Oil in the Back Yard
I
OKLAHOMA CITY’S pulse is reacting just now to the alphabetical vitamins in its oil — not viosterol, haliver oil, codliver oil, or castor oil, but plain smelly old crude. The oil industry is on the march. To be exact, it has already marched and lies encamped at the door of the State House itself. New reënforcements are moving up, and new sectors are being taken over as fast as the lessees can shoot holes in the zoning ordinance. And as a counterattack to protect the sluggish brown oil underlying the properties of the State, Governor Marland has picketed the Capitol grounds with his own derricks. Even the lush green parkway dedicated to beauty and a dignified approach to the formal south entrance of the Capitol is parade ground for those tall steel vigilantes.
As the crowds say who drive by, gazing as at one of the wonders of the world, ‘It’s a sight! ’ By day the derricks stand gaunt skeletons of hard-bitten steel; by night, brilliant, illumined Jacob’s ladders leading from earth to heaven. By day it is magnificent and hideous; by night, all ugliness inked out, it is a fairyland of glamour. An oil field is nothing new to the people of Oklahoma City, but an oil field on the front lawn of the State’s White House, adorning the Capitol grounds with giant rigs, ornamenting it with slush pits and preëmpting the front and back yards of one of the exclusive residential districts as casually as do dandelions in spring, is another thing.
One day back in 1928, a wildcat gusher, lying to the south of Oklahoma City, gushed in and opened up a Midas pool, which became known as the South Field. It spread out eight miles long and two miles wide. Oil tanks and derricks mushroomed up overnight in groups and colonies as far as the eye could see. Squat thick tanks sat gorged with oil; slush pits and pools of greenish-brown fluid, escaped from the latest producer, lay inert in the sun; tall rigs signaled the presence of fabulous underground riches. To those who owned a fragment of a lease or a scrap of royalty it probably looked like trips to Europe, a RollsRoyce, an ermine coat — or, it may have been, just new shoes and the next month’s bills paid. However it looked, it sounded like all the switch engines in the world trying to make the grade up the same hill.
At first the only territory affected was open fields, creek banks, washed-out gullies. When, in 1930, drilling reached the city limits, which had been extended to take in an area much wider than was of use at the time, it still met no opposition, as the city dump, the squatters with their unsightly shacks, and Negro cabins offered no competition in beauty or sanitation. But with nine hundred wells already producing or drilling, and the trend of march toward the wholesale district, the City Council laid down a chart of oil zones outside of which there could be no drilling. One of the protected zones included the executive mansion and the State Capitol, for the beautification of which $250,000 had just been allotted.
There is nothing negative about an oil field. It is either on the make or done for. Deserted, it lies gutted, its deep dark wounds barren and sterile of any earthly interest; on the make, it is a seething, hurrying, sweating, brawling, exhilarating jumble of men and machinery.
In the first flush of production in the South Field, huge trucks laden with drilling pipe rumbled over deeply rutted roads which a few weeks before had been fields of cotton. Company cars scurried from lease to lease. Tool dressers, tool pushers in corduroy and khaki clinging to stripped-down Fords, rushed pell-mell to new locations just spudding in. From the window of a tall office building one saw only spires of promise and fulfillment; along the roads leading into the heart of the field one saw rough, boardedup shacks, too flimsy to be called houses, perched like mammoth goods boxes on ragged patches of ground. Tin cans and old iron brightened the umber drabness of vacant lots douched brown by sticky oil, while a few scattered trees, relics of an apple orchard, hurried to bloom, hoping to bear before the next lusty gusher should blight them.
Across the road an emergency hospital — a pine packing case of a house with rows of white cots — stood ready for the next explosion, the next epidemic, the escape of poison-gas fumes, or for the lady known as Lou and her two companions shot or slashed in the dance hall around the corner. Boardinghouses thrown together quickly to accommodate hordes of homeless, hungry, and tired workers, smelled of boiling cabbage and the week’s wash flapping in the wind. The roads, beds of yellow dust when dry and seas of red mud when it rained, were flanked by unnumbered cold-drink stands, pool halls, and machine shops. There were actually blacksmith shops, for the mule is an important worker in an oil field.
In ‘Rag Town’ children, hogs, and chickens roamed together amicably in warm spring sunshine. Hogs, feasting on the city’s garbage dump, were the aborigines of this section, and the grunt of the porker was heard in the land long before the chug of the drill. Out of the heart of a lowly pigpen roared a sixtythousand-barrel well whose twin usurped the homestead of the city pesthouse, while the Phillips Petroleum star producer was significantly called ‘Ash Can No. 1.’
Oil is no respecter of persons or places. From the bed of a river, the ball ground of a ward school, the yard of the Free Will Baptist Church, and, with sardonic humor, from the county poor farm it poured, boisterous and blatant.
II
Cut off from further encroachment by the warehouse district and having discovered that the ‘ big pay ’ wells were to be found in the fabulously rich, prolific, but tricky producing sand known as the Wilcox, lying, as they believed, southeast and northwest of the city, the oil companies executed a flank movement around the city and secured permission to drill. This was during the depression, when any business which promised work and pay was not scrutinized too closely; besides, the landlords were heart and soul in favor of it, for they needed the lease money and the one-eighth royalty.
When wells and more wells came in, the public cast a thoughtful eye over the horizon and decided that, just in case the Council might be cajoled into going a little too far with this drilling business, it might be well to amend the city charter, taking away from the Council and giving to the voters the right to decide such matters. The charter was amended. The sole power left the Council was to zone the city, saying where wells might and might not go, unless the majority of the taxpayers in such zones wanted them, in which dim and distant event the proceeding would be to petition the Council, pay the expenses of an election on the question, and heed the voice of the people.
The first petition was not so dim and distant as had been thought. It had to do, however, with an outlying district, and the balloting brought a distinct murmur of assent from Ward Three and a loud shout of ‘yes’ from Ward Four. Wards One and Two, unaffected as yet physically, but a little anxious at this point about what might happen if the wells continued their march, voted ‘no.’ There were more ‘yeses’ than ‘noes,’ because all the ‘yeses’ went to the polls, while some who meant ‘no’ were too busy directing the landscape man where to put the shrubs and place the lily pools to vote.
To the oil-field worker, the man with a team of mules, the ditch digger, to artisans of almost every trade, the oil fields meant work — work and pay. To the Negro with his shack, to the small home owner, to the owner of a vacant lot, it was good business to get a bonus worth as much as and often more than his property, and the chance of an eighth or maybe a fourth of the oil ‘if and when.’ Oil in Oklahoma is not a wraith or a phantom. So much Aladdin magic has taken place before the very eyes of the average citizen that it seems more than a bare possibility. It is here, it is there, for the taking. The question is: Where is here? Where is there?
The geologists, who had been core drilling and seismographing territory adjacent to and east of the State Capitol, though without the city limits, believed they had found the answer. Very quietly companies began buying leases, almost within a stone’s throw of the State House, and then started in to drill. The oil field was definitely on the move! It goosestepped along the outer edges of the small cottage district, squeezed through the palings of vegetable gardens, stalked across an outlying golf course, sidestepped indignation meetings as well as threats of impeachment petitions, and finally, one fine day, bespattered the clean new bib of the executive mansion across the road.
III
And now the fat was in the fire! The British-American’s Mary Green roared in a 20,000-barrel producer, and up went more rigs! The flank movement had skirted the city and crept up on the State Capitol from the east. Derricks pierced the sky line one hundred and thirty yards behind the executive mansion, and engines chugged away in syncopation, no two on the same beat. Nothing could be done! It was a free country; a man’s home was his castle, and if he wanted to live in the same yard with a mud hog, a drilling engine, a slush pit, and a derrick, that was his privilege. It was beyond the city limits, and the Council could do nothing. But the neighbors across the line, within the city, did. They had smelled oil and liked it; they had seen lease money and helped figure out on a shingle, with an old stub pencil, just what their neighbor’s royalty checks would be when the well came in. A daily income of, say, $15 would more than compensate for any discomfort. To live within touch of a derrick was better than to worry about a mortgage. Anyway, they were getting bespattered and begrimed, and they might just as well get paid for it.
Balance against this group the people whose homes, valued at from $15,000 to $75,000, also lay along the line of march, and who, if voted into the operating district, could drink their coffee each morning along with the rancid odor of crude oil, and sleep at night to the raucous sound of a drilling engine.
‘We don’t want any gushing wells around our premises!’ they shouted. ‘Most of us built homes with the intention of living in them the rest of our lives. We want to water tulips, not slush pits.’
At this point the oil men began to offer inducements to the votaries of beauty. They promised to sink drilling machinery in deep pits so that you could n’t see it, to use a noiseless electric pump so that you could n’t hear it, and for good measure to screen their greasy holes with fragrant roses and honeysuckle so that you could n’t even smell the oil.
Everybody was either mad or glad. The Governor started out by being mad. At first blush he was opposed to marring the beauty of the capital city, but that blush deepened into an angry red when the surrounding acreage became the property of oil interests demanding that the City Council call an election on March 24, 1936 to zone the mansion district for oil. Wrapped in the protection of that early ordinance, the State Grounds were sacred from zoning; but, if the election carried, all the adjacent territory just across the road would become another seething oil field. Realizing that the State’s lands, under which lay millions of dollars of oil, would then be drained without compensation, Governor Marland petitioned the Council to include these lands on the ballot and at the same time plead with the people to vote ‘no’ against the whole project. The Council, thoroughly shocked at the idea, flatly refused to have the State Grounds defiled and denied the petition.
Meanwhile the president of the city school board sent out letters listing royalties in oil and gas and rentals and bonuses which the school board had received from production on city school property in addition to its share of the gross production tax used for the maintenance of schools in Oklahoma City. It was a total of $1,138,301.50. ‘I did n’t tell anybody how to vote,’ the president said; ‘I just gave them the figures.’
The Council at this point, on the three horns of a dilemma, — pro-extension, anti-extension, and Governor Marland, — wrung their hands and prayed for wisdom. In their anguish they decided to follow that safe middle course, halfway between good and evil, and called an election to zone the section across the road from the Capitol and north for a mile. This would include a small golf course, a number of frame and brick homes ranging from $2500 to $10,000 in value, vacant lots, a tourist hotel, and, in addition, a plat of small houses and lots to the south and east of the Capitol.
When the polls closed at seven o’clock on the evening of March 24, the ordinance had carried by an overwhelming majority. Before dark the Phillips Petroleum Company had fifteen wells tentatively staked. All night trucks and wagons rumbled along the highway dragging in pipes to new locations. By morning other companies went into action. As fast as building permits were issued, crews of men and mules began digging cellars. In a single day twenty-seven locations were staked and fourteen derricks contracted — a record for the nine years of oil activity. Contractors had been booked weeks in advance. There was a shortage of drillers and roughnecks and men handling explosives, but big wages brought them on the run from the east Texas field.
IV
Governor Marland, who was an oil man long before he was a governor, watched the frenzied activity across the road with feverish unrest. Preserving inviolate the placid beauty of the landscape surrounding the State Grounds and executive mansion was now problematical. The only thing left, as the Governor saw it, was to grab a spoon and get into the jam pot before it was all gone. But how? The City Council had refused to include the State lands on the March 24 ballot, and they had not been voted into the zoned district.
4 Why should the State forgo $500,000 in bonus and $5,000,000 in royalties while near-by wells ravage the pool?’ argued the Governor. ‘Regardless of the Council’s action, we ’ll drill five wells as fast as we can, unless I am stopped by a superior authority, and the only superior authority I know is the President of the United States.’ Defying the city’s power to control the drilling, the Governor promised all bidders on State leases that they could sink their wells behind the protection of armed guards, and announced that in the event that the Council tried to enjoin the State authorities he would call out the militia. After considerable shadow-boxing between the two, Governor Marland, one fine morning, stepped off the location for the first well behind the kitchen and named it Defiance No. 1. And in due time a detachment of the State militia executed a comic-opera manœuvre of ‘Marche Militaire ’ on the doorstep. Shortly after this the District Court handed down a decision that the city was without power to enforce oil zoning laws against the State. Since then the Governor has been busy seeing that the State is not defrauded, pilfered, cheated, or drained of one drop of oil asleep in its subterranean grabens.
Tantalized, however, by the thought that quite probably the greatest gusher of all lay imprisoned beneath the Capitol itself, and unable to drill down through the place where the dome ought to be, as some facetious crooner of ‘Old Uncle Ned ’ suggested, Governor Marland and the drilling authorities decided to find out by slanting a hole under the structure from an adjoining block. From a surface location one hundred and fifty feet south of and three hundred and seventy-five feet west of the Capitol building, a slanting 6400-foot hole, by angle drilling and the novel indirect approach known as whipstocking, connected with the objective pool in October 1937, and, without destroying grass or flowers, completed a well with an initial production of 7744 barrels — which, if not the greatest gusher of all, was well worth angling for.
In the week following the vote on March 24, 1936, fifty-six wells were spudded in the newly zoned district. Sentiment was growing to throw open the whole of the East Side to drilling. The Council was again petitioned to grant another extension so that the rest of the property owners, who had suffered all the evils, detriments, and nuisances of the oil field, might be allowed to lease and so receive some compensation. Hard pressed, they agreed to permit a vote, but reserved Lincoln Terrace, the millionaire residential district, and the State’s medical centre — consisting of the University Hospital, the Medical School, and the Crippled Children’s Hospital — as islands safe from oil encroachment. This altruistic gesture, however, only tangled another knot in the situation. Horrified at the prospect of oil wells on the fifteen acres surrounding the hospitals and school, the Board of Regents, after figuring probable royalties, changed its attitude and asked to be included on the May ballot.
Beautiful Lincoln Terrace, split into two factions, became the focal point for a bitter and confusing civil war. With drilling wells within a few blocks on three sides, it was a question whether it was any longer worth saving. ‘Let the hair go with the hide; we’ll lease and get what we can and move out,’ said one faction. ‘We’ll fight to the last ditch; we’ll file injunctions and petitions and damage suits; our property is covered by a plat restriction, and in the event of drilling in this addition we’ll sue the property owners who sold an oil and gas lease, the drilling company, and the man who developed the restricted property,’ insisted the other faction.
Affidavits were taken from architects and contractors as to the present value of homes, in view of asking for damages if invaded or made unsightly or obnoxious by drilling operations. ‘If over 50 per cent of the home owners demand a place on the ballot,’ the Council sorrowfully announced, ‘it will be unfair to keep Lincoln Terrace off the ballot.’ And thus, on May 12, almost the whole of Oklahoma City east of the Santa Fe Railroad was, by decree of the people, thrown open to drilling.
V
The Council was at once besieged for permits to drill. Each permit granted called for a $1000 fee and a $200,000 bond for fulfillment of contract and indemnity for injury or damage to property or person. Locations hopscotched away as far north as two miles. The race for the pay sand was on. Hordes of rig builders, tool dressers, drillers, tankies, foremen, mule skinners, roustabouts, and roughnecks swarmed to work. Veteran oil hands and their families arrived in automobiles, found a camping place between derricks on high ground, threw together ‘knockdown’ houses, and were at home. When the boom is over, the families, cars, dogs, and houses will move on, following the bite of the drill.
Leases were bought, sold, and traded. Excitement flourished. Flower beds and lawns gave up without a struggle. Houses were put on wheels and trundled away to less valuable plots of ground. Lots 25 by 140 feet brought a thousand dollars each. Seventy thousand dollars was paid for the royalty alone on one five-acre tract. Some of the deals to drill were slyly referred to as ‘AndrewBrown’ deals, because everybody concerned was talking in terms of millions. Money had come to town. The talk was never of dusters, but of producers — big producers — gushers. People who had never been able to see a month or a week ahead found themselves overnight with more actual cash than they had ever dreamed of possessing.
The scout who closed a deal for a drilling block for one of the big companies told me of the scene enacted in that block just six hours after the pay-off. Returning late in the afternoon to secure signatures of possession, he stumbled on to a Christmas night celebration. The inhabitants had all been to town and bought the accumulated longings of years. Before one house stood a shiny Chevrolet roadster and its new owner, a fat little man, shaking all over like jelly as he chuckled.
‘Hi!’ he shouted, a half block away; ‘just see what I got! Yessir, I went down to a automobile place this very day and I says to the man, “Send me out a Chevvy!” And by golly he did, and there she is!’
At the next house the scout’s knock was drowned in the music from the new radio. Pushing his way in past unopened bundles, he attended the first demonstration of a washing machine. In the next house, supper had been delayed, for ‘Mother’ was marching up and down trying on her new evening dress. He was welcomed like a fairy prince and an old friend of the family, and his advice was asked as to the cut of the back. It was pink chiffon.
Oil is the medium of fabulous riches and gigantic losses. It offers as bait prodigious speculative adventure. To the big investor it says, ‘Put in your thousands for the chance at millions’; to the clerk, the dressmaker, the boardinghouse keeper, it means more than pennies for pounds — it means the one chance, perhaps, at economic independence. It is a gigantic game of put-andtake. Put by all means, and take if you can!
VI
How does one play the game? There are, broadly speaking, two methods: royalty and lease. Each offers certain advantages. When land is leased, the lessee pays a bonus to the owner for the privilege of drilling and developing for oil; in return he receives a specified interest in all oil and gas produced. As a rule the lessee receives seven eighths of the oil and gas and the lessor a oneeighth interest known as royalty. In the Oklahoma City pool, however, the competition has been so great that in some instances one fourth of the oil and gas has been allowed as royalty. The landowner, Mr. Jones, may lease only a part of his land and await the outcome of the test well. If it is a producer, he can dispose of the remainder of his holdings at a big profit; if it is a duster, he can be a philosopher and hope that the other portion is on the structure.
After leasing all or part of his land, Mr. Jones may go further and sell all or a part of his prospective royalty. In this way he assures himself of some money whether or not oil is found. This royalty often becomes a commodity to be traded in small pieces. If it is very valuable, or supposed to be, it is often split and sold as undivided interests. The royalty owner puts up no part of the drilling money and draws out, free of expense, his share of the oil. His reward, if any, is not so large, but on the other hand his gamble is not so prodigious. It should be remembered that in selling the royalty or lease Mr. Jones does not part with the surface right and use of his land, and when the lessee exercises his rights to prospect for oil he pays Mr. Jones for any damages to growing crops or other property thereon.
The mansion area extension of the Oklahoma City field presented an entirely new riddle to lessees and lessors and to the ordinance-fixing body. Instead of tracts of land, it was already cut into small homesteads, not of acres, but of feet — twenty-five feet to a lot. Most people owned two or more lots. The customary spacing of wells in other fields had been one well to every ten acres, but with many people owning small parcels in a block of five acres consisting of sixty-five lots of twenty-five feet each, it was agreed to allow one well to every five acres, unless the block contained less than five acres, in which case a well might be drilled on two and onehalf acres. Out of this condition grew the community lease. The lessees of fragments of a tract pool their leases, and the one owning 51 per cent controls the drilling. All lessees pay their proportionate share of drilling expenses and, with royalty owners, receive their share of the oil.
Without regulations covering well spacing, an offset spree of drilling would plaster the scene with derricks and result in colossal waste. In the unrestricted area there were seven rigs in one block, chugging and pounding away against time in the effort to be first to the sand. There are now some three hundred and eighty-four drilling or producing wells in the residential districts of the city.
It is surprising that of all wells completed in this area only five or six have got away from the drillers, — gone wild, as they say, — owing, doubtless, to the infinite care and precaution taken to minimize hazards; for the damage in certain sections, should a well get away, would cripple, if not ruin, a drilling company. This is an oil field de luxe. No débris is allowed on the drilling field; there is no ‘ Rag Town ’ of parasites hanging on the fringe. Even the City Planning Commission, plundered of shrubs and grass, have taken heart and, starting anew, have approved the ‘Shop Beautiful,’ a lovely white-tile ‘hot dog’ stand for the army of oil-field workers, which, like other armies, travels on its belly.
‘It will be just as beautiful as we can make it,’ vowed the prospective owner. ‘Oh, it will be fine!’ And the Commission, which had fought against back-yard riches at the expense of beauty, sighed and thought so too.
VII
Aside from the teamsters who dig the cellars, there is little downright unskilled labor in an oil field. To watch the coordination and synchronization of six or eight roustabouts or roughnecks, as they are called, getting a huge pipe together and running it into the bowels of the earth, is a stirring experience. It is not the skilled labor of a precision machine, but the roustabout knows his pipe, how to coax it, how to yank it, how to ‘wrastle’ iron. He has to know, for drilling is a hazardous business.
While the modus operandi of drilling a well is common knowledge in an oil community, to those beyond the border it is often but a jargon of strange words and phrases. Stated in unoiled terms, the procedure is something like this. After the lessee has secured a permit to drill and put up a bond, the engineer stakes the well. Teamsters and mules dig the cellar and slush pit; the rig driller lays forms for concrete pillars, which are run with cement, builds the floor, and puts up the derrick, which comes in portable form like a giant erector set. All derricks in the new field are of steel. If the need is urgent, the derrick can be put up in forty-eight hours after the cement has set.
At this point the drilling contractor moves in and rigs up tools — ‘R.U.R.’ to you in the oil sheet of the morning paper. The contractor sets the mud-hog engine and drilling engine, moves in pipe, sets and connects the boilers, and is ready to ‘spud,’ which means the first turn of the drill. After drilling a hole approximately a thousand feet deep, thirteeninch casing is set to prevent surface cavings. In rotary wells no additional casing is used until the top of the Wilcox sand is reached, as the mixture of common mud and water, plus a rare mud containing colloidal substances dumped in continuously by the mud-hog engine and rotating with great velocity and force the full length of the hole, coats the sides with a hard mud skin which is practically impervious. When these muds circulate, they are liquid; when still, they turn back into jelly.
After this it is chug, chug, chug, with time out for a fishing job or two. Various ingenious gadgets have been invented for fishing. A drilling tool broken off several thousand feet down in a hole requires one type of tackle; a coil of rope, another. Shutting off water from sands above or below is another misadventure which slows drilling. However long it takes, once spudded, the well becomes ‘our’ well to lease owner, royalty owner, and every roustabout and roughneck on the lot, who eagerly watch the chart of its health, its progress through the adolescent period of shale and lime, past the telltale sands which, encountered at certain depths, forecast its fortune, until that last roundup, the last bite of the drill.
When the well is completed and ready to produce, the master gate or valve above is opened; the oil, saturated and propelled by gas, rushes up and through into a flow pipe connected with the separator tank, where gas, like the steam in a teakettle, rises to the top of the tank, leaving the oil in the bottom. From here the oil is run into a storage tank holding a certain number of barrels. A yardstick is used to measure it, so many inches corresponding to so many barrels. To determine the potential, the well is opened for, say, four hours — the run in that time, multiplied by six, denoting its potential output in a twenty-four-hour day. Under the present proration, as fixed by the State Corporation Commission, however, only a small per cent, varying from month to month, of the capacity flow may be run for storage.
Through ‘gathering lines’ which spread out like fingers over the field, touching each gorged tank, the pipe-line companies withdraw the oil and convey it to refineries, where it is made into gasoline and varied by-products. The gas released from the oil is either piped away for commercial purposes, allowed to escape, or used in the field. One important use is to energize dead oil wells where the gas pressure is too low to raise the column of oil. This outside gas is forced under tremendous pressure through perforations in the oil pipe far down in the hole near the sand, and artificially hoists the oil. It is known as the oil-lift operation.
At the International Petroleum Institute held recently in Tulsa, Oklahoma, two strange new inventions for the exploration and recovery of oil far underground were displayed: the famous ‘bottom hole pump’ which, like a tireless iron mule, stands on its head at the bottom of the well and kicks oil to the top with its heels; and the cameras or ‘seeing eyes,’ as they are called, which look ten thousand feet down into the earth and tell what they see. The seeing eye is being developed by science primarily to detect the wandering or whipstocking of a well meant to go straight. Like a sleuth, the eye detects any suspicious angling toward another man’s pool, photographs the evidence, and reports to the driller. But more important perhaps is its help in guiding the drill into devious paths in order to recover oil from oceans and rivers.
With drilling in hitherto inaccessible places made possible, imagination shies at the picture every now and then suggested of America’s reversion to the horse-and-buggy days, with motor vehicles useless, machinery silent, and airplanes unable to fly for a lack of fuel. Recently a group of scientists predicted that there would be a serious shortage of crude oil by 1940, and despite geophysical methods of discovery, deeper drilling, and more efficient recovery processes there would be little available after 1945. To-day with proration as tight as a vise, cutting past the bone and into the very marrow of production, and with stabilization dependent on the steps taken recently by the oil states further to curtail present allowables, it seems a remote possibility.
Engineers estimate that 75,000 barrels of oil per acre may be recovered from the rich Wilcox sands, and, as the State owns seventy-nine acres in the drilling zone, the total would be close to 5,925,000 barrels. The State receives one fourth as royalty, which, at the current price of a dollar a barrel, would bring $1,481,250, in addition to the $683,852 bonus already received.
In ten years, from 1928 to January 1938, some 1214 wells were drilled in the Oklahoma City pool. At the extremely low estimate of $65,000 each, they cost producers, for drilling alone, $78,910,000. From these wells over 410,855,249 barrels of oil have been produced, selling from a low of twenty cents to $1.82, and valued at $419,072,353. Strange as it may seem, of all locations drilled only nineteen were dry! Engineers believe that another 180,000,000 barrels from the Wilcox and 40,000,000 from other horizons will yet be recovered. From the new mansion field, made hesitant by the appearance on the north of dry holes, the State received in the eighteen months from June 1936 to January 1938, in bonuses and lease rentals, $1,563,596.42.
Once referred to as the ‘infant industry,’ oil long since kicked out of its swaddling clothes. Discovered by chance in Pennsylvania seventy years ago, it traveled west by southwest along with the other pioneers to make a fortune. In less than forty years it created five billions of new wealth. As I look from my two windows to-night I see brilliantly lighted spires piercing the darkened sky line. On one side, they are oil in the making; on the other, the finished product — new skyscrapers, giants of steel and marble. Oil has cut a wide swath in this city of the plains. It has stalked on stilts into a community, outraged precedent and tradition, worked a visible kindness to the hopes, fears, and longings of some and despoiled openly the accumulated treasures of others. Blatant, boisterous, but buoyant — ‘smelly old crude!’