No industry can boast a history more dramatic, more exciting, than that
of oil. From the discovery of petroleum, on through the development of
its usefulness and the vast expansion of its production, the story is
one of intense human interest, and not even the story of mining has
chapters more stirring or more spectacular.
The average man has never stopped to consider how close he is to the
oil business or how dependent he is upon it; from babyhood, when his
nose is greased with vaseline, to the occasion when a motor hearse
carries him on his last journey, there is not often a day when he fails
to make use of mineral oil or some of its by-products. Ocean liners and
farmers' plows are driven by it; it takes the rich man to his office
and it cleans the shopgirl's gloves; it gives us dominion over the air
and beneath the waters of the sea. We live in a mechanical age, and
without oil our bearings would run hot and civilization, as we know it,
would stop. It is the very blood of the earth.
Oil production is a highly specialized industry, and it has developed a
type of man with a type of mind quite as characteristic as the type of
machinery employed in the drilling of wells. The latter, for instance,
appears at first glance to be crude and awkward, but as a matter of
fact it is amazingly ingenious and extremely efficient, and your
oil-field operator is pretty much the same. Nor is there any business
in which practical experience is more valuable. As a result, most of
the big oil men, especially those engaged in production, are graduates
of the school of hard knocks; they are big-fisted, harsh-handed fellows
who are as thoroughly at home on the "thribble board" of a derrick as
at a desk or a directors' table, and they are quite as colorful as the
oil fields themselves. Their lives are full and vigorous.
Of all the oil excitements, that which occurred in North Texas was
perhaps the most remarkable; at any rate, the world has never witnessed
such scenes as were enacted there. The California gold rush, the great
Alaskan stampede, the diamond frenzies of South Africa and of
Australia, all were epic in their way, but none bred a wilder insanity
than did the discovery of oil in the Red River district.
For one thing, the time was ripe and conditions were propitious for the
staging of an unprecedented drama. The enormous wastage of a world's
war, resulting in a cry for more production, a new level of high prices
for crude, rumors of an alarming shortage of supply, the success of
independent producers, large and small--all these, and other reasons,
too, caused many people hitherto uninterested to turn their serious
attention to petroleum. The country was prosperous, banks were bulging
with money, pockets were stuffed with profits; poor men had the means
with which to gamble and rich men were looking for quicker gains.
Inasmuch as the world had lived for four years upon a steady diet of
excitement, it was indeed the psychological moment for a spectacular
boom.
The strike at Ranger lit the fuse, the explosion came with the first
gush of inflammable liquid from the Fowler farm at Burkburnett. Then,
indeed, a conflagration occurred, the comprehensive story of which can
never be written, owing to the fact that no human mind could follow the
swift events of the next few tumultuous months, no brain could record
it. Chaos came. Life in the oil fields became a phantasmagoria of
ceaseless action and excitement--a fantastic stereopticon that changed
hourly.
"Burk" was a sleepy little town, dozing amid parched wheat fields. The
paint was off it; nothing much more exciting than a crop failure ever
happened there. The main topic of conversation was the weather and, as
Mark Twain said, everybody talked about it, but nothing was done.
Within sixty days this soporific village became a roaring bedlam; every
town lot was leased, derricks rose out of chicken runs, boilers panted
in front yards, mobs of strangers surged through the streets and the
air grew shrill with their bickerings. From a distance, the sky line of
the town looked like a thick nest of lattice battle masts, and at night
it blazed like Coney Island.
The black-lime territory farther south had proven too expensive for
individual operators and small companies to handle, but here the oil
was closer to the surface and the ground was easily drilled, hence it
quickly became known as a poor man's pool. Then, too, experienced oil
men and the large companies who had seen town-site booms in other
states, kept away, surrendering the place to tenderfeet and to
promoters. Of these, thousands came, and never was there a harvest so
ripe for their gleaning.
Naturally a little country town like this could not hold the newcomers,
therefore Wichita Falls became their headquarters. Here there were at
least a few hotels and some sort of office quarters--sheds beneath
which the shearing could take place--and there the herd assembled.
Of course, the cougars followed, and, oh, the easy pickings for them! A
fresh kill daily. Warm meat with every meal. Such hunting they had
never known, hence they gorged themselves openly, seldom quarreling
among themselves nor even bothering to conceal the carcasses of their
prey. It was easier to pull down a new victim than to return to the one
of the day before.
Rooming houses slept their guests in relays, canvas dormitories sprang
up on vacant lots, the lobbies of the hotels were packed with
shouldering maniacs until they resembled wheat pits, the streets were
clogged with motor cars, and the sidewalks were jammed like subway
platforms. Store fronts were knocked out and the floor space was railed
off into rows of tiny bull-pen brokers' offices, and in these companies
by the hundred were promoted. Stock in them was sold on the sidewalks
by bally-hoo men with megaphone voices. It seldom required more than a
few hours to dispose of an entire issue, for this was a credulous and
an elated mob, and its daily fare was exaggeration. Stock exchanges
were opened up where, amid frenzied shoutings, went on a feverish
commerce in wildcat securities; shopgirls, matrons, housemaids gambled
in shares quite as wildly as did the unkempt disreputables from the oil
fields or the newcomers spilled out of every train. People trafficked
not in oil, but in stocks and in leases, the values of which were
entirely chimerical.
But this speculative frenzy was by no means local. Burkburnett became a
name to conjure with and there was no lack of conjurers. These latter
spread to the four points of the compass, and the printing presses ran
hot to meet their demands. A flood of money flowed into their pockets.
While this boom was at its height a new pool, vaster and richer, was
penetrated and the world heard of the Northwest Extension of the
Burkburnett field, a veritable lake--an ocean--of oil. Then a wilder
madness reigned. Daily came reports of new wells in the Extension with
a flush production running up into the thousands of barrels. There
appeared to be no limit to the size of this deposit, and now the
old-line operators who had shunned the town-site boom bid feverishly
against the promoters and the tenderfeet for acreage. Farms and ranches
previously all but worthless were cut up into small tracts and drilling
sites, and these were sold for unheard-of prices. Up leaped another
forest of skeleton towers some ten miles long and half as wide.
But this was the open range with nothing except the sky for shelter, so
towns were knocked together--queer, greasy, ramshackle settlements of
flimsy shacks--and so quickly were they built that they outran the law,
which is ever deliberate. The camps of the black-lime district, which
had been considered hell holes, were in reality models of order
compared with these mushroom cities of raw boards, tar paper, and tin.
Gambling joints, dance halls, and dens more vicious flourished openly,
and around them gathered the scum and the flotsam that crests a rising
tide.
Winter brought the rains, and existence in the new fields became an
ugly and a troublesome thing. Roads there were none, and supplies
became difficult to secure. The surface of the land melted and spinning
wheels churned it; traffic halted, vehicles sank, horses drowned.
Between rains the sun dried the mud, the wind whirled it into
suffocating clouds. Sandstorms swept over the miserable inhabitants;
tornadoes, thick with a burden of cutting particles, harried them until
they cursed the fate that had brought them thither.
But in Wichita Falls, where there was shelter overhead and pavements
underfoot, the sheep shearing proceeded gayly.
Of the men engaged in this shearing business, none, perhaps, had
gathered more wool in the same length of time than the two members of
the firm of McWade & Stoner. Mr. Billy McWade, junior partner, was a
man of wide experience and some accomplishments, but until his arrival
at Wichita Falls he had never made a conspicuous success of any
business enterprise. The unforeseen invariably had intervened to
prevent a killing. Either a pal had squealed, or the postal authorities
had investigated, or a horse had fallen--anyhow, whenever victory had
perched upon his banner something always had happened to frighten the
bird before its wings were fairly folded.
Mr. McWade had finally determined to wipe off the slate and commence
all over. Accordingly, he had selected a new field, and, in order to
make it a real standing start, he had likewise chosen a new name. He
had arrived at Wichita Falls with one suit of clothes and nothing more,
except an assortment of contusions ranging in color from angry red to
black-and-blue, these same being the direct result of repeated
altercations with roughshod members of a train crew. These collisions
McWade had not sought. On the contrary, when, for instance, outside the
yards at Fort Worth his unobtrusive presence on the blind baggage had
been discovered, he had done his best to avoid trouble. He had
explained earnestly that he simply must leave the city by that
particular train. The circumstances were such that no other train would
do at all, so he declared. When he had been booted off he swung under
and rode the trucks to the next stop. There a man with a lantern had
searched him out, much as a nigger shines the eyes of a possum, and had
dragged him forth. He was dragged forth at the second stop, and again
at the third. Finally, the train was halted far out on a lonely prairie
and a large brakeman with gold teeth and corns on his palms held a knee
upon Mr. McWade's chest until the train started. Ignoring the hoarse
warning breathed into his dusty countenance, along with the odor of
young onions, the traveler argued volubly, but with no heat, that it
was vitally necessary to his affairs that he continue this journey
without interruption; then, when the brakeman rose and raced after the
departing train, he sprang to his feet and outran him. McWade was lithe
and nervous and fleet; he managed to swing under the last Pullman at
the same instant his captor reached its rear platform.
It is probable that a blithe determination even such as this would have
eventually succumbed to repeated discouragements, but at the next stop,
a watering tank, aid came from an unexpected quarter. From the roof of
the car another knight of the road signaled, and thither McWade
clambered, kicking off the clutching hand of his former enemy.
The second traveler was a robust man, deliberate but sure of movement,
and his pockets were filled with nuts and bolts. This ammunition he
divided with his companion, and such was their unerring aim that they
maintained their sanctuary for the remainder of the journey.
On the way in to Wichita Falls the stranger introduced himself as Brick
Stoner. He was a practical oil man, a driller and a sort of promoter,
too. It was his last promotion, he confided, that had made it necessary
for him to travel in this fashion. He had many practical ideas, had Mr.
Stoner, as, for instance, the use to be made of a stick with a crook in
it or a lath with a nail in the end. Armed thus, he declared, it was
possible for a man on the roof of a sleeping car to pick up a
completely new wardrobe in the course of a night's ride, provided the
upper berths were occupied and the ventilators were open. Mr. Stoner
deeply regretted the lack of such a simple aid, but agreed that it was
better to leave well enough alone.
McWade warmed to his traveling companion, and they talked of many
things, such as money and finance, sudden riches, and ways and means.
This led them back naturally to a discussion of Stoner's latest
promotion; he called it the Lost Bull well, and the circumstances
connected therewith he related with a subtlety of humor rare in a man
of his sorts. The nature of the story appealed keenly to McWade, and it
ran like this: Stoner had been working in the Louisiana gas fields near
the scene of a railroad accident--three bulls had strayed upon the
right of way with results disastrous to a freight train and fatal to
themselves. After the wreckage had been cleared away, the claim agent
settled with the owner of the bulls and the carcasses were buried in an
adjoining field. This had occurred some time prior to Stoner's arrival;
in fact, it was only by chance that he heard of it.
One day in passing the spot Stoner noticed a slight depression in the
ground, filled with water through which occasional bubbles of gas rose.
Being of an inquisitive turn of mind, he had amused himself with some
experiments and found that the gas was inflammable. Moreover, it gave
off an odor not unlike that of natural gas. It was a phenomenon of
decomposition new to the driller, and it gave him a great idea. He went
to town and very cautiously told of his discovery--a gas seepage, with
traces of oil. His story caused a sensation, and he led several of the
wealthiest citizens to the spot, then watched them in all gravity while
they ignited the gas, smelled it, tasted the soil. They were convinced.
They appointed Stoner their agent to buy the farm, under cover, which
he did at a nice profit--to himself. This profit he spent in riotous
living while a rig was being moved upon the ground. Not until the
derrick was up and the crew, in the presence of the excited
stockholders, came to "spud in," was the true source of that gas
discovered--then the enterprise assumed such a bad odor that bystanders
fled and Mr. Stoner was forced to leave the state without his baggage.
This had been the nature of McWade's and Stoner's meeting; on the roof
of that swaying Pullman they laid the corner stone of their partnership.
Arrived at Wichita Falls, Stoner went into the field and McWade
obtained employment in a restaurant. It was a position of trust, for
upon him developed the entire responsibility of removing the traces of
food from the used dishes, and drying them without a too great
percentage of breakage. It kept McWade upon his feet, but, anyhow, he
could not sit with comfort, and it enabled him, in the course of a
week, to purchase a change of linen and to have his suit sponged and
pressed. This done, he resigned and went to the leading bank, where he
opened an account by depositing a check drawn upon a Chicago
institution for fifty thousand dollars. McWade made it a practice
always to have a few blank checks on hand. Airily, but in all
earnestness, he invited the Texas bank to verify the check at its
convenience.
So many were the strangers in Wichita Falls, so great the rush of new
customers, that the banks had no means of investigating their accounts
except by wiring at their own expense. This was Saturday afternoon,
which gave McWade two days of grace, so he pocketed his new pass and
check books, then mingled with the crowd at the Westland Hotel. He
bought leases and drilling sites, issuing local checks in payment
thereof--nobody could question the validity of those checks with the
evidence of fifty thousand dollars deposited that very day--and on
Sunday he sold them. By the time the Wichita Falls bank opened its
doors on Monday morning he had turned his last lease and had made ten
thousand dollars.
A few days later he and Stoner incorporated their first company. This
was at the height of the town-site boom, and within a few hours McWade
had sold the stock. Thereafter prosperity dogged the pair, and before
long they had made reputations for themselves as the only sure-fire
wildcat promoters in town. McWade possessed the gift of sidewalk
oratory; Stoner posed as the practical field man whose word upon
prospects was final. He it was who did the investigating, the
"experting"; his partner was the bally-hoo.
But competition grew steadily keener, other promoters followed their
lead, and it became necessary to introduce new and original methods of
gathering an audience. Mere vocal persuasiveness did not serve to
arrest the flow of pedestrians, and so McWade's ingenuity was taxed.
But he was equal to the task; seldom did he fail of ideas, and, once he
had the attention of a crowd, the rest was easy.
One morning he and his partner provided themselves with some dice and
several hundred dollars in gold coin. With these they began shooting
craps on the sidewalk in front of their office. Now gambling was taboo,
hence the spectacle of two expensively dressed, eminently prosperous
men squatting upon their heels with a stack of double eagles before
them caused a sensation, and people halted to witness their impending
arrest. Soon traffic was blocked.
The gamblers remained engrossed in their pastime, as well they could,
having thoughtfully arranged the matter with the policeman on duty;
gravely they breathed upon the cubes; earnestly they called upon
"Little Joe," "Long Liz," "Ada," and the rest; silently they exchanged
their stacks of gold pieces as they won or lost.
Calvin Gray, but just arrived from Dallas, looked on at the game with
some curiosity, not divining its purpose, until McWade pocketed the
dice, then mounted a box at the curb and began, loudly:
"Now, gentlemen, that is one way of making money, but it is a foolish
and a hazardous way. There is a much saner, safer method, and I'm going
to tell you about it. Don't pass on until you hear me, for I have a
most incredible story to relate, and you'll be sorry you missed it."
There was a ripple of appreciative laughter, but the crowd pressed
closer as the orator continued:
"You've all heard about these 'doodlebugs' who go around locating oil
with a divining rod, haven't you? And you don't believe in them. Of
course you don't. Neither do I. I can't put any trust in willow twigs,
but--we'll all admit that there are forces of nature that we don't
understand. Who can explain the principle of magnetic attraction, for
instance? What causes the glowing splendor of the Aurora Borealis? What
force holds the compass needle to the north? What makes a carpet tack
jump onto a magnet like"--the speaker paused and stared hard at a
member of his audience who had passed a humorous remark at his
expense--"just like I'll jump you, stranger, if you don't keep your
trap closed. I say who can read those secrets, who can harness those
forces? The man who can has got the world by the tail and a downhill
pull. Now then, for the plot of my story, and it will pay you to do a
week of listening in the next five minutes. Awhile ago an eminent
scientist, unknown to me or to my partner, Mr. Stoner, came into our
office, which is at your backs, one flight up, second door to the
right, and showed us an electrical device he has been working on for
the last eight years. He claimed he had it perfected and that it would
indicate the presence of oil on the same principle that one mineral
attracts another. 'Oil is a mineral,' said he, 'and I think I've got
its magnetic complement. I believe my invention will work.'
"'I'll bet a thousand dollars it won't,' I told him. But what do you
think that pilgrim did? He took me up. Then he bet Stoner another
thousand that I'd made a bad bet." McWade grinned in sympathy with the
general amusement. "We arranged a thorough test. We took him,
blindfolded, through the field, and, believe me or not, he called the
turn on forty-three wells straight and never missed it once. Call it a
miracle if you choose, but it cost Brick and me two thousand iron men,
and I've got ten thousand more that says he can do the trick for you.
I'll let a committee of responsible citizens take a dozen five-gallon
cans and fill one with oil and the rest with water and set them in a
row behind a brick wall. My ten, or any part of it, says his electric
wiggle stick will point to the one with the oil. What do you say to
that? Here's a chance for a quick clean-up. Who cares to take me on?"
From the edge of the crowd Gray watched the effect of this offer.
Divining rods, he well knew, were as old as the oil industry, but he
was surprised to see that fully half of this audience appeared to put
faith in the claim, and the other half were not entirely skeptical. A
man at his side began reciting an experience of his own.
McWade now introduced the miracle worker himself, and Gray rose on
tiptoe to see him. A moment, then he smiled widely, for the eminent
scientist was none other than Mr. Mallow--Mallow, a bit pallid and
pasty, as if from confinement, and with eyes hidden behind dark
goggles. With a show of some embarrassment, the inventor displayed his
tester, a sufficiently impressive device with rubber handles and a
resistance coil attached to a dry battery, which he carried in his
pocket.
Gray looked on as the comedy was played out. It transpired that
Professor Mallow had tested, among other properties, the newest
McWade-Stoner lease, a company to drill which had just been formed
under the title of "The Desert Scorpion," and he really judged from the
behavior of his machine that a remarkable pool underlaid the tract. He
was willing to risk his reputation upon the guaranty that the first
well would produce not less than three thousand barrels a day. He was
interested in the out-come only from a scientific standpoint; he owned
not one single share of stock. Then McWade resumed his sway over the
crowd, and soon shares in "The Desert Scorpion" were selling rapidly.
Shortly after lunch, Mallow and the two partners were seated in the
office upstairs, their work done for the day. Another successful
promotion had gone to the credit of McWade and Stoner; all three were
in a triumphal mood. Mallow was recounting a story that had just come
to his ears.
"Remember that old silver tip that took a stand in front of the Owl
Drug Store a few days back? He called his company 'The Star of Hope.'"
Stoner nodded. "He had a good piece of ground, right adjoining the Moon
Petroleum tract--three wells down to the sand. I wondered how he ever
got hold of it."
"He didn't. That's the big laugh. He didn't own that land at all. He
just had himself a map drawn, with the numbers changed. His ground was
a mile away. He sold his stock in two days, thirty-five thousand
shares, then he blew. Some Coal-oil John, who had plunged for about
three shares, got to studying his own map, found there was something
wrong and let up a squawk. But Silver Tip had faded like the mists of
early morn--thirty-five stronger than he was. Snappy work, eh?"
McWade frowned his disapproval. "Something ought to be done to stop
those crooks or they'll kill us legitimate promoters. You can't sting a
crowd too often in the same spot."
There came a knock at the door, and in answer to an invitation to enter
it opened. The next instant both McWade and Stoner sat erect in their
chairs, with eyes alert and questioning, for at sight of the stranger
Mallow had leaped to his feet with a smothered exclamation, and now
stood with his back to the desk and with his head outthrust in a
peculiar attitude of strained intensity.