Work Cited

Black, Brian. Petrolia: The Landscape of America’s First Oil Boom. Baltimore & London: The Johns Hopkins University Press. 2000.

Boatright, Mody C. and Owens, William A. Tales From the Derrick Floor; a people’s history of the oil industry. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc.,  1970.

Carlson, Peter. Roughneck: The life and times of Big Bill Haywood.  New York: W. W. Norton. 1983.

Lambert , Paul F. and Franks, Kenny A. Voices From the Oil Fields. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. 1984.

Lynch, Gerald. Roughnecks, Drillers, and Tool Pushers: Thirty-three Years in the Oil Fields.  Austin: University of Texas Press. 1987.

McCracken, Harold. Roughnecks and Gentleman. Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company. 1968.

            *This is a novel that I was hoping would be really helpful. However, what talk there is of production and the hard life is all taken place in Alaska.

National Commission on Labour, Report of the Study Group for Oil Refining and Distribution. Delhi, India: M/s Samrat Press. 1968.

                  *There was a chapter dedicated to working conditions, It was useful but didn’t focus on the production, only refining.

Olien, Roger M. and Olien, Diana D. Oil and Ideology. Chapel Hill & London: The University of North Carolina Press.

            *This had a lot of good information in it but didn’t fit the feel of the blog. It talked mostly of Standard Oil and politics.

Roughneck. Johnny Cash. From the album: Blood, Sweat & Tears. Released 1963. YouTube, May 29, 2009.  Uploaded by Oiyoo.

Roughnecks Career Information. OilRecruiter.net. The Oil & Gas Industry Jobs Board.  2007

            Accessed: Dec. 15, 2010 http://oilrecruiter.net/index.php?page=d_roughnecks

*What sources that aren’t directly cited in the blog I still used as a general knowledge to get into the role of the roughneck, however not all seemed fitting to quote so they are just added here. 

When times get Rough

“In youth I gnawed life’s bitter rind

And shared the rugged lot

Of fellows rude and unrefined,

Frustrated and forgot;

And now alas! It is too late

My sorry ways to mend,

So sadly I accept my fate,

A Roughneck to the end.

Profanity is in my verse

And slang is in my rhyme,

For I have mucked with men who curse

And grovel in the grime;

My fingers were not formed, I Fear,

To frame a pretty pen,

So please forgive me if I veer

From Virtue now and then.

For I would be the living voice,

Though raucous is its tone,

Of men who rarely may rejoice,

Yet barely ever moan:

The rovers of the raw-ribbed lands,

The lads of lowly worth,

The scallywags with scaley hands

Who weld the ends of earth.

   -Robert Service, Prelude (pg 13)

I turned 20 years old today. I almost forgot, 'cept Lum called the driller i've been working for and asked to talk to me. After a few minutes of talking with him I really started to miss home. Then again, where is home for me? I guess i'd call it Seminole, even though Mamma and Lum moved out of there too when the boom ended. Even if I wasn't roughneckin' now i'm not too sure where i'd be calling home. It makes me remember the time Lum tried to keep me at home, but no I was gonna go if it was the last thing I did. Now that i'm in this place there's no going out. My schooling's only up to 10th grade, i'm never in one place long enough to start a family, and the only thing I know how to do in life is drill a well. 

"Even if a roughneck could get in every day as long as he could work, he wouldn't last but twenty or twenty-five years, if he could make it that long. You ever notice it, you don't see many of 'em over forty? Well, if they don't get killed by something falling on 'em, or get caught in between something, or if they're not drillers, ... they're wore out by the times they get to be forty. The veins in their legs get busted an' their muscles get cramped and stiff, and if a roughneck can't move around quick on the derrick floor, he's going to kill himself and everybody working with him (Franks, 81)."

Well shoot, i've only been doing this for about three years and i'm already having trouble staying on board. Work isn't as steady as it was before I came in. I started this job when there was work everywhere I looked, of course it seemed like a great idea. Now things are different. "When I started out, and a  long time before that even, they used to drill as many wells as they could afford and wanted to, but now they're got so they don't want to drill on anything but twenty-acre leases (Franks, 82)." So work isn't steady anymore. I could be working two months straight then nothing for six months. What about all the men with families? I can't complain about the money we get here, but it doesn't go a long way when there's kids to feed. 

Living off the land has brought me a long way so far. My best bet is to either "work long's [I] can and then try to get on WPA [Works Progress Administration] if it's still going, or get some contractor to take a chance on us and make us drillers (Franks, 81)." Becoming a driller was the plan all along, I guess I just thought it'd come already. 

It's hard to see us workers get so much out of the land, and give so little back. I can't remember a job I've worked on that didn't have a spill, gas flare, or a ruined town left behind. It's all part of the job, I thought, but boy it doesn't seem right. I'm glad now I never got a family with me. Raising those kids around this mess, I wouldn't want that for a second. Clean showers are hard to get, clean water you have to buy. If there's anything you want that isn't covered in oil, you might wanna try the next town over.

Well what more can I say. Not only did I want this lifestyle, I didn't quit 'til I got it. "I had plenty of opportunities to get out, but did not take them, and as a consequence, I have lived a very tough life. Being oil-field trash ain't a bed of roses (Lynch, 5)."

                                         Aga-Jari Oil Field, Time & Life pictures, 1945

The Boom Towns

Boom towns started becoming more and more regular and we started traveling to them more and more often. Production was up, i'd hear the driller say, well, I thought, that must be a good thing seeing as we have all this oil coming out of the ground. 


What always made me curious was, what started the "boom town" craze? why did i leave Seminole to go to Texas, and then up traveling all across the states to get the same product: oil. Well little by little I started to find out some reasons why. Things I heard from the boss, from other drillers, and just folks around the towns. 


"What more than anything else determined the character of the boom town was a legal principle known as rule of capture... It meant that if an owner of a leaseholder drilled an oil well, his neighbor had to drill too, to prevent the oil from being drained from under his land (Boatright, 61)." Once I got to the first few towns I started picking up on this. All the land owners were begging us to get out as much oil as we could. It was a race, I thought. I've never been much for competitions, but I have to admit it sure felt like one at times. 


The towns that were originally at the oil sites we couldn't even recognize. New stores (mostly for us workers), bad roads and trails would be made just to get from here to there, and there weren't enough houses to put up all the workers who were only here for a short stay. "Workers generally lived in tents or shacks, or crowded flophouses that rented cots in eight-hour shifts, the "hot bed" system. Sewer and water systems could not be created where they did not exist, and where they did exist, they could not be extended to meet the need of the expanded population. Health laws could not be enforced in the eating places. Epidemics broke out from time to time (Boatright, 62)." 

                                                    Burkburnett, Texas. 1919


I don't think all the wives and children liked us much. I thought about getting a wife here and there, it sure does get lonely starring up in the tents or boardinghouses, with nothing but a clan of muscles all around me, snoring through the night. Just none of the women around the saloons seemed fitting. Maybe after a few years of doing this, and after I make it up to a driller and have more money to save, i'll go looking for a wife. The women I did see around, some already with their kids, well they weren't too fond of the saloons and drinking and fights us roughnecks brought with us wherever we'd go. 


"There was lots of fights there, yes, fist fights. In the beginning I don't remember of anybody killing anyone there. But they'd fall out over different things and have fist fights. And after the pipe liners come in there, 'course the saloons come in there. They sold beer and liquors of all kinds there. And there was lots of it drank (Boatright, 64)." 


One night some of us got curious with all the town chatter, and some of the guys knew of a town meeting that night. Well we went, and it sure was an experience. I don't remember all the talk of it, the man who was running the show wasn't too friendly on us workers, I could tell by the looks he's give our way. During one of his rants, he muttered something that had always stuck with me. He said his land was "sacrificing" for us, the whole town was. Sacrificing? Of course not, right? It's just land and we're doing what we should with it. The oil is down there whether we bring it up or not. 


The man running the meeting got me a little heated. Sacrificing? what is he trying to say? We're here helping this town out ya know. We're digging up the oil, working hard all day, and they're getting money for it! On the walk back to the boarding house, what the man was trying to say started making sense. I looked around me and the place was a mess. "The soil is black, being saturated with waste petroleum. The engine-houses, pumps, and tanks are black, with the smoke and soot of the coal-fires which raise the steam to drive the wells... The men that work among the barrels, machinery, tanks, and teams are white men blackened... Even the trees, which timidly clung to the sides of the bluffs, wore the universal sooty covering. Their very leaves were black (Petrolia, 67)." 


Man, oh man. What have we done?

                                                       Boomtown (still photo from movie)
  

My First Boom

A few months passed and i've been getting into the swing of things here. We work 12 hour days, 7 days a week (Career info). A schedule like that doesn't leave much time for sleep. I've come to learn that no matter the weather, the work is hard. All the men around here are built with muscle, and they use it every day pushing around that pipe and lining up those drills.   The hard work gives me an appetite though, so i'm not so skinny now. I came into work riding the end of the Kilgore boom, and since my first day on the job i've been waiting to see a boom of my own.


Us roughnecks and drillers don't do any of the oil finding. We just get word of a boom, pack a bag, and drive out to the well for a few months time. It's hard to tell when a boom is coming. It was a week or two since work got slow. "Bankrolls got slim and we began to want to go back to work. This was my first taste of the feast-and-famine episodes that I was to experience many times later in my life (Lynch, 29)."


Then one of the wildcat wells struck the black gold. About 36 miles away from where we were staying, in a place called Darst Creek. Just so happens the driller i was working for knew of a lady there who'd house us for a while. So just like that, we had my first boom underway. "It was a fairly short lived boom. It flared up, raced ahead, tapered off, and died, within ten months. But it was a godsend to a whole bunch of broke or nearly broke roughneck and drillers (Lynch, 29)."


If you don't know much about drilling, let me tell you a little something, just so you can say "well, now i know." All of our derricks are "made out of wood - mostly unfinished sawmill "roughs." The floor of the derrick was made of raw lumber boards. The legs were spiked together as the derrick was built...considering the amount of effort involved, derricks went up rather rapidly (Lynch, 11)." Once the derrick is up, we rigged up our rig, now we can finally go on with our drilling. 


The drilling of this well was nothing special. We didn't have any problems and tools were actually getting modern for their time. "The Kelly is the square hexagon-shaped joint that literally drives the drill pipe round and round. Today it is 48-60 feet long, but the first one I ever saw was hexagon-shaped, 28 feet long, and had split drive bushings (Lynch, 31)." A longer kelly brought on more new tools. This drill was the first drill I worked on that used the "tooled joint". Those were heavy metal box and pins that when put together made a seal. "Tool joints made a large difference in oil-field procedure. They brought Wilson tongs and front-latch elevators into general use, since we had to have stronger tools to make and break pipe. The old-time chain tongs and Hill tongs just couldn't handle tool-joint threads and shoulders (Lynch, 31)."


Our tour had been working together for a while now, so we got into a pretty good rhythm with things. As heated as us men get sometimes, there's no other place for us to go, so might as well work through it. Towards the end of this boom, just as the well was goin' dry, we got a new "kid" we had to train. I say kid, cause even though now i'm just hitting 19, the only kids here are ones who don't know how to drill. This kid reminded me a lot of myself only about a year back. I can almost imagine how Lum saw me then, when all I wanted to do was make it in the business, but I didn't have a direction to start in. 


"To my dying day, I will remember that [we] never hazed, ribbed, or harassed [him]. [We] answered all [his] questions honestly, and tried in every way to take care of 'the kid' (Lynch, 6)." He was a good kid. He moved around to a different driller as soon as we got back from Darst Creek, but at least he learned a thing or two. 

                                                     Dingham Discovery, 1913.

Getting Work

Before I made the move to Texas I tried to do a bit of work in Seminole with Lum. He saw I was trying to find work instead of going to school, and gave me a shot at it. I went on five jobs with him, all in Kansas working for the Laughlin Brothers with Lum as the driller (Franks, 75). I did a little of everything during those jobs. There are usually four roughnecks on a well, but when i was young and just starting out, Lum had me on as the fifth one just so I could learn.


"One roughneck's the derrick man; he stands up on the platform about halfway up in the derrick, and when they need another joint of drill pipe, he pushes one out from the stack of it leaning up against the inside of the derrick and hooks the elevators on to let it down the hold. He gets four bits a day extra for his job. Another one is floor man, and he helps the driller on the well floor. Then there's the oiler, and he's got to oil up the Kelly or rotary table that twirls the drill pipe to drill with and the pumps and anything else that needs oiling. The fourth one tends to the drilling mud and keeps it at the right thickness, and when they're changing bits or some big job like that, all four of 'em pitch in and help (Franks, 74). "


All this I knew coming into Texas. I knew I'd have to be patient, because there's only about one way a roughneck can get a job, and that's if you know a driller willing to hire him. You see, a driller usually gets to pick his own roughnecks. They don't want any boys working on the drills, they're gonna pick the biggest and strongest men.


When it comes to appearances I may not look like the best one for the job. Sure I'm tall enough, but I was too skinny didn't have enough muscle to make a good hand yet. I just figure if I get a shot to prove myself, I can start making some money. Roughnecks and drillers follow the boom towns. When the oil strikes everyone moves, it's why I came to Texas in the first place. "The migrations to the oil fields were large and rapid. Sour Lake, hardly a village when oil was discovered there in 1903, had in a few months a population of ten thousand (Boatright, 60)."


Everyday I started hitting up the contractors early in the spring. I would get up early that morning and not come back til late that night. I just wasn't getting a job though. I had to live off the little bit of money i  saved with me, but it was running low. As a last resort  I met up with a contractor who knew Lum, after i spent the last of my money on a long distance phone call so Lum could give me a recommendation, I got a job with the second biggest oil company going. It must have been a pretty good recommendation too, he put me on the next job coming up on the day tour (Franks, 75).


"If you never worked around an oil field, you don't know what that means; the day tour is the tour (pronounced "tower") to work on, and most contractors won't put a man on that shift unless he's had plenty of experience and unless he's their best man (Franks, 75)."

                                                    Rig in the Goodrich field (1941)

From the beginning...

"...Only thing is, when the oil bug bites you, why, you stick by it harder and closer."
           - V. B. Daniels, after forty-nine years in the Sour Lake field






The days are long, they go by slowly. I don't even look forward to nightfall because we all pile inside the tent, side by side, the tents and the men. I came to this boomtown looking for a job. I dropped out of school as early as i could and destined for Texas. "I told Lum (my step-daddy), the last argument we had about it, I wasn't going to go [to school] no more'n I had to, and as soon as I got a job I was getting out, and I did, too. Like I said told him, though, I didn't see no sense of setting in school eight hours a day wasting my time and his money when I could be out making money myself (Franks, 69)." 

The stories told us oil was everywhere. The black gold would save me, I thought. I would have a good steady job and earn more money than I could do with.


I came to Texas a few weeks after set out. I don't remember dates very well, but I do recall looking up at the sky one night and seeing a full moon. The boom town was bigger than I ever could have expected. Miles upon miles all I could see were derricks and shacks. The place got so crowded so fast no one had time to build anything but the derricks. Tents were what we stayed in, some men were lucky and had a few bucks to rent a room in a nearby house. That's what my momma did before i left her. 


"When the discovery well came in at Seminole [Florida], she was already tired of Ardmore, so she sold out and moved to Seminole and opened up a boardinghouse there. She said she didn't want no trash, so she raised the prices so high the pipe liners and lease workers and truck drivers and those guys like that couldn't afford to stay with her, only the drillers and rig builders and the ones that made the real dough (Franks, 72)." 


I knew a little about roughnecking before hitting Texas. Lum and my daddy were in the oil fields so I grew up with talk of drillers and pushers and roughnecks. Drillers and tool pushers are the ones that make the money, but to get there I know I have to start off on the ground. So now i'm where I want to be, and it's time to begin my journey as an oil man. As Johnny Cash will later say, i'm born to be a roughneck.