Gunsight Pass: How Oil Came to the Cattle Country and Brought a New West

by William MacLeod Raine

With the first faint streaks of day men came galloping across the desert to the Jackpot. They came at first on horseback, singly, and later by twos and threes. A buckboard appeared on the horizon, the driver leaning forward as he urged on his team.

"Hart," decided the driller, "and comin' hell-for-leather."

Other teams followed, buggies, surreys, light wagons, farm wagons, and at last heavily laden lumber wagons. Business in Malapi was "shot to pieces," as one merchant expressed it. Everybody who could possibly get away was out to see the big gusher.

There was an immediate stampede to make locations in the territory adjacent. The wildcatter flourished. Companies were formed in ten minutes and the stock subscribed for in half an hour. From the bootblack at the hotel to the banker, everybody wanted stock in every company drilling within a reasonable distance of Jackpot Number Three. Many legitimate incorporations appeared on the books of the Secretary of State, and along with these were scores of frauds intended only to gull the small investor and separate him from his money. Saloons and gambling-houses, which did business with such childlike candor and stridency, became offices for the sale and exchange of stock. The boom at Malapi got its second wind. Workmen, investors, capitalists, and crooks poured in to take advantage of the inflation brought about by the new strike in a hitherto unknown field. For the fame of Jackpot Number Three had spread wide. The production guesses ranged all the way from ten to fifty thousand barrels a day, most of which was still going to waste on the desert.

For Burns and Hart had not yet gained control over the flow, though an army of men in overalls and slickers fought the gusher night and day. The flow never ceased for a moment. The well steadily spouted a stream of black liquid into the air from the subterranean chamber into which the underground lake poured.

The attack had two objectives. The first was to check the outrush of oil. The second was to save the wealth emerging from the mouth of the well and streaming over the lip of the reservoir to the sandy desert.

A crew of men, divided into three shifts, worked with pick, shovel, and scraper to dig a second and a third sump hole. The dirt from the excavation was dumped at the edge of the working to build a dam for the fluid. Sacks filled with wet sand reinforced this dirt.

Meanwhile the oil boiled up in the lake and flowed over its edges in streams. As soon as the second reservoir was ready the tarry stuff was siphoned into it from the original sump hole. By the time this was full a third pool was finished, and into it the overflow was diverted. But in spite of the great effort made to save the product of the gusher, the sands absorbed many thousands of dollars' worth of petroleum.

This end of the work was under the direction of Bob Hart. For ten days he did not take off his clothes. When he slept it was in cat naps, an hour snatched now and again from the fight with the rising tide of wealth that threatened to engulf its owners. He was unshaven, unbathed, his clothes slimy with tar and grease. He ate on the job—coffee, beans, bacon, cornbread, whatever the cooks' flunkies brought him—and did not know what he was eating. Gaunt and dominating, with crisp decision and yet unfailing good-humor, he bossed the gangs under him and led them into the fight, holding them at it till flesh and blood revolted with weariness. Of such stuff is the true outdoor Westerner made. He may drop in his tracks from exhaustion after the emergency has been met, but so long as the call for action lasts he will stick to the finish.

At the other end Jed Burns commanded. One after another he tried all the devices he had known to succeed in capping or checking other gushers. The flow was so continuous and powerful that none of these were effective. Some wells flow in jets. They hurl out oil, die down like a geyser, and presently have another hemorrhage. Jackpot Number Three did not pulse as a cut artery does. Its output was steady as the flow of water in a pipe. The heavy timbers with which he tried to stop up the outlet were hurled aside like straws. He could not check the flow long enough to get control.