Oklahoma Passage Telecourse #114 Petroleum & Mining - Unit 3, Lesson 4

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. . . . . . . George married a wonderful woman in Elizabeth, and they had a little boy. Daniel. George. Daniel wants to say good night. That's my boy. Did you have fun with my little man? I know I share him. Good night, little Danny. I've got to get some fresh air. Oh, you know I sleep a little boy, aren't you? I got some lipstick on your face. You know I'll never cease to be amazed how quickly things change. One day, I'll be able to see you. I'll be able to see you. I'll be able to see you. You know I'll never cease to be amazed how quickly things change. One day is golden. The next dark is night. Like one of those summer storms, it seems to come out of nowhere. One minute the sun is shining. Then suddenly the wind grows cold, and the day closes down gray like a sheen. Over 29th, 1929.

The day the stock market crashed, the centumerica into the Great Depression. What happened? The George Tom. Boom and bust. Soaring success and sudden failure. As George Benton discovered, Oklahoma's economy has always been cyclical. A personality developed in large part by the influence of the extractive industries, mining and petroleum. It's a heritage that can be traced to prehistoric times, when neolithic peoples mined flint for tools and weapons and harvested salt from the river flats. Members of the five civilized tribes continued that tradition, especially salt extraction, which became a major industry that attracted both Sequoia and John Ross. John Ross's brother was drilling a saltwater well in 1859 when he hit oil. Disgusted at his bad luck, he plugged the well and looked elsewhere for saltwater. But the major chapter of extractive mineral production begins in 1871,

and it does not involve oil. It was coal. Dr. Kenny Brown, a professor of history at Panhandle State, describes that early mining frontier. My name is Kenny Brown. I teach history at Panhandle State University. I've done some work in the history of coal mining in Southeastern Oklahoma, when I was working with the Italians in Oklahoma, the book on the Italians. Mining has always played an important role in the history and economy of Oklahoma. The first explorers who came through, beginning with Coronado, who came through the 1540s in search of gold, was, of course, not necessarily searching for it here, but was passing through hunting for it. The other explorers who came along Bernard De La Harp in 1719, when he was exploring eastern Oklahoma for his fur trading industry, noted outcroppings of coal in Southeastern Oklahoma.

And other American explorers at the time of the Louisiana purchase with Thomas Jefferson in 183, Jefferson wrote about the salt mountain, which could have been a big salt plain in northwestern Oklahoma. And the other American explorers, such as Thomas Nuttall in 1819, who came out from Fort Smith in eastern Oklahoma, and others made note of the various outcroppings of coal. When the five-cellized tribes came into eastern Oklahoma, they found seepage of oil in various places that they used as medicine and fuel in some cases. But the real tapping of the mineral resources did not come, of course, into the advent of the well-road and introduction of white settlers into an territory. Among the various mineral resources, there are three,

I would call the big three for Oklahoma, coal mining, oil and gas industry, and the lead in zinc mines. Of course, there are other important resources in addition to those, but those are what I would refer to as the big three. The coal mining started just after the Civil War. There had been, again, several notations of the coal outcroppings in eastern Oklahoma. The railroad survey of 1853, the Emil Weeks Whipple, was in charge of recorded several outcroppings. And then in the late 1860s, James James Callister, who was a Confederate colonel in the Civil War from Arkansas, lived with a man who had traveled through Indian territory building roads, and he told McCallister about outcroppings of coal and where many of these were and gave him some of the notebooks.

McCallister, therefore, got involved in the mercantile industry, opened up a store of his own at the crossroads where the Texas road met the California Trail in what is now the northern part of the town of McCallister. And he moved there purposely in order to develop the coal industry. In 1872, as the MK&T was building through eastern Oklahoma, he went to Parsons, Kansas, with the load of the coal, and showed it to the railroad officials there and induced them to pass close to his store. They probably would have come pretty close anyway, because they were following the Texas road. But nonetheless, that was how the coal was first tapped in the callister, conveniently married a Chickasaw Indian woman, which made him also eligible for rights in the Choctaw Nation. And he staked a mile, square mile claim for the production of coal, and ultimately sold his company to the railroads.

By early 1870s, there were several mines already in operation by 1890s. It was a major production at the peak of production. In 1920, Oklahoma was producing almost 5 million tons of coal a year. At one point, there were 8,000 miners in southeastern Oklahoma, involved in the coal mining industry. In the 1920s production fell off considerably because of labor troubles, and the mining industry, coal mining industry, was never the same, although it was revived during World War II to an extent. And much later in the 1960s, some of the last mines were closed. In 1972, the last shaft mine was closed. And from that point on, most of the coal mining has been done has been in northeastern Oklahoma, rather than southeastern Oklahoma. And it's been strip hits rather than shaft mines. And with the development of the coal industry, of course, came numerous intruders into the inventory who had permits to be there as workers.

But it was part of that entire economic development that brought in more and more outsiders and led to the breaking up of the five civilized tribes and the allotment of land. Italians, Lithuanians, Poles, all kinds of immigrants from Europe came into the area and began working in the mining industry. Many of them left after a few years, went back home with plenty of money to take back to Italy or to Lithuania. And so it brought about a very colorful time period with a real mix of different nationalities. Throughout much of Oklahoma, there's not much of an immigrant group or an ethnic background or color, but the southeastern part of the state had quite an ethnic population. The remnants are still there, of course. The third major category of mineral production in Oklahoma were the lead in zinc mines in northeastern Oklahoma, part of what was called a tri-state district with Missouri and Kansas. The discoveries there were much earlier in the mining there that went on the 1870s and 80s.

It was already an important production in that field. But it wasn't until 1890s that major discoveries were found in Indian territory. And a few years later, the production geared up between 1918 and 1945, Oklahoma was the leading producer of zinc in the United States. And this field was the most important field in the entire world. By the mid-1940s production declined in the 1970s. In fact, in 1970 itself, the last mine shut down. So the field was not producing at this point. Now, there are many other types of mineral production in Oklahoma from clay to limestone to granite rock, bentonite clay, which is used often in oil well servicing. And there are also, of course, perhaps one of the most important resources is the gypsum in western Oklahoma.

There are an estimated 50 billion tons of gypsum underlying western Oklahoma, which, at the current level of use of gypsum, would last the world 5,000 years. If that were the only source available, and if we can mine all of it, related to those gypsum deposits are also massive salt deposits in Oklahoma, amounting to 30 trillion tons available for use in the future, which we barely, barely begin to tap. The gypsum production has been important in recent years. We've ranked as high as fifth in gypsum production in the United States. And so it will probably continue to be an important resource as time goes by. Now, there have been traces of other minerals found, copper, a little bit of gold, but not enough to get excited about. And the turn of the century, when the land lottery occurred in southwestern Oklahoma, there was a gold rush to the Wichita Mountains. There had been some prospecting going on earlier.

The army was forced to push the people out of the hills, which taught mountains when they went in. But in 191, when they were allowed to go in and homestead, the minimum took claims in the mountains and actually dug some shafts, built some smelters that virtually no gold was found, or there was a lot of hull of blue about it. Gold production may not have added much to the economy of early Oklahoma, but the search for it did. Thousands of miners scoured the Wichita Mountains. Hundreds of shafts were begun. And one town, Mirrors, was a real gold mining boom town for a short while. On the other side of the state, another boom. One that would last much longer was also just beginning the oil boom. Dr. Paul Lambert traces those crude beginnings. Hello, my name's Paul Lambert. I'm Executive Director of the Oklahoma Heritage Association. I'm a capital grant today with the oil derrick right in front of it. That is one of the Derrick's remaining here.

There used to be in the 1930s and into the 40s a veritable forest of Derrick's in this area. Oklahoma, of course, has long been known as an oil state. And our oil heritage, if you will, began as early as 1859. The same year that the industry began in Pennsylvania with Edwin Drake's well at Titusville. It went in Indian territory then too. It was an accident, however. Lewis Ross, the brother of Cherokee Chief John Ross, had assault works near Salina in eastern Oklahoma. And he was drilling a deep well looking for of all things, salt water. Instead, he hit oil, a 10 barrel a day well, that produced for almost a year. This was more of a curse than a blessing because he had no market for the oil other than this, his cattle dip or axle grease, that sort of thing. No railroads in the area, no pipelines, no way to market the crude. Pennsylvania, however, had major metropolitan areas nearby. They had a river system that could transport the crude by river barge and so forth.

And thus, the oil boom of North America took root and began in Pennsylvania rather than Indian territory. The Civil War stopped all further oil drilling. After the war, there was interest in the region. They knew that there was oil here because of Ross's well, but also oil seeps. Around many of the seeps, spas were developed because it was viewed as having medicinal properties. People would bathe in these spas with petroleum interspersed into the water. They would drink it. It was seen as a great elixir of health and so forth. So, we knew oil was here in what was then Indian Territory, Eastern Oklahoma today. The oilmen came into the region in the 70s and 1980s and into the 90s. And actually negotiated leases with the Indian tribes. Oftentimes, the federal government would interfere, void leases, cause them to be really negotiated ostensibly to protect the Indians. Frequently, they caused them to get worse deals than the Indians themselves negotiated.

But they still had the problem, even when they drilled some successful wells, that there was no market of any kind here, of any size, and no pipelines or railroads in order to provide a means of marketing the product. So, they would shut the wells in and go on. In 1897, in Bartlesville, Michael Cuddahay drilled a well, which became known as the Nellie Johnstone number one. And as had been the case earlier, at first, not an adequate means of marketing the oil that well was shut in. It was a producer, about a 50 barrel a day well. They shut it in in 1897. Waiting for the time when a railroad would build into Bartlesville, which they knew was inevitable at that point. While they were waiting, however, the well leaked, incidentally, a little stream of crude down to the cany river.

And in the winter, when the river was frozen over, students would sometimes build fires to keep warm while they would play and skate down there. One time they built a fire, went all the way up, the little stream of crude caught the well on fire, and the kids all ran home, and no one never knew. Until later years, who was there, it turned out that Nellie Johnstone herself was part of that group that set the well on fire. It was, of course, reopened. And in 1899, when the railroad built into Bartlesville, all of a sudden, these well, this well, and others that were drilled, became commercially successful, they could ship the oil to Nyoda Shae Kansas, where a small refinery had been built. The rush to Bartlesville was on. And Bartlesville became the first boom town in Oklahoma, the first oil boom town. Derrick's ball through the community and in the country countryside. Bartlesville later became the headquarters for the development of the fabulous Osage oil fields. And people like Frank and Ellie Phillips were drawn to that community.

They later, of course, established Phillips petroleum company. The Osage nation was rich in oil. Numerous pools throughout what became Osage County after statehood were uncovered during the years from 1900 into the 1920s. The Osage Indians had retained as a tribe the mineral rights under the former reservation. And as a result, the Osage Indians became the wealthiest indians in the world. And they, of course, that attracted many others who came to try to relieve them of some of their wealth. Honest merchants, but also many unscrupulous types, came to the area. Many of the Osages, however, managed to retain their wealth, invest wisely, and become very outstanding and prominent citizens, including opera star or ballet performers.

General Clarence Tinker, of course, was an Osage for him. Tinker Field was later named the many outstanding Osages in our history. In addition to the development in the Osage area, oilmen from this early success were spurred to explore many other areas. A strike near Tulsa at a place called Red Fork attracted a lot of attention. The well, the discovery well, turned out to be not to be such a huge well. But at the time, the people who were promoting it did little things like they would cap it and let the gas pressure build up, and then when spectators would come out, they would let that go, and the oil would sprout over the dairy, and people would go away excited, and what have you. So lease traders swarmed into the area, and oil prospectors began looking throughout that whole region. Soon thereafter, oil was found on the Uncle Bill Lowery farm at Cleveland, just across the Arkansas River in Pont E County.

And the Cleveland Field became a major find, and it attracted more oilmen from around the country, including George Getty, as I mentioned earlier. George Getty came in originally to sell insurance in the area, but he became intrigued with the oil business, founded his own oil company. His son came in to help, and actually worked on the well as his son, and of course, was Jay Paul Getty, who went on to become known as the world's wealthiest individual. So the Getty started in Oklahoma. This search ultimately led to the discovery of the first giant field in Oklahoma, Glen Pughle, which was just south of Tulsa, south in a little west. Robert Galbreath and his partner, Frank Chessley, began drilling a well on the Ida Glen farm. It was a wildcat fairly far removed from any existing production, but he felt the area looked promising.

However, as they continued to drill with no results, again running out of money, this was really drilled on a proverbial shoestring. They got to 1,300 feet and had to sit down and make a decision about whether they could continue or not. They finally decided that they could manage to afford to go 100 more feet, and then they would have to abandon the project and give up. Well, less than 20 feet further down in the hole, they hit a well. It's terrific well, and this was the discovery of Glen Pughle. Glen Pughle was explored by many prospectors and wildcatters, developed rapidly, and it was a huge field. Tremendous production, ultra-high quality crude as well, and also what made it so attractive is that it was relatively shallow. Anywhere from 1,700 to 1,500 to 2,000 feet max,

you've had tremendous production. Glen Pughle had a downside, and that should have been tremendously profitable field, and people didn't make great money from it. But the production was so great that supply vastly outstripped the demand, and particularly the transportation, the capability of moving it to market, so that really Glen Pughle oil never really got much over 40 cents a barrel, and most of itself around 30 cents a barrel. Of course, 30 cents in those days is significantly more than now, but still incredibly cheap for such high-quality crude. This spurred, however, tremendous exploration. The Glen Pughle was internationally renowned. Further exploration then led to strikes at near Drumrite by Tom Slick, known as the King of the Wildcatters on the Frank Wheeler Farm. The Drumrite Strike, of course, drew by the thousands of other lease hounds

and prospectors into the area, and that field soon grew dramatically. It became known as, ultimately, as the greater Cushing Field, as a number of major pools in the area were discovered. Cushing was so prolific that between the years 1912 and 1919, 3 percent of the world's production of crude oil came from Cushing Field. And it really sort of is mind-boggling when you think that Glen Pughle was still producing, or the Osage Fields and other areas, and also the Heelton Field, which we'll talk about in a moment. If you take their production into it, it would be amazing to think about what percentage of the world's production was being produced right here in Oklahoma. Amazing. Well, Cushing had some of the same problems as Glen Pughle. The production was so tremendous.

You could wells that would produce 10, 12, 15,000 barrels per day. Tremendous storage problems. They had the 50,000 barrel storage tanks built, that sort of thing. And some of the problems that that caused were fire. One of the problems was fire. In August of 1914, a tremendous thunderstorm swept through the Cushing Field, lightning bolts ignited numerous storage tanks and even storage lakes, but certainly the tanks, and you had an inferno that raged. Maybe a million barrels of oil consumed in this particular episode. And this happened in other fields where you had this kind of vast above-ground storage of crude oil. In Northern Oklahoma, E.W. Marlin, who later became governor, and built the incredible Marlin mansion, which is still in Ponca City and can be toured, was exploring in and around Kay County and also in the Osage.

One of the fields that he played a major role in bringing in was Burbank. Burbank became one of the largest oil fields in Oklahoma. It was in Western Osage County and spilled over into Kay County. He also then did a lot of exploration in Kay County and on in the Noble County area. Along with many other oilmen of the day, Lou Wentz was another outstanding oilmen who developed that area. A very interesting find was made just south of Tonkawa in what became known as the Three Sands Oil Field. A little town of Three Sands also sprung up right in the middle of the field, which was a very interesting boom town. What made Three Sands so interesting was it only covered an eight square mile area. But within that eight square miles, there were 14 different producing horizons or oil sands located. So as an extremely prolific field, you could just drilled in this small area and could find all sorts of different levels at which you could produce oil.

There were three of the sands that were highly prolific, however, and hence the name Three Sands applied to the field. It was not uncommon at all to see three different derics virtually with interlocking legs clumped together, each one tapping one of the three different sands at the same time. The developments at Three Sands also, you had in Northwest Oklahoma, the Garber Field, known as the Wonder Field at the time that came in in 1917, produced extremely high-grade crude, almost so high that they claim they had to do very little refining of it in some instances. Then in the early 20s, in 1923, the discovery well of the Wilwoka Pool, which ultimately became the beginning of what was known as the Greater Seminole Oil Field. The Greater Seminole ultimately expanded into five different counties, the heart of which, of course, was Seminole County.

This was the greatest oil field yet in Oklahoma, and one of the greatest in the history of the nation. The major pools at Seminole, the Seminole City Field, Earlsboro, Cromwell, Bowlegs, the Little River Field, on and on. As it turned out, there were 59 separate producing pools in what became the Greater Seminole Field, a remarkable producing area, really amazing. That was followed in 1928 with the discovery well, drilled by the Indian Territory Illuminating Oil Company in Oklahoma City. The Oklahoma City Field burst onto the national oil scene in a big way. This was the most prolific of all the Oklahoma oil fields in terms of crude oil production. The peak production in Oklahoma City came in 1935 when over 60 million barrels of oil were produced from the Oklahoma City Field.

From 1897 to the 1930s, Oklahoma's economy was studded by progressively larger oil discoveries, Glen Pool, Osage, Three Sand, Seminole, and Oklahoma City. Each attracted capital to a largely colonial economy, each created jobs, and each created wealth, not only for oil men and suppliers, but also for landowners, whites, inden and black. While the accumulation of wealth was gradual, the most immediate impact following each new discovery was in the boom towns. In some cases existing communities exploded overnight, and others new towns sprang up fully grown from the Blackjack-covered hills. Dr. Lambert turns to this colorful chapter of urban development. We've all read about the silver and gold mining boom towns of Colorado and Nevada, the cattle towns and Kansas, the cattle boom towns. But Oklahoma, well into the 20th century, had boom towns equally as colorful as not more so.

As I mentioned, Bartlesville was the first, but some that came later worked really amazing. The town of Kiefer in the Glen Pool, for example, was tremendously rough. What would happen is you would have a town that maybe had 50 or 100 people before the boom, or maybe a town would spring up where there had been no community at all. Because this was a point the railroad decided to put in some facility for loading and oil and offloading supplies. Town would build up around that. Almost overnight you might have 10,000 people there, or more. The business was very labor intensive. You had to have lots of people to build the wooden rigs of that era. You had to have people to build storage tanks. You had the people who worked on the rigs and on and on. Then you had all the people who came to swarm to the booms to make money from the workers.

As a result, almost overnight, flimsy sheet iron buildings or buildings built of cheap wooden structures with a little tar paper thrown over them would spring up. You had oil field hotels using that word loosely. Most of them were cot houses as they were called. When spring up, cafes, pool halls, beer halls, illegal gambling dens, houses of prostitution, anything you can think of, as well as more legitimate type businesses, would suddenly spring up to market their wares to this throng of humanity that suddenly appeared. These people were paid relatively well for that era. They were paid in cash usually on Friday once a week. Said many to spend, many of them were single, men who followed the booms, or if they were married, they tended to leave their family at home because of the difficulty of life in these places.

So what did they face when they arrived at a boom tent? Well, where am I going to stay? Available rooms were quickly rented. Oftentimes they would acquire a tent and have to pay rent for some space to pitch their tent to sleep in. There are cases where you see pictures of tents pitched on tops of buildings and they had to rent that space. People also, farmers would convert chicken, chicken, and any spare rooms they had to rent. People slept in theaters, even on pool tables. You would rent space to sleep on or in some cases under pool tables and there were instances where men learned how to cook their legs so that people could walk around and play pool while they were sleeping underneath the table. So if you manage to find accommodation of some kind, or then the problem of food, what are you going to eat? Well, all sorts of greasy spoon, cafes sprung up.

People reported having to wait maybe an hour to get into them because the demand was so great. The food of dubious quality and cleanliness at high prices. There's the story of one orfiel worker who went into one of these places and asked him what he wanted. He said he wanted to bottle soda pop and a hard boiled egg. She said well that's a rather odd order and he says yes but that's two things you can't get your filthy hands on. The expression greasy spoon that we think of now became common in those days. Tomane palaces, all that sort of stuff. Food was a problem and continued to be in all the boomtands. Sanitation systems, sewer systems were non-existent in many cases. Outhouses were put up where more based on convenience rather than on sanitary considerations.

Disease as a result oftentimes would sweep through these boomtands. You had obviously the problem of law enforcement. In most cases, if there was, if it was an existing community, the existing law enforcement was simply overwhelmed with this in blocks of humanity. As a result, they had to try to do what they could and look the other way in many cases. Simply couldn't handle it. This kind of money attracted hoodlums, people who were willing to kill somebody to take their money. And you had a lot of violence of this type. People simply being knocked over the head and robbed. The key for the town I mentioned before had a number of large oil tanks for storing crude oil right behind Main Street. Years later, when those tanks were drained, a number of skeletons were found there where people had been simply killed and dumped in the storage tank.

And no one knew what happened to them until maybe 15, 20, 30 years later. And this also happened at Cromwell and other places. Mineral extraction has had a major role in shaping the personality of Oklahoma and that influence is not ended. Well, the coal mines are largely shut down. Oil and gas exploration continue with that old spirit of wild abandon and excitement. The Russian to the deep anodarko gas basin in the late 1970s and early 80s was yet another example of oil field fever. The search has even returned to the old fields where new technologies have made secondary recovery of stripper wells cost effective. On any given day, giant drilling rigs can be spotted on the Oklahoma landscape searching for pockets of oil and gas still buried miles under the earth's surface. The mining and oil industries have added much to the history of our state by understanding that influence by learning to cope not only with the booms but with the busts. We can use the wealth of the land more effectively for the benefit of all.

Until next time, I'm your host Dean Lewis with Oklahoma Passage. Welcome to Oklahoma Passage. Welcome to Oklahoma Passage. Major funding of Oklahoma Passage was made possible by the Samuel Robert

Noble Foundation. Phillips Petroleum Foundation. Grace B. Kerr Fund, the McCastlin Foundation, and the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Additional funding provided by the McMayan Foundation and the OETA Foundation. These organizations invite you to join them in celebrating Oklahoma's past and future.