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.