Tall and lean, three riders with handkerchiefs covering their faces rode their horses into Lavoye about 40 miles north of Casper in the mid-1920s, robbed a poker game at gunpoint, and fled to Pine Ridge.

"Nobody knew who they were," Billie Jean Beaton said.

The town served as home to many of the men who worked at the Teapot and Salt Creek oil fields.

"I remember it was pretty wild," Beaton said. "There was gambling in the evening."

There also were places to smoke and drink, even though Prohibition was in full effect in the early 1920s, said Beaton, whose family still has the Teapot Ranch.

An estimated 1,000 or more people lived and worked in the shaky houses and buildings, with businesses including a two-story hotel and the dress shop where Beaton's mother worked, she said.

By the mid-1930s, however, most of the townspeople had left after the bust following the boom of the world's premier oilfield centered at Midwest and Edgerton, she said.

Beaton's granddaughter, Rep. Lisa Shepperson, R-Casper, now calls the site of Lavoye home. Rancher Shepperson and her fiance Gus Garnhart are building a home to join the buildings of his contracting business.

The new house will face a stretch of the original Salt Creek Highway, which bisected Lavoye.

The Wyoming Department of Transportation long ago abandoned that portion of the highway that snaked around some hills.

The Shepperson family legally owned the roadway, and over time bought all the private lots, Lisa Shepperson said. "We knew what we were getting when we bought it."

But she needed a resolution from the Natrona County Commission to vacate the plat of the town. That allowed her to have clear title to the ghost town where the streets and alleys have reverted to grass and hoofprints.

A few piles of brick are the only reminders of the wild Lavoye Beaton knew in her childhood, with one major exception a hundred yards or so from her granddaughter's new home.

Despite the shanties and vices, the townspeople of Lavoye built a full-sized, 12-foot-deep municipal swimming pool, which lies empty a hundred yards or so from Shepperson's house. It's still full in Beaton's mind.

"That's where I learned to swim," Beaton said. "It had rings (to swing on) across it; I loved it."

The diving board is gone, some of the concrete has settled near the pool's pump room, and grass grows at the deepest part of the pool.

But the iron ladders for the swimmers to climb out are still bolted to the wall at the pool's deep end, and the outlines of the walls for the changing rooms are visible.

"This is a major pool," Shepperson said.

New Lavoye, old Lavoye

The pool's remnants underscores the resilience of Lavoye's townspeople.

Unlike the county commission's perfunctory passage of the resolution to vacate the plat, the federal government first vacated Lavoye - the "old Lavoye," also known as Mosher and Mosherville - in April 1924, with a successful lawsuit forcing Louis P. Lavoye and his tenants from the town bearing his name about 42 miles north of Casper.

Old Lavoye started as a tent city, but grew to a respectable town of about 1,800 people, two banks and a Ford dealership, according to "Wyoming Tales and Trails," by G. B. Dobson.

The lawsuit was filed in December 1923 by Wyoming U.S. District Attorney Albert Walton after the Ohio Oil Co. - the predecessor of Marathon Oil Co. - claimed Louis Lavoye illegally occupied land it needed for oil production.

"If Walton's suit is successful, the town of Lavoye, in the heart of the Salt Creek oil field, will be wiped from the map," according to a Dec. 4, 1923, report in the Casper Daily Tribune.

That's exactly what happened four months later.

U.S. District Judge T. Blake Kennedy ruled in the government's favor and ordered "the removal of 'all buildings and structures and all deposits of filth and refuse' and ordering the defendant to 'forthwith place said land as nearly as possible in its original condition,'" according to a Tribune report.

Meanwhile, a suspicious fire erupted in a garage in old Lavoye on Dec. 23, destroying a city block and causing $100,000 worth of damage. A few days before the fire, several insurance companies cancelled their policies in Lavoye because of the possible eviction of the town and threats of arson.

The news of the eviction of people and buildings rivaled the ongoing congressional hearings of Harry F. Sinclair, who held the lease to the Teapot Dome naval oil reserve. The Teapot Dome scandal - America's greatest political scandal until Watergate in the 1970s - eventually landed Sinclair and Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall in prison. The scandal so marred Warren G. Harding's presidency that historians consider him among the worst presidents in the nation's history.

Back in Wyoming, Lavoye residents vowed to fight the order, but had little hope of prevailing, since Louis Lavoye declined to contest the action.

"People were not happy," said Kevin Anderson, historian at the Casper College Western History Center.

Over the next year, they moved buildings to Midwest, Edgerton and some of the smaller communities.

A large number, though, moved to new Lavoye. Business directories of the time listed Lavoye firms that intended to move with the town.

A year after Kennedy's order, The Casper Herald published a sunny vision of the new town's future.

"Lavoye is moving!

"Down the road, with many creaks and groans, rumbles and mishaps, the town travels; with its ultimate goal three and a half miles away," according to the Herald.

"Soon there shall be no town. Soon there will be a new town, more prosperous, more beautiful and filled with people more happy than ever before nestled in the oil field section."

By the 1930s, everyone in the new town would be gone.

Reach Tom Morton at (307) 266-0592, or at tom.morton@trib.com. Read his blog at tribtown.trib.com/TomMorton/blog.

Video: Tin and Bricks populate ghost town

By Daniel Craig

Star-Tribune videographer