Saturday, August 13, 1921. Zacamixtle.
We were awakened at 6:00 A.M. by the sound of men whistling as they dressed, and finally the gramaphone on the other side of the partition played “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and I got up, looked around for water to wash in. Outside on the verandah (where the men have their wash-stand!) I found it in gasoline tins. We had breakfast at the “dining room” to which we motored across an open muddy space. The breakfast, fried eggs, dried bacon, tinned butter, and canned milk was excellent, after which we started homeward, with a feeling of great appreciation for the simple hospitality of these splendid, hardworking men. They had not much to offer, and it is rare indeed that a woman intrudes upon their lives (I believe only about five have done so) but they offer ungrudgingly all they have and make one welcome. I felt badly that two people had been obliged to give up their room to me for the night, and never learnt who they were to thank them.
Passing by daylight the hills with their drilling towers that we had only seen dimly the night before made of the journey a new one.
As we passed through Amatlan we stopped, and got out into the mud to photograph lot 162. This is the hillside with the twelve drilling towers, “derricks” as they are called. 162 is the most prolific lot. It was at this point that the field was threatened by the recent fire, and it is estimated that from 500,000 to a million barrels of oil were lost. I was interested to hear how an oil well on fire can be extinguished, but in order to understand, we first stopped at the Huasteca well, known as Amatlan No. 6, in lot 228, and watched it being drilled. They had reached a depth of 1700 feet and expected to strike oil at about 2,000 feet. A well is drilled by means of a bit. As the hole is bored in, it is filled up by steel casing pounds up and down, worked by a wooden wheel. When a depth of 1800 feet below sea level is reached in a proven territory, the gas is encountered and the drillers know they will soon strike the oil. After drilling through the final strata, the oil dome is reached at about 2,000 feet below sea level. When the well “comes in” the drillers first let her “clean herself out.” This means that the gas is allowed to flow freely out of the well. With the roar and rush of gas come pebbles and stones, in many cases with sufficient force to throw the drilling tools out of the hole, and wreck the derrick. The gas is very inflammable and not even an automobile is allowed to pass within a radius of 300 metres during an in-coming of a well. After the tools are thrown out, a great black spray of oil comes up, and then the well is “in.”
The difficult part is closing in the well. A valve is set on the casing with a stem about 30 feet running at right angles to the casing, and usually the wheel that turns the valve steam is covered by a small hut. A pressure gauge indicates the pressure of the oil, and from this the engineers calculate the estimated daily flow.
When the big fire was raging in Amatlan, the only method of closing the well was to tunnel to the casing, cut the casing and insert a valve so as to shut off the supply of oil that was feeding the flame. This was accomplished by one man, who, by means of an asbestos suit, and tunnel, successfully accomplished the greater part of the work himself. It is claimed that the Oil Companies had about 5,000 men at work, throwing up earthen dykes to prevent a spread.
Craving for information, with the earnest desire of the ignorant person to become knowledgable, I asked if the oil from these wells reached its base through common pipe carriers, as in the United States. But this is not the case here. Each individual company runs its pipe lines at enormous expense, a procedure which is well afforded by the big companies, but which is paralyzingly detrimental to the smaller ones. Only the very rich can afford the luxury of enriching themselves.
From Amatlan we proceeded some miles, to the great crater known as Las Bocas, which took fire and burnt for nine years. In those days the means of extinguishing a burning oil well had not been evolved. The narrow neck had burnt and burnt until it had converted itself into a crater the size of a lake. From the surface of the sluggish waters, gas was still rising and the water bubbling and hissing in eddies. All round the crater the trees stood grey and lifeless, as in some districts of the battlefields in France. This, as in France, being caused by poisonous gas which has killed all vegetation, and left a wood standing like a bare skeleton.
Near this place we met a native, with a gun dragging along a baby coyote. He had wounded it in the hind legs, and the animal unable to walk, was being towed along the ground by means of a willow branch tied round its neck. We asked the man why he did not kill it. He answered that he wanted to bring it “alive to the village, to show to the people.” We argued that it was dying. The native was smiling and unmoved. We offered him a peso to shoot it immediately. He continued to smile. We offered him five pesos, he remained unmoved. “It will be dead in an hour, and you will be without your five pesos.” But he smilingly went on his way, dragging the bulging eyed, panting, dying baby coyote with its limp broken legs. It wasn’t that he was cruel, he was merely a brute with no understanding.
We pushed on to the camp known as Kilometer 40, for lunch, and here, one of the first things they showed me in the Superintendent’s quarters, was a Hearst magazine of July 12th, with a review and long quotation of Clare Sheridan’s Russian diary with photographs of self, with right and lefts of Lenin and Trotzky! I was sure well known by the staff at this point.