Growing Up in the Oil Patch. John Schmidt J.
a month. It was then decided to drill another few feet. This paid off. At 1,915 feet the flow increased to seven million. On Feb. 23 the flow increased to 8.3 million.
Coste forgave all. He wired them to tube the well. But this wasn’t the end of the excitement at Old Glory. Big trouble occurred July 18 when a group of farmers visited the site.
“One of them, A. Tremblay, deliberately struck a match near a leaking gate valve to see what would happen. His assurance was highly volatile. Leakage was coming through a brand new four-inch No. 2000 Darling gate valve, with a heavy four-inch plug screwed in the open end of the gate.
“It was a small leak and did not amount to anything. The fire could have been put out easily, if there had been anyone at the pumphouse who knew anything about gas. After the fire had burned a few minutes the heat began to expand the balance of the connections and fittings and caused gas to leak through them. The other leaks naturally caught fire and the gaskets started to burn in the gate valves. The heat was so intense the brass valves started to melt. Finally, the tubing became so hot it burst with the internal pressure of 800 pounds.”
A drill crew was pulled off the Bassano well and sent to Bow Island with a couple of boilers, to make steam to smother the “nasty” fire. The heat was so intense a man couldn’t get within 75 feet of the fire.
Frosty put in a request to a CPR vice-president in Winnipeg to send in an army unit with a 10-pound gun, to shoot the fiery valves off if the steam failed to douse the fire. Fortunately, the artillery wasn’t needed. On July 28, Tiny was able to douse the fire with two boilers of steam.
In the early days, as many as 10 to 12 boilers were required to snuff gas fires. The object was to move the boilers as near to the fire as possible and to cut the oxygen supply by blowing live steam at 150 pounds pressure into the fire through 12-inch pipes. A large empty pipe laid on the opposite side of the well to the boilers was laid to “pull the flame into it.”
If Old Glory was considered a big well, Bow Island No. 4 was considered the granddaddy. It came in at 29 million cubic feet. All the adjectives were gone by the time No. 6 came in at 42 million.
Those wells assured Coste that field had sufficient reserves to take on the Calgary market 170 miles away and supply it by pipeline. At its height the total field totalled 59 million cubic feet a day at a pressure of 800 pounds.
History must record that the chronicle of the discovery and development in the natural gas industry might have been written quite differently, had it not been for the brassy intestinal fortitude of a couple of young American drillers, with a shirttail full of equipment (by present-day standards), and nothing to lose and who kept drilling at No. 1 well against all odds and orders. There is no gainsaying that luck played a part. The result was that it ensured them of jobs, as Coste went East to arrange for the financing to drill more wells to prove up the Bow Island field. Tiny’s scribbler records:
“I often think of the loyalty of the men in this industry, who were willing to go into those rigs where oil and salt water were spraying many feet above the top of the derrick. They were ready to go up the rig, clad in oilskin suits and rubber hats and boots and take their turns in putting tubing into the wells. They could only endure about 20 minutes at a time of this kind of punishment. But it had to be done. In spite of all obstacles, the wells were eventually tubed in with a rock pressure of more than 1,200 pounds.
“In my job, even though I worked a 12-hour day, my work was never done Maybe I would have a Sunday off — or a weekend. But then the next week it meant going day and night no matter what the weather.
“Often it meant barreling across the prairie in an open car, with the side curtains flopping in the wind in a blizzard or at 25 below zero. You just had to get that gas or oil well going.
“Maybe you were moving to a new location and your boiler didn’t show up. You would go down the road a mile or two and hear your teamster cussing the horses, because they couldn’t pull the load out of a mudhole. Maybe after a futile attempt to move a heavy wagon he would have to unhitch, arrive at camp at 8 p.m., feed the tired teams and slide into a bunk for a few hours of sleep.
“Next morning the teamster would be up before dawn and go back to the load with a new idea for moving it. Maybe it would move this time.
“When I first started drilling I often slept on the ground wrapped in a blanket after following a rutted wagon trail all day. There were bountiful trout streams, numerous elk, deer, bears, with wolves and coyotes to keep you awake at night with their howls.
“That is the pioneering work I and my good fellows did for our newly adopted province. You wonder at times that some of the brass of the government, who brag about the riches of the Province of Alberta, have the nerve to brag. They never went through what the common drillers, tool pushers, roustabouts and other labourers did to bring in the volume of oil and gas which has filled government coffers so full of money, they are now fighting about the way it is being distributed.
“Yes, this is a rich province. Thanks to who?
“But the compensations were the many trips through snowcapped mountains and green valleys. What more could a romantic person wish for?”
While this is a noble sentiment, the real facts of the matter are, that drillers weren’t making all that much and they had to improvise and cut their living costs by any means possible.
For instance, when Tiny was drilling Old Glory winter came early in 1908, he and Zulah and their 18-month-old son, Fred, were living in a tent at the wellsite. It was customary in those early days, for the families to go to camp along with the men. They lived in tents with board floors. These provided good, snug, warm living conditions until the bitter cold weather came.
Zulah used to talk about an early November storm that blew in and piled so much snow around the tent, the men from another tent had to come and dig them out in the morning. Following that, the families moved to a Medicine Hat apartment for the winter.
The prairies were just being opened to the big wave of settlers at the time and Zulah recalled seeing plenty of buffalo skulls along the wagon roads. When one had to travel off the wagon roads, the only means of finding the way from one place to another was the odd survey marker. It was a delight for the women to arrive in Medicine Hat and find concrete pavements.
There were Indians encamped in the vicinity who delighted young Fred with the mocassins they made for him and who couldn’t fathom just what the palefaces from the CPR were up to, with their giant rig.
The Phillip’s early days in the West were in the age when homesteaders made a bet of $10 with the government, that if they could stick to a quarter-section three years it was theirs. But a good many did not make it — after working two years for nothing.
The only thing necessary to get one’s hands on the 160 acres, was to file on the homestead at the land office, then hunt out the corner-stake — no easy task. This was a country where one would see for miles in all directions with nothing but blue sky, hot sun and heat coming up in waves; maybe a few head of cattle belonging to some other homesteader five or six miles away. There was no fencing in sight. A note in Tiny’s scribbler:
“You wondered who the land belonged to: a rancher or the government? But the rancher was there. So what?
“It was up to you to make a country of this province of Alberta.
“Many people emigrated without much and expected to get rich by work alone. But they did not always succeed. The authorities told them they had to build a house on a homestead pre-emption, before they could claim the land for $10. Many a poor fellow built the house out of sods and lived that way maybe the first year, maybe two.