Some Perspective on the Coming Oil Boom
After documenting some of the excitement and glamour that oil caused in Titus County, we would like to put other aspects of a boom in perspective for those not familiar with the big picture how the boom really worked.
The discovery of oil in Texas was not unlike the discovery of gold in California in the latter 1800s, and had much the same effect on people who heard about it, causing some people to flock to the area in an unrealistic search of fabulous wealth. It was true that operators who brought in producing wells and the lease and royalty holders who held rights to the oil produced made lots of money - much, much more money than could be legally made by any other method in this area at the time.
Times were hard for honest residents of this area and surrounding states. Many had families to support. The price of cotton crashed after World War I, and many had a hard time feeding their families. Many men were illiterate because they often had to quit school at an early age to go to work to help support their family. Many honest, hard working men flocked anywhere there was word of an oil discovery, simply in hopes of finding steady employment at a decent wage. A strong back, not education, was the qualification to work in the oil field. Oil field jobs, even simple manual labor jobs if a man could get one, paid above-average wages and provided steady work. This was particularly true if a man could find employment with a major oil company.
At the same time, there was the low-life class who would rather steal than work. They, too, followed the oil discoveries because massive amounts of money were put into circulation quickly and they had more opportunities to take it from someone else by various means during a boom than anywhere else.
As was the case in many other booms, the East Texas oil boom attracted thousands of men to the area seeking work. There were far more men than jobs, and often dozens of men applied for one job.
News of the East Texas oil field spread around the world. A 16 year old boy who lived in Berlin, Germany heard about the East Texas oil boom and was attracted by its allure. He left home to find employment in the oil fields. He made his way from Berlin to Vera Cruz, Mexico on a tanker. From Vera Cruz he went to Longview by the shortest possible route.
He showed up in the "jungles," a worker's camp near Longview, on Tuesday night, February 17, 1931 willing to take a job at any salary. He also had a plan B. If he failed to find work after visiting the Kilgore and Joiner fields, he planned to go find the nearest German consulate, even though it might mean having to return home to Germany.
We thought you might enjoy reading the following verbatim copy of a letter that Homer W. Belton wrote the Mt. Pleasant Daily Times giving his first-hand description of conditions in the Longview oil field.
Mt. Pleasant Daily Times, Mt. Pleasant, Texas
Tuesday, March 3, 1931
Titus County Man Writes About East Texas Oil Fields
Willow Springs, Near Longview -- I have been employed for two weeks here in the builder's trade, and from my viewpoint it's no place at this time for carpenters or helpers.
Have had from one to six applicants a day for work. Some with pitiful tales of being hungry and "dead broke," no place to sleep, and those with money to buy food have difficulty in finding a bed and lots of them sleep in automobiles. There are very few houses being constructed of the first class, but several shacks of the tourist kind are going up in several places and five men for every job. Labor and food prices are about on par with other near-by places. Room rent is advancing rapidly. I know very little about the oil business here, but from a "hill billy's" viewpoint there is very much activity, boilers, engines, pumps and rig material going in every direction. Some on trucks that are big enough to haul off a courthouse, almost; a few on wagons with sixteen big mules or horses hitched in pairs. Mud holes hold no terrors for them, even if the axles are on the ground. They go where trucks can not move.
Highway police are very alert, and cause much worry to truck drivers, but the trouble has already been done on the roads as any one can see. A new derrick rises above the tree tops in some direction almost every day. But when completed, activity ceases from some cause. Just two wells drilling within my knowledge and several derricks waiting. Yet machinery and material rushes out some where.
There are a number of experienced drillers and "roughnecks" looking for jobs every day. Inexperienced men would have rough-sledding getting in the game here at this time.
The finest set of people live here. They do all they can to take care of strangers looking for work. Are friendly, and will go out of their way to help one. As far out as 12 or 15 miles one will see all kinds of transportation--old men with a camping pack on their bucks, away down the hill of life, looking, hoping to find a place to earn a living-evidently a tragedy some where behind him. All kinds of make-shifts for shelter, a few with nothing but the sighing pines for shelter as far as I could tell.
After work hours, I have watched the hurrying, jostling, God-forgetting throng, and in all this crowd, not one drunk. Yet have decided that the man that milks his cows, gathers his eggs, raises his vegetables away from this noise and hurry is the happiest of the two by a darn long shot. -Homer W. Belton.
Some Gave Their Lives for Oil
By the nature of using heavy equipment, oil drilling and production is a hard, dirty, and dangerous occupation. The drill passes through pockets of natural gas and explosions can occur if the gas reaches an ignition source, which can be as simple as a spark caused by two rocks hitting each other. Things were worse in the 1920s and 1930s, because workplace safety requirements had not been perfected and were not regulated like they are today. It was not uncommon to see belts on running pieces of equipment with no safety guards, and other things that aren't permitted today. Men simply did what they had to do to accomplish the task at hand, which led to fairly frequent injuries and deaths.
On the afternoon of Tuesday, April 28, 1931 fifteen men died and nine others were injured as they tried to harness an oil well blowout on the Sinclair Oil and Refining Company's No. 1 Cole well four and a half miles southeast of Gladewater, Texas. The well had been out of control for more than thirty hours after unexpectedly blowing out on Monday morning. Connections had been assembled and equipment was finally ready to be swung into place to tame the well's flow. Wesley Gish, head of East Texas Sinclair's Tyler office, said another two minutes and the flow would have been shut in. Suddenly a fire, thought to have started from a spark or heat from friction, started under the derrick platform. A blast rocked the equipment, men fell, and the more fortunate ones scrambled to their feet and ran out of reach of the flames. Rescuers braved the fast-spreading flames to drag the injured and the bodies of five dead men from the roaring furnace.
Rig men weren't the only ones who died in the fire. Teamsters were driving several spans of mules and horses in circles scraping out new earthen tanks to catch the spouting oil. Some of the teamsters and their teams were caught as the wild fire raced across the storage lake and cut off their escape.
A circle of blue-white flame that was a quarter-mile-across shot high in the air through the night and could be seen from any part of the east rim oil fields, where nine others had died in the previous ten days.
Sinclair called the M. M. Kinley Company of Houston, pioneers in early oil well firefighting, to quench the flames. The company was owned by Myron M. Kinley and his younger brother Floyd, who started the world's first oil well firefighting and blowout containment company. Red Adair worked for the Kinleys after returning from military service and before striking out on his own to perfect the processes they developed and become the most famous blowout specialist in history.
Molten machinery fell around the top of the well's casing to form a gigantic gas jet. The stream of oil spraying from the well casing was striking either the rotary table or a Kelly joint above it and breaking into a fine mist, scattering the flame and making the fire much harder to control. Before the fire could be extinguished, white hot engines, pumps, the rotary table and other metal had to be cleared from around the fire so heat reflection would not re-ignite the fire when a blast of nitroglycerin was used to douse the flames.
While removing damaged debris from around the flames on May 1, Myron Kinley was injured when a chain he had tied around part of the rig engine pulled an anchor beam loose and dragged the steel beam over his right foot. The beam fractured the small bone in his leg just above the ankle. Myron fell at the edge of the flames and Floyd Kinley, his younger brother, tugged in vain to free him. Water streams were turned on the brothers as heat dried the protective drenching out of their overalls.
Texas Ranger Sergeant Manuel T. (Lone Wolf) Gonzaullas, watching from fifty feet away, quickly shed his pistol belt and ran to help. Glenn Harroun, drilling superintendent, and Walter Boggess, safety director for Harry Sinclair, followed and the four men lifted the beam and freed Kinley dragged him out of the fire. As soon as his leg was stabilized, Kinley went right back to fighting the fire and was able to extinguish it a few days later.
Titus County was fortunate to never have had a major oil-related disaster. However, many men were injured and quite a few were killed one or two at a time in smaller accidents while working in Titus County's oil fields. The accidents varied in nature from having heavy pieces of equipment fall on them to becoming entangled in moving machinery to being scalded over their entire bodies by steam when boilers used to power the drilling equipment exploded.
We did not include the stories of the individual men injured or killed in Titus County in our history of oil field development, but wanted to bring out the fact that this is a dangerous occupation and quite a few paid with their lives to participate in it.
The Texas Railroad Commission and Proration
Before we continue with the story of oil actually being discovered in Titus County, we would also like to explain the term proration, which will come up many times as things progress. It may interest some of our readers to know that the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries, better known as OPEC, who regulates today's world oil prices was patterned after The Texas Railroad Commission's policies of overseeing and regulating Texas oil development and production in the 1930s.
The Texas Railroad Commission was one of the state's most powerful agencies during the latter 1920s and 1930s. In addition to their oversight of railroads and transportation, they were given the authority to oversee development and conservation of Texas' oil resources. Their stated purpose was to prevent the physical waste of Texas' crude oil and natural gas resources. To accomplish this goal, and possibly to do some other things that weren't openly stated, the Railroad Commission issued proration orders for oil and gas fields in the state. These proration orders told oil producers how much oil and natural gas they could extract from the ground during a given period.
Needless to say, producers wanted to run their wells at full-bore in order to produce and sell as much oil and gas as they could, thereby increasing their profits. Sometimes the proration orders seemed to favor certain fields or certain major operators.
On July 2, 1931, Manger M. D. Abernathy of the Longview Chamber of Commerce sent a petition to Governor Steele urging that he enact special legislation in behalf of the East Texas oil industry. The petition was signed by eighteen members of the Chamber's executive board and stated that Gregg County's landowners, business firms, and oil operators were experiencing large financial losses because of prevailing conditions. The petition stated that an equitable and positive proration of production was imperative.
When things didn't improve, East Texas oil producers sued the Texas Railroad Commission in federal court. A three-Judge Federal panel consisting of Circuit Judge J. C. Hutcheson and District Judges Duval West and Randolph Bryant heard the case of Alfred McMillan et al. vs. the Railroad Commission in Houston on June 24, 1931.
They filed their opinion with the clerk of the United States Court on Friday, July 24, 1931. In a sixteen-page opinion, the court held that after examining all recitals of orders and the facts of record, it appeared that while proration orders purported to be physical waste orders, they were actually thinly disguised attempts to regulate market conditions.
The court reviewed Texas statutes defining the Railroad Commission's powers for dealing with waste oil and gas at length, and pointed out that the statutes only had to do with physical waste. They failed to find any statues giving the Railroad Commission authority to issue proration orders, and ruled the proration law void. They further held that since the case would be disposed of on consideration of the question of statutory authority, it was unnecessary to consider the constitutional questions argued.
A new conservation law was passed, and the Railroad Commission moved swiftly on Thursday, August 13, 1931 to comply with the new law. It refused to concede that a federal court had repealed its July proration orders or that they were abrogated by the new statute.
The new law required ten days notice before considering the adoption of conservation orders, so the Railroad Commission issued a hearing notice for August 25, the earliest date possible under the new statute, to consider adoption of rules and regulations to prevent physical waste in East Texas and ascertain whether waste is prevailing or is imminent. All three commissioners signed the notice.
The notice applied exclusively to Upshur, Gregg, Rusk and Smith Counties in East Texas. It said the investigation would be to determine whether there was "physical waste of crude petroleum and natural gas" or whether it was "reasonably imminent." The Commission's authority to prevent waste was claimed to be in the conservation statutes, the common purchaser act, and the pipe line law or amendments. The Commission reserved every form of legal right and power to make conservation orders.
Proration orders have been used ever since both to prevent waste and also to stabilize prices by controlling the amount of oil put on the market at a given time, thereby preventing a glut of oil from causing prices to drop, as had happened to cotton after World War I.
