Up From The Ground Comes A Bubbling Pool

Oil, that is. Black gold. Texas Tea.

Even before sabre-tooth cats stalked wooly mammoths during the last Ice Age, the La Brea tar pits in Southern California have oozed a sticky dark fluid, with the occasional gas bubble burping up through the mire. That substance is heavy crude oil or tar. The goo that bubbles up in Pitch Lake on the island of Trinidad is mined for high quality asphalt. Likewise, man tried to make use of the natural oil seeps throughout the world, mostly as medicine or salves. When they tried to burn it as fuel or in lamps they were put off by the clouds of nauseating smoke.

During the War of 1812, Thomas Cochrane, the 10th Earl of Dundonald patented a lamp that burned the oil produced by boiling chunks of asphalt. It was expensive to use though because asphalt was so rare. As whale oil began to get more scarce, Scottish inventor, James Young, invented a process to extract lamp oil and industrial lubricants from coal, producing what is known as coal oil. In 1854, Nova Scotian geologist, Abraham Gesner invented a process to distill a similar oil from crude oil, calling it kerosene, keros means wax in Greek. This innovation led to more people seeking out natural oil seeps or springs in various parts of the world.

The swamp in rural Lambton County in Southwestern Ontario was one of the least settled parts of what was known then as "Western Canada". The reason it wasn't settled, even though it was surrounded by fertile farming country, was a swamp whose mire contained a dark oily substance, rendering it unsuitable for agricultural use. In 1857, Charles Tripp was going broke trying to extract asphalt from the swamp. It looked promising, samples of the asphalt had won awards in England and the French had ordered 20 shiploads of it.

The asphalt proved difficult to get out of the swamp. The only road was a 20 miles long wagon track known as "the canal". Tripp ordered a fleet of sturdy wagons, but eventually his money ran out. One of the people he owed money to was James Miller Williams, a Hamilton, Ontario carriage-maker. He paid him off with hundreds of acres of Lambton swamp land. In 1858 they went into the swamp to find a good source of oil. Near Black Creek they registered what is claimed to be the world's first oil well.

It was a well in the traditional sense, a hole dug in the ground where the oil bubbled to the surface, to be dipped out with buckets filling barrels by hand. The same year, a railroad spur was built within a few miles of Black Creek. This meant Williams could make money as fast as he could haul the oil out. This oil discovery prompted the first oil rush, the population of the small hamlet of Black Creek swelled to 4,000, the swamp pockmarked with drill holes. Black Creek changed its name to Oil Springs, a town soon to have paved streets, horse-drawn buses, and street lamps. A few years later, Hugh Nixon Shaw, drilled what he thought was a dry hole in the area. But rather than give up, he kept drilling. At about 198 feet, a geyser of black crude rumbled out of the drill hole. Oil was running down Black Creek, and running as much as a foot deep on the Sydenham River before Shaw and his men could get it capped four days later. This triggered the second Oil Springs oil rush.

Oil Springs, Ontario wasn't the first place where oil was struck by drilling. In Pennsylvania people drilling water wells had struck oil for several decades previous, but they considered the oil a nuisance. Oil from natural oil seeps in western Pennsylvania had been used by Native Americans since at least 1410 by skimming the oil from small pits dug and lined with wood. In the mid-1850s, George Bissell, a New York lawyer, planned to use this oil commercially. He hired a chemist to analyze the properties of "Seneca Oil" found there to use as an illuminant. The chemist, Benjamin Silliman of Yale University, found the oil could be distilled into several fractions, on of which was an excellent illuminant. With this analysis he was able to get financial backers to form Pennsylvania Rock Oil Company.

The company backed "Colonel" Edwin Drake in exploratory drilling near Titusville, Pennsylvania. They ran out of money during the project, which was called by many, "Drake's Folly", forcing the company to borrow even more money before striking oil on August 27, 1859 at a depth of 69-1/2 feet. By modern standards, the Drake well was a small one, only 20 barrels a day, but it triggered an unprecedented oil rush in the narrow valley of Oil Creek. Oddly enough, Drake had received an order from the main financial backer to close up shop on the same day as the discovery. Pennsylvania was responsible for production of half of the world's supply of oil until the southeast Texas discoveries of 1901.

Well before 1901 though, in late 1859, in a place already known as Oil Springs, about 10 miles east of Nacodoches, Texas, where Native Americans and settlers had been using the oil seeping out of the ground for decades, maybe centuries, Lyn Barrett, inspired by Edwin Drake's discovery drilled for oil. In 106 feet he struck oil, about 10 barrels a day. Unfortunately, Barrett ran out of money and the discovery lay undeveloped for more than two decades. In 1887, drilling companies struck oil nearby and by 1889 there were over 40 wells in production, triggering a boom that lasted until 1900.

There were other places also explored for oil because of natural oil springs, including a place known as Tar Springs in Wyoming. Tar Springs was noted in Washington Irving's The Adventures of Captain Bonneville or Scenes Beyond the Rocky Mountains of the Far West, published in 1837.

“In this neighborhood, the captain made search for ‘the great Tar
Spring,’ one of the wonders of the mountains, the medicinal
properties of which he had heard extravagantly lauded by the
trappers. After a toilsome search, he found it at the foot of a
sand-bluff, a little east of the Wind River Mountains, where it
exuded in a small stream of the color and consistency of tar.

“The men immediately hastened to collect a quantity of it, to use
as an ointment for the galled backs of their horses, and as a
balsam for their own pains and aches. From the description given
of it, it is evidently the bituminous oil, called petrolium or
naphtha, which forms a principal ingredient in the potent
medicine called British Oil. It is found in various parts of Europe
and Asia…and in some places of the United States. In New York,
it is called Seneca Oil, from being found near the Seneca lake.”

As early as 1852, petroleum dipped from a well dug next to Hilliard Oil Spring, near Fort Bridger, Wyoming, was being used in tanneries in Salt Lake City. The first recorded oil sale in Wyoming was on the Oregon Trail when entrepreneurs sold locally obtained oil to wagon trains as a lubricant. In 1868, William Carter of Fort Bridger was drilling for oil in the Hilliard Oil Spring area, the transcontinental railroad going through the area provided the market needed for the oil. But it wasn't until 1887, perhaps inspired by Bonneville's story, Mike Murphy drilled Wyoming's first commercially successful oil well in what is now known as Dallas Dome oil field, not very far from the Tar Springs mentioned in Bonneville's exploits.

These early finds led to more and deeper exploration for oil. Oil booms came and went as these oil finds would initially flood the market with oil, then decrease in production over time, leading to increased oil prices, which led to more exploration. The depth of the wells and the methods of discovery may have changed, but the motivation remains the same, to make money by exploiting a natural resource for which there is a demand.