In the early 1900s, hopeful oil workers flooded Salt Creek, especially boomers from failed oilfields in other states, and companies built camps next to wells to house employees as operations shifted. About 200 camps thrived in Salt Creek, housing more than 10,000 people during the peak years of the 1920s, while some workers built their own camps and ragtowns of tents, and local homesteaders turned ranches into towns such as Lavoye, Snyder, and Edgerton. The most significant camp was Home Camp, first built in 1910 by the California Oil Company, and after World War I the Midwest Refining Company transformed it into an ideal company town with standardized houses, lawn care requirements, boarding houses, mess halls, schools, a hospital, commissary, drug store, playing fields, a theater, and a community hall, while nearby towns supplied saloons, a dancehall, and brothels. To attract residents, boom towns competed through entertainment, civic organizations, and commercial development, including drugstores, barbershops, banks, automobile dealerships, garages, clubhouses, civic buildings, movie theaters, an oak-floored dancehall, orchestras, performers, pool halls, and cabarets, and the paved Salt Creek Highway and North & South Railroad strengthened hopes for permanence by making the towns more accessible and attractive. An unsettling episode centered on Lavoye, where homesteader Louie Lavoye developed a railroad stop and town of 1,000 residents, but in 1923 the Ohio Oil Company contested his claim and won the right to drill under the town after a fight that reached the Secretary of the Interior; some residents moved elsewhere, and many founded New Lavoye near Teapot Dome, known for a large indoor swimming pool fed by naturally hot water piped from Tisdale Mountain. Salt Creek's boom days ended in the late 1920s as oil production diminished because of reduced gas pressure and decreased supply and as the Great Depression arrived; wages dropped, people left for more active oilfields, and fires and the closure of the North & South Railroad hastened the death of most boom towns. Midwest and Edgerton survived, with Midwest remaining because its owning company became the oilfield's sole operator and because it was the largest and most established community, and Edgerton enduring by providing services and amenities that the company town did not allow. In 1975-76 Midwest became an independent incorporated town. Although oil overshadowed other activities during the excitement of the 1920s, the land was also used for ranching, and abandoned camp and boom-town structures that survived fires were bought, moved, and repurposed by ranchers and are still in use today.