Hard Oiler!: The Story of Canadians' Quest for Oil at Home and Abroad

271 Pages·1998·12.52 MB·English

by  Gary May

Hard Oiler!
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Hard Oiler!
The Story of Early Canadians' Quest for Oil at
Home and Abroad
Gary May
DUNDURN PRESS
TORONTO • OXFORD
Copyright © Gary May 1998
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical,
photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of
review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press Limited. Permission to
photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Reprography Collective.
Editor: Dennis Mills
Design: Scott Reid
Printer: Transcontinental Printing Inc.
Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data
May, Gary, 1951-
Hard oiler!
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 1-55002-316-0
1. Petroleum industry and trade — Canada — History.
HD9574.C32M39 1998 338.2'7282'0971 C98-931615-7
1 2 3 4 5 DM 02 01 00 99 98
We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the
Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the
THK CANADA COUNCII LE CONSFH DES ARTS support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Book Publishing
"R™7 ™™"A Industry Development Program of the Department of
s
Canadian Heritage.
Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book.
The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any
references or credit in subsequent editions.
Printed and bound in Canada.
Printed on recycled paper.
Dundurn Press Dundurn Press Dundurn Press
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Suite 200 Headington, Oxford Tonawanda, NY
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Contents
Acknowledgements 6
Introduction 8
Part 1: The Early Story of Oil 13
Chapter 1: Out of a Swamp 15
Part 2: Discovery 25
Chapter 2: The First of the Hard Oilers 27
Chapter 3: The Man Who Made Boom-Town Boom 41
Chapter 4: John Henry Fairbank: Putting Down Roots 59
Chapter 5: Rascals, Heroes, Blasts, and Blazes 77
Part 3: A Golden Age 93
Chapter 6: The Oil Barons 95
Chapter 7: This Business of Oil 107
Part 4: To Distant Shores 119
Chapter 8: The Travellers 121
Chapter 9: The Petroleum King of Austria 135
Chapter 10: Escape from Destruction 151
Chapter 11: The Persian Solution 167
Chapter 12: Expedition to Sumatra 177
Chapters 13: They Sought Adventure 193
Part 5: The Legacy of Oil 213
Chapter 14: Farewell to the Barons 215
Chapter 15: Looking Ahead 223
Appendices 230
Notes 249
Bibliography 260
Index 263
Acknowledgements
I offer my special thanks to Charles Whipp of Kincardine, Ontario, for
helping me to work through the concept of the book, for pointing me in
all the right directions and to all the right people, for critiquing my
research and writing, and for all his encouragement and support. He
knows more about this subject than any journalist anywhere, and I still
think Charles should have been the one to write this book.
Thanks to Donna McGuire, curator of the Oil Museum of Canada in
Oil Springs, Ontario, for opening up the museum's resources, finding and
directing me to the appropriate materials, pointing me to the many
people around the Lambton County with connections to the foreign
drillers, for the photocopying, the hunting up of pictures, and for
regularly offering coffee on those cold winter days.
To Helen Maddock of the Lambton Room at the Lambton County
Library in Wyoming, Ontario, for guiding me through the acres of files
and documents and peering through old microfilmed newspapers, and to
her staff, for their patience, direction, and words of encouragement.
To Petrolia Discovery manager Betty Popelier for lending materials
from her files, and to guide Don Wilde for the tours, for explaining the
early oil technology, and for all those great stories.
To librarian/historian Edward Phelps of London, Ontario, for his
guidance, wisdom and encyclopedic knowledge of the Hard Oilers' story,
and for his suggestions and ideas.
To Charles Oliver Fairbank for sharing four generations of experiences
in the petroleum business as well as his infectious enthusiasm for the
story of the Hard Oilers.
To Paul Miller of the Lambton Heritage Museum in Grand Bend,
Ontario, for searching for early pictures of the oil fields at home and
abroad. To Bob Cochrane of Cairnlins Petroleum Services in Komoka,
Ontario, for explaining and critiquing my description of oil's formation.
To Terry Carter of the Ontario Oil, Gas, and Salt Resources Library, in
London. And to Doug Gilbert, manager of the Ontario Petroleum
Institute, in London.
In Austria, my thanks to Dr. Hermann F. Spoerker, managing director
for Oil & Gas Tek International of Leoben, Austria, and Christian
Hannesschlager of the Technisches Museum of Vienna, for helping to
track down pieces of William McGarvey's story.
Thanks to all the people who contacted me with amazing anecdotes
and information about their fantastic and daredevil relatives, including
Maureen and Mildred Bradley of London, Murray Brown and Jim and
Bette Lackie of Petrolia, Jean Mearce of Corunna, and Fay Bertrand of
Vancouver.
I'm grateful to those who answered my pleas for family histories and
anecdotes, including Jane Day of Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England;
Lorna Mays of Mississauga, Ontario; and Pete McGarvey of Orillia,
Ontario; as well as Lambton residents Dorothy and Charlie Stevenson,
Laurence Oliver, Margaret Gregory Smith, Bertha Gleeson, Kathleen
Gillespie, John Mclntyre, Millicent Woods, Mary Wallen, Marion
Berdan, and Gary Mater.
Thanks to Fritz Skeries of London, Ontario; Bill Wilson of Chicago,
Illinois; and Arlene Gehmacher of Toronto for help in translating
German-language documents.
And finally, thank you to all my friends and family, who endured
listening to my regular updates without appearing visibly bored.
Introduction
A hard-luck Yankee fortune seeker. A Hamilton wagon maker hoping to
sell cars to the new railways. And a howling swamp so isolated and foul
that pioneer farmers had steered it a wide miss. An unlikely combination
indeed. And yet this trio, seemingly unconnected, came together at just
the right moment in time, to create one of the great but little known
stories of Canada's early years.
It is the story of how the first commercial oil well in North America was
dug into the heavy blue-clay soils of Lambton County in the far reaches of
southwestern Ontario 140 years ago. That discovery set off a frenzy of land
speculation and drilling that created both wealth and heartache. And it led
to the training of a class of men who later introduced their expertise and
equipment to new oil fields around the world, earning for Canadians a
leading place among the pioneers of petroleum.
It is a story, too, about the invention of an industry, one that has
changed our lives. Today, Canadians are the biggest consumers of energy
of any people in the world. It seems only fitting, then, that the energy
source that at the turn of a new century remains the world's most
important — petroleum — was first captured and spun into a viable
commercial enterprise in this country.
However, Canada's seminal part in opening up our modern-day oil
industry has received little attention from historians and writers. Just
what was that part? I began to ask that question back in the mid-1970s
after being posted to a newspaper reporting job in Sarnia, Ontario. Why
and how had that city become the petrochemical and oil-refining capital
of Canada? After a preliminary search, I was astonished by what I found.
Over time I became privy to one of the best kept secrets in Canadian
history: the story of how oil had been discovered in Lambton County
near Sarnia and how the subsequent exploitation of that oil gave birth to
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Introduction
what is arguably the world s most important industry today. It is the story
of the men who to this day in Lambton are called the Hard Oilers.
After returning some twenty years later to continue the search, I
unearthed an amazing chapter of Canadian history and accomplishment I
had not even dreamed existed. I found that, contrary to American claims
that Pennsylvania was the home of the modern oil industry, it was in
Lambton County that James Miller Williams dug the first commercial oil
well in North America — if not the world — and began refining and
marketing his product as machine lubricant and lighting oil.
Williams thus set off a chain of events that resulted in the
establishment of an industry on which our way of life today is so heavily
dependent. What was the allure? Why would men leave their homes and
travel, under very primitive conditions, into the stinking, mosquito-
infested swamps of Lambton County, in search of oil? The search for
adventure is as old as human existence. Something in the stories these
men heard tapped into one of our species' most powerful emotions, the
thrill of discovery and the quest for success. Like the early explorers who
braved the uncharted oceans, trekked to the South Pole, or dared the fates
in search of the fabled Northwest Passage, these early wildcatters, who
came to be known as the Hard Oilers, were in search of the unknown.
The story, however, does not begin with Williams and it certainly does
not end with him. It begins in the Paleozoic Era, and it continues
through the gold-rush-like frenzy that sees the overnight rise and decline
of the frontier town of Oil Springs, the creation of the much more
permanent community of Petrolia, which still flashes its Victorian charm
to this day, and then takes a more exotic twist. As early as 1873, Lambton
oil drillers started to travel the globe and open up oil fields from Java to
the Ukraine, from America to Venezuela, and in the Middle East.
It was said that during the latter part of the nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, no major oil field anywhere in the world was without
its Lambton drillers — its Hard Oilers. I came across one account of a
Petrolia man sitting in a park in Singapore in 1899 as he waited for the
arrival of the steamship that would take him from the Asian field, where he
had been a supervisor, back to his family in Canada. The man looked up to
see a familiar face coming his way, another Petrolia driller who was on his
way to the rain forests of Sumatra. Certainly these adventurers who came to
be known in Lambton as the "foreign drillers" were among the best-
travelled Canadians of their day. They, as well as their wives and children
— both those left at home and those who travelled with the men to distant
lands — could later recount fascinating stories of their escapades.
This book relates the astonishing story of the circumstances that
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