The Forest City basin of Missouri, Kansas, Nebraska, and Iowa is the area in which the first oil and gas production west of the Mississippi River was found. Production near Paola, Kansas, followed within a few years of the birth of the oil industry at Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859

Initial movements of the Ozark uplift and the Chautauqua arch began in Late Ordovician time. Attendant subsidence in the north Kansas area formed an ancestral basin which was bisected later by the Nemaha anticline forming the Salina basin and an unnamed basin on the east. Post-Mississippian, pre-Atokan peneplanation of the entire area took place before renewed activity along the Nemaha anticline uplifted the area west of the anticline while downwarping east of the Nemaha scarp formed the Forest City basin. Thus it is defined as a Pennsylvanian basin. Movement along the Nemaha anticline may have begun during the late Early Ordovician but certainly it was mobile during Early Mississippian time and continued to be active intermittently until at least the early Permian.

The Cherokee and Forest City basins were separated by a low arch until middle Cherokee time when the Forest City basin filled with sediments and the two basins linked across the Bourbon arch.

Northeast-trending folds developed after Mississippian deposition whereas previous structural orientation was northwestward.