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Chapter 7

29 Million Cubic Feet a Day

When he shut down this project, Coste had other things in mind for them. He asked them to go to Medicine Hat, Alberta, in the late summer of 1906, to work on a wildcat drilling contract for the Canadian Pacific Railway. Frosty became field superintendent and Tiny head driller. The culmination of this venture was the first big natural gas discovery in Alberta, when Old Glory was drilled near Bow Island in 1908-9. Oil was not found in commercial quantities here.

Generally lost sight of in this drilling project, was the fact a number of smaller commercial gas finds were brought in at Dunmore, Cummings, Suffield, Brooks and Bassano.

Their contract with Coste allowed Frosty and Tiny to do some freelance work. Between the time they arrived in Medicine Hat and the bringing in of Old Glory, they had drilled five gas wells for J.D. McGregor of the Grand Forks Cattle Company, who had an 80,000-acre grazing lease near Medicine Hat. This lease was later expanded to 380,000 acres through his participation in the Southern Alberta Land Company. His idea was to use cheap natural gas to operate huge pumps, to lift water 300 feet over the banks of the Bow and Belly Rivers to an extensive irrigation system, in this semi-arid short-grass prairie. He had been persuaded by Coste there was sufficient gas to achieve this purpose. There was — but the cable tool rigs were not capable of reaching enough of it to do the job.

McGregor toyed with the idea of tapping into larger constant gas reserves around Medicine Hat, but eventually the concept was dropped as there was no guarantee of continuity of supply.

Despite the failure of finding enough gas for this purpose, McGregor and the SAL continued the wildcat drilling program. Up to 1914, $127,000 had been spent.

From the very first he had pushed a scheme to build an electric railway from Medicine Hat to Calgary via Suffield, Ronalane, Retlaw, Milo, Arrowwood and Aldersyde. Once again he planned to use gas for power generation. The Phillips’ scribbler notes:

James Duncan McGregor (1860-1935). Cattleman extraordinaire who, in 1929 at the age of 69, was appointed Lieutenant-Governor of Alberta. Photo: Western Canada Pictorial Index.

McGregor and his brother, Colin, were obsessed about electric railways as a quick, effective means of transportation for farmers. At one point construction bonds had been guaranteed. Not only that, but a successful well was brought in on Colin’s farm at 2,177 feet. On it were based the hopes of supplying power for the electric railway and for the proposed townsite of Ronalane nearby. Neither ever got past the planning stages. Later the CPR built a branchline over the right-of-way McGregor acquired.

That left him with quantities of gas, which were developed for heating homes.

When McGregor’s grand idea didn’t pan out, necessity sent the SAL 150 miles up the Bow River to build a diversion works at Carseland. Bow River water was sent coursing through an immense canal system; dumped back into the river at Ronalane.

Tiny and Frosty had more success in drilling under the CPR contract. Based on the success of the Colin McGregor well north of the river, they decided to drill for the CPR south of the river. But this project didn’t happen immediately. The engineer of the western region of the CPR didn’t take kindly to this idea, being a good company man with little imagination and a finely ingrained sense of job security.

Working for the CPR was usually akin to holding a civil service job, with attendant inter-department wars fought hand-to-hand. At that particular period in 1907, Guinter, the man in charge before Frosty arrived, decided to side with the engineer. The result was it was decided to drill another well at Dunmore Junction. Drilling here was regarded as a “sure thing” as gas had been discovered in Medicine Hat sand, which was very productive in the vicinity. An eight-inch pipe was drilled into this zone but it froze. It was then decided to abandon the well.

The rig was finally moved to the Bow Island location with a payroll which included Frank Lawler, Martin Hovis and Garrett W. Green, drillers; H.C. (Fat) Gloyd, Edward Cumming and Alvin Van Alst, tool dressers; Chris Haerman, T. Penhale, R.L. Quinn, H.C. Schouert, F. Hopkins, helpers; A.W. Chisholm and H. Blythe, teamsters; J. Fun, H. Hanson, T.A. McElhany, J.A. Rees, H. Arblaster, T.A. Ross and D.W. Angus, carpenters; M. Cumming and S. Kunerman, cooks; and Orville Fuller, Hugh Henderson, L.E. Exley, J.H. Brown, J.C. Bright, supernumaries with no fixed occupation.

The year was 1908. The well was officially known as Bow Island No. 1. But when it blew in at eight million cubic feet a day — the biggest gas well in Canada at that time — the American drillers dubbed it Old Glory.

In one of those crazy incidents which often precede big discoveries, Old Glory came within an ace of not being drilled on the site which brought in the hugh flow of gas. When Martin appeared on the job site, he found the derrick had been built and pipe and fuel were on the ground. Coste came out from his Toronto office on an inspection tour and, to his horror, found the crew had located the well on the wrong lease.

Due to a misunderstanding or just plain error — easy to make on the trackless open range — the crew had started work on Crown land, not CPR land.

Coste told Frosty to tear down the rig and move to the correct location. Frosty figured this was a sacrilege. He argued with him for a couple of days to let them go ahead and drill and straighten out the paper work later if need be. With plenty of misgivings Coste agreed reluctantly.

Of course, when the big well came in there was a great scramble in the CPR legal department in Montreal, to get the matter straightened out. The man sent to straighten things out was its young assistant solicitor, E.W. Beatty, (later to become company president). He arranged for a swap with the Canada Department of the Interior for a quarter-section the CPR owned near Innisfail, a quarter that was later granted as a homestead to Gisli Erickson.

This seemed a simple enough transaction but legal minds wrangled over it several years before it was satifactorily settled in favour of the railroad.

The CPR owned all the land and mineral rights for 20 miles on each side of lines it built, as part of the compensation given it by the federal government for building the system linking Eastern and Western Canada. The big question mark was: Would the CPR secure the mineral rights under the Crown land on which Old Glory was located? If the interior department withheld the mineral rights, would it mean the CPR would be required to pay the government a hefty slice of royalties? It was finally established the CPR did own the mineral rights. The question never entered anyone’s mind, that the mineral rights under Erickson’s land might have been worth considerably more years later.

Drillers in the early days in the Canadian West had to know more than the physical end of operating the drill. They had to operate on guile and bravado along with their ability to “string along” their principals, who were usually far from the scene. The reason for this was, that trouble often developed during a drilling operation and the drillers operated on the theory that what the bankrollers didn’t know, didn’t hurt them. It was the custom to create a “bank roll” of their own by holding back in drilling reports a few hundred feet on the actual depth of the well, so that if trouble occurred progress could be reported while the trouble was being remedied.

Tiny’s log of the well, in the well-thumbed scribbler, shows there was a great deal of trouble with the well. The CPR engineer in Winnipeg was told they were down only 900 feet, when they actually they were down 1,100.

Although most of the wells up to that time were producing from Medicine Hat gas sand, Tiny and Frosty were of the opinion if they could get down to Dakota sand, the flow would be greater. The only thing they didn’t know was how deep they’d have to go to reach this formation.

At 1,860 feet, (actually only 1,660), they ran into real trouble when they lost some tools in the hole. They lost the under-reamer dogs and broke the stem of the six-inch bit in the lower weld. This required what is known in the trade as a “fishing job,” a job at which Tiny became very proficient and won himself quite a reputation later in the Alberta oil fields.

They used up all the “bank roll” on the fishing job and Coste, becoming wary of the progress reports, ordered them to abandon the well. This put them in a quandry, because they were surer than ever there was a big flow of gas in the hole.

C.P.R. Oil well located on a siding at Brooks, Alberta, 1912. Photo: Glenbow Archives, Calgary, Alberta.

It was well into the middle of January, 1909, by then. Contact with the East was rather indefinite. Frosty put his creative efforts to work writing long-drawn-out alibis and somehow two or three telegrams from Coste telling them to cease and desist, got lost in transit from the CPR station at Bow Island to the wellsite. The crew was drilling 24 hours a day. At 1,912 feet a great flow of gas estimated at 4½ million feet was encountered. Tiny exulted in his scribbler:

“I remember Old Glory came in on the daylight tour. It was spitting sand out of the hole after we had drilled a few feet into the Dakota formation. There was great jubilation that day for this was the first big producer in the new Province of Alberta.”

They knew their job was done Feb. 17, 1909, when the flow of gas measured four million feet after the well had blown wide open a month. It was then decided to drill another few feet. This paid off. At 1,915 feet the flow increased to seven million. On Feb. 23 the flow increased to 8.3 million.

Coste forgave all. He wired them to tube the well. But this wasn’t the end of the excitement at Old Glory. Big trouble occurred July 18 when a group of farmers visited the site.

“One of them, A. Tremblay, deliberately struck a match near a leaking gate valve to see what would happen. His assurance was highly volatile. Leakage was coming through a brand new four-inch No. 2000 Darling gate valve, with a heavy four-inch plug screwed in the open end of the gate.

“It was a small leak and did not amount to anything. The fire could have been put out easily, if there had been anyone at the pumphouse who knew anything about gas. After the fire had burned a few minutes the heat began to expand the balance of the connections and fittings and caused gas to leak through them. The other leaks naturally caught fire and the gaskets started to burn in the gate valves. The heat was so intense the brass valves started to melt. Finally, the tubing became so hot it burst with the internal pressure of 800 pounds.”

A drill crew was pulled off the Bassano well and sent to Bow Island with a couple of boilers, to make steam to smother the “nasty” fire. The heat was so intense a man couldn’t get within 75 feet of the fire.

Frosty put in a request to a CPR vice-president in Winnipeg to send in an army unit with a 10-pound gun, to shoot the fiery valves off if the steam failed to douse the fire. Fortunately, the artillery wasn’t needed. On July 28, Tiny was able to douse the fire with two boilers of steam.

In the early days, as many as 10 to 12 boilers were required to snuff gas fires. The object was to move the boilers as near to the fire as possible and to cut the oxygen supply by blowing live steam at 150 pounds pressure into the fire through 12-inch pipes. A large empty pipe laid on the opposite side of the well to the boilers was laid to “pull the flame into it.”

If Old Glory was considered a big well, Bow Island No. 4 was considered the granddaddy. It came in at 29 million cubic feet. All the adjectives were gone by the time No. 6 came in at 42 million.

Those wells assured Coste that field had sufficient reserves to take on the Calgary market 170 miles away and supply it by pipeline. At its height the total field totalled 59 million cubic feet a day at a pressure of 800 pounds.

History must record that the chronicle of the discovery and development in the natural gas industry might have been written quite differently, had it not been for the brassy intestinal fortitude of a couple of young American drillers, with a shirttail full of equipment (by present-day standards), and nothing to lose and who kept drilling at No. 1 well against all odds and orders. There is no gainsaying that luck played a part. The result was that it ensured them of jobs, as Coste went East to arrange for the financing to drill more wells to prove up the Bow Island field. Tiny’s scribbler records:

“I often think of the loyalty of the men in this industry, who were willing to go into those rigs where oil and salt water were spraying many feet above the top of the derrick. They were ready to go up the rig, clad in oilskin suits and rubber hats and boots and take their turns in putting tubing into the wells. They could only endure about 20 minutes at a time of this kind of punishment. But it had to be done. In spite of all obstacles, the wells were eventually tubed in with a rock pressure of more than 1,200 pounds.

“In my job, even though I worked a 12-hour day, my work was never done Maybe I would have a Sunday off — or a weekend. But then the next week it meant going day and night no matter what the weather.

“Often it meant barreling across the prairie in an open car, with the side curtains flopping in the wind in a blizzard or at 25 below zero. You just had to get that gas or oil well going.

“Maybe you were moving to a new location and your boiler didn’t show up. You would go down the road a mile or two and hear your teamster cussing the horses, because they couldn’t pull the load out of a mudhole. Maybe after a futile attempt to move a heavy wagon he would have to unhitch, arrive at camp at 8 p.m., feed the tired teams and slide into a bunk for a few hours of sleep.

“Next morning the teamster would be up before dawn and go back to the load with a new idea for moving it. Maybe it would move this time.

“When I first started drilling I often slept on the ground wrapped in a blanket after following a rutted wagon trail all day. There were bountiful trout streams, numerous elk, deer, bears, with wolves and coyotes to keep you awake at night with their howls.

“That is the pioneering work I and my good fellows did for our newly adopted province. You wonder at times that some of the brass of the government, who brag about the riches of the Province of Alberta, have the nerve to brag. They never went through what the common drillers, tool pushers, roustabouts and other labourers did to bring in the volume of oil and gas which has filled government coffers so full of money, they are now fighting about the way it is being distributed.

“Yes, this is a rich province. Thanks to who?

“But the compensations were the many trips through snowcapped mountains and green valleys. What more could a romantic person wish for?”

While this is a noble sentiment, the real facts of the matter are, that drillers weren’t making all that much and they had to improvise and cut their living costs by any means possible.

For instance, when Tiny was drilling Old Glory winter came early in 1908, he and Zulah and their 18-month-old son, Fred, were living in a tent at the wellsite. It was customary in those early days, for the families to go to camp along with the men. They lived in tents with board floors. These provided good, snug, warm living conditions until the bitter cold weather came.

Zulah used to talk about an early November storm that blew in and piled so much snow around the tent, the men from another tent had to come and dig them out in the morning. Following that, the families moved to a Medicine Hat apartment for the winter.

The prairies were just being opened to the big wave of settlers at the time and Zulah recalled seeing plenty of buffalo skulls along the wagon roads. When one had to travel off the wagon roads, the only means of finding the way from one place to another was the odd survey marker. It was a delight for the women to arrive in Medicine Hat and find concrete pavements.

There were Indians encamped in the vicinity who delighted young Fred with the mocassins they made for him and who couldn’t fathom just what the palefaces from the CPR were up to, with their giant rig.

The Phillip’s early days in the West were in the age when homesteaders made a bet of $10 with the government, that if they could stick to a quarter-section three years it was theirs. But a good many did not make it — after working two years for nothing.

The only thing necessary to get one’s hands on the 160 acres, was to file on the homestead at the land office, then hunt out the corner-stake — no easy task. This was a country where one would see for miles in all directions with nothing but blue sky, hot sun and heat coming up in waves; maybe a few head of cattle belonging to some other homesteader five or six miles away. There was no fencing in sight. A note in Tiny’s scribbler:

“You wondered who the land belonged to: a rancher or the government? But the rancher was there. So what?

“It was up to you to make a country of this province of Alberta.

“Many people emigrated without much and expected to get rich by work alone. But they did not always succeed. The authorities told them they had to build a house on a homestead pre-emption, before they could claim the land for $10. Many a poor fellow built the house out of sods and lived that way maybe the first year, maybe two.