Part of: James L. Delaplain Interview (2 objects)
James L. Delaplain Interview
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- PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL TOPIC: Seminole and Fittstown Oklahoma
- NAME: James L. Delaplain INTERVIEWER: Ray Stephens
- PLACE: Hardin City, Oklahoma TAPE NO: 201A DATE: March 27. 1959 RESTRICTIONS:
- None (?) Stephens - This is an interview with Mr. J.
- L. Delaplain, Hardin City, Oklahoma, March the 27th, 1959.
- Delaplain- We went to work in the oil fields in May, in 1924), in Wyoming.
- We worked there three years. We have worked most of our time
- in the oil field in the gasoline, natural gasoline, department in the
- Carter Oil Company. Our work hasn't, to a very great extent, been
- connected with the producing of oil. We've been mainly interested
- in producing natural gasoline from the gas and oil wells. We came
- to Seminole in 1924, in May. It was pretty wet at that time. The
- field was new. It was lots of people there, lots of work going on,
- drilling. That time was kind of the beginning of any experience we
- had had, at least with the rotary drilling. We were down there drilling
- most of the Seminole field with rotary tools down at least to the
- top of the formation and then they finished them with, with the other
- drilling tools. After the air, the wells were drilled in there in
- Seminole field, mostly there were not enough reservoir pressure there
- in the field to make the wells flow, so they floated them with what
- they called at first the "air lifter." That's what they used at first.
- They'd compress air and put it down in the hole and through the casing
- and blow oil out through the tubing, or vice versa. Then they found
- pretty soon that that was kind of dangerous so they changed to gas, and
- they recycled the gas then and we produced some natural gasoline that
- PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL p. 2
- way with the compression and pooling of the gas as we recycled it.
- That was quite a bit of our connection with the production of oil.
- We worked a little while on a lift station. That's what they called
- the stations that done the pressuring to lift the oil, where we also
- done the switching of the oil, or, in other words, took the place of
- the pumper. When we went there to Seminole there wasn't very much
- roads in the fields. They, lots of mud, and they done a good deal of
- their hauling with teams and lots of their work, their pit digging and
- things like that, they done with teams. There were a good many teams
- in the fields. And then moving boilers, why, they'd have, oh, six or
- eight teams on a wagon and very often, in bad places, along the road
- in places where it was pretty soft, they'd get maybe as many as two or
- three of their mules drowned, I guess you'd call it, in the mud, drug
- down, and would suffocate in the mud. That happened quite often there,
- and so far as going anywhere in the car, why, it was just a, you just
- kind of had to take your turn to get in line and go as they moved. My
- wife was staying in McAlester when we first came there. It was hard
- to get a house around there. You couldn't hardly get a house at all.
- A lot of people living in tents and one way and another, and we finally
- got a little boxed up tent and during this time, why, I'd go on weekends
- to McAlester. And it was about seventeen or eighteen miles to
- Wewoka and we had to go around by Bowlegs to get to Wewoka at that
- time and it took me longer to get from Seminole to Wewoka than it did
- from Wewoka to McAlester by quite a bit, nearly every trip we'd make,
- because the hold-up in traffic, would be so many cars and roads bad and
- be places where they'd have to move slowly. Were not too many trucks
- in the early days in Seminole. That is, there was a good deal of the
- PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL p. 3
- work done with teaming, but trucks had begun to come in quite a bit. Of
- course, as the field advanced, why, there was more trucking going on.
- The roads, of course, were improved. After a few years, why, they got
- most of the roads up in good shape. Got good roads through Seminole
- both ways, and Seminole was quite a boom town. There were lots and
- lots of people came to Seminole. There were lots of boomers there at
- that time, as we called them. They're people that came along to make
- money off of the people that worked in the oil field one way and another
- and selling whiskey and stealing and first one thing and another. It
- was pretty bad up there at that time. A person couldn't hardly, didn't
- hardly know when he went to bed whether he'd have all he had the next
- morning or not. Very common practice there, they'd steal cars, take
- them off and strip them, get the battery and tires and go off and leave
- them and let you come back and get them. Perhaps the police force or
- somebody would bring them into town for you. They'd find them and
- bring them back into town for a certain fee. That was going on all
- the time, such things as that, and of course the lower side of Seminole
- was quite a, quite a wild town. It was at that time, Seminole, the
- post office at Seminole was said to be the largest mail order post
- office in the world. That is, there was more money sent out there on
- the Seminole Post Office, they said, than any other post office in the
- world. People who'd come from other states, off the farms, and one
- business and another that hadn't done very well, which a good many of
- them were that way at that time, sending money back to their folks and
- their friends where it was needed. As time went on, the town of course
- built up. Got nice buildings in it. Quite a few churches and quite a
- bit of business going on. I remember the editor of the Seminole
- PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL p. 4
- Producer there said that, along about that time, along through the
- big days there which run from about '24 to '29 and '30, that there were
- more people going to shows and dances and getting into trouble in Seminole than
- anywhere else. There were more people going to church there
- than there was anywhere else. There were always lots of things going
- on around Seminole and people was a going and coming, and, shut it down
- a little bit-- These men, a lot of them that came into the
- Seminole field, what I mean, the men that came there to work, looking
- for jobs, quite a lot of them, quite a large percentage of them
- came out of Arkansas, a good many from Missouri, and some from Texas. Not
- too many from there. And of course there were a good many native
- Oklahomans, too, that were new to the oil field. There were lots of new
- men in the oil field in Seminole. In the field, probably at least
- thirty thousand people at the time of the boom that were interested
- in, in one way and another, in the production of oil there, its other
- products. There were-- S.- Estimate including squatters.
- D.- Well, now, let's see. Including the squatters there'd be, they
- would be, oh, maybe eight or ten thousand of those. I don't know
- whether I'd, maybe not that many, there might not have been maybe over
- three or four thousand. That's kind of hard to estimate. It seemed
- like a whole lot too many, but there was about, I think their top
- production was around six hundred thousand barrels a day there at
- Seminole at the top, when they were at their peak of production. They
- were producing more oil there than all the rest of the state of Oklahoma
- put together. Of course, after the field went down some and the
- field came in at Oklahoma City, why they produced a lot more oil up
- PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL p. 5
- there for a while. In fact, their wells were a little more productive
- at Oklahoma City per well, I guess, than they were at Seminole.
- However, they were very good wells there at Seminole. The Carter
- Oil Company, which I worked for, had three different wells that
- produced over a million barrels of oil a good many years ago, and one
- of those wells produced almost three million barrels. That was
- through the life of the well. That is, up till, that was for several
- years. Now, I think this well, this, two of these wells had been
- producing about three or four years before they had come to a million
- barrels of oil. That's lots of oil, you know. But there were two
- of them at least, that I'm sure went on and produced over two million
- barrels and there were three, a third one, that produced over a million.
- Of course, there were other companies had wells similar, no
- doubt. There were a good many companies interested in that production,
- that is, had acreage in the Seminole field. The I.T.I.O. is
- quite a large holder. That was the Indian Territory Illuminating
- Oil Company, which was a subsidiary of the Empire, which was a subsidiary
- of Cities Service, and they had quite a large holding there.
- The Carter Oil Company had quite a large holding. The Gypsy Oil had
- quite a little bit of acreage. And other companies were the Mid
- Continent, Amerada, Sinclair, and the Phillips, of course, they had
- lot of production there, quite a lot, and the, well, I don't know.
- There were several, there were quite a lot of smaller companies I
- don't recall the names of now, and, let me see. Oil, of course, got
- to where it was pretty cheap. The storage of oil come to be quite a
- problem there at Seminole. It seemed like when we, when they started
- out there at Seminole they were all in a hurry to get their part of
- PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL the oil on top of the ground, and they had
- lots and lots of tank farms, they called them, these big, oh, from
- forty to a hundred thousand barrel tanks. They had that oil stored
- in the tanks. There were hundreds of thousands of barrels of oil
- stored there at that time and then they went along and I believe
- that Governor Murray came into the governor's office. They got an idea
- of limiting that production, holding it down, handling the storage in the
- ground instead of getting it all out as fast as they could
- and storing it on top of the ground, because they soon, they knew that
- that was a waste and had known it for years. But it was finally
- some kind of a regulation that was passed by the state government regulating
- that thing, and they caused all the wells to be prorated.
- They'd allow them to make just so much oil in a month, and then when
- they got that made, why they'd have to shut down, and that was quite
- a help to the oil business. The price had got in such a situation that
- they almost had to do something. Oil had got so cheap that
- they couldn't hardly afford to produce it, especially the later
- wells, the later pumping wells. They just couldn't afford to operate
- them, and of course plugging those holes would be shutting a lot
- of natural resource there that the country eventually would need.
- And since that time, then, that has been a practice of the oil
- industry, I guess, through- out the United States, that they prorate the
- wells. When a new field comes in, big wells, big producing wells,
- why they let them produce for a while to kind of pay off some
- of the costs of putting the hole down and then they set them on a
- certain percentage of production which cuts them back so that they
- won't produce the oil all out so fast and I think the engineers
- have found that that's p. 6
- PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL p. 7
- the more economical way to produce oil because it doesn't exhaust
- the reservoir pressure so rapidly and allows the flow longer and it
- keeps the water from coming in so quick. S.- [Inaudible question]
- D.- Well, as to the personnel of the oil fields there were never any
- Negroes hired in the oil fields so far as I know, that is, in the oil
- industry, in the producing end of the oil industry. The companies
- just didn't make it a practice to hiring any Negro workers at all.
- Of course, the Indians worked in the oil fields the same as anybody
- else. A lots of Indians worked in the oil field. Good many Indians,
- of course, around in the Seminole country and I suppose all through
- Oklahoma, but with their royalty from the oil wells, a good many of
- them were pretty wealthy. They'd build them nice houses and fix
- them up all fine and they'd have dances in the nice house and do
- their cooking and eating outside like they had been in a habit of
- doing for centuries before. Of course, they didn't all do that.
- Some of them took to the white man's ways and his money pretty rapidly.
- Of course, they, a great many of them are, I guess, maybe not
- any larger percentage than there were white folks under similar situations.
- They kind of wasted their money away, but there were those
- that took care of it and fixed up their homes and bought nice cars
- and wore good clothes and things like that, but so far as any other
- kind of, any foreign labor of any kind, like Latin Americans or
- that type labor, there weren't hardly any of them in the oil field
- at all. The companies just didn't make a practice of hiring that
- type of help. The roustabouts in the oil field, they are the boys
- that done, well, just nearly any type of work you had to do there;
- that was not including pumpers and foremen and things like that. They
- PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL p.8
- were just the regular oil field help. With our company at the time
- of the opening up of the Seminole field in 1927, when we went there,
- was drawing up to a hundred and thirty-five dollars a month. Pumpers
- drew a little more than that. Of course, the head roustabout, he was
- the boss that was next to the men, drew a little more than the pumpers
- and then, of course, they had the farm boss and superintendents
- on up, which drew, of course, each of them, more money. The wages,
- as time went on, of course, increased along through that period.
- It was for a while, though, that during the depression when we were
- cut back to half-time with our company and we just drew half of our
- wages. However, it seemed like we got along pretty good. We didn't
- have any taxes to pay at that time, that we knew of, anyhow. I guess
- we paid some. There weren't direct, and groceries and things that we
- needed to buy were pretty cheap and we got along pretty well. And
- then when they started kind of coming back just a little bit, why,
- they shortened the work week, and I believe along about that time,
- why, we went to work on a five-day week. Of course, that was changed
- for a while then during the war when help got kind of scarce, why,
- we went back to work for six days a week for some time during the
- war. Then after the war was over, why of course, went back to the
- five-day week. The wages gradually went up as other wages increased,
- why we were usually increased about the same thing, probably about
- the same percentage. It's a little harder to tell now just what
- we make. We have quite a few deductions from our wages that we, I
- think the roustabout at that time drew around five hundred dollars
- a month in the oil field for his total pay. Of course, he doesn't
- get to take home that much. The Seminole field at the time of,
- PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL p. 9
- perhaps what we call the Greater Seminole area, covered from about
- twenty-three to twenty-five miles north and south, roughly from the
- North Canadian River to the South Canadian with some breaks in between
- running north and south in places as much as ten to twelve miles,
- other places not so wide. In fact, seems like at the present time
- the pool was extended more or less to take in the entire county with
- some breaks in between. It's, it's lots of territory producing oil
- in Seminole County. S.- [Inaudible comment]
- D.- Well, yes, I might say while we're talking about the Texas and
- Magnolia, Texas Company and the Magnolia Oil Company had quite
- considerable holdings we didn't mention before in the--
- S.- Which ones were the larger? Carter, Magnolia or which were larger?
- D. - Of the holdings there? S.- Yes.
- D.- Well, the Carter and the I.T. I .O., I think, were the largest
- holders of acreage there. Of course the Magnolia had quite a bit of
- acreage. The Gypsy had quite a bit. I really don't know just how
- they would compare that way. S.- Where was the crude oil shipped to?
- D.- Well, the crude oil, of course, went to various pipeline companies,
- owing to which, which company that-- S.- There wasn't a refinery at Seminole?
- D.- No, no refineries at Seminole. It was, quite a bit of it went to
- Tulsa and, of course, some, I suppose, went to Ponca City. The Sinclair
- Refining Company piped their oil, their own oil, mostly, and
- I think the Gypsy Oil Company, they had, their oil probably went to a
- different place. The Carter oil mostly went to Oklahoma Pipeline.
- PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL p. 10
- In the early days we shipped through the Oklahoma Pipeline and, of
- course, it went to various refineries from the Texas coast, I suppose,
- to the border of Kansas, at least. Perhaps some went a short distance
- at least east through the pipeline. S.- [Inaudible question]
- D.- Yes. We came to Fittstown when the field opened up. It was in
- August in 1935. Our company built a plant there, in Pontotoc County.
- We came with the plant. Of course, the oil producing business was
- just, they were just drilling at that time in a big way in the field.
- Was lots of gas in the Fitts field at that time, quite a bit of
- reservoir pressure. The wells flowed pretty freely and there were
- some real good wells in the Fitts area. Also had a gas sand that
- produced quite a lot of gas. The wells, in the drilling at Fitts,
- they were not in such a big hurry as they were at Seminole. The, oh,
- wells were drilled a little more carefully and in completing the
- wells at Fitts, they used the hydrill which is a kind of rotary
- drill that uses fluid, water or oil, for their, In place of mud, and
- they use that after they get into a producing formation and whenever
- they come into more production it's easier to tell when they're
- using hydrill because it flows right out into the pits and they can
- see it at the time it comes in. They don't seem to use the hydrill
- to much anymore. I don't know what's the reason of that. At the
- present time, some wells, they use hydrill, use air and blow the
- stuff out where there's not too much water in the hole, and here at
- Fitts we had a more orderly development than was at Seminole. However,
- it was not a unitized field, by any means. Each company had
- Its own part and they drilled their own wells and produced them their
- PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL p. 11
- own way. The wells flowed for some little time and after the wells
- ceased flowing, why, they'd put them on pumps. Just regular pumps.
- They never tried to use any gas lift or anything like that at Pitts
- or have, here at Pitts we have about five different producing formations.
- Some of them, some of them don't produce very much and in very
- much of the field. Others produce practically all over the field.
- Our main production from the, what we call Bromide and McLisch(?)
- series, covers pretty well the whole field. And there's spots in
- the field that produce in the Cromwell, other, small strip on the
- south side produces Wilcox sand. We did have one oil creek well
- in the field, and then there's production from the Gilcrease(?) sand
- here. A few wells that have some gas here yet in these fields.
- Still enough to operate the gasoline plant and make some butane and
- propane, keep the fuel in good situation which was, after the Seminole
- field got older, why, the gas was kind of scarce there, since
- it was much richer gas and more of it turned into liquified products.
- At the present time they're doing some water flooding here at the
- Pitts field. Seems to be, they're water flooding at the present
- time what we call the Hunt Lime and the Viola Lime, mostly in the
- Viola. Seems to be doing pretty well at that, extending through the
- field gradually, and it's supposed that it will eventually cover the
- field in that sand. They're not at the present time trying to water
- flood any other formations. However, in some places they're putting
- the surplus salt water back in the producing formations. It seems
- to be moving some oil in the Bromide. We haven't done very much
- prospecting around the Pitts field. There's some oil discovered,
- of course, over in the Jesse area and the Muse area several years
- PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL p. 12
- ago and that's still producing some. Recently there's been one new
- well at least drilled in the field and I, there are some more locations
- being made now to make some more tests to find out about extending the
- field somewhat, finding out what's deeper. There's been
- a good deal of talk about oil deeper down but there's never been any
- wells drilled. S.- [Inaudible remark]
- D.- Well, yes, at, during the opening or the bringing in of the Pitts
- field the squatters were not allowed to settle in the field as they
- had been in most of oil fields before that time. The companies made
- contracts with their, from their people they leased from to, that
- didn't allow them to, that is, not allowing them to let anybody settle
- on their leases. So, by means of that, we didn't have very many
- of the riff-raff that very often follows into a boom, here at Fitts.
- It was rather clean and orderly oil field, and very few people, no
- people here, you might say, in the field that were not working for
- an oil company. Of course, our little towns, Fittstown and Hardin
- City and Wooley Bugger, as they called it, were little trading centers
- that took care of oil field business of one kind or another,
- and other than those towns, why, there wasn't any settlement in the
- field. S.- [Inaudible comment]
- D.- Practically all of the work here at Pitts was done with trucks,
- all of the hauling. There was some teaming when the field first
- opened up. There was a good many slush pits and jobs of that type
- that was done with teams, but at the present time, why, there's no
- teaming at all. In fact, there's no teams in the field at the present
- PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL p. 13
- time at all. That's, all such work as that is done with bulldozers
- and dirt moving machinery. All the slush pits and things like that
- are done with, with cranes and dozers. The roads were, for the most
- part, pretty good here in Pitts field. The companies built pretty
- good roads when they opened up the field, and they haven't been
- troubled too much with bad roads. However, our main road into the
- field is rather rough, that is, muddy in wet times for a while.
- We now, though, have a paved road into the field. Gomes off of
- Highway 99 so we're fairly well, fairly good shape for roads.
- S.-[Indistinguishable sounds] D.- This field, which ends, oh, roughly, that's
- not including the West Fitts part, there's a gap in between
- the main Fitts pool and the West Fitts pool of about two miles. The West
- Fitts pool extends probably a mile and a half, possibly a little
- more than than, more, mostly east and west, not very wide north
- and south. And the Fitts field extends from the west to east about
- nine miles, I imagine, eight or nine miles; it's not very wide, probably
- two miles in the widest place. It's rather a narrow field.
- The companies operating the Fitts originally, the Phillips Petroleum
- Company had some leases here, E. H. Moore Oil Company was the largest
- holder of leases in the field, the Magnolia had some, holds some
- leases, and Carter holds some. The Deep Rock had some, a small amount
- of lease here and - S.- Sinclair?
- D.- Yes, Sinclair has some leases too, Sinclair has a fairly large
- lease. At the present time Kerr-McGee has some holding here that
- originally belonged to the Crosby Oil Company, Oil and Gas Company,
- Then the Blackstock has some holdings here. I believe that's about
- all of the holdings there are now. The E. H. Moore production has
- PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL p. 14
- been taken over by Silverman(?) Oil and Gas Company. They're doing
- the water flooding. Over in the Muse area there's, that was mostly
- held by the E. H. Moore Company originally, there was a few wells
- held there by Mira Mirand(?). And over in the Je3se field, which
- is on to the southeast, the Continental and Mid Continent held the
- most of the production over there. S.- [Inaudible question]
- D.- So far as the lawlessness here in the Pitts field or things like
- that, there was very little of it here. The companies and the county
- officials and all kind of worked together here and there was very
- little of any kind of trouble like stealing or anything of that kind
- here in the field at all. And it has been a very nice field to live
- in and work in. The labor situation here at Pitts was considerably
- different to some boom fields. Practically all of the labor at
- Pitts was more or less experienced oil field workers. Of course,
- there were some new hands came in more or less for short periods of
- time during construction and things like that, but mostly it was
- old oil field hands that carried on the work here at Pitts. These
- doodlebugger people that we've heard about, I've never known of any
- wells being located on the strength of their goings on. I don't
- know just exactly how they operated on, in, in telling about where
- to locate an oil well or anything about it. I have understood that
- some operators followed them and took their advice and had some luck
- with it. Mostly in more recent years the, of course formerly they
- went more or less, the engineers did, by the formations that they
- could see on the surface, and tried to locate the domes and faults
- and drill the wells accordingly. In recent years they got to using
- PIONEERS IN TEXAS OIL p. 15
- a seismograph operations for locating the high spots and formations
- and so on, This gives them a pretty good idea where to find the oil
- if there is any oil in a formation. They can tell where the high
- places [are] and drill there and if they don't find any oil or gas
- in the formation there, well, then they know that that place is not
- worthwhile. They also have electric logs and things like that that
- they can run in the hole and tell about where hydrocarbons are located
- in the formation. All these things help them quite a bit in the oil
- producing business. So far as the old time doodlebug people are.
- concerned, I've never been personally acquainted with any of them.
- Never saw any of them operate in my time. I've heard talk of them,
- but that's about all. [End of Tape]