Finding Oil: The Nature of Petroleum Geology, 1859-1920

Introduction

1 Shortly after walking over the dry west Texas plains, Jett Rink knelt on the ground while squeezing handfuls of oil-soaked dirt through his fingers and gazed in amazement at the black crude slowly bubbling to the surface. Later, Rink stood atop a cable tool drilling rig when a loud noise caught his attention. The black crude that had merely bubbled to the surface began to emit an awesome roar as it erupted from the hole Rink punctured in the earth. He stepped back to behold the spectacle he had created, as oil spewed from the earth and rained down on him. He held both hands in the air as if to thank Mother Earth for her beneficence, and jumped up and down to celebrate his good fortune. The image of a gusher is a powerful symbol in the history of the American Southwest. Dramatized by James Dean in the movie version of Edna Ferber’s novel Giant, this scene played out repeatedly throughout the early twentieth century in the history of oil-rich states such as Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and California. Captivating and dramatic, a gusher represented a visual image of nature’s bounty spewing forth uncontrolled and seemingly uncontrollable. The image was powerful but far from simplistic: it held different meanings for the prospectors who found gushers as the oil industry grew and matured. For example, an oil prospector like Jett Rink might see a gusher as a symbol of great wealth, a fortune in the making, while to another Introduction introduction 2 prospector the gusher symbolized profligate waste and technological incompetence. Oil prospectors expressed these different views about oil over time. However they conceived of gushers, all prospectors strove to translate the geological forces governing oil into other forms of power�economic, intellectual, and cultural�within this emerging industry. This book recognizes the diversity of their views but shows that important similarities existed in the kinds of knowledge cultivated by the most successful prospectors. The central argument of this book is that oil prospectors struggled for cultural, intellectual, and professional authority�over both nature and their peers�from 1859 to 1920. Throughout the oil industry’s early history, multiple people from varied class, educational, and professional backgrounds vied for the authority to determine where oil resided. Despite the towering presence of a figure like John D. Rockefeller as the quintessential “oil man,” prospectors made up a diverse lot who saw themselves, their interests, and their relationships with nature in different ways primarily through their work. Oil men established relationships with nature through their work in order to harness geological forces and unleash oil in a rushing flow, but they encountered and understood geological forces differently. At the center of the relationships they formed with nature lay a struggle for power, position, and prestige within the oil industry and, for some, within the scientific community. Certainly economic gain motivated many prospectors, but the knowledge they cultivated and articulated about oil and its character bestowed upon them intellectual and cultural power too. Finding (and failing to find) oil through physical and intellectual work taught prospectors knowledge that they built upon as the industry evolved, but this process often unfolded irrationally and with intense conflicts among people who disagreed about how and where to find oil. The idea that people within the oil industry engaged in a quest for power hardly seems novel given oil’s central importance throughout the twentieth century, but this book complicates that story by arguing that the prize prospectors sought constituted power that did not introduction 3 always equate to financial gain. Clearly discoverers of large oil deposits potentially stood to amass fortunes, and this prospect alone motivated many to explore for subterranean riches. Explaining the behavior of all prospectors on the basis of financial gain alone, however, illuminates their motivations no more clearly than does the argument that fish swim because they live in the water. Indeed, one very popular book on the history of the oil industry argues that “oil has meant mastery” and it was this “quest for mastery” throughout the twentieth century that constituted an “epic quest” for “oil, money, and power.”1 Indeed, the men who formulated the knowledge for locating oil (and they were mostly men) successfully applied their learning to uncover vast stores of oil, and they profoundly and radically changed the world through their discoveries in the United States. Their story is significant because...