The Wildcatters: An Informal History of Oil-Hunting in America

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Text originally published in 1946 under the same title.

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Publisher’s Note

Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

We have also made every effort to include all maps and illustrations of the original edition the limitations of formatting do not allow of including larger maps, we will upload as many of these maps as possible.

THE WILDCATTERS

AN INFORMAL HISTORY OF OIL-HUNTING IN AMERICA

BY

SAMUEL W. TAIT, JR.

THE WILDCATTERS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

DEDICATION 5

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 6

MAPS AND DRAWINGS 8

QUOTATION FROM WALLACE E. PRATT 9

PROLOGUE 10

I. A STAGE IS SET 13

II. THE CONNECTICUT COLONEL 16

III. ALONG CREEK AND RIVER 26

IV. NATIONAL PANORAMA 37

V. FROM SALT TO OIL 41

VI. THE FIELD THAT LIVED AGAIN 47

VII. DOODLEBUGS & ROCKHOUNDS 56

VIII. THAT WORTHLESS LIME ROCK 80

IX. CYCLORAMA 91

X. SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME 100

XI. POOR MAN’S PARADISE 107

XII. FIELDS THAT COULDN’T BE THERE 115

XIII. OIL TOWNS: STYLES NEW AND OLD 121

XIV. COWPUNCHERS AND CLAIM JUMPERS 127

XV. END OF THE TRAIL 138

XVI. BACKTRACKING 147

EPILOGUE 153

NOTE ON SOURCES 156

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 158

DEDICATION

TO THE MEMORY OF

MY FATHER

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

WALLACE E. PRATT and the University of Kansas Press have been so kind as to permit the use of a passage from the former’s Oil in the Earth.

Lt.-Col. R. B. Harkness, Gas Commissioner of Ontario, has taken time from the pressing duties of foreign service to refer me to invaluable information as to early drilling in his province.

The Derrick Publishing Company and E. P. Boyle, president, have permitted me to use passages from The Derrick’s Hand Book of Petroleum, and specifically a long section describing the Thorn Creek gusher.

P. C. Lauinger, president of the Petroleum Publishing Company, and C. O. Willson, editor of The Oil and Gas Journal, published by that company, have permitted me to use linecuts which appeared in that magazine and have made useful suggestions. L. P. Stockman, California district editor of the same publication, has provided valuable data about petroleum history in his state. To the research and historical writings of at least two other members of the Journal staff, James McIntyre and Thomas F. Smiley, I owe an incalculable debt.

Warren L. Baker, editor of The Oil Weekly, has been very helpful in answering questions as to historical points upon which there were no written data.

My appreciation goes to two Tulsa oil editors whose aid was invariably given in that spirit of camaraderie which has always distinguished the oil game: Paul S. Hedrick of the World and Andrew M. Rowley of the Tribune.

Thanks are due Miss Margaret Corrie of the Union Oil Company for composing from data exclusively in that firm’s possession a carefully detailed and dramatic account of the Lakeview gusher.

C. M. Joiner, discoverer of the East Texas field, has been so kind as to settle disputed questions about his explorations.

A. W. Hamill, contractor and driller of the Spindletop gusher, has read my account of the drilling of that great well and has offered valuable suggestions which have been followed.

My appreciation goes to the Drake Museum of Titusville for permission to consult documents and manuscripts in its files.

Warwick M. Downing, attorney at law, of Denver; Harold D. Roberts, attorney at law, of the same city; C. J. Hares, geologist, of Casper; Max W. Ball, geologist, of Denver; and W. B. Emery, geologist, of Findlay, have provided information for the section on the Salt Creek field.

I am particularly indebted to the following members of state geological surveys: George H. Ashley of Pennsylvania; R. C. Tucker of West Virginia; Wilber Stout of Ohio; R. A. Smith of Michigan; A. H. Bell of Illinois. The publications of these and of other states covered by this book have, of course, been useful, as have those of the United States Geological Survey, the Geological Survey of Canada, and the Ontario Department of Mines.

Other geologists who have been helpful are W. V. Howard, J. V. Howell, H. B. Goodrich, all of Tulsa, Ralph Arnold of Los Angeles, and M. Gordon Gulley of Pittsburgh.

Finally I must acknowledge my great debt to the American Petroleum Institute and its staff, incurred during some years of membership in that organization. Without its facilities for historical and statistical research no history of petroleum-hunting could be written.

S. W. T., JR.

Montpelier, Indiana

MAPS AND DRAWINGS

MAJOR MIGRATIONS OF OIL MEN

THE DRAKE RIG

PRINCIPAL OIL POOLS OF PENNSYLVANIA IN 1887

DRILLING AND PUMPING WELLS

THE LIMA-INDIANA FIELD

OIL AREAS OF CALIFORNIA

OIL AND GAS REGIONS OF THE UNITED STATES

QUOTATION FROM WALLACE E. PRATT

SOME factors in the problem of where oil is in the earth, however, elude graphs and statistical calculation. These factors are not resolved by any study of the record of past discoveries. They bear no discernible relationship to the physical character of the earth’s oil reservoirs. If, for example, the region we call Kansas today had slipped from her present moorings at the inception of our Civil War, say, and transplanted herself bodily to become part of the national territory of any one of a half-dozen old-world powers, the chances are that few of her oil fields would have yet been discovered. The oil fields of Kansas and other western states were discovered and developed by a curious movement or force like nothing ever recorded in any other country. This force was born with Oil Creek, grew and developed with the spread of oil through Pennsylvania, and gradually pushed westward, leaving a train of oil fields in its wake. The states across which this quest proceeded yielded up their oil, more or less without regard to their geological constitution. To be sure great areas of metamorphics and crystallines like the iron ranges of Minnesota and the Ozarks in Missouri remained obdurate, but other regions responded one after another to the call of the wildcatter; states as diverse geologically as Kentucky and Ohio, Illinois and Texas, Kansas and Louisiana, each developed great oil fields. Continental France today possesses no large oil field, yet if France had lain across the path of the American oil-finder I have little doubt that France too would have taken her place in this procession of oil-producing regions. It is the genius of a people that determined this achievement; the presence of oil in the earth of itself is not enough.

Men who grew up among the oil fields of Pennsylvania, or West Virginia, came west and, knowing nothing of geology—indeed, almost in defiance of geology—drilled wells that uncovered new oil fields. The Fortieth Parallel Survey traversed this same westward course in the early 1870’s, a little ahead of these pioneers, with intellectual giants like Clarence King and Frank Emmons searching with trained eyes for possible evidences of mineral deposits. Yet this classic of geologic exploration reported nothing to justify the belief that myriads of oil derricks would soon come to dot the plains. Where, for example, could a less promising location for an oil test have been found than the red-beds plains of western Oklahoma, where Ponca City now stands, when the prospecting that resulted in the discovery of that great oil field was undertaken? Surely, these rolling prairies bore no physical resemblance to the cuestas and hog-backs of Pennsylvania in the Appalachian foothills where American pioneers had learned to drill for oil. What then guided these adventurers in their sensational discoveries of oil fields across the entire width of a continent?—WALLACE E. PRATT, Oil in the Earth (1942).

PROLOGUE

If one were to apply to the occupations of mankind the terminology of a diagnostician observing individual human beings, there is little doubt what opinion would be given of the wildcatters. The diagnosis would be that the profession of hunting petroleum by drilling wildcat wells (i.e. wells whose chances of productivity cannot be accurately predicted) has always carried with it that fashionable modern ailment: essential hypertension.

People who are hypertensive usually display a chronic restlessness, a constitutional inability to relax. Just so with the followers of the oil game, since that August afternoon in 1859 when the drilling tools of Drake’s wildcat well at Titusville, Pennsylvania, dropped into a crevice and thus started the wildcat oil-drillers dancing their way across the continent. The wildcatters have backtracked occasionally—returning to areas formerly abandoned—but unlike the pioneers in iron, coal, and most other minerals, they have never relaxed long enough in one place to become settled there.

The oil game is one pioneering activity that has never had a frontier, and until the last porous stratum of rock is explored it never can have one. There would be mirth-provoking irony in a map of the United States showing the boundaries, lateral and horizontal, beyond which dogmatists have at one time or another said oil could not be found—which mental barbed-wire fences have snapped under the irrepressible urge of the wildcatter. The primitive creekology which kept derricks for a while off the hillsides of Pennsylvania, the phobias about the red beds of central northern Oklahoma, the antique geological shibboleths which long obscured the potentialities of the Illinois basin—all such and a hundred more have been exposed to ridicule through the wildcatter’s boundless energy, curiosity, ambition, and skill with a string of tools.

Perhaps the hypertensive nature of the oil game is, indeed, a true symptom, or maybe it is only a fancy. But it is unquestionable that wildcatters are usually restless and far-ranging. One need only recall the great names among them to prove this—those who have left their trail-marks not only across a continent but throughout a hemisphere. Guffey and Galey opened oil pools from southwestern Pennsylvania to Kansas and Texas. Hardison and Stewart left their marks from Pennsylvania to California. The trail of the five Spellacy brothers starts likewise in Pennsylvania and leads to Ohio, California, Mexico, Venezuela and back to California. But this quality of ceaseless movement over great distances is in the history of even obscure wildcatters whose paths can be traced only in the weekly reports of well completions in oil magazines.

What drives men to pursue such an occupation? Once while traveling over a prospective oil region with one of the country’s leading geologists and oil writers, I suggested that the wildcatter risks his money too readily and accepts its loss too uncomplainingly for so simple an explanation as the ordinary profit motive to be adequate. Usually he seems to have only one reason for wishing to make money out of oil, and this is to have the means of hunting more oil.

The geologist agreed. I believe, he said, that if every cent were taken away from them but the money to keep on hunting oil and a bare living while doing it, not one wildcatter would quit the oil game.

He may have exaggerated, but there is no denying the thrill of gambling on the hidden history of the earth. Robert W. Service must have been thinking of the same thing when he had his prospector declare that it isn’t the gold that I’m wanting so much as just finding the gold.

This book has been written by one who was almost literally born in a derrick, and whose father, when a little less than fourteen, went to work on wells on Oil Creek, when the game itself was barely ten years old. To the author it was worth writing because it is always enjoyable to write about the thing one likes best. But it is worth reading only if it transmits to the reader some of that glamor and fascination which for nearly a century have inspired men with the zeal to search for petroleum in faraway and lonely places, where often the only reward is the poetry of a rising and falling walking beam or the music of a whirling rotary table.

I. A STAGE IS SET

PEOPLE in the year 1851 puzzled over a new book called Moby Dick by a writer named Herman Melville. His contemporaries probably failed to realize that Moby Dick was a commentary upon a crucial turning point in American industrial history: men were finding it necessary to go far into the Pacific to catch the whale.

Whaling grounds had been worked out before. The Norwegians had depleted those off Greenland in the ninth century, and the Basques, founders of the industry by the sale of oil and other whale products, had exhausted the area about the Bay of Biscay in the fifteenth and sixteenth. The Spanish and Dutch next went into whaling, the Dutch building up their forces to over two hundred ships and fourteen thousand men before they, in turn, ran out of raw material. By the early 1800’s the United States had taken the lead from the English, who had earlier picked up the rusting harpoon of the Dutch, and whalers sailed from Nantucket to grounds as far away as Newfoundland, the West Indies, Brazil, and the Cape Verde Islands. As the Americans enforced no more proration in killing whales than had their French, Dutch and English predecessors, the invariable law of depletion soon was operating, and before 1830 the Yankee was rounding Cape Horn and pursuing his butchering way toward the Kodiak ground off Alaska.

But here entered a whole series of economic factors which were not present when other whaling nations had run short of crude material. The American experience was separated from the English by a gulf not only of years but of the industrial revolution and changing customs. Mankind, at least in this hemisphere, began to emerge from its long physical dim-out and to demand adequate illumination at about the same time it made its first essays in machine production. There had to be whale oil for the lamps of a rapidly growing nation and whale oil for the spindles and bearings of an industrial system which was growing quite as fast. There had to be, this meant, a great and increasing amount of oil. In the peak year of the whaling industry, it meant that over seven hundred ships were in the trade, $70,000,000 of investment, and over 70,000 persons.

As supply did not keep up with demand, an oil-hungry people were obliged to pay higher prices. There is overwhelming evidence that by 1850 this is just what was happening. Perhaps the demand became simply too great for the available shipping and manpower, or perhaps the whale himself became elusive. Melville shows us that the harpooners had to hunt him even far into Pacific waters, with all that entailed in the way of increased expense. Statistics tell us that whale oil was selling at $2.00 to $2.50 a gallon in 1850, with no ceiling in sight. Inevitably there was a search for substitutes.

That search had, to be sure, been proceeding for some years before mid-century. Oil made from fats of animals other than the whale, as well as vegetable oil, had been tried with no great success. Better results were obtained from camphene, a mixture of alcohol and turpentine, and lamps were designed in which to burn this.

At the early age of twenty-one Justus Liebig had become professor of chemistry in the University of Giessen, in the Province of Upper Hesse, through the influence of Alexander von Humboldt, who, interestingly enough in this connection, had written of the gas wells he had encountered in his travels in China. Liebig invented a method of organic analysis still in use, and, with Woehler, did research on the benzoyl compounds, but he should be remembered as a prophet also. Along about the year 1841 he predicted that the oil needs of the future would be supplied chiefly from mineral sources.

Perhaps at the very time the German chemist made this prediction his Scottish contemporary, James Young, was working on the problem of making oil from coal. For a short while he was deflected from his task because a friend showed him a petroleum spring in Ridding’s colliery at Aferton, Derbyshire, which furnished a product that could more readily be made into an illuminant and a lubricant. But by the early 1850’s the spring had gone dry and he was patenting a process for the slow destructive distillation of coal, particularly of the Boghead variety, which he had found gave a better yield of oil than any other.

Meanwhile, on this side of the Atlantic, the problem was attacked by Abraham Gesner, a Nova Scotian who had studied medicine and geology in London and become geologist of his native province. He first made an oil from Albert coal, found in the county of that name in New Brunswick. Then he discovered that he could make it from asphalt obtained from the famous beds in Trinidad. He was the first to name the resulting oil kerosene, a contraction of the Greek words for wax and oil. By 1854 two large plants in New York were using the Gesner process for making kerosene from cannel coal, and fifty-six throughout the country were making it by some process in 1860.

As the bitumen of the pitch lake of Trinidad contained sulphur and could not be shipped without consolidating (which meant it had to be mined in the holds of ships before unloading), a search soon began for bitumen beds with purer chemical content and situated on the mainland of America. Two such beds were in southwestern Ontario, in Enniskillen Township of Lambton County, near the St. Clair River. Sir William Logan, who became director of Canada’s geological survey when it was organized in 1843, described them as beds formed by the exposure of petroleum to the air.

News of these gum beds reached J. H. Williams, then a resident of Hamilton, Ontario, but a native of Scotland. He was well acquainted with the accomplishments of James Young and had himself had some experience in distilling Scotch coal and refining oil found at seepages in Rumania. In 1857 he went to the bed on Black Creek, and in the following year erected a small refinery in the forest nearby for making illuminating oil. Before Williams had his refinery in operation, A. C. Ferris, the New Yorker who was providing a market for petroleum even before drilling for it began, visited him and tried to purchase his land. The experience seems to have stimulated Williams to redouble his efforts at increasing output. He dug shafts about four feet square into the beds, and found at a depth of forty to sixty feet a section of gravel with which was a heavy oil that could be brought to the surface by pumping.

If that were the extent of Williams’ operations, he would merit no more space in a history of petroleum than he has usually received—which has been none at all unless the writer happened to be a Canadian. True, Williams may have been the first major oil operator, as that term is understood today, for he produced, refined and marketed oil. But there is reason to believe he did something much more revolutionary than dig shafts into tar beds.

By the fall of 1861 there had developed an oil boom in southwestern Ontario. The owner of the Toronto Globe happened to have a financial as well as a journalistic interest in what was going on there, and he assigned a special correspondent to the area with directions to get detailed and exact reports about the new field. We may, therefore, accept as true this item in a dispatch listing producing wells which the correspondent sent his paper on August 29, 1861:

No. 27. Williams & Co., proprietors

Well sunk 46 feet to rock; bore

100 feet in rock. This well averages

the large quantity of 60 barrels a day.

A very great deal of oil has been

taken from it. It has been in operation

two years.

It had been in operation two years.

If this means the well had been in operation exactly two years, then Williams completed a paying well drilled for oil on the very day—August 29, 1859—that news spread throughout western Pennsylvania that E. L. Drake had got oil in his well near Titusville.

If, on the other hand, the correspondent’s statement of length of operation means, as such expressions so frequently do, that the well had been operated longer than two years, then to J. H. Williams belongs the distinction of drilling the first commercial well drilled solely for oil on the North American continent.

At any rate, it was a photo-finish, and that in itself is significant. Writing of the Bradford field just a few years back, four geologists stated that a non-productive well had been drilled expressly for oil near the Seneca Oil Spring at Cuba, New York, in 1857—two years before the ventures of Williams and Drake. At more than one place in the western world and at about