How Oklahoma Millionaires Are Made - George Krumme

"How Oklahoma Millionaires Are Made"

Narrated by George Krumme

GK: My name is George Krumme. I'm a partner in Krumme Oil Company of Bristow, Oklahoma.

In the early 1980's, J. B. Red, a Stillwater oil man, contacted my brother and me with a proposition. A friend of his, Sam Myers, had saved a four-reel, silent moving picture made for his father's company many decades earlier. J. B. had just seen the picture and said to himself "This movie ought to be preserved, but the old celluloid film will not last indefinitely." So he talked to someone at Oklahoma State University and their audio-visual center agreed to copy the 35 millimeter film onto new 16 millimeter film, and make several copies, if some group would subsidize the costs. As I remember it, we paid a third of the cost and in return got a copy of the film.

The movie covers the Cushing Oil Field, and it was made in 1917 or 18 when the field was five or six years old. Sam Myers father was a principal in the Cushing-Webb Oil Company of Stillwater which planned to drill a well near the 00:01:00Cushing Field northwest of Oilton. The company made the film to promote the sale of interests in the well. Mr. Myers hired a professional photographer from Oklahoma City who used an early style, manually operated camera. The well was drilled by the way, and it was a dry hole.

With that as the background, let's start the action.

A WEEK'S TRIP

IN THE

GREAT CUSHING

OIL FIELD IN

OKLAHOMA

FOUR REELS REEL ONE

THE LARGEST

HIGH GRADE OIL FIELD

IN

THE WORLD

OIL FIELD TOWNS.

OILTON 15 YEARS AGO

(Background music)

The caption says Oilton 15 years ago, but it should say Oilton today and Oilton 15 years ago, because the first scenes are of downtown Oilton during the boom. Oilton was not even founded until 1915, three years after the discovery well was drilled.

(Native Americans riding though camp)

The Cushing Field and the proposed wildcat well were both located in Creek County in the Creek Nation, but the Indians shown in this movie are certainly 00:02:00not Creek Indians. The Creeks were one of the Five Civilized Tribes, originally from Mississippi, Alabama, and Georgia, and teepees, feathered headdresses, and buffalo were not part of their world. These Indians are clearly plains Indians. Oilton is only a few miles from Pawnee County, so these may well have been Pawnee Indians, or perhaps they were Indians who performed at the old 101 Ranch who were hired as extras to add some exotic color to the film. Either way, these are honest Indians and not Hollywood Indians.

The white man tied to the stake and the white woman pleading for his life may have been employees of the Cushing-Webb Company, who as a bonus were allowed to appear in the movies.

(Piano music playing)

Somehow I don't think there were any wild bison in Oklahoma in 1917, and I doubt 00:03:00very much if this particular animal was killed by a spear or a bow and arrow. Authentic scenes of early day Oklahoma add color to the film. By 1917 the most common draft animal should have been the mule, and oxen should have been rare.

Log houses chinked with mud would have been unusual, too. The film was made near the end of horse and buggy days when electricity was available only in towns, running water in country homes was unheard of, and outdoor privies were regularly stocked with Montgomery Ward catalogs.

BUSY OILTON TO-DAY

AND WHAT

MAKES IT

Cushing Field was discovered in 1912. It was named for Cushing even though the town is 10 or 12 miles west of the field. At the time, it was the closest town. Drumright was founded near the discovery well during the following year, and Oilton was founded a couple of years later.

(Background chatter)

The discovery well was drilled by the legendary Tom Slick, later called "King of the Wildcatters." Slick was not yet 30 but he had already built a reputation. Unfortunately, it was a reputation for drilling dry holes, because during the previous seven or eight years he had drilled or participated in about 10 dusters without a single hit. At the time it was said that he was "broke as flat as a pancake". He could toss up a dollar and it would change into ten cents before it hit the floor. Even though he still had some backers, he had to go to Chicago to persuade an old employer, C. B. Shaffer, to lend him eight thousand dollars to drill the well, and he had to borrow a hundred dollars in order to pay for the trip.

DRUMRIGHT

FOUR YEARS OLD

POPULATION 15000

At the first strong showing of oil and gas, Slick had the driller fill the hole with mud and water and invert a wash tub over the casing with a heavy drilling tool on top. He then cut the telephone line to the Wheeler home and high tailed it to Cushing where he hired every livery team and every notary in Cushing in 00:05:00order to delay his competitions' landmen. Meanwhile, Slick and his associates began taking oil and gas leases. Even though they did obtain many, so did others, and many a fortune was made in the field during the next few years.

BUILDING A DERRICK

(Sawing and rig building sounds)

Drilling with cable tools was fairly well standardized in the early days of the industry. All of the original drilling in the Cushing Field was done with what was called a standard rig, using steam power. In those days, rotary drilling was generally confined to the soft rocks of the Gulf Coast and California because the early rotary bits did a poor job of drilling in hard rocks. To build a standard rig, rig irons and lumber were hauled in and everything was assembled on the location. A boiler, a steam engine, and lots of casing completed the setup leaving only the wire lines and the tools which were furnished by the drilling contractor.

DRILLING

Drilling was done using the walking beam, but the tools had to be below floor level before it could be used. So to start the well, a spudding line was run from the crank to a sliding shoe which was hooked over the drilling line just above the bull wheels. As the crank turned, the sliding shoe pulled and then slackened the line, which raised and lowered the tools.

The same principle operates a spudder, which was the cable tool machine that replaced the standard rig. A spud, by the way, was originally a spade used for digging roots, which is why starting to drill is called spudding, and why potatoes are called spuds

UNLOADING CASING

AT THE

RAILROAD

If the well turned out to be a producer, the steam engine was replaced with a big single cylinder engine, and the rig and derrick were kept to pump and service the well. If the derrick was blown down, the rig was kept in operation 00:07:00but was referred to as a bob tailed rig.

This is a primitive but practical way to unload casing. When our company first started in the oil business in the late forties, we bought a few railroad cars of casing. We did not own a truck with tall enough gin poles, so we unloaded the casing exactly the same way as they're doing here, except that we used a truck or a pickup instead of a team of mules.

LOADING CASING

AT THE

CIMARRON RIVER NEAR OILTON

As you can see, the casing being loaded here is too large to be production casing. Big casing was used in drilling the well. Drilling at the Cushing Field was difficult because there were numerous shallow sand formations that produced 00:08:00water. Drilling in a hole full of water is very slow. To dry up the hole, the drillers installed a string of big casing, and then as more water sands were reached successively smaller strings were run. Four or five strings of pipe were generally run to reach the Bartlesville producing sand in the Cushing Field. This represented quite an investment and most often the bigger strings would be stripped out either at the completion of the well or sometime later, leaving only the inside one or two strings. None of the casing was cemented, that technological improvement occurred in the 1920s.

The discovery well in the Cushing Field was completed at about 2200 feet, in an uralitic phase of the Oswego limestone. The pay zone was promptly named the Wheeler sand because it was found on the Wheeler farm.

HAULING CASING

TO THE

WELL

(Sounds of wagons being pulled)

Teamsters prefer horses instead of mules for hauling in the oil fields. Draft horses were bigger and stronger. Farmers, and the US Army in World War I, preferred mules because they were heartier, but they were also more stubborn. A year or so after the discovery well was drilled, a test drilled deeper to the Bartlesville sand found a far better pay sand and in another year or so production peaked at 300 thousand barrels a day from about three thousand wells. For comparison, the total oil production for the entire state of Oklahoma in 2002 averaged about 180 thousand barrels a day, only a little more than half the peak production of the Cushing Field in 1915.

MOVING HOTEL

BETWEEN

MEALS

(Horses walking across wooden bridge)

Ironically, some of the biggest Bartlesville wells were not in the Bartlesville 00:10:00sand at all. The Cushing structure is bald-headed. Over most of the structure the Mississippi lime is missing, and the Bartlesville lies directly on the ore division, Wilcox, and other Simpson sands.

PREPARING THE 'EATS'

NOON

(Sounds of chickens, washing, talking while eating)

Between Drumright and Oilton, in an area of a few square miles, even the Bartlesville is missing and the drill goes directly from the Redfork into productive Arbuckle limestone. Some Arbuckle wells made five or six thousand barrels a day. It was a long time before operators realized that the pay zone was not only not Bartlesville sand, it wasn't even sand. An old Sinclair hand once told me that one reason they didn't realize it was limestone was that the flow of gas and oil was so strong they never saw the cuttings. A Drumright oil man told me that they first recognized that it was not sand production when their separators and receiving tanks filled up with chunks of limestone that the 00:11:00heavy flow of oil and gas had carried from the formation into the tanks. A United States Geological Survey bulletin printed as late as 1917 doesn't even list the Arbuckle as one of the productive formations.

A WEEK'S TRIP

IN THE

GREAT CUSHING

OIL FIELD IN

OKLAHOMA

FOUR REELS REEL TWO

CASING CREW AT WORK

In a standard rig, the big bull wheels which held the drilling cable blocked the face of the derrick so the casing wrap was placed opposite the crank, and the casing was wagoned in from the walking beam side using a front wagon and a back wagon. This pipe looks like seven-inch casing so it may be the final inside production string. When the picture comes to the rig floor, you can see the driller turn the throttle control wheel and in the background you can see two ropes in the form of a figure eight. These are the bull ropes which carried power from the band wheel to the bull wheels, somewhat like a long, fat, round 00:12:00v-belt. The principle reason for the figure eight was to give the rope greater friction on the bull wheels and on the tug pulley which was bolted to the band wheel. Early rigs used the bull wheels to run casing. Later standard rigs used a separate chain driven reel much smaller so naturally it was called a half-wheel. You can see the half-wheel behind the driller. And yet they are running casing using the bull wheels, why I cannot say.

To screw the pipe together the crew is using a "never slip", a rope, a casing pole, and six men. Our company used to drill with cable tools but we used only four men. But then we were running round thread casing rather than the older style D-thread casing.

HAULING STORAGE TANK

TO THE

TANK FARM

Back to the subject of the Arbuckle limestone, one Arbuckle well north of Drumright still makes about a hundred and fifteen barrels a day along with 00:13:00ungodly amounts of water. New wells are still occasionally drilled to the Arbuckle.

SHOOTING THE WELL

THE SHOOTER

ARRIVES

Liquid nitroglycerin is highly unstable and very dangerous to handle. Shooting continued to be the most popular way to stimulate a well until the development of sand fracking around 1950. The first sand fracking jobs were done using napalm, that is, jellied gasoline. The early standard frack job was a thousand pounds of sand and a thousand gallons of jell. Now a days jelled water is used and the job might be a hundred times as big.

SOUNDING FOR DEPTH

Stanolind Oil Company got a patent on the sand fracking process and it collected royalties on every job. Stanolind soon constructed a large research lab in the corn fields at the edge of Tulsa at 41st Street and Yale. It was very appropriately called "the house that frack built."

PREPARING THE CHARGE

I'm sorry to say I don't know what the washing in the bucket is accomplishing. By the time we started in the business a blasting gel had been developed and it was much safer than nitroglycerin. In the early days a shot was set off by dropping a short piece of pipe called a "go -devil" to hit a firing cap at the top of the torpedo. By the time we were in the business, the shot was set off with a time bomb made in Tulsa by the Zero Hour Bomb Company.

POURING NITRO-GLYCERINE

INTO TUBE AND LOWERING

IN THE WELL

When sand fracking put the well shooting trade out of business, the Zero Hour 00:15:00Bomb Company shortened its name to Zebco and began manufacturing fishing reels. Before the development of the time bomb, there was no way to tamp the shot. That is, to confine it in some way. So when the shot went off, it would blow whatever was in the hole out. This made some impressive photographs possible, and it was a good time to have company officials or investors around to watch.

(Sound of a gusher)

LAYING PIPE LINE

TO THE

TANK FARM

The Cushing Field has produced about a half billion barrels of oil. Early flush production overloaded the hastily constructed pipelines. It broke the price of 00:16:00oil and kept it low for several years. But Tom Slick and others found a solution. Slick erected twelve giant tanks on the Frisco Railroad at Bristow and built a twenty-mile pipeline to carry his oil into storage until the price went up. Note the use of a pipe-jack to hold the line pipe in line while the crew is screwing the joints together using latongs. Where two crews worked together they timed their actions in synchrony with the strokes of a worker who hammered the pipe near the collar. The hammering not only synchronized the working of the tongs, it also caused a vibration of the pipe that made it easier to screw the joints together. Regardless of his personal traits, the hammer man was called a pecker.

THE TANK FARM

Like Tom Slick, others built tank farms, and at one time about 23 million barrels of oil was stored at or near the Cushing Field, which is part of the reason why Cushing became "the pipeline crossroads of the world." About 30 million barrels of oil storage capacity is currently located in the vicinity of Cushing.

A FEW SCENES AMONG

THE OIL WELLS

ADJOINING OILTON

OIL WELLS

IN THE

CIMARRON RIVER

The Cimarron River between Drumright and Oilton ran through one of the richest parts of the field. Ownership of the mineral rights under the river bed up to the line of highest water was claimed by both the federal government and the state of Oklahoma, but their claims were disputed by the owners of the adjoining Indian allotments. The state of Oklahoma sold river bed leases and many wells 00:18:00were drilled along the banks of the Cimarron. A decade and a half later, the court decided in favor of the Indians. Some wells were even drilled in the middle of the river on tiny islands built for that purpose. Most of the time there were few problems, because the Cimarron was wide but shallow. "A mile wide and a foot deep" as they say on the high plains. In flood times it was a different matter.

A SCENE FROM THE

CUSHING-WEBB OIL CO'S

SUB-DIVISION

The Santa Fe built a railroad line from Cushing into Oilton with a spur to Drumright, and the Oil Belt Terminal Railroad tied into the Short Line from Jennings to Oilton. Both lines carried passengers, but their main goal was to deliver supplies and take out crude oil. As the field was extended southward, a railroad entrepreneur named Joseph A. Frates built a similar spur from Depew to Shamrock which eventually connected to the Santa Fe at Drumright. But Joseph 00:19:00Frates had another tie to the history of the Cushing Field. Frates had a 25-year old daughter. He also had a friend who was a banker in Bristow. The banker was none other than Bernard B. Jones, one of Tom Slick's principal associates. Jones introduced Bernice Frates to his bachelor friend, and within a few months Tom Slick and Bernice Frates were married. So J. A. Frates, who liked to build railroads, had a wealthy son-in-law. For years afterwards, Slick furnished the capital for railroad and real estate ventures promoted and managed by his new father-in-law. One of these ventures was the construction of a railroad from Bristow to Okmulgee about 1920. The principle attraction for that particular route was a recently discovered oil pool about ten miles east of Bristow. The railroad skirted the edge of the pool and Frates plans included a railroad stop and a town site to service the new pool. I'll tell more about that later.

HAULING FLOW TANK

TO THE

WELL

(Sound of horses)

A WEEK'S TRIP

IN THE

GREAT CUSHING

OIL FIELD IN

OKLAHOMA

FOUR REELS REEL THREE

LAYING OIL PIPE LINE

FROM THIS FIELD TO

THE GULF OF MEXICO

Numerous pipelines were built to carry away the flood of crude oil. The Texas Company and Magnolia both laid a line all the way to the Gulf of Mexico. Note that this scene was posed. Men in suits don't just stand around very often, and this prehistoric Ditch Witch is rotating but not moving forward.

The best Arbuckle production at Cushing was owned by the McMan Oil Company whose principal owners were Robert McFarland and James Chapman and his father. The McMan built a 130 mile, eight inch line all the way to the Healdton area to tie 00:21:00into Magnolia's gathering system there. The McMan maintained that the pipeline was a private line, not subject to the common carrier rules and with a capacity of 22,000 barrels a day it handled only McMan's own crude production.

An experienced crew could lay even a big pipeline very fast. Today most pipelines are welded rather than screwed together.

OIL FIELD CATASTROPHES

INSURANCE COMPANIES ARE

THE LOSERS

TANKS STRUCK

BY

LIGHTENING

(Sound of fire burning)

During the flush production days, lots of Cushing oil was stored in big earthen pits, and there were several spectacular fires set by lightening. Lightening also set tanks afire. Sometimes a 55 thousand barrel would catch fire and burn at the top of the tank. The companies learned that if they could drain the tank into the moat surrounding the tank, they could pump the oil out of the moat and 00:22:00save lots of oil. So the companies set a cannon, just like the old civil war cannons, to fire at the base of the burning tank so they could generate a hole big enough to drain the tank and pump away the oil. The Drumright Oil Field Museum still has a cannon on display.

RESULT OF A

00000 GASOLINE EXPLOSION

FIVE MILES OF

CUSHING-WEBB OIL CO'S

SUB-DIVISION

Notice that these tanks are riveted tanks. Pressure vessels had to be riveted because electric arc welding had not yet been perfected. Most of the oil field tanks in those days were bolted tanks, and all the stock tanks and big storage tanks were bolted. Electric arc welding was developed during World War I and welded tanks gradually became the standard. Even so, leases drilled in the forties in our area were still being outfitted with bolted tanks.

Chapman and McFarland's ties to Magnolia were quite strong. In 1917 the McMan 00:23:00sold all of its production to Magnolia at the unheard of price of 39 million dollars, which was a lot of money in 1917 dollars. The sale included other properties besides the Cushing production. It was the biggest sale in the industry up to that time, and it stayed a record breaker for more than 30 years.

To those of you not familiar with Tulsa, the names Chapman and McFarland were important here. Originally ranchers from Holdenville, Phillip Chapman had married Robert McFarland's sister so their son James Chapman was McFarland's nephew. Before the Glenn Pool was discovered in nineteen-five, McFarland had bought a forty-acre tract near Sapulpa. Instead of leasing their land, they decided to drill it themselves. They formed Holdenville Oil and Gas, found prolific oil, and became well-to-do. James Chapman soon married McFarland's daughter, his first cousin, so it was a rather closely interconnected business relationship. Both families eventually moved to Tulsa and were very active in 00:24:00business and civic affairs.

JUNK CREW

SAVING

WHAT'S LEFT

(Horses walking on bridge)

The Chapman's and McFarland were already well-off, but they really made their money when they drilled leases they took in the Cushing Field. At times the McMan was the major producer in the field. Now-a-days charitable foundations created by members of the Chapman family distribute about 50 million dollars every year, much of it to non-profit organizations in the Tulsa area. The Tall Grass Prairie Preserve north of Pawhuska was originally the property of James Chapman and Horace Barnard. Barnard was Robert McFarland's brother-in-law, and 00:25:00therefore Mrs. James Chapman's uncle. He had also been an associate in the family's oil business.

(Sounds of horse's whinny, 'git up', and loading large pieces of scrap)

GASOLINE PLANTS & REFINERIES

NEAR

OILTON

The one non-family owner of the McMan was E. T. Harwell, who owned one-sixth of the stock so he became quite rich. He built a mansion at 22nd Street and 00:26:00Riverside which his widow gave to the Arts and Humanities Council of Tulsa and today Harwelden is the council's home.

At least a dozen gasoline plants operated in the Cushing Field to recover as much gasoline as possible from the casing-head gas. Most of the gas was quite rich and lots of gasoline could be recovered. In fact, drips had to be installed in the gas lines near the producing wells to catch the liquids that would gather in the lines. Drip gasoline burned quite readily in the simpler automobiles of the day, and many a pumper had a plentiful supply of tax-free gasoline to power his Model-T. Modern cars will not run on drip gasoline.

Wooden tanks were common in the early oil fields. Virtually all the water tanks were made of wood - redwood, because its straight grain and resistance to decay makes redwood ideal for a water tank.

The big engines and compressors of the gas plants required lots of cooling capacity, but even the smaller single cylinder engines of the pumping wells required a modest wooden circulating tank.

Gasoline plants recovered liquids that would have otherwise been wasted. But 00:27:00lots of oil and gas was wasted in the Cushing Field anyhow. Much of the natural gas was vented, and one gas well making an estimated 50 million cubic feet a day burned wild for several weeks. In addition, much Cushing crude oil was lost into various gullies and creeks and finely into the Cimarron River. Two men built a dam and a trap to catch oil floating on Tiger Creek and collected about 6,000 barrels of oil over a very short period of time. Other entrepreneurs copied their example, and skimming crafts became common. Grease skimming crafts were even constructed across the Cimarron River. The last skimmer on Drumright's Tiger Creek was finely abandoned in the early thirties when the field was about 20 years old. One old timer said he had seen oil run down Tiger Creek two or three feet deep.

The shortage of pipeline and railroad transportation facilities made other waste inevitable. In the great fire of 1914, almost one million barrels of oil was 00:28:00converted to smoke. Evaporation and seepage from oil stored in open pits were continual losses. The McMan alone had 60 thousand barrels of crude in two giant pits at one time, and even after they had erected and filled thirty-seven 55 thousand barrel tanks, they still had about three thousand barrels of oil in an open pit. Occasionally you will see in the background a locomotive pulling tank cars. Magnolia alone had about a thousand tank cars, each holding two hundred barrels to transport oil or gasoline. A barrel of crude oil contains 42 gallons.

The Cushing Field is on a distinct anticline that shows on the surface. An anticline is an elongated dome of rocks, originally deposited as horizontal layers and it is a common kind of trap for oil or gas. Many of the oil pools discovered in the earliest days of the industry have been stratigraphic traps not located on an anticline. And therefore the theory that oil collected in 00:29:00domes and anticlines have been challenged by competing theories. The Cushing Field was one of the largest fields discovered up to that time, and it was clearly an anticlinal trap. It has been frequently credited with being the first real confirmation of the anticlinal theory of oil accumulation. After the Cushing Field was discovered, oil companies established geological departments and blanketed prospective areas with surveying crews mapping the outcrops and looking for surface anticlines.

The Cushing Field, as important as it was with a half-billion barrel cumulative recovery, barely ranks as a giant field. It does not compete with other giant and super giant fields of the world, or even of the United States. For example, the East Texas pool, the largest in the contiguous United States, has produced more than five billion barrels of oil, and the Prudhoe Bay field in Alaska will ultimately produce 12 or 13 billion barrels. In the year 2000, the Cushing Field 00:30:00proper was still producing about 24 hundred barrels a day.

A WEEK'S TRIP

IN THE

GREAT CUSHING

OIL FIELD IN

OKLAHOMA

FOUR REELS REEL FOUR

(Birds)

As I related earlier, Joseph Frates promoted a town site in the edge of a new oil pool on the route of his new railroad from Bristow to Okmulgee. Since Tom Slick had put up most of the money, Frates chose him to be the president of the railroad, and he also named the town after Slick. Contrary to the assumptions of many people, Slick had nothing to do with the discovery or the development of the Slick pool, which was named for the town, rather than the other way around.

The railroad was never built all the way to Okmulgee. Automobiles, trucks, and pipelines took away the need for a railroad and soon spelled its end. As for the Slick town site, it boomed to about five thousand, and gradually dwindled to 00:31:00about a hundred and fifty inhabitants today.

FILLING TANK CARS

WITH

GASOLINE

Soon after the Cushing Field was discovered, Tom Slick's best friend, Charles F. Urschel, married Tom's sister Mary, and took over the management of Slick's business affairs. When Slick died at the age of forty-six in 1930, Urschel became trustee of the estate. Mary Slick Urschel died the next year, but Urschel did not remain a widower long. In 1932 he married Tom's widow, Bernice Frates Slick, and so united in a new way the Slick and Urschel families and fortunes. Keeping it all in the family seems to be an oil field tradition. Needless to say, Urschel and his wife were quite well off.

The next year, on July 22nd, 1933, George "Machine Gun" Kelly and a confederate 00:32:00broke up a bridge game at Charles Urschel's home in Oklahoma City, kidnapped him, and held him for a quarter of a million dollars ransom. A quarter of a million dollars is a respectable figure even these days, but it represented a lot more in 1933 dollars in the middle of the depression. After the ransom was paid, Urschel gave every clue he could remember to the FBI, including his observation that a plane flew over the hideout at the same time every afternoon during his nine-day captivity, except on Tuesday. There weren't many scheduled flights in 1933 and the police found that an afternoon flight westward out of Dallas had been cancelled on that very Tuesday. With this and other clues, they located the farm house where he had been held. The two kidnappers were subsequently caught and given life sentences.

MR. O.A. BREWER

DIRECTOR OF STANDARD OIL

OF WYOMING AND A

LOT OWNER IN THE

CUSHING WEBB OIL CO'S

SUB-DIVISION

Along with the film itself, we got a copy of some remarks made by Sam Meyers who had saved his father's movie all those decades. Included was a message that probably was part of a flyer or brochure for the benefit of the people who had watched the film. Here's the pitch:

MR. PAUL A. WINTERSTEEN

OUR

SECRETARY

"When you saw our canvas banner flying on Main Street, inviting you to see this picture titled "How Oklahoma Millionaires Are Made", you wondered why we were here and just what we were selling. My friends, we're not here to sell you anything. We are here to show you how many of your neighbors

MR. S.M. MYERS

OUR

TREASURER

in Oklahoma are taking advantage of the golden opportunity they have to acquire 00:34:00riches by investing in the great Cushing Oil Field. You've seen our picture, you've seen how people from Tulsa and elsewhere daily debark from the passenger train at Drumright, to participate in the rush to acquire a piece of the action in the great Cushing Oil Field, hoping to improve themselves financially. You've seen in our picture how oil, black gold, comes out of the ground, often

OUR CHIEF ENGINEER

flowing over the crown blocks of the wooden derricks, into wooden tanks or earthen pits in an excess of a thousand, two thousand, three thousand, or five thousand barrels per day. At a market price of a dollar to a dollar and a half per barrel, this sometimes means a monthly income from one well of a hundred and fifty thousand dollars, or often much, much more. We would have preferred to have you visit Oklahoma

INTERIOR OF

OUR

OFFICE

and the Cushing-Webb company offices, and to see in person on the ground of the 00:35:00great Cushing Oil Field. But like Mohammad, when the mountains wouldn't come to him, he went to the mountain. Since it was impossible for you to come to us, we have come to you. You have seen in the movie and our offices the recommendations from our bank and from our chamber of commerce and the officers of our company, and the potential oil property we own and proposed to develop adjacent to the great Cushing Oil Field."

That is the end of the message.

Here we have an example of the crucial part of a presentation, the closing. But there's also another important stage in the life of a project, the ending. I remembered well the advice of an old hand of the business of spending other people's money looking for oil. "If your well is dry" he said, "keep your acreage and tell all your investors something might turn up later to make it valuable. And occasionally", he said, "something did turn up. But in the 00:36:00meantime you have kept some hope alive, and disappointment is accepted much more gracefully if the realization is spread out over time".

CUSHING-WEBB OIL CO'S

OFFICE

In contrast to some promotions that have been made in the oil business, this project was advanced by a reputable company in a very original manner, and we have been able to look back almost a century because the company was enterprising enough to present its wares in a new medium, on film.

LETTERS

OF

RECOMMEDATION

You can see that Cushing-Webb was a legitimate operation.

The northern most town is Jennings, and the town to the left is Yale. To the east of Yale, you can see the hand and finger pointing to the proposed well, which as I have said proved to be a dry hole. Oilton is the town in the bend of the Cimarron River. Southwest of Oilton is Cushing, and to the east of Cushing at the edge of the field is Drumright. Needless to say, the inhabitants of Drumright prefer to call the field the Drumright oil field. The field actually extends another seven or eight miles south of the wells shown on this map.

I'm not sure how their lot system worked, but a thirty-dollar investment seems reasonable for almost anything.

BETTER BUY A LOT

AND GET

ONE

OF THESE

And remember, the investment came with an Oklahoma guarantee.

SEE

OUR

REPRESENTATIVES

WE THANK YOU

THE CUSHING WEBB OIL CO

GENERAL OFFICE

STILLWATER OKLAHOMA

Thanks for watching the show with me.

Reproduction courtesy of

Krumme Oil Company

Bristow, Oklahoma

Produced by

George Krumme

Written & Narrated by

George Krumme

"How Oklahoma Millionaires Are Made"

Copyright 2003 Krumme Oil Company