Growing Up in the Oil Patch. John Schmidt J.

      James Duncan McGregor (1860-1935). Cattleman extraordinaire who, in 1929 at the age of 69, was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Alberta. Photo: Western Canada Pictorial Index.

      McGregor and his brother, Colin, were obsessed about electric railways as a quick, effective means of transportation for farmers. At one point construction bonds had been guaranteed. Not only that, but a successful well was brought in on Colin’s farm at 2,177 feet. On it were based the hopes of supplying power for the electric railway and for the proposed townsite of Ronalane nearby. Neither ever got past the planning stages. Later the CPR built a branchline over the right-of-way McGregor acquired.

      That left him with quantities of gas, which were developed for heating homes.

      When McGregor’s grand idea didn’t pan out, necessity sent the SAL 150 miles up the Bow River to build a diversion works at Carseland. Bow River water was sent coursing through an immense canal system; dumped back into the river at Ronalane.

      Tiny and Frosty had more success in drilling under the CPR contract. Based on the success of the Colin McGregor well north of the river, they decided to drill for the CPR south of the river. But this project didn’t happen immediately. The engineer of the western region of the CPR didn’t take kindly to this idea, being a good company man with little imagination and a finely ingrained sense of job security.

      Working for the CPR was usually akin to holding a civil service job, with attendant inter-department wars fought hand-to-hand. At that particular period in 1907, Guinter, the man in charge before Frosty arrived, decided to side with the engineer. The result was it was decided to drill another well at Dunmore Junction. Drilling here was regarded as a “sure thing” as gas had been discovered in Medicine Hat sand, which was very productive in the vicinity. An eight-inch pipe was drilled into this zone but it froze. It was then decided to abandon the well.

      The rig was finally moved to the Bow Island location with a payroll which included Frank Lawler, Martin Hovis and Garrett W. Green, drillers; H.C. (Fat) Gloyd, Edward Cumming and Alvin Van Alst, tool dressers; Chris Haerman, T. Penhale, R.L. Quinn, H.C. Schouert, F. Hopkins, helpers; A.W. Chisholm and H. Blythe, teamsters; J. Fun, H. Hanson, T.A. McElhany, J.A. Rees, H. Arblaster, T.A. Ross and D.W. Angus, carpenters; M. Cumming and S. Kunerman, cooks; and Orville Fuller, Hugh Henderson, L.E. Exley, J.H. Brown, J.C. Bright, supernumaries with no fixed occupation.

      The year was 1908. The well was officially known as Bow Island No. 1. But when it blew in at eight million cubic feet a day — the biggest gas well in Canada at that time — the American drillers dubbed it Old Glory.

      In one of those crazy incidents which often precede big discoveries, Old Glory came within an ace of not being drilled on the site which brought in the hugh flow of gas. When Martin appeared on the job site, he found the derrick had been built and pipe and fuel were on the ground. Coste came out from his Toronto office on an inspection tour and, to his horror, found the crew had located the well on the wrong lease.

      Due to a misunderstanding or just plain error — easy to make on the trackless open range — the crew had started work on Crown land, not CPR land.

      Coste told Frosty to tear down the rig and move to the correct location. Frosty figured this was a sacrilege. He argued with him for a couple of days to let them go ahead and drill and straighten out the paper work later if need be. With plenty of misgivings Coste agreed reluctantly.

      Of course, when the big well came in there was a great scramble in the CPR legal department in Montreal, to get the matter straightened out. The man sent to straighten things out was its young assistant solicitor, E.W. Beatty, (later to become company president). He arranged for a swap with the Canada Department of the Interior for a quarter-section the CPR owned near Innisfail, a quarter that was later granted as a homestead to Gisli Erickson.

      This seemed a simple enough transaction but legal minds wrangled over it several years before it was satifactorily settled in favour of the railroad.

      The CPR owned all the land and mineral rights for 20 miles on each side of lines it built, as part of the compensation given it by the federal government for building the system linking Eastern and Western Canada. The big question mark was: Would the CPR secure the mineral rights under the Crown land on which Old Glory was located? If the interior department withheld the mineral rights, would it mean the CPR would be required to pay the government a hefty slice of royalties? It was finally established the CPR did own the mineral rights. The question never entered anyone’s mind, that the mineral rights under Erickson’s land might have been worth considerably more years later.

      Drillers in the early days in the Canadian West had to know more than the physical end of operating the drill. They had to operate on guile and bravado along with their ability to “string along” their principals, who were usually far from the scene. The reason for this was, that trouble often developed during a drilling operation and the drillers operated on the theory that what the bankrollers didn’t know, didn’t hurt them. It was the custom to create a “bank roll” of their own by holding back in drilling reports a few hundred feet on the actual depth of the well, so that if trouble occurred progress could be reported while the trouble was being remedied.

      Tiny’s log of the well, in the well-thumbed scribbler, shows there was a great deal of trouble with the well. The CPR engineer in Winnipeg was told they were down only 900 feet, when they actually they were down 1,100.

      Although most of the wells up to that time were producing from Medicine Hat gas sand, Tiny and Frosty were of the opinion if they could get down to Dakota sand, the flow would be greater. The only thing they didn’t know was how deep they’d have to go to reach this formation.

      At 1,860 feet, (actually only 1,660), they ran into real trouble when they lost some tools in the hole. They lost the under-reamer dogs and broke the stem of the six-inch bit in the lower weld. This required what is known in the trade as a “fishing job,” a job at which Tiny became very proficient and won himself quite a reputation later in the Alberta oil fields.

      They used up all the “bank roll” on the fishing job and Coste, becoming wary of the progress reports, ordered them to abandon the well. This put them in a quandry, because they were surer than ever there was a big flow of gas in the hole.