The Year of Fear (10 page)

But Urschel and his competitors in Texas and Oklahoma were finding so much oil that the price per barrel was going through the floor. From 1932 to spring 1933, the price of oil had fallen from eighty-seven cents a barrel to forty-four cents. Then, big oil companies, in an attempt to drive independents like Urschel out of the market, escalated their overproduction to bring the price down to a quarter, and then a dime. The independents needed FDR to step in and establish price controls and production quotas. The President eventually would come to Urschel’s aid, but not in the way he was hoping, or even imagining.

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Tom Slick was the best thing that had ever happened to Charles F. Urschel, a poor farm boy from Ohio who worked his way out of the Midwest by translating his love of numbers into accounting skills and a number of jobs that allowed him to polish his craft and save enough money to leave the farming life behind. Barely twenty years old, he packed what little he had, boarded a southbound train and headed to Oklahoma to make his fortune in the oil business. There he found a job with oilman Charles B. Shaffer, with whom Slick had also gone to work.

Slick was coming off a string of spectacular failures and had teamed up with Shaffer, who was about the only other oilman who believed in the potential of the Cushing oil fields. Slick was buying up leases and drilling as secretly as it is possible to drill, hoping to strike gold and buy up the surrounding land before the competition could get word of the find. When he hit a gusher in the middle of winter in the middle of the night in 1912, he capped it off quickly and told his crew to hold tight and spread the word that the well was proving a disappointment. But the shroud of secrecy could only hold for so long, and when word leaked out the industry pounced.

However, when they got to Cushing they found they’d been stymied. Typical was the note that Harry Ford Sinclair’s man wrote to his boss, the founder of Sinclair Oil:

Slick and Shaffer roped off their well on the Wheeler farm and posted guards and nobody can get near it … I got a call yesterday at the hotel in Cushing from a friend who said they had struck oil out there. A friend of his was listening in on the party line and heard the driller call Tom Slick at the farm where he’s been boarding and said they’d hit. Well, I rushed down to the livery stable to get a rig to go out and do some leasing and damned if Slick hadn’t already been there and hired every rig. Not only there, but every other stable in town. They all had the barns locked and the horses out to pasture. There’s 25 rigs for hire here in Cushing and he had them all for ten days at $4.50 a day apiece, so you know he really thinks he’s got something. I went looking for a farm wagon to hire and had to walk three miles. Some other scouts had already gotten the wagons on the first farms I hit. Soon as I got one, I beat it back to town to pick up a notary public to carry along with me to get leases—and damned if Slick hadn’t hired every notary in town, too.

Slick had leased everything solid … except some Indian leases. I’ve been checking the records and you have to get the Interior Department to put them up for sale.

Slick had locked everything up at one dollar per acre. By the time the Indian leases became available, Sinclair and others were paying $200 per acre.

The gusher that Slick tapped that night in Cushing eventually set off one of the greatest oil booms in American history. Within a few short years, Cushing made Oklahoma the leading producer of oil in the nation. Slick had found gold in the red dust of the Oklahoma soil, and Charles Urschel had found the man he wanted to work for. It was a partnership that blossomed into a friendship that would last for life.

Within a few years of painting the skyline black with belching wells, Tom Slick had acquired the title that would stick for life: King of the Wildcatters.

Cushing sat atop the richest field in the history of the oil business. When Urschel joined him, Slick was putting so many wells in the ground and finding so much oil that it overwhelmed the technology available to contain it. The landscape that Urschel found himself surrounded by was otherworldly and bizarre.

Farmers were eager to lease their lands to Slick because, in many cases, it was the only way they could stay on their land. Slick was a man of the people and always dealt generously with his leaseholders and others from the lower ranks. Farmers knew that Tom Slick was a man of his word and that if he struck oil on their land, they’d be paid their share—and maybe more. And that was true whether they were white, black or Indians on the reservation.

So they cared little about the devastation brought to their land when Tom hit a gusher. Natural gas would spew into the air with little opportunity or system to contain it. Lest it collect in low-lying areas and choke people to death, in many cases it was ignited and allowed to burn off in fires that would last weeks. Inspectors from the Bureau of Mines estimated that in some of the fields drilled by Slick more than a billion cubic feet of natural gas was escaping into the air or being burned off in low-lying fires that gave the landscape a numinous glow that could be seen for miles. Oil would pool up in farmers’ fields, creating shallow black lakes. The escaping natural gas would blow geysers of oil into the air, where the winds would carry the slimy clouds for miles.

When the wind wasn’t blowing punishing brown dust clouds, it carried black rain, spreading a slick and stinking blanket over once-rich farmlands as the gas-powered rigs thumped and clanged and steam hissed and belched, adding a deafening soundtrack to the appalling scene.

One newspaper reported that “oil runs in the ditches; escaping gas shimmers in the sunshine, and on the hills are brown patches where the oil has gushed over the top of the derrick and come down in a golden torrent at the rate of 76 cents a barrel until the well has been choked into submission.”

The oil flowed into creeks and rivers. The oilmen built dams in an attempt to contain it, but the dry heat would cause the oil to partially evaporate into an unusable lake of stinking slime. Creeks and rivers turned black, running so thick with oil that Slick’s competitors would pump it out downstream into storage tanks. This set up bitter fights over who owned the oil, the company that pumped it out of the ground or the company or farmer with the surface rights to the land through which the spewing oil flowed. As inadequate as the technology was to capture and contain Slick’s wells, the law was equally undeveloped in interpreting who it belonged to after it had escaped the well.

And, despite the environmental devastation that an oil strike might create, there wasn’t a town, city, hamlet, burg or farm that wouldn’t welcome—or pray for—a strike on their land. In a matter of months, oil could not only lift an entire region out of the Depression—it could bring riches to the formerly destitute.

Like most of the country, Oklahoma was a bitter cauldron of racial division and hatred. In fact, to fight the Klan’s influence, Governor John Calloway put the entire state under martial law in 1923 and called out the National Guard to keep the peace. Yet, in the impoverished, segregated black country towns, signs were often posted stating, “White men not welcome after dark—except Tom Slick.” Such was the appeal and the legend of the King of the Wildcatters.

When Urschel left the lush green landscapes of the Midwest to find his fortune in the Oklahoma-Texas oil boom, he found himself in the polluted and acrid world of a largely unregulated business that was inflicting an environmental nightmare on the countryside. He was also time-traveling back to a world that closely resembled the locale’s Wild West past.

When Slick or one of his competitors would find oil in some lost corner of the countryside, the word would spread and throngs of entrepreneurs, dreamers, schemers and crooks would rush in, hoping to ride Tom’s coattails to the riches a boom town might bring. First the roustabouts, rig workers, miners and carpenters would flood in to build the derricks, assemble the drills and plumb the wells. With no housing, often for miles, they’d live in tents or hastily constructed shacks and cook their meals on open fires until the get-rich-quick business sharks would flood in to erect cheap shantytowns with lumberyards, blacksmiths, brick masons and all the attendant services to support the oilmen in the field. And in no time at all there were a multitude of saloons, pool halls, gambling dens and whorehouses supporting the men in town who were supporting the men in the field.

In a matter of months, a formerly quiet corner of the countryside would revert back in time some fifty years, and the Wild West was reborn in the Oklahoma Plains. With very little governance and no law enforcement to speak of, the denizens of the new towns would stick a revolver in their belts or grab a shotgun off the shelf for their own protection as they set off into the night as it came alive with the kind of adventurous entertainment that a man who’d labored fourteen hours in the sweaty stench of an untamed oil field could most enjoy.

In 1920, Slick and his partner, Joseph Frates, attempted to bring some order and discipline to the land developing around their oil fields, essentially by building their own towns, the first of which they named Slick. They advertised it as “a mecca for wide-awake businessmen who are ever on the lookout for better locations for their business,” boasted that it was surrounded by a “great forest of oil derricks” and claimed that it would swell to a population of five thousand within weeks.

On the first day of the land rush to Slick, hundreds of lots were sold and businesses started popping up like weeds in the barren wheat fields. Frates routed his railroad in and facilitated the flow of supplies and people to fuel Slick’s growth. Within a year, the town boasted not only the usual oil-supporting supply stores and businesses, but a fine hotel, train station and a small hospital. Slick built a baseball park and an outdoor boxing ring for the men of the town to let off steam in a more gentlemanly manner than was the custom in the “less civilized” boom towns. He also installed streetlights, natural gas and water lines.

But some people just don’t want to be civilized. In short order, Slick had the usual collection of rowdy saloons, houses of prostitution and gambling dens feeding on the after-hours desires of the oil workers with fresh money in their pockets and sidearms on their hips.

Within a year of its establishment, the
Tulsa Tribune
reported that “The old west, unfettered by law and conventionalities lives again in Slick.”

In some ways, the town was a little more advanced than the typical boom town in that it had its own underworld enforcer, Whitey Payne, a law enforcement officer who was supposed to keep a lid on things. But the lid just didn’t stay on.

On Christmas evening in 1920, a bunch of drunken roustabouts started firing their weapons randomly into businesses and the various enterprises around town. Amid the confusion, the town’s meager security force fled. A thirty-six-hour gunfight played out over December 26 and 27, and Slick’s main street was transformed into a shootout scene only Hollywood could imagine. Stores and patrons were robbed, cars were hijacked and several people were shot before the merriment subsided and additional police support arrived from the county.

Urschel had not imagined that the oil business would transport him so far back in time, but it didn’t matter. In Urschel, Slick found a man he could trust like a brother.

By 1916, Slick’s business empire was so sprawling and internecine that even he couldn’t keep track of it. So he brought on Urschel, a born numbers man, to help him out. Urschel could work numbers in his head nearly as fast as he could on paper. And he forgot nothing. In no time he was saving the company thousands and building a fast friendship with Slick, who took to him almost immediately. The two were perfectly complementary personalities. The chain-smoking, hyperactive, risk-taking gambler paired up with the stoic, methodical German. Together they were making millions, and Urschel was even able on occasion to pull Tom away from his workaholic ways for a round of golf or a trip into the country for some hunting and fishing. Urschel couldn’t match Slick on the links, but he was impressive with a rifle in his hands.

The two traveled the vast acreage of Slick’s oil fields in Oklahoma, Texas and Kansas and continued to find oil and earn millions until most in the business considered him the largest independent oilman in the country. But the pace and the pressures of the business were killing him. Slick had worked himself into hospital-inducing exhaustion several times in his career, and doctors continually advised him that he could not live long at that pace. By 1929, he was wasted and frail and, conceding to the pleas of his family, agreed to get out of the business and rest until his health returned.

He arranged for his good friend Urschel to sell most of his oil-producing wells, and when Urschel completed the deal, the grateful wildcatter handed his numbers man a little bonus—a check for $2 million—and headed off for some extensive R & R.

The deal drew the attention of even
The New York Times,
which detailed the transaction under the headline:

TOM SLICK, EX-MULE DRIVER, SELLS HIS WELLS

TO THE PRAIRIE OIL COMPANY FOR $30,000,000

The largest transfer of oil-producing properties in recent years was made known yesterday in the announcement that the Prairie Oil and Gas Company had bought all the Mid-Continent holdings of Thomas B. Slick, who is called the world’s greatest individual operator.

The story went on to note how Slick had begun his oil career as a teenage mule-driver, roustabout and driller in the oil fields of southern Illinois before discovering huge deposits in Oklahoma, Kansas and North Texas. The story said he planned to take a year off and tour Europe.

But relaxing was something that Slick was just not good at and, within a matter of weeks after the sale, he was back in the business. In April he established the Tom Slick Oil Company and named Urschel as his first vice president and treasurer. The two chased Tom’s latest hunch and began drilling for oil on leases in Oklahoma City itself. Characteristically, nearly every well that the company dug began producing record amounts. However, city folk were not quite as enamored of Slick’s handiwork as were the impoverished residents of the countryside, where the income from the oil leases was keeping them afloat. As the wind blew the oil spray across cars, businesses and city parks, and lakes of sludge belched from the ground, Slick Oil was battered with dozens of lawsuits. Slick lived in fear that an errant fire would ignite the combustible fumes blowing through the dry city and burn it down in an untamable conflagration. Still, he could not stop. The Oklahoma City discovery was turning out to be the biggest deposit since the Cushing fields, and it was feeding some of the most productive wells that Slick had ever drilled. But the yearlong pursuit of the Oklahoma City claim only accelerated the decline in his health.