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The following article first appeared in the Journal issue of Fall 1977, Vol. VIII, No. 5.
PLUNDERED LEGACY: THE EARLY HISTORY OF NORTH LOUISIANA'S OIL AND GAS INDUSTRY
by William I. Hair
During the nineteenth century no one paid much attention to the evidence of substantial oil and gas accumulations under the soil of North Louisiana. Well diggers looking for water occasionally, to their annoyance, hit gas pockets instead; fishermen on Caddo Lake often noticed gas bubbles in the water—sometimes the v***rs rising to the surface set on fire. Even earlier, the Indians had found oily springs and used the petroleum residue as soothing medicine for skin ailments and injuries. White settlers in Louisiana and Texas would utilize the oil seeps for similar purposes, and also to lubricate the axles of their wagon wheels.1
The only major commercial product made from petroleum in the nineteenth century was kerosene, used chiefly in lamps, and most of the wells that supplied the kerosene refineries were located in the Northeast, especially Pennsylvania. West Virginia in the 1870's became the South's first oil producing state, but not until 1889, when some primitive, shallow wells near San Antonio, Texas reported a mere 48 barrels of oil—not until then was the Deep South classified by Federal statisticians as an oil producing region. 2 Nowhere in America, as yet, was there a great producing field. As late as 1901 the average daily production of the Eastern wells was only two barrels each.³
It was, of course, the Spindletop gusher near Beaumont in January of 1901, coincidentally the first month of the twentieth century, that touched off the first genuine wave of oil fever in Texas and neighboring Louisiana and Oklahoma. Spindletop, spewing out 100,000 barrels a day before it was capped, was the harbinger of things to come; and soon America's gasoline automobile industry offered a rising market for the "black gold" of the Southwest. Louisiana's first commercial oil field came in near Jennings in August of 1901, followed by Anse-la-Butte (near Lafayette) in 1902.⁴
Oil prospecting in North Louisiana began on a serious basis near Caddo Lake in 1904, after small amounts of petroleum were discovered in a shallow well. Surface evidence of abundant natural gas in the Caddo Lake area convinced oil prospectors that a large oil pool must be in the vicinity, since gas usually occurs in association with petroleum. The suspense was heightened in 1905 when four wells near the lake produced strong gas flows, but no measurable oil.
Two of these 1905 wells were not even plugged, but were left to blow their v***rs into the atmosphere. Regrettably, abandoned "wild gassers" would become an all too common phenomenon in North Louisiana during the years to come. This best and cleanest of all fuels was considered worthless by the pioneer drillers because it had no immediate market; oil could be put in storage tanks and barrels, but there was no way to store or transport natural gas without installing expensive pipelines. Yet the potential value of natural gas was common knowledge; the town of Fredonia, New York had been lit by it since 1821. Even as far back as 900 A.D., communities in China were making use of natural gas, piping it from wells through bamboo tubes.⁵
The first oil producing well in Caddo Parish—and North Louisiana's first—came in on March 28, 1906. By 1907 eighteen petroleum wells near Caddo Lake yielded an annual total of 50,000 barrels - a figure far below that of the Jennings field, or the Texas Gulf coast, and even more outdistanced by the fabulous Glenn Pool of Oklahoma, which was then producing over 3,000,000 barrels a month.⁶ But, even if Caddo's early petroleum yield seemed modest when compared to other places, its waste of natural gas during the first decade of this century was second to nowhere on this earth.
Wells that brought in gas were customarily left to "blow," in the hope that liquid petroleum lay beneath the hydrocarbon v***rs. The Louisiana Conservation Commission cited one case where $1,000 worth of gas was wasted daily at one of the wells "in order to secure ten dollars worth of oil." Month after month, the roar of escaping gas was heard in towns near Caddo Lake. This uncontrolled gas made widening craters in the earth; several derricks along with drilling machinery fell into these great holes. One crater grew to 300 feet in width before the pressure below was exhausted. Summer lightning caught several "wild gassers" on fire and the residents of Shreveport, twenty-five miles away, could see gigantic flames from the Caddo field illuminate the night sky. Each day by 1907 an estimated 70,000 cubic feet of Caddo's natural gas simply vanished into the atmosphere, prompting a staff member of the United States Geological Survey to exclaim that this was "the most flagrant abuse of natural wealth yet recorded in the industry." But for the next six years this squandering of Louisiana's most precious resource actually increased. In 1908 oil prospectors drilling a well named Dawes Trustee Number One hit gas under extraordinarily high pressure; efforts were made—unsuccessfully—to stop the flow, and during the next five years this solitary "wild gasser" wasted, according to the Louisiana Conservation, a total of 27,000,000,000 (twenty-seven billion) cubic feet of gas.⁷ To my knowledge no one tried to estimate the total waste of natural gas in the Caddo field from 1906 to 1913, but based on available evidence it could not have been less than 150,000,000,000 (one hundred fifty billion) cubic feet, and probably exceeded 200,000,000,000 (two hundred billion) cubic feet.
Some of the Caddo gas was not wasted. As early as 1906 a pipe line near the lake carried the v***r to Shreveport, where it sold for 35¢ per thousand cubic feet to homeowners, and for one-half that price to businesses. Communities around Caddo Lake were presently supplied with this clean and relatively cheap fuel; by 1910 pipe lines from the Caddo gas fields extended to Bossier City, Texarkana, and Marshall, Texas. It had begun to dawn upon some citizens and state officials that Louisiana had more gas than liquid hydrocarbon, and that it was not in the state's interest to permit further squandering of this great gift of nature.⁸'
But North Louisiana also had, it soon became apparent, impressive reservoirs of petroleum. Prior to 1910 the Caddo field took place to Jennings, but in that year Caddo oil production zoomed to over 5,000,000 barrels -- three times that of its South Louisiana competitor. The quantity of Caddo oil climbed even further in 1911 due to the Gulf Company's successful drilling on the bed of Caddo Lake; as historian Carl Rister observed, this was the freshwater beginning of Louisiana's aquatic oil exploration, which has assumed so much importance since the 1940's. Some of the increased flow from Northwest Louisiana's wells was carried by oil pipeline to the new Standard Oil Refinery in Baton Rouge; this 270-mile pipeline had been completed in May of 1909. Two years later the Texas Company completed its pipeline from Caddo to Port Arthur, Texas.⁹
By 1911 it became evident that North Louisiana's petroleum was not confined to Caddo Parish. That year producing wells came in near Mansfield and Naborton in DeSoto Parish, and by 1915 additional wells were pumping oil from DeSoto and Red River parishes. Meanwhile Caddo Parish continued to sprout new derricks as the producing area of the Caddo field increased.¹⁰ Some optimists even began dreaming that this region might contain the world's largest supply of both liquid and gas hydrocarbons. One such fantasizer was the young lawyer and railroad commissioner, Huey P. Long, who, shortly after moving from Winnfield to Shreveport in 1918, sent his brother George this message:
"It would appear that oil could be discovered in every part of North Louisiana. Gas and oil wells are constantly being brought in. There are negro wood choppers in this country that are worth a million dollars."
But Huey concluded this otherwise ebullient letter with the glum note that "not a great deal of the money has hit me, however."¹¹
Moving eastward across the upper tier of Louisiana's parishes, oil men began exploration near the town of Homer in 1917. Two preliminary wells yielded nothing of consequence, but the third drilling (in January of 1919) inaugurated successful oil production in Claiborne Parish. Later that year the Homer Guardian Journal observed an influx of "tramps and beggars" into the community, along with "an occasional jezebel" walking the streets with "highly painted cheeks and 'immodest apparel.'" Yet the editor decided not to complain about their presence, since he had heard that "all such things belong in an oil town."¹²
In 1920 Louisiana's annual petroleum output reached 35,700,000 barrels, which was eight per cent of the nation's total production. By then virtually all the Pelican State's crude oil came from the Northwest parishes of Caddo, DeSoto, Red River, Bossier, and Claiborne, with the Homer field in Claiborne furnishing the largest portion. But from this point the state's annual production declined for several years, as no important new fields of petroleum were discovered in Louisiana until the great Rhodessa strike in northern Caddo Parish in 1930. By the time of the Rhodessa discovery geologists had generally concluded that Louisiana's recoverable oil reserves were mostly confined to the northwestern parishes, and the parishes along the Gulf coast. Offshore oil deposits were suspected, but the technology to exploit them did not yet exist. And Northeast Louisiana had proven a disappointment insofar as petroleum was concerned.¹³
Yet Northeast Louisiana was anything but lacking in the lighter form of hydrocarbon. The first hint of this region's abundance of natural gas came in 1901, when an artesian water well in East Carroll Parish suddenly transformed itself into a "wild gasser"; someone came by and struck a match to see what would happen, and something happened; for weeks afterward a 50-foot high flame was visible for miles. But not until 1916 did commercial gas production begin in what came to be called the Monroe field, located primarily in Ouachita and Morehouse parishes. The prospectors there had been hoping for oil. They found instead one of the nation's largest accumulations of natural gas. By 1922, 40,150,000,000 (forty billion, one hundred fifty million) cubic feet of gas per year was being drawn off the Monroe field (this was the official figure, the actual amount was much more). "Wild gassers," though not unknown, were less in evidence here than in the old Caddo field.¹⁴ In Northeast Louisiana there was also tragic waste, but it took a different form.
The carbon black industry consumed ninety per cent of the officially reported production of the Monroe gas field, and took one hundred per cent of an illegal amount upon which no taxes or royalties were paid. Carbon black itself was a necessary item in the modern world, being a basic ingredient for paint, printer's ink, and automobile tires. Manufacturing it from natural gas, however, was only one of several ways it could be produced. In the 1920's, Louisiana's low-cost natural gas offered the cheapest way. But making carbon black by this method was grossly wasteful of a natural resource that deserved better usage. Several other gas-producing states had either outlawed or severely restricted the consumption of natural gas by the carbon black industry. Only three per cent of the gas piped to the Louisiana carbon black plants was actually converted into carbon black; the remainder dissipated into the atmosphere as lost heat. Not only were these plants wasteful, but they ranked among the worst polluters known. Clinging black particles impregnated the air near the carbon black plants; the Ouachita River was befouled with industrial discharges, and a leaden pall frequently hung over the landscape around Monroe.¹⁵
Louisiana Attorney General A. V. Coco in 1924, sent by Governor John M. Parker to investigate conditions in the Monroe gas field, found the carbon black plants in violation of several state laws which prohibited "waste of any natural gas." Coco personally opposed the carbon black industry's use of natural gas, saying that "it seems almost criminal" to utilize one of Louisiana's greatest assets in such a profligate way. But the Attorney General was most outraged by what he termed "a positive fraud" practiced by the major carbon black companies. For the Louisiana Carbon Company, the Monroe Carbon Company, the Humphreys Carbon Company, and the La-Del Oil Company were all caught in the criminal act of bypassing gas. This simply meant that these companies were periodically using valves that bypassed the meters at the wellheads, and thus the state was cheated of an estimated two to four million dollars in severance taxes each year, while landowners were being defrauded of an even larger total amount of royalty money. Several spokesmen for the carbon black industry did not bother to deny the Attorney General's accusations, and justified their companies' bypassing of gas with that oldest of all excuses: "Everybody else is doing it."¹⁶
The threat of prosecution and a tougher state conservation law passed in 1924 apparently did much toward reducing fraud by the carbon black companies. Overproduction of carbon black subsequently caused a slackening off of the legal use of natural gas by these manufacturers. But by 1930 at least a trillion cubic feet — probably more than that — had been taken from the Monroe field.¹⁷
It was in 1930 that a National Geographic writer, although finding much to admire about the Pelican State, pointed out that a great deal of its natural wealth had already been squandered, and even then conservation these resources could not last forever. "It is inevitable," noted Ralph Graves, "that some day Louisiana's oil fields will be depleted and its gas wells will cease to flow." In the case of the Monroe and Caddo gas fields he made a specific prediction: that North Louisiana's natural gas would all be gone by 1980.¹⁸ Although this estimate almost fifty years ago apparently was unduly pessimistic, it is nonetheless true that the waste of natural gas which occurred here between 1900 and 1930, has deprived present day Louisiana and the nation of part of what should have been our legacy.
NOTES
1. Report of the Louisiana Conservation Commission of 1910 (n.d., n.p.), 16; Shreveport Evening Journal, July 25, 1900; Colfax Chronicle, July 24, 1915; Clark Coke Rister, Oil! Titan of the Southwest (Norman, 1949), 3-4, 9, 98.
2. John Samuel Ezell, The South Since 1865 (2nd ed., New York, 1975), 150-51; J. Stanley Clark, The Oil Century: From the Drake Well to the Conservation Era (Norman, 1958), 104-23; Rister, Oil!, 9-10.
3. C. Vann Woodward, Origins of the New South, 1877-1913 (Baton Rouge, 1951), 302.
4. New Orleans Daily Picayune, January 16, 24, 1901; Abbeville Meridional, April 6, 1901; Woodward, Origins of the New South, 302-303; Fred B. Kniffen, Louisiana: Its Land and People (Baton Rouge, 1968), 166.
5. Report of the Louisiana Conservation Commission of 1910, p. 16; Rister, Oil!, 96-97; Donald L. Kemmerer and C. Clyde Jones, American Economic History (New York, 1959), 10-11; Encyclopedia Britannica (Chicago, 1974), XII, 858.
6, Rister, Oil!, 89, 93-94, 97-98.
7. Shreveport Weekly Caucasian, February 11, 1909; Gerald Forbes, "A History of Caddo Oil and Gas Field," Louisiana Historical Quarterly, XXIX (January, 1946), 62-64; New International Year Book: A Compendium of the World's Progress for the Year 1909 (New York, 1909), 443; Report of the Conservation Commission of Louisiana, 1912 to 1914 (n.p., n.d.), 29. See also, Winnsboro Rising Star, May 23, 1913.
8. Report of the Louisiana Conservation Commission of 1910, p. 18; Encyclopedia Britannica (New York, 1910), XVII, 54.
9. New International Yearbook: A Compendium of the World's Progress for the Year 1910 (New York, 1911), 434; Forbes, Louisiana Historical Quarterly, XXIX, 68-69; Rister, Oil!, 99-100.
10. Rister, Oil!, 100-102.
11. Huey P. Long to George S. Long, November 29, 1919, in Huey P. Long Papers, Department of Archives, Louisiana State University.
12. Rister, Oil! 102; Homer Guardian-Journal, December 10,1919.
13. Seventh Biennial Report of the Department of Conservation of the State of Louisiana, 1924-26 (New Orleans, n.d.), 19; Rister, Oil!, 102 n. 17, 215-18.
14. Lake Providence Sentry, May 16, 1901; Rister, Oil!, 101; M. L. Alexander to John M. Parker, February 20, 1922, in Governor's Correspondence, Department of Archives, Louisiana State University; Rayville Richland Beacon-News, February 4, 1928.
15. H. Flood Madison to John M. Parker, March 1, 1922, in Governor's Correspondence; "Carbon Black from Natural Gas in 1921" (mimeographed report of U. S. Geological Survey, April 17, 1922), copy in Governor's Correspondence; "Report of Attorney General A. V. Coco to Governor John M. Parker," April 10, 1924, in Governor's Correspondence; Ralph A. Graves, "Louisiana, Land of Perpetual Romance," National Geographic, LVII (April, 1930), 447.
16. "Report of A. V. Coco," in Governor's Correspondence.
17. Seventh Biennial Report, Department of Conservation, 20-23; Rister, Oil!, 102; Graves, National Geographic, LVII, 447-48.
18. Graves, National Geographic, LVII, 448-49.
William Ivy Hair was Callaway Professor of Southern History at Georgia College, Milledgeville, GA. He presented this article at the 1977 spring luncheon of the NLHA. It was originally printed in the Fall 1977 Journal.
