Oklahoma Black Gold

Before dawn on November twenty-second, nineteen oh five, a drill bit on Creek Indian land south of Tulsa punched through rock at a depth of one thousand, four hundred eighty-one feet. What came up changed the state before the state was even a state.

The discovery well was called the Glenn Number One, and it sat on land belonging to Ida E. Glenn. The field it opened, the Glenn Pool, became the first major oil discovery in what would become Oklahoma, and it came just two years before statehood. Total production from the Glenn Pool in its first two years exceeded forty-three million barrels. By nineteen oh seven, the year Oklahoma entered the union, it was the leading oil-producing state in the country, and the leading oil-producing jurisdiction in the world.

The oil economy transformed the geography of the state almost overnight. Tulsa, which had been a small Creek Nation town of a few thousand people, became the self-proclaimed Oil Capital of the World. Refineries, pipelines, and land companies multiplied. A man named Tom Slick, exploring east of Cushing in nineteen twelve, found an oil seep on a farm that turned out to sit above one of the largest fields yet discovered. By nineteen nineteen, the Cushing field alone was producing seventeen percent of all oil marketed in the United States.

Oklahoma oil made fortunes so fast and so visibly that the state acquired a particular mythology, part wilderness, part boomtown, part confidence game. The money attracted everyone: wildcatters, lease brokers, hucksters, bankers, oil-company lawyers, and communities that built opera houses and universities on royalty payments they assumed would never stop.

The oil still flows. Oklahoma remains one of the top producing states, and its energy economy has expanded into natural gas and, more recently, wind power, with more installed wind capacity than almost anywhere else in the country. The Glenn Number One has long since gone dry. The field it opened never really closed.