Cool enough. Just on the edge of too cold. The spring sunlight not quite blue but the translucent curtain filtered gray of a not quite foggy day. All quiet. Just myself and Roy Brower, the dog from Labrador. Both in our outdoor chairs watching. Me the birds, the deep Blue Jays coming in looking for bread crumbs or peanuts. Deigning the bird feeder, the old dinner plate mounted on a post amongst the blood red geraniums, it’s too low for them. They never touch the ground. No, the old plate is for the perching birds. The tiny Towhees and the Crested Tits dainty in their habits. The Western sparrows with their little black and white caps if they are males, the dun colored female only coming down when they hear the “All Safe.”
In the red blossomed Trumpet Vine the married pair of Mocking birds flutter around keeping a sharp eye for the Crow, the Thief of Eggs. The Crows drift along in a stately manner like WWII B-17’s until like Focke-Wolfs, the Mocking birds swoop down to attack.
Down in the lower garden a trio of Ameruacana hens drift in convoy, scratching and rooting for bugs and assorted insects or grubs. From the rear their heads down their tails looking like the high pitched roofs of Balinese Temples I have seen.
Roy lifts his head. Swinging his nose around about, gently sniffing the breeze. Does he smell the delicate perfume of the yellow Angel’s Trumpet blossom, perhaps. The slightly sour odor of Rabbits’ Bush is also on the breeze.
By some quirk of atmosphere there isn’t a sound, not even the usual clapping sound of the big oak tree scraping its leaves.
Roy an I mused about lunch but thought better of it. I stayed in my chair for a good half hour gazing absently at the garden and its parade of birds. The gift of Reverie is a blessing divine, and it is conferred most abundantly on those who lie in Hammocks or drive alone in cars. Or sit in backyard chairs. The mind swims, binding itself to whatever flotsam comes along. To old driftwood faces and voices of the past, to places and scenes once visited, to things not seen or done, perhaps only dreamed.
Elwood, his name was Elwood Cooper and he owned the large Elwood Ranch in what is now Goleta and the adjacent hills. His first name lingers in several local place names including the oil fields. There are Elwood Canyon, Elwood School, Elwood Station Road, and a Goleta neighborhood. He ran cattle. He was a horticulturist and was best known for importing millions of Ladybugs from China to California which wiped out the black fungus that was killing walnut trees and saving that industry. He also imported the first Blue Gum tree which he though might be a good source of lumber. There are still thousands of Eucalyptus planted in wind breaks all over Southern California. This turned out not to be a wise choice.
After the death of his wife in 1909 he sold out and lived the rest of his life at Santa Barbara’s Arlington hotel. The ranch was sold to the Doty family who kept the business until 1921 when it was foreclosed, auctioned off and was essentially dormant until 1927 when an exploratory oil well was drilled there by a company from Texas.
The first oil discovery in the area was in July 1928, by Barnsdall Oil and the Rio Grande Company, who drilled their Luton-Bell Well No. 1 to a depth of 3,208 feet into the Vaqueros Sandstone. After almost giving up they not only struck oil, but had a significant gusher, initially producing 1,316 barrels per day. This discovery touched off a period of oil leasing and wildcat well drilling on the Santa Barbara south coast, from Carpinteria to Gaviota. During this period, the Mesa Oil Field was discovered within the Santa Barbara city limits, about 12 miles east of the Elwood field. The Elwood Field contained approximately 106 million barrels of oil, almost all of which has now been removed. The field has been abandoned.
Elwood piers and wells. Elwood Field, Goleta, CA
Barnsdall moved Bruce up to Elwood in early 1929. Almost all the wells were being whipstocked trying to reach the oil sands covered by hundreds of feet of seawater in the Santa Barbara channel. His expertise was in high demand. The drill strings were boring diagonally down in to the field like the tentacles of a squid. The whipstocks themselves never saw the light of day, snuck in at night because no one wanted the competing oil company on the neighbor’s lease to know just what was going on.
The business was still the wild wild west. There was no government control on production. Small producers took no prisoners they just drilled and drilled. Since wells typically produced the greatest amount of oil when they were still new, the impetus was to never stop drilling. The big companies were no better. Over production was taking its toll at the gas pump but no one in the business cared. Neither did the Hoover government. The public liked the idea of .22 cent gasoline.
Times were still pretty flush during the postwar boom. Car companies were turning out automobiles as fast as they could and Ford, especially Ford with its emphasis on utility and low price was driving car production at a breakneck pace. In 1929 Henry Ford raised wages to $7.00 a day. The other auto makers promptly sued him citing unfair labor practices.
Wages in the oil fields were also high, seven to eight dollars a day. The length of a tour was now just 8 hours down from twelve. Things were better for Bruce and Eileen because he was able to spend a little more time at home though it also meant that the rigs now required two crews a day to make hole. As a tool pusher he was now required to supervise both crews not one.
It was rough work. Bruce wasn’t out of danger yet. In 1930, 67 oil workers were killed on the job. Blowouts, falling rigging, toppling derricks, explosions and fire were always a danger. There was rarely at time when there wasn’t something burning in the fields. Barnsdall, operating all over California sent them back to Oildale. a place where they lived for nearly a year. Bruce came home one day with the skin ripped from his fingertips to nearly his elbow peeled back. At the rig they had smeared some grease on the open wound, laid the skin back down and wrapped it in a dirty undershirt and sent him home. My grandmother opened it up, cleaned the dirt and stickers off, slathered it with Vaseline and wrapped in in a clean bandage which she cut from a sheet. He went back to work the same day. They were both tough people.
In 1929/30 they lived in Bakersfield in a house for the first time that was big enough for the whole family, Bruce Eileen and the three kids. It had enough bedrooms for each kid which was the first time that had happened. It was considered a luxury by the children because no one had to sleep on the couch or the screened porch. Wonder of wonder it had indoor plumbing. A faucet in the kitchen and a bathtub. No toilet though, you still had to use the “Backhouse” to do your business.
Robert Mariel and Barbara Hall, 1930. Hall Family photo
Bruce was getting a reputation for knowing what a well was doing. He could tell by smell and taste what was happening a thousand feet down. He could hear in the creaks and groans, what she was thinking. He had the drillers sense of where she was going. Kneeling on the platform you would have seen him sniffing at the casing head, taking a finger and tasting the liquid mud used to lubricate the drill string. How hot was the mud flooding up out of the well? What did it smell like, was that hint of rotten eggs? When traces of crude came up getting a little on the fingertips and touching it with the tongue to help predict its gravity, was in light and sweet or thicker, could it be chewed. There was even a difference when you wiped your hand on a rag, did it soak right in or stick to the surface. Was there gas coming up, how much pressure was pushing it? There were a thousand indicators, the well was telling you its story. It had to be read on the spot for there was little scientific measurement in the oil patch just yet.
He always said that the kind of things you see in a movie, wells blowing up or a gusher blowing vast amounts of oil skyward could and would get your fired. Crude was money and the big men in the office wouldn’t be happy if a well got out of control. If you’re senses told you what was coming next you were a valued worker and grandpa was that. He had eleven years on the job and the experience was paying off. There were just a few thousand men working the rigs and people as good as Bruce were worth their weight in gold, or oil as the case may be. Word gets around.
Everything was looking pretty rosy. All three kids doing well in school, Mariel would be in high school in a year, Barbara in seventh grade and Bobbie in fourth. The kids were old enough now that their constant moving about had taught them how to quickly make friends. How to spot the popular kids who were school leaders and elbow there way into the group. Their parents sat them down and counseled them on the best way to survive as the constant new kid. Moving two or three times a year from school to school strengthened their social skills. I remember my mother, Barbara, the second child could make a friend in about two seconds.
Something bad was lurking in the United States and the world though. On the surface was the gloss of good times shown brightly but they masked something sinister. By the end of the decade cracks would begin to show though no one seemed to understand the why or what of it just yet. Let the good times roll.
Life magazine cover. Art, John Held JR. November 1926
All during the twenties in the aftermath of the war the times were good, very good. Society had rapidly changed. The old song which opined that soldier boys who had seen gay Paree wouldn’t want to go back to the farm was true. Young people saw skirts go up, way up. Flappers wore silk stockings. They rolled them over a rubber band just below the knee slipped a flask of bootleg whiskey under their garters and shimmied like their sister Kate. Hair was bobbed. Silk undies, just a chemise and a pair of step-ins, let’s party like 1929.
Miss Bee Jackson 1925, The Charleston Girl. British Pathe photo. Youtube.
Henry Ford was turning out the Flivver by the millions, they cost just over two hundred dollars and the kids soon discovered that petting on the back seat was a delight. They wanted to go and party with Jay Gatsby on long Island. F Scott Fitzgerald helped open the door.
It Wouldn’t last.
Chapter 14, coming soon. Disaster.
Michael Shannon is a writer. These stories come from his mothers side of the family many of who spent more than sixty years in the oil patch.
…or how scribblers turn a joke, a phrase, a story.
When newspapers were the only mass communication in the country they reached nearly every home. My dad drove down to Kirk’s Liquor every morning after his men went to work and bought the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal. The big boys dominated and some said “Made” the news. The term Fake news is neither Fake nor new. Reading the papers at the kitchen table in our home was a part of my education. Guided by my fathers exhortation that most of what you read was suspect and how you might find a way to validate that was how I was instructed. He said, “Always remember that newspapers are always owned by an individual with an agenda.” He advised that you do your home work, read a conservative view then a liberal view and that the answer lies some where in the middle. Maybe.
About the only place you see a newsstand anymore is in the old asphalt jungle, New Yawk, New Yawk. Once the center of the news world, publishing as many as sixteen dailies and uncounted numbers of weeklies. Hearst built his temple of journalism to Saint Francis de Sales patron Saint of newspaper scribes and never looked back. He fought a circulation war in the late eighteen nineties with Joseph Pulitzer of the NY World while Alfred Ochs was busily, quietly making the NY Times the most trusted paper in the country.
Hearst and Pultitzer invented Yellow Journalism in the 1890’s, a term that is a sensationalized style of news reporting characterized by exaggeration, vivid illustrations, and a focus on sensational stories like scandal and crime, rather than factual accuracy. The term is believed to have originated from a comic strip character called the Yellow Kid written by Richard Outcault. The Kid is considered to be the seminal comic strip for those we know today. My grandfather Shannon who palled around with Outcault said he never refused a drink which was his way of saying he was a “Hale fellow well met.” Jack Shannon could spin a tale pretty well himself.
The rival newspapers of Hearst and Pulitzer competed for readership by printing sensational news stories pitched at the lowest common denominator, thus inaugurating the modern conception of journalism for a mass audience and gullible one too.
There were sporting papers for the Punters, guys like Nathan Detroit* who speculated on the ponies. Their were ethnics too. Papers in Yiddish, Polish, Italian and Rooshin for the reds to read. Lest the reader thinks newsmen are just hacks who couldn’t write books consider American writers like Bret Harte, Mark Twain, Jack London, Ambrose Bierce, Stephen Crane, and Damon Runyon. The original Rush Limbaugh, Westbrook Pegler had a Hearst column in which he preached hate and division and even Hearst eventually fired him. There were Walter Winchell, Dorothy Kilgallen, and Bob Considine too. Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, and Winston Churchill, climactic figures of the twentieth century were contributors. Karl Marx, Einstein, Susan Sontag and the critic HL Mencken as well as James Baldwin wrote the news.
The greatest of sports writers, Ring Lardner, Red Smith, Frank Deford, George Will, Roger Angell and Dick Young dispensed real insight into popular culture cloaked in sporting news. Jim Murray of the los Angeles Times and E B White of Vanity Fair didn’t write the nuts and bolts of games but looked to the humanity contained in it.
“The sports editor stuck is head out the office door, green eyeshade pulled down low, a chewed, five cent seegar clenched between his teeth. Swinging his head around he looked a human version of a snapping turtle. Hooking his index finger around the stump of rolled tobacco leaf he spotted Lardner. He sent a stream of tobacco juice in the general direction of the spittoon and bellowed, “Hey Lardner, gimme five hunert on dat busher from Balmer. (Baltimore) They call ‘Im Baby or Babe, sumpin’ like that. He licked the Yankees taday. Need it for the extra edition at five .”
BABE LICKS CUBBIES
BOSTON TWIRLER BLANKS CUBS, SOX IN SIX.
Beantown takes ’17 World Series.
For the scribbler in the newsroom, the idea…set the hook with an eye catching headline. Something to catch the eye of the Rubes. Something the newsboy could screech. Something simple, catchy, suck the penny right outta their vest pockets.
Newsboys with Morning Telegraph, New York City. 1899. The original Toughnuts.
Below are actual headlines which were carefully crafted to get attention from the buyer. Believe it or not there are archives and collections of the best and most amusing ever written.
OXYGEN KEY TO STAYING ALIVE.
CONFIRMED BY TOP SCIENTISTS
Breathing Found Necessary
Princess Kate all A-Titter
Princess and the Frog
Frog Photog, No Top Pix Draws Suit.
Princess Kate of Great Britain was filmed topless on a friends yacht. She sued a French tabloid and won.
I’M A CHEETAH
WOOD’S WIFE BONKS HUBBY WITH WEDGE
Tiger Woods, serial Tomcat Bogies out of his marriage. Lock up the waitresses!
CLOAK AND SHAG HER
CIA BOSS ADMITS AFFAIR
General David Petraeus resigns over the outing of his affair with his biographer. Headline, considered tasteless at the time would barely be news today.
‘Headless body in topless bar’ was voted as one of the greatest newspaper headlines of all time by New York magazine. It was written by the Post’s larger-than-life managing editor Vincent Musetto. Murder by Wife always gets the lead..
No More Mister Wiseguy
MOB RAT BLASTS YAPPER DON
Gabby Gotti Ruined the Mob says GambinoCapo
State Population to double by 2040
Babies to Blame
OFFICIALS CONCERNED, SAY NIX TO SEX
I was thinking about papers today after reading an essay by Steve Rushkin, a writer for Sports Illustrated. In it he quotes Bobby Knight once the basketball coach at Indiana University who famously said of writers, “Everybody learns to write by the second grade, most of us move on to better things.” Most of us stop calling ourselves Bobby and quit throwing chairs by then too, but I get his point.
Don’t take yourself too seriously, have some fun. Also remember that what we know of our history we know because SOMEONE WROTE IT DOWN. There’s that Bobby.
Cover Photo: Ring Lardner at work for the Sporting News. Considered one of America greatest satirists he was a contemporary of Ernest Hemingway, Virginia Woolf and F. Scott-Fitzgerald. In 1916, Lardner published his first successful book, “You Know Me Al,” an epistolary novel written in the form of letters by “Jack Keefe”, a bush-league baseball player, to a friend back home. The letters made much use of the fictional author’s idiosyncratic vernacular. Lardner is well worth the read.
Nathan Detroit: A fictional rogue and gambler from the Play “Guys and Dolls.” Guys and Dolls is a musical with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser and book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows. It is based on “The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown” .
Michael Shannon lives in California and writes for the heck of it.
Texas oil sprouted big personalities. Theodore Newton Barnsdall whose daddy started in the Pennsylvania fields, drilled the second well ever and built the first refinery taught him the business the way a butcher sharpens a knife. “Tede” as he liked to be called started out working for his father as a pumper annd when his dad died he inherited the company. Ambitious, a hale fellow well met, he also had the three things an oilman must have. He was fearless, supremely lucky and had a nose for oil. Not in barrels, oh no, a nose for oil underground. He was doing ok in Pennsylvania but thought he should go west and his case that was Indian Territory. The home of the Choctaw and Osage. With his gift of gab he made a friend of Chief James Bigheart of the Osage. Bigheart was instrumental in Barnsdall buying a stake in the Osage oil company, ILIO in 1903 which covered all of the Osage reservation, some 1,470,938 acres of what is now Osage county Oklahoma.*
Barnsdall became wealthy by bringing in well after well. Immensely rich he sold his company in 1912 and took stock from the new company, Cities Service. Though Theodore Barnsdall died in 1916 his company survived.
The oil business is and always has been a labyrinth of connections, co-ownerships, subsidiaries, wholly owned or leased. Oil companies owned and were owned by railroads, refiners, conglomerates and even companies who had no connection to production at all. Production was sold to refiners, refiners to banks and then bought back by the producers. Companies were deliberately bankrupted in order to not only clear debt but sometimes to assume debt by the buyer of the defunct company. Sometimes defunct companies were not actually defunct. Names lived on.
Though “Tede” was long buried away., his company lived on but now owned by Cities Services a refiner and major lender to the business, Cities kept the name and the Barnsdall Company continued to operate. It partnered with the Philllip’s company, now Conoco-Phillips and Socony, Standard Oil of New York and in 1927 decided to move some operations to California under the name Barnsdall-Rio Grande**
How does this effect the man who laborers on the rig. No need to ask him because he likely has no idea. It’s affect on my grandparents though, easy to understand.
Grandpa Hall in the course of following the work ended up in Summerland and Santa Barbara by 1927. They rented a little house on Mission street and Bruce began working as a Farm Boss down in Summerland. Today it is a hip little town but in 1927 it was very small cluster of small houses just north of the section of beach which would become famous for the oil rigs there.
The road south from Summerland at the Rincon. SB Historical Society Collection. 1920’s
A former Treasury agent, Henry Lafayette Williams, initially intended to raise pigs there when he bought this land in 1885. But when the Southern Pacific Railroad announced it was laying tracks north from Los Angeles that would cross his pig ranch, he decided to sell off lots and build a town next to the rails.
What made this act of entrepreneurship unusual was that Williams and his wife were Spiritualists. A popular religion at the time its practitioners believed that mediums connected the living to the dead. Williams and his wife persuaded fellow Spiritualists to move to their town. Lots of 60 feet by 25 feet sold for $25 each. In 1889, the early settlers named the town Summerland which was the name of the Spiritualists’ heaven.
Town lore has it that many of the homes that the Spiritualists built had hidden rooms from which the spirit of a dead relative would enter during seances. People from neighboring towns nicknamed Summerland “Spookville” because of all the strange happenings they thought were going on.
The Williams home, The Big Yellow House.
The Williams’ own home, rumored to still have ghosts today is the Big Yellow House Restaurant, a Summerland landmark.
In 1894 the accidental discovery by a man drilling for water who struck oil instead. Oil fever and the boom was on. The bluffs along the coast came right down to the waters edge. As the field expanded piers were built into the ocean, derricks erected and Summerland had what is considered the first offshore oil field in the Western Hemisphere.
The Ortega curve, Southern Pacific RR above the Summerland field. SP Photo.
Both things played to Bruce’s skills. The wells were very shallow, some at only 400 feet which favored cable tool rigs. Shallow wells and sandstone formations were made for cable rigs. The other thing he knew was the whipstock and how to use it.
Grandpa Bruce did not whip my grandmother. He wouldn’t have dared. She was a farm girl and raised by a fierce independant woman. She would have been a handful. No, the whipstock was a tool used to direct the path of a drill bit. it seems a bit need only go straight down but there might be a reason why you wouldn’t want it too.
Here is where we might want to return to “Tede” Barnsdall and his like. You see, experimental oil drilling, as was practiced in the early days required a man who was a gambler and a risk taker like ‘Tede. “Perhaps a little “Shifty” a man who mght just bend the rules.
Oilfield history is rife with legendary fields and the Wildcatters who risked everything on an all chips in the pot hand, high card wins the gamble.***
Spindletop, Wink and Burkburnett in Texas, Sunset on the Midway in the West Kern, Old Maude in the Casmalia field, Alamitos no.1 on Signal Hill, Doheny’s first well at La Brea, each field drilled by one of those elite gamblers with which the old boys begin their tales of adventure.
When old time oilmen circle their Eldorados for the night and hunker down around the campfire at the Petroleum Club to talk about the good old days, sooner or later one name always pops up.
Mister Glenn McCarthy. Not sure about the mister though, he never seemed like the kind of guy who needed a mister.
The loner. The poor boy who made good. The rich boy who made bad. The Wildcatter. The model for Jett Rink in the movie Giant.
Jett Rink, Wildcatter. Warner Brother, 1956.
Remember the time Glenn made a half-million from a field that all the oil companies said was dry? That’s nothing, once he was a million and a half in debt, so he built a $700,000 house just for the hell of it.
He said the banks would think he was rich. “Buy a new Cadillac and let them see you drivin’ it. Put ’em off the scent. And the time the Houston Country Club wrote him a letter saying that, all in all, they’d rather not have him around the place?
Yeah, those were the days, when—at least to the outside world—he was the personification of Houston, Texas, USA. Feast and famine, gusher and duster, whenever two people got together to fight or wheel or deal or all of the above, one of them was a smiling Irishman with curly brown hair and a dark mustache—Glenn Herbert McCarthy, the Wildcatter.
He came from Beaumont originally, the son of an itinerant oilfield worker, William McCarthy, who was a driller at Spindletop. Young Glenn was eight then, and carried a water bucket from the pump to the sweating workers. When he was 23, McCarthy wooed and wed Faustine Lee, the 16-year-old daughter of T. P. Lee, a rich Texas oilman. Lee was upset, since Faustine had run away from high school to marry, but by then, Glenn could hold his own. After all, he was an oilman too and soon he proved it. It’s been up and down, cold Brut Champagne and hot Bud. Time had him on its cover, the King of the Wildcatters. One of many.
“So what if some oilmen were flamboyant and boisterous and loud? They were the men who worked their tails off, rain or shine, winter or summer.” They risked everything and sometimes they won.
It took a man with an idea. A man like my grandfather who could solve a problem. Drilling wasn’t as straight forward as you might think. Bits did no always go straight down, they could wander all over the place. Drilling in sand or punching through rock can bend the drill string every which-a- away.
Since the business of punching holes in the ground was made up on the fly and there were very few engineers on the drill floor things had to be figured out by the dirty, sweaty roughnecks and Toolies. And by God they did.
The first slant well was successfully drilled in 1929 in Texon, Texas. Sidetracking a well can solve some unexpected problems such as bypassing damaged sections of the well or going around broken tools at the bottom that can’t be retrieved by fishing. Lateral deflection of the well bore has been achieved by placing a wedge or whipstock in the well. The whipstock is, essentially, a wedge that crowds the bit to the side of the hole, causing it to drill at an angle off the vertical. The angle of the hole was measured, in the days before high technology by the simple expedient of lowering a glass jar half filled with Sulphuric acid down the casing until it hit bottom. Left there for a time the acid would etch the inside of the jar and when pulled up a line indicating the angle would be clearly visible. The difference between this line and top of the jar indicated the angle of the bore. Very simple. Workman who solve problems rarely have any time to figure out something sophisticated like an engineer does.
When Bruce was working on the West side, as the fields around Maricopa, Reward and the Elk Hills were called, the depth of the wells was such that Rotaries were needed to make hole. A rotary rig with a Hughes Tool bit was able to drill nearly 9,000 feet**** No Cable tool rig could go much over 1200 feet. The Cable Tool method which he had nearly ten years of experience with were in the minority. Learning the rotary bit system wasn’t difficult and he soon became an excellent Tool Pusher for both types.
Tripping pipe on a rotary rig, Elk Hills. Near Taft Ca.
In Summerland it took just a few years to drill along the foreshore. The wells crowded together so close you could literally spit on your neighbor. The oil sands were shallow and the old walking beams of the cable rigs were everywhere. When they ran out of room the drillers simply built piers out into the ocean and kept on going. At about 1,200 feet the Rotary Rigs were set up on the piers and they moved farther out. When it got too deep for piers they brought in the whipstock and began slant drilling.
Summerland. 1928. Not a square foot wasted. and insanely dangerous. SB Historical
What they did was to take a large chunk of wood and shape it into a wedge, thinner at the top and thick and heavy at the bottom. Then all the pipe in the well casing was tripped out, the wedge lowered to the bottom of the hole. The drill string was then tripped back in and when the bit hit the whipstock it followed the angle of the wedge and began drilling at an angle.
Whipstocking. Baker-Hughes company illustration.
Now a driller could go around cave ins, or difficult strata reorienting the bit in the right direction. They quickly figured out that they could now drill more than one hole off the same rig. And of course, in the still wild and wooly oil business it took about two seconds for some sharp operator to figure out that he could drill under someone else’s lease and steal their oil. Bruce knew the technology and working for Seaside Oil they soon had a literal bowl of spaghetti of pipe with holes going every which-away. It was near impossible in those early days to figure out where any one’s string actually went. In a day when roustabouts still carried revolvers you had to be careful about what you said and to whom. A man had a family to feed after all and it was common custom to pay a man in shares of production once the well came in. Instead of cash, which was paid at the end of the job, a percentage of the payout on a barrel of oil was your wage. Contractors made their own rules and the big Companies looked the other way. Why they practically encouraged it by ignoring it. You couldn’t find a Toolie who knew anything about it. It was a mystery. It was highway robbery best kept quiet.
*The Osage county seat is in the small town of Pawhuska which you may be familiar with from watching Ree Drummond, the Pioneer Woman’s cooking show. Her husband Ladd Drummond owns the family ranch which covers 433,000 acres in Osage County. Oil rights obtained from the Osage has immensely increased the family’s wealth. The Drummonds were actively complicit in the Osage oil scandal of the 1920’s buying up “headrights” and foreclosed or bankrupt ranches from members of the Osage tribe. Not illegal exactly but certainly the result of “Sharp.” practice. Since Ladd’s cousin is the states attorney general, they are covered.
**The genealogical timeline for Barnsdall goes as such. Bigheart Oil Company-Barnsdall-Cities Services-Phillips-Rio Grande Oil-Standard Oil of New York, (Socony)-Richfield-Atlantic Richfield, (Arco)-Sinclair-Continental- Marathon oil and in 1999 British Petroleum, (BP Amoco)
***Boomtown 1940. A film starring Clark Gable, who actually worked for Barnsdall oil in Oklahoma when he still had big ears and bad teeth. Old timers will tell you its the best film ever made about boom and bust wildcatters and is largely true to life. From Kilgore Texas to the Kettleman Hills in California.
Cover Photo: The Hall Family Mariel, Bob, Barbara, my mother, Eileen and Bruce. Uncle Marion in the rear. 1928.
Michael Shannon’s mother was on the ride with his grandparents. Her memories form a great part of this story.
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