Nellie Johnstone No. 1: Oklahoma's First Gusher

On the west bank of the Caney River in Bartlesville, a replica wooden derrick marks the spot where Oklahoma's petroleum age began. The Nellie Johnstone Number One, completed on April fifteenth, eighteen ninety-seven, was the first commercially productive oil well in what was then Indian Territory, and its story touches on Cherokee land rights, corporate ambition, and the petroleum dynasty that would define the entire state.

A small group of businessmen led by George B. Keeler had secured rights to explore within the Cherokee Nation, whose lands covered this part of the territory. They brought in the Cudahy Oil Company to drill on a lease held jointly with a settler named Frank Overlees. The well was named for the daughter of one of the partners, Johnstone being an early investor in the venture. Drillers reached oil at approximately thirteen hundred feet on March twenty-fifth, eighteen ninety-seven, but the well was not officially brought in as a commercial producer until April fifteenth.

At three in the afternoon on that April day, Jennie Cass lowered an explosive charge down the bore hole and detonated a canister of nitroglycerin, a technique called shooting the well, which fractured the rock and allowed oil to flow freely. The Nellie Johnstone came in at fifty barrels per day. She would produce more than one hundred thousand barrels before being plugged in nineteen forty-eight.

The well sat capped and commercially dormant until eighteen ninety-nine, when the Kansas, Oklahoma Central and Southwestern Railway was extended through Bartlesville and gave drillers a way to ship crude to outside refineries. That infrastructure opened the floodgates. Within a few years, the Bartlesville region was crawling with oil companies, and two brothers from Iowa named Frank and Lee Phillips arrived in nineteen oh four. They built their fortune here and eventually founded Phillips Petroleum Company, one of the largest oil firms in American history.

A replica of the original wooden derrick stands today at Johnstone Park, marking the precise location where Oklahoma's oil era was born.