Growing Up in the Oil Patch. John Schmidt J.
with quite a flash and bang — much to the amusement of the bystanders.
Mullen would then go to the nearest bar and take a slug of good Canadian whisky, to take the taste of the coal oil away.
Mullen’s favorite yarns were about getting the better of the Findlay police, who tried to enforce a bylaw prohibiting transport of nitro on city streets. The bylaw resulted from an explosion in the city centre in which two men and two horses were killed.
Any attempt to arrest a driver, resulted in him getting off his wagon and offering the cop the reins.
That usually ended it. No cop was brave enough to take over the reins. And he would have been afraid to take the driver away and leave the wagon standing in the street. Most drivers were given warnings and allowed to go on their way.
But one of Mullen’s mates had his bluff called by Constable Jack Crawford. When the driver got off the wagon, Crawford calmly took his place, picked up the reins and motioned the startled driver up onto the seat beside him and drove to the police station.
Crawford had been a nitro wagon driver himself. That ended those shenanigans.
The Leamington-Mersea oil field was a small one — only eight miles long and half a mile wide — brought in 1902. It was part of a larger field extending from Petrolia, (Canada’s first commercial field), across the west end of Lake Erie to Findlay. It was also exploited for natural gas and marketable quantities sold by Eugene Coste, a native of Amherstburg, Ont. A man who was to have an enormous influence on the lives of Tiny and Frosty.
The original big players in the Leamington field were Capt. Ed Winter, a lake boat captain, and Ed Wigle, a crony of Winter and a partner with him in the Leamington Torpedo Company. They founded the Leamington Oil Company, in 1904, with capital raised by friends of J.C. Hickey of Detroit.
Hickey was associated with the National Supply Company, which supplied most of the drilling equipment in the United States and, from 1905, in Canada. Hickey also headed the Detroit Oil Exchange, where most of Ontario’s venture capital was raised.
Hickey also formed an oil company, when Winter’s company brought in a well with a good paying flow. The Winter well started an oil rush, which saw 300 technical personnel from the Ohio fields working there, in the summer of 1905. Common labourers in the oil fields of Ontario were making $2 to $5 a day, compared to $1 a day for industrial labourers.
When there was a slow day, the city editor of the Toronto Globe would assign a reporter to take the train to Leamington and do an update on the drilling. Those stories brought in thousands in new capital, as they indicated oil was flowing from gushers in all directions, because of lack of wooden tankage to contain it. But nobody cared — especially the farmers. They were collecting big royalties and becoming rich. And then, if the flow of a well was shut off, how would the well owners be able to tell if there was any more in the ground.
A note from Tiny’s scribbler attempts to clear up a popular misconception, that has created hard feeling between eastern and western farmers even to this day.
Ontario farmers owned their own mineral rights and the usual lease rental was one barrel for every eight produced. In the three Prairie provinces, the provincial governments took over all mineral rights from the federal government in 1905, (except those owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway and the Hudson’s Bay Company). The provinces thus collect the royalties and the land owners receive only a small rental from oil companies, for the use of their surface rights. Few people in the east believe farmers get such a shoddy deal.
In 1904, oil companies were receiving $1.86½ a barrel at the refinery in Sarnia. The refiners paid $1.34 a barrel and the federal government 52½ cents bounty. The bounty was paid to encourage drilling for oil, as the demand in Canada then made it necessary to import large amounts from the United States.
At the time, the U.S. was carrying out an intensive drilling program of 1,400 wells a month, while Canada was spudding in only 20, despite the royalty.
The politics of government intervention in oil pricing is interesting. The Canadian government subsidy didn’t succeed in increasing supplies, because there wasn’t much oil in Ontario for self-sufficiency in 1904. However, in the 1980s, the National Energy Program tax of the Trudeau government, nearly put the Canadian oil industry out of business in the West. This policy was a repeat of a five-cent-a-barrel tax, which Pennsylvania placed on its oil production, a tax which forced small producers out of business.
The bounty never had a chance to prove anything in the Leamington field as it petered out by 1910.
When Tiny and Frosty finished drilling three low-producing wells for Winter, work had started to become scarce. Thus, when Eugene Coste, the geologist for the Provincial Natural Gas and Fuel Company, offered them a contract to drill three wells at Dunnville, Ont., at the east end of Lake Erie, they moved there quickly.
These wells were part of a wildcatting program. Coste visited the rig while they were setting it up. He was disappointed in their equipment, which looked like all oil drilling outfits when piled on the ground: a pile of junk. He doubted they could drill a well with it.
However, they persevered and brought in a hole with a slight showing of gas. Coste sold the pipe in the hole to a farmer and the gas went to supply his home and a nearby school. Tiny wrote of Coste on page 18:
“I told him our pile of junk was all Frosty and I had to make our living. If we didn’t think we could finish the contract, we wouldn’t have taken it. Coste admired our spirit. He told us to go ahead and he’d consider what was to be done on the second hole. What he did was the biggest surprise of our lives.
“Although he was a professional geologist he had the common touch. He would come into a rig and look around and want to know everything. He asked questions to the point of annoyance to the crew. He was also quick-tempered and could get into a quarrel mighty fast. But he was admired and respected by the workers in the field. If he came out and had to stay overnight and no extra cots were available, he would roll up in a blanket and sleep on the floor of the tent.
Eugene Coste of Amherstberg, Ontario, the man with the “golden touch”. Photo: Glenbow Archives, Calgary, Alberta.
“He was a good man to be around as every project he touched made money. He had a golden touch.”
The Costes were a remarkable family. Eugene was the third son of a Frenchman, Napoleon Coste of Marseilles, who went to sea but jumped ship at Amherstburg, Ontario. Here Eugene was born in 1859.
Four years later the family moved back to France, where the sons were later educated as professional engineers in Paris. The money to finance their education was made by Napoleon as a contractor on the Suez Canal, completed in 1869.
The family moved back to Amherstburg in 1882 and built Mireille, a large house that became a landmark. It was similar to Coste House built by Eugene in Calgary 30 years later, also a landmark.
Eugene went looking for gold in Ontario, then oil and gas. He brought some science to oil exploration, which had been previously based on the work of “witches” or dowsers.
His science was a bit different than the American and British school. He contended to his dying day, that oil and natural gas originated in inorganic or volcanic rocks. Mysterious fluids were created and they seeped into sediomentary formations where man could tap pools of them. The other view is oil and gas are of organic origin, living material which has been buried and compressed and congregates in underground pools.
Coste’s first well was near Kingsville, Ont. It came in at 1,031 feet, with a flow of 10 million cubic feet a day. His Prairie Natural Gas and Fuel Company exported gas to both Buffalo and Detroit. This continued until supplies became depleted by the turn of the century.
Back in Dunnville, Coste showed up at the second hole of Tiny and Frosty and asked them to break off and go to Langham, Saskatchewan, to a wildcat site on the North Saskatchewan