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3. Shared Authority: Practical Oil Men and Professional Geologists
- University of Nebraska Press
- Chapter
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81 Roswell Johnson set up shop as a petroleum geologist in the northeast corner of Oklahoma in 1908 and began advertising his services as an independent consultant. After arriving in the small town of Bartlesville, hebegandutifullyrunningadsandoccasionallyevenpublishingarticles in the pages of the petroleum industry bible, the Oil and Gas Journal, as part of a campaign to convince oil men of the practical advantages his services could provide.1 Prospectors had been pouring into the midcontinent region from the Appalachian oil fields, and Johnson perceived an untapped market for his consulting skills if only he could demonstrate that geology offered a better prospecting method than vernacular beliefs such as the beltline theory. He explained that even though practical men had successfully found oil in Pennsylvania by drilling along lines that ran at forty-five-degree angles, “many operators had accordingly come to believe that there was some mystic power in this particular direction” and that they could find oil in Oklahoma by applying the theory.2 When this approach failed to produce oil in the midcontinent fields, “those mystically inclined” adopted a new faith that drilling along a line of 22½ degrees would yield oil.3 Johnson contended that geology, and particularly the anticlinal theory, offered a better prospecting tool than the belt-line theory. Although his advertisement sat prominently on the corner of the same page on which one of his article appeared, he had attracted so few clients by Shared Authority practical oil men and professional geologists 3 shared authority 82 1912 that he accepted a position teaching geology at the University of Pittsburgh and quit the oil business. Sensing that he championed a losing cause, Johnson left Oklahoma, but his timing could not have been worse because within a year after his departure, the oil industry began seeking geologists’ advice on an unprecedented scale. Some practical oil men accepted petroleum geology earlier than others, but 1913 proved a pivotal year in the history of the oil industry because many who had resisted geology began to take it more seriously.4 During this year geologists mapped an anticline in Cushing, Oklahoma, and demonstrated with a visual representation that they could find oil by applying geological principles. Because geologists could never say with absolute certainty whether drilling in a particular place would strike oil, their techniques and ideas remained open to debate. Practical men still found their share of oil, but they began to offer more specific information about the physical conditions beneath the surface of the earth that they used to create visual images of the strata, thereby eliminating much of the guesswork. Johnson’s experiences indicated that the contests for the authority and power to interpret the meaning of local knowledge remained divided as the oil industry shifted westward from Pennsylvania to the southern plains states of Kansas, Oklahoma, and Texas. The Pennsylvania survey provided a unique forum, unprecedented in scale and scope, to formulate and codify geological knowledge in order to find oil, but it met with mixed results. Fractures among practitioners who understood their relationships to nature differently from one another complicated that effort as these practitioners carried their contested understandings of work and nature with them to the southern plains. The lines between the knowledge different practitioners cultivated continued to overlap, and as the southern plains environment yielded great quantities of oil, the contests for authority to determine how geological knowledge revealed those oil reserves intensified. The environment participated in those contests by requiring prospectors to cultivate new forms of local knowledge in order to understand [18.232.188.122] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 09:39 GMT) shared authority 83 how this region’s geology differed from states farther east. The lines between natural and cultural landscapes blurred on the southern plains as they had in Pennsylvania, and practitioners’ negotiations of those boundaries created tensions out of which the field of petroleum geology would emerge. The oil industry moved west over several decades as the United States underwent dramatic changes. From approximately 1880 to 1920, the nation gradually transformed from mostly autonomous and localized island communities to a distended society of centralized planning with institutions that aimed to rationally organize science, industry, and government. John D. Rockefeller and his Standard Oil Company stepped into American business’s organizational void to eliminate the chaotic production practices that resulted in too much oil and destabilized markets. Standard’s imposition of order resulted in a market monopoly that limited economic opportunities for practical men and stifled the individualist...