No Mammoths, Just Mess: The Tar Pits of Oklahoma

While I was mindlessly scrolling through TikTok, wasting away an unseasonably cold August evening by the fire pit, I stumbled across some new information about an ancient thing in Oklahoma.

Tar pits.

Not La Brea, But Still Sticky

Now, before you get ahead of yourself and start picturing the tar pits you're likely familiar with, Oklahoma has no bubbling pools of asphalt with mammoth bones sticking out, no saber-tooth cats or anything cool like that... That’s California’s claim to fame. La Brea Tar Pits, the real deal.

But Oklahoma does have its own little pockets of sticky history.

Long before the oil boom, folks noticed black, tarry stuff seeping right out of the ground. You didn’t need a geologist to tell you something was down there. And if you walked through the right creek bed, it’d literally stick to your boots.

Oklahoma's tribes knew all about it. Sooners and settlers wrote about it, and there's quite a bit of evidence that everyone even used it from time to time.

The Chickasaw and Choctaw used natural asphalt to waterproof things like baskets and canoes. Early Oklahomans smeared it on roofs and wagons before shingles and tar paper were a thing.

The Tar Springs of Sulphur and the Arbuckles

One of the better-known spots was near Sulphur. People called them “tar springs.” The seeps weren’t giant pits, but they bubbled up enough to get noticed. Deeper in the Arbuckle Mountains, there were deposits of natural asphalt too, and at one point in history, it was even mined for road surfacing.

If you’ve ever driven across some of our older highways, chances are you’ve ridden on it.

Of course, none of this turned into a tourist attraction. California got the mammoth bones, we got the sticky mess. But it does add a layer of perspective to Oklahoma’s oil story.

Before there were derricks dotting the landscape and gushers blowing sky-high, there were just slow seeps, little hints that something valuable was hiding below the red dirt.

What’s wild is how many of these places are gone and forgotten now. Buried under development, paved over, or simply left to dry up. If you asked most people in Sulphur today about tar springs, they’d probably assume you were confusing it with the mineral water springs the town is famous for.

But the tar was real, and it’s part of why Oklahoma became an oil state. The ground gave us clues long before we had the tools to dig deep.

The Last (Known) Living Tar Pit in Oklahoma

There is one still alive and well located on Fort Sill down by Lawton. It's little more than a clear water pond with a seaping mess of organic asphalt slowly bubbling up. Likely seen as a safety hazard on a military installation, they did try to get rid of and drain it at some point, but it keeps on producing tar, but it's nothing like the famous pits around the world.

So no, you won’t find a La Brea-style tar pit in Oklahoma. You won’t stumble onto a prehistoric boneyard preserved in asphalt. But if you know where to look, and maybe poke around some old geological surveys, you’ll find proof that Oklahoma’s been oozing black gold for a long, long time.