Biography

Thelma Gwendolyn Baker  was born on 4 Jun 1906 in Shelton, Mason, Washington to William H Baker and Lauretta Fisher Baker. She was the youngest of the Baker's seven children and the only child to be born in Washington. The other children were all born in Minnesota: Iza in 1890, Bernice in 1892, Lettie in 1893, Bernard in 1895, Helen in 1897 and Jay in 1902. One of her sisters, Lettie, died as an infant while the family was in Minnesota.

Thelma's parents divorced after they moved to Washington and in 1911 her mother married William J Lawton. Lauretta and William left Olympia in 1915 and moved to Montana to homestead on Horse Creek in Treasure County, Montana. Lauretta's two sons, Bernard and Jay, went with them.  By that time Lauretta's oldest daughter, Iza,  had married Jacob Frisch and was settled with two children in Olympia. Nine year old Thelma stayed behind with Iza rather than be uprooted from her school and friends to face the hardship of homesteading in Montana. Bernice had left for California to marry Arthur Barnes in 1915 and Helen joined her there a year later after her brief marriage and divorce from Carl Nommensen. Both Bernice and Helen had contracted TB as children and they needed to live in a warm, dry climate for their health.. 

In the early 1920's Lauretta and Thelma and Jay ended up in Casper Wyoming in Natrona County in the middle of the oil boom in the Salt Creek Oil Fields.

The Salt Creek Oil Field is the largest pool of oil that has been found in the Rocky Mountains and is one of the largest in the United States. The first well to strike oil was drilled in 1889 but at that time there were few uses for oil and nothing much happened until a gusher was struck in 1908.  By the 1920's the area had became a boom town drawing thousands of men, mostly veterans of World War 1 and some families including Lauretta's.  Everyone wanted to get in on the act and make some money including Thelma's future husband, Rex Snyder, and his father Ora Snyder.

Ora Snyder was a sheep rancher who homesteaded in Natrona County in the late 1890's. His son, Antone Rex Snyder, was born on the family ranch on 24 September
1898  In 1923 Ora took out patents on land on Castle Creek on the Salt Creek Oil Fields in Natrona County and founded the town of Snyder where the depot for the North and South Railroad serving the oil fields was to be built  At the time of his marriage to Thelma in 1923, Rex was selling the town lots for development including surface oil and mineral rights. Rex had been one of fifteen ex servicemen who had filed a successful lawsuit in 1919 for the right of their homestead patents to the surface mineral and oil rights after the federal government withdrew homestead patents from the oil companies in 1914 but left them with the right to lease the oil rights. The oil companies had fought to keep homestead rights to the land and the attendant mineral and oil surface rights but were denied and could only claim right to the oil under the surface.

Snyder was just one of the towns that arose overnight during the oil boom but except for Edgerton and Midwest they did not survive the ending of the boom and the great depression in the 1930's. It does not appear that founding the town of Snyder brought the Snyder family much financial success either.  In the 1925 Casper City Directory Rex and Thelma are living in Snyder and Rex is acting as a salesman for Ora's land company. However, in the 1928 Casper Directory they are still living in Snyder but are raising purebred poultry and chicks. By the1930 census Rex is working as a welder in a machine shop in Natrona and there is no mention of Snyder.

In the 1940 census, Rex and Thelma are living fourteen miles west of  Riverton in Fremont County, Wyoming as is Lauretta. It appears they are either right beside or on the Jim Deardorff Ranch which is interesting because that is where Lauretta's son, Jay Otis, was working when he died in 1947.

Rex died on 5 Dec 1967 in Riverton, Fremont, Wyoming, at age 69, and was buried in Mountain View Cemetery. Thelma died on 6 Mar 1997 in Riverton, Fremont, Wyoming at age 90. She had a paid cemetery plot next to Rex in the Mountain View Cemetery and space for her inscription on the gravestone but she is not in the plot according to the cemetery. She was cremated and her ashes were released to her daughter Burdette but they were not buried and their whereabouts are unknown.