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.