rise and Decline of Montana’s Kevin-Sunburst Oil Field

The Setting: Sweetgrass Country Before the Drill

In the years before 1922, the broad, wind-scoured tableland of northern Toole County, Montana, offered little to distinguish it from the rest of the northern Great Plains. The land sat roughly twenty miles south of the Canadian border, at an elevation of about 3,300 feet, a place where chinook winds could raise temperatures forty degrees in an afternoon and where dryland farmers had arrived during the homestead boom only to discover that the country was far less forgiving than the federal pamphlets suggested. Towns like Kevin and Sunburst were rail stops, primarily — places where the Great Northern and its subsidiary lines paused long enough to take on water and let passengers stretch their legs. Kevin itself had been named for Colonel Thomas Kevin, an official of the Alberta Railway and Irrigation Company, whose narrow-gauge line, nicknamed the “Turkey Track,” had pushed south from Lethbridge, Alberta, into northern Montana as early as 1887.

Beneath this landscape, however, the geology was doing something unusual. The region sat atop what geologists called the Sweetgrass arch, a vast structural uplift of the earth’s crust running roughly a hundred miles northward from Great Falls to the international boundary, averaging about forty miles in width from east to west. On the northern end of this arch, the strata had bulged upward into a low, nearly circular dome covering about sixteen townships — a feature that would eventually be known as the Kevin-Sunburst dome. The key lay not merely in the dome’s existence but in what lay beneath it: at the unconformable contact between the Jurassic-age Ellis formation and the older Mississippian Madison limestone, petroleum had accumulated in quantities no one had yet begun to measure (Collier 59; Clark 263).

There had been scattered hints. Oil had reportedly seeped near Kevin as early as 1909, and a test well had been drilled in the area in 1912, shortly after which a Standard Oil subsidiary leased a local landowner’s holdings. But the major companies moved slowly. The region’s agricultural collapse in the drought years after 1917 had thinned the population and dampened investment. The ground lay waiting.

Discovery: March 1922

The world changed in Toole County on March 14, 1922, when a wildcat well drilled by Gordon Campbell struck oil four miles north of the town of Kevin. The find drew immediate attention. Within weeks, newspapers were springing up to serve what was already being called a boom. The Kevin Courier published its first issue on May 5, 1922, its front pages dominated by production figures, lease announcements, and editorials urging readers to “Write it in caps — KEVIN.” A competing paper, the Kevin Review, appeared in the same month, provoking the Cut Bank Pioneer Press to offer a skeptical comparison to “the silly homesteading days when every hamlet had at least two papers.” The Courier eventually folded itself into the Shelby-based Montana Courier, but the point was clear: a discovery of consequence had been made (Library of Congress, Chronicling America).

What made the Kevin-Sunburst field scientifically significant, beyond its commercial dimensions, was its geology. As the American Association of Petroleum Geologists reported in 1926, the field was at that time the first in the United States to yield a truly important quantity of oil from Jurassic strata. The principal producing horizon sat at the basal sand of the Ellis formation, at the contact between the Jurassic and Mississippian rocks — a geologic relationship that did not conform to the patterns petroleum engineers had been trained to expect. The principal gas-producing zone lay in the Sunburst sand of the Lower Cretaceous. The dome itself presented a further puzzle: oil appeared concentrated on the northwest flank rather than at the crest, a distribution that neither Heald in 1926 nor Collier in 1929 could satisfactorily explain (Heald 197; Collier 62-63; GeoScienceWorld, Structure of Typical American Oil Fields).

The dome covered an area of roughly 700 square miles within its lowest closed contour, with an average dip of 50 to 75 feet per mile — shallow enough to make surface mapping difficult, but sufficient to trap hydrocarbons in commercially significant quantities (Clark 263-264).

Boom: The Mid-1920s

The pace of development in the years immediately following discovery was, by any measure of the era, extraordinary. Between 1922 and 1927, approximately 1,500 wells were drilled on the dome, of which more than 880 were rated productive. By May 1925, the Kevin-Sunburst field ranked second in oil production among all Rocky Mountain states, surpassed only by the enormous Salt Creek field in Wyoming. For a remote stretch of the northern Montana plains, this was a transformation with few precedents (Collier 57-58; Collier, UNT Digital Library).

The journal Nature noted in 1930 that the field’s daily production exceeded 6,000 barrels, placing it second in importance throughout the mountain states — a fact remarkable enough to attract the attention of British scientific readers accustomed to hearing only of Salt Creek’s dominance (Nature 727).

The boom reshaped the immediate landscape and the towns within it. Sunburst, which had its origins as a farming community, saw the construction of the International Oil Refinery in 1922, the same year as the discovery. The town incorporated in 1924 and its population peaked at approximately 1,000 residents sometime before 1930 — a significant figure for a community on the northern Hi-Line (Montana History Portal, “Sunburst”). The Kevtana refinery opened in Kevin and operated for nearly fifty years, eventually passing through several corporate hands before being absorbed into what became Big West Oil Company, which continued operations until 1977. By 1929, thirteen operational refineries had taken root across Montana, serving local and regional markets, with several others concentrated in or near the Kevin-Sunburst field (Montana Petroleum Association).

Among the operators working the field, the partnership of W. M. Fulton and W. E. Rice would become the most celebrated. Their Fulton-Rice pool within the Kevin-Sunburst field ranked first in Montana crude oil production for several years running, and a refinery the two men later organized in Great Falls — the Home Oil and Refining Company, built between 1931 and 1932 — would earn them recognition as two of the founding figures of Montana’s oil industry (Montana Petroleum Association).

Shelby and the Consequences of Confidence

No accounting of the Kevin-Sunburst boom can omit the episode that became its most dramatic — and cautionary — expression. Flush with oil money and convinced that the field’s prosperity was permanent, boosters in Shelby, the Toole County seat, decided in 1923 to host the World Heavyweight Boxing Championship between defending champion Jack Dempsey and challenger Tommy Gibbons. The event, promoted by Tex Rickard, required a specially constructed arena and promised to draw tens of thousands of spectators who would, the boosters believed, spend lavishly in Shelby’s hotels and businesses. The town invested heavily. The bout was held on July 4, 1923. Roughly 7,000 people attended — far short of the 40,000 the promoters had projected — and the financial losses bankrupted the town. The visitor center building Shelby constructed for the occasion, completed in 1923 and now listed in the National Register of Historic Places, remains on the landscape as the most legible architectural record of what oil money and unchecked optimism could produce in a small Montana city (Montana’s Historic Landscapes, Carroll Van West).

The boxing debacle was extreme, but it pointed to a broader pattern. The discovery of oil near Kevin had pushed land prices far above any agricultural value the ground could support. Farmers who had barely survived the drought years of the late 1910s found themselves competing for acreage with oil speculators and company landmen. The social character of the region changed rapidly, then changed back — or tried to — as the mid-decade production peak passed.

Decline and the Limits of a Dome

The Kevin-Sunburst field did not collapse overnight. Its structure — a low-relief dome with multiple producing intervals — allowed for sustained if diminishing output through the late 1920s. But the field’s limitations were inherent in its geology. The dome covered a finite area, the producing sands were comparatively thin, and the oil was concentrated in a manner even the best geologists of the period could not fully predict or extend. By the early 1930s, the field had been surpassed in Montana crude oil production by the Cut Bank field in Glacier County, where development accelerated through the Depression era and into the war years (Montana Petroleum Association; Bureau of Business and Economic Research, University of Montana).

The Great Depression compounded the decline by reducing demand and investment simultaneously. By the middle years of the decade, production had slowed markedly. The Montana Board of Oil and Gas Conservation’s records document the contraction clearly. The towns of Kevin and Oilmont, which had grown with the boom, began losing residents — a trajectory that continued for decades. Carroll Van West, surveying the landscape for the Montana State Historic Preservation Office in 1984, found the former Oilmont school still standing — “an ungainly hodge-podge of after-thoughts and additions,” in the recollection of one local memoirist — as a physical remnant of what the field had briefly supported. The buildings of Kevin and Oilmont, Van West noted, told a story common across Montana: boom and bust, the inevitable consequence of extractive industries built on finite resources (Montana’s Historic Landscapes).

The field was not entirely exhausted, however. Limited production continued for decades. Van West observed in 1984 that the Kevin-Sunburst area had “dried up until the 1950s, although limited production remains even today,” a characterization confirmed by the persistence of pump jacks visible from Highway 15 well into the twenty-first century (Montana’s Historic Landscapes).

Geological Legacy and Historical Significance

The Kevin-Sunburst field’s importance to the history of American petroleum geology exceeds its production totals. Before 1922, Jurassic-age strata were not considered a significant or proven petroleum source in the United States. The field’s discovery established, for the first time, that the Ellis formation could yield oil in commercially meaningful quantities — a finding with implications for exploration throughout the northern Rockies and adjacent Canadian provinces. The AAPG Bulletin’s 1926 geological notes described the field as unique: no other field of importance in the country depended on the Jurassic for its major production (Heald 197).

The structural geology of the Sweetgrass arch also attracted sustained scientific attention. The arch itself had been identified and named by Eugene Stebinger of the U.S. Geological Survey in 1916, and the Kevin-Sunburst dome had been surveyed in some detail by the USGS following the discovery well in 1922. Arthur J. Collier of the USGS returned to the field in 1923 and again in 1925, and his comprehensive 1929 bulletin remains the foundational document in the field’s geological literature. Collier was careful to note that the arch’s potential extended well beyond the Kevin-Sunburst dome — pointing toward adjacent structures, including the Crown Butte and Willow Creek domes and the region surrounding the Sweetgrass Hills — that deserved further exploration (Collier 57-60).

For the communities of Toole County, the field’s legacy is written in the built environment as much as in the documentary record. The Kevin depot, constructed by the Great Northern in 1903 and listed in the National Register of Historic Places, was eventually moved off the tracks and converted into a community and senior citizens center — an adaptive reuse that the town’s fewer than 200 remaining residents have sustained with evident commitment. A circa-1930 service station in Kevin, with its period Firestone signage, stood as a secondary reminder of the era when the automobile and the oil field arrived simultaneously on the northern plains (Montana’s Historic Landscapes, Van West 2014). The high school athletic teams in Sunburst have carried the name “Refiners” for generations — an unsentimental but precise acknowledgment of what once defined the town’s economy.

Conclusion: What the Dome Offered and What It Withheld

The Kevin-Sunburst oil field was, by any fair measure, one of the most consequential petroleum discoveries in Montana history. It established the state’s commercial oil industry on a firm footing at a moment when agriculture had failed to deliver the prosperity that homestead-era boosters had promised. It proved that Jurassic strata could produce oil in significant quantities. It briefly made a distant corner of the northern plains the second-ranked oil-producing area in the entire Rocky Mountain region. And it generated enough capital to sustain refinery construction, railroad freight, and community infrastructure across a wide swath of north-central Montana through the 1920s and into the Depression years.

What the field could not do was last. Its geology was ultimately its boundary. A dome of finite extent, with oil concentrated in ways that resisted easy prediction, the Kevin-Sunburst structure was never going to sustain the pace of development that its discoverers imagined in the spring of 1922. The towns that grew in its shadow contracted when the oil did. The Oilmont school fell into disrepair. Kevin’s population dropped to under 200. The pump jacks that still turn in the fields north of Shelby do so at a fraction of their 1920s rhythm.

The field’s history is, in this sense, a compressed version of the larger pattern that has governed Montana’s relationship with extractive industries across a century and a half: discovery, acceleration, overreach, and contraction, each cycle leaving behind a landscape altered but not transformed, communities tested but not destroyed, and a record that rewards careful attention.

Works Cited

Clark, Frank R. “Notes on the Kevin-Sunburst Oil Field, Montana.” AAPG Bulletin, vol. 7, no. 3, 1923, pp. 263-276. American Association of Petroleum Geologists. https://doi.org/10.1306/3D932624-16B1-11D7-8645000102C1865D.

Collier, Arthur J. The Kevin-Sunburst Oil Field and Other Possibilities of Oil and Gas in the Sweetgrass Arch, Montana. U.S. Geological Survey Bulletin 812-B, Government Printing Office, 1929. UNT Digital Library, https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc944633/. Accessed 28 June 2026. Also available at https://pubs.usgs.gov/bul/0812b/report.pdf. Accessed 28 June 2026.

Heald, K. C. “The Kevin-Sunburst Oil Field, Montana.” AAPG Bulletin, vol. 10, no. 2, 1926, pp. 197-214. GeoScienceWorld, https://doi.org/10.1306/3D93270F-16B1-11D7-8645000102C1865D.

“Kevin-Sunburst Field, Toole County, Montana.” Structure of Typical American Oil Fields, vol. 2, American Association of Petroleum Geologists, 1929. GeoScienceWorld Books, https://pubs.geoscienceworld.org/aapg/books/edited-volume/1499/chapter-abstract/107180781/. Accessed 28 June 2026.

Library of Congress, Chronicling America. “The Montana Courier (Shelby, Mont.) 1922-192?.” https://chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/lccn/sn85053342. Accessed 28 June 2026. Provided by the Montana Historical Society, Helena, MT.

Montana History Portal. “Sunburst.” Montana Memory Project, Montana Historical Society. https://www.mtmemory.org/nodes/view/128213. Accessed 28 June 2026.

Montana Petroleum Association. “Montana Refining.” https://montanapetroleum.org/educational-resources/montana-refining/. Accessed 28 June 2026.

“Kevin-Sunburst Oilfield, Montana.” Nature, vol. 125, 1930, p. 727. https://www.nature.com/articles/125727a0. Accessed 28 June 2026.

University of Montana, Bureau of Business and Economic Research. Montana’s New Energy Frontier. BBER, 2012. https://bber.umt.edu/pubs/Energy/12energy.pdf. Accessed 28 June 2026.

Van West, Carroll. “Toole County, 1984 and Now: Day Two.” Montana’s Historic Landscapes, 6 Feb. 2014. https://montanahistoriclandscape.com/2014/02/06/toole-county-1984-and-now-day-two/. Accessed 28 June 2026. Carroll Van West is director of the Center for Historic Preservation at Middle Tennessee State University and former coordinator for the Montana State Historic Preservation Office survey program.