Encyclopedia of the Great Plains

OIL BOOMTOWNS

Beginning in the 1890s, oil fever spread expectations of new growth and money across the Great Plains from the eastern parts of Kansas and Texas. Oil seeps and folds and faults in the layered limestone beds of the Flint Hills looked promising to both oil scouts and geology professors at the University of Kansas. Prairie Oil Company, correctly suspected to be allied with the Standard Oil Company of John D. Rockefeller, brought twenty experienced drillers from older fields in Pennsylvania to Neodosha, Kansas. In 1893 they completed the first commercial well in the giant midcontinent collection of fields that would eventually arc southward through Oklahoma to Abilene, Texas. A lively oil industry also developed in the Prairie Provinces.

The Plains were open to high hopes, exploration for oil, and speculative investments. Oil was found in Central Texas, just to the east of the Plains, at Corsicana in 1894. Discovery wells were subsequently drilled in Indian Territory and Texas. As new fields were found, schemes to solicit investment money for oil development became particularly active in Fort Worth, Texas. Later, Calgary, Alberta, developed a similar collection of brokers selling leases and shares in new oil companies, some of which were paper creations aimed at gullible purchasers.

In the United States, the production of oil from states west of the Mississippi River exceeded that of the eastern states by 1904. At that time, interest focused on the Osage Hills in Indian Territory near the Kansas border. A major discovery in the Turner Valley of Alberta, just to the south of Calgary, in 1914 started a rush to develop the large new oil reservoir. In both the Prairie Provinces and Kansas, large amounts of natural gas were also found. Towns and cities began to enjoy heat and lighting from natural gas as pipelines fanned out across the Plains. With new discoveries, especially in North Texas and the Permian Basin of West Texas, a chain of booming oil towns appeared from the far southern reaches of the Great Plains to its northern margins.

Black-and-white photographs taken in the oil boomtowns show landscape images of raw wood, angular steel, and legions of grimy, exhausted men staring blankly into the camera. Heavily laden wagons threaded for miles along rutted roadways hauling pipe and supplies. Other pictures of intensely worked early fields show scars, scrapes, roads, trenches, and blast holes in the land similar to some of the battlefields of World War I. The boomtowns filled with men who worked, slept, ate and imbibed, celebrated, waited for mail, prayed with oil field preachers, and occasionally fought each other. Women and children found it difficult to fit into these places of bad housing, incessant noise, invasive lights, dangerous machinery, fires, toxic flammable gases, explosions, unsanitary conditions, and high prices, but surprising numbers of them endured the hardships of oil field life as they migrated with their husbands or fathers from one new field to the next. However, the harshness of such a life was reflected in high divorce rates, especially in the early development periods of isolated fields like the Permian Basin.

raw wood, angular steel, and legions of grimy, exhausted men staring blankly into the camera. Heavily laden wagons threaded for miles along rutted roadways hauling pipe and supplies. Other pictures of intensely worked early fields show scars, scrapes, roads, trenches, and blast holes in the land similar to some of the battlefields of World War I. The boomtowns filled with men who worked, slept, ate and imbibed, celebrated, waited for mail, prayed with oil field preachers, and occasionally fought each other. Women and children found it difficult to fit into these places of bad housing, incessant noise, invasive lights, dangerous machinery, fires, toxic flammable gases, explosions, unsanitary conditions, and high prices, but surprising numbers of them endured the hardships of oil field life as they migrated with their husbands or fathers from one new field to the next. However, the harshness of such a life was reflected in high divorce rates, especially in the early development periods of isolated fields like the Permian Basin.

In the 1920s the large oil companies began building camps for workers and families in an attempt to improve living conditions in the new fields. Life in these camps was preferred over the tents or boomtown housing, even though most camps only provided a few rows of houses painted white with green or orange roofs. Outdoor toilets were the rule, but even these were unavailable in many camps and towns, leaving people to their own devices, usually vacant lots or empty fields. Contagious diseases, including tuberculosis and diphtheria, spread rapidly in such conditions.

Many people came to the boomtowns to make money in service occupations, most of which were as legitimate as running retail stores, hotels, and restaurants and teaching school. Some came to practice lucrative illegal activities such as bootlegging liquor, gambling, and prostitution. "Jake joints" sold Jamaican Ginger, an illegal alcoholic product well known for paralyzing the legs of those who drank too much of it.

The Turner Valley of Alberta had its own collection of oil boomtowns such as Longview (dubbed Little New York) and Royalties (Little Chicago), with seedy suburbs such as Banana Flats and Whiskey Row. The valley quickly filled with development. One area of the valley, with its numerous gas flares, became known as Hell's Half Acre. The same name described a few blocks of saloons in Fort Worth, Texas.

For the Great Plains, oil and gas development meant frontiers in a new guise. Some towns appeared and became small cities; others quickly disappeared. The fields needed a few larger places to serve as regional oil field support centers for equipment and services. Examples include Odessa, Texas, and Wichita, Kansas. Others, like Fort Worth, Texas, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, and Calgary, Alberta, became even larger oil and gas logistical centers, with central supply houses, technical services, and homes for families as workers were able to drive farther to work in the fields on improved highways. At the eastern margins of the Great Plains, two major management and finance centers–Dallas, Texas, and Tulsa, Oklahoma– became the hometowns of wealthy oil investors who founded their own corporations– Harry Sinclair, J. Paul Getty, and H. L. Hunt, among others. The population shifts prompted by oil development jolted Great Plains farm and ranch people, as did the grimy landscapes filled with manic activity and so completely defined by their function that their form and appearance became a kind of ingrained tattoo.

Boomtowns such as Borger, Texas, and Kiefer, Oklahoma, earned reputations for violence, but most injuries and deaths were caused by dangerous jobs around large, moving equipment or explosions in the oil fields rather than from fighting in the streets or saloons. A distinction can be made between some Texas and Oklahoma towns, with their whiskey celebrations in saloons and dance halls, and more staid Kansas towns, with their clear ideas of propriety and personal conduct. Everywhere, life in the fields discovered after World War II was milder than in the early boomtowns.

The early Plains boomtowns, mainly those in Texas and Oklahoma, became a popular setting for fictional stories. A singular theme, the corrupting influence of oil money, was emphasized repeatedly in novels and movies, with iconography and imagery drawn from the stereotypical early boomtowns. This simplified representation became the standard view of all oil towns across the Great Plains. The 1941 Hollywood movie Boom Town, set in Burkburnett, Texas, is typical. The central figure drills his first well with stolen money, rejects his oil field partner and his wife, and enjoys the sweet life with lots of booze and a new romantic liaison. After losing his fortune, he sheds the evil of oil money with the help of his old friend and long-suffering wife, then returns to the true values once again to drill another well.

See also FILM: Oil Field Films / INDUSTRY: Petroleum, Canada; Petroleum, United States.

Gary L. Thompson Norman, Oklahoma

Landrum, Jeff. A Photographic Essay of the Burkburnett Oil Boom. Wichita Falls TX: Humphrey Printing Company, 1982.

Olien, Roger M., and Diana Davids Olien. Oil Booms: Social Change in Five Texas Towns. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1982.

Rister, Carl. Oil: Titan of the Southwest. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1949.