Chapter 33

When they finished unloading the flatcar, they headed back to the house. Smitty, Leon, James, and Albert were on the wagon and Eli drove.

“Smitty, I need to have a talk with you. Want to walk down to the river with me?” Eli asked.

“Sure Eli, let me get a drink from the pump and I’ll be ready.”

“I’ll meet you out front.”

Eli went through the house and into the kitchen where the women were fixing supper.

“Corinne, come go with me,” Eli said.

“Eli, I’m not sure about this now. Can we wait for another time?” she knew what was about to happen.

“Corinne, get up and come with me. I want you to meet a good friend of mine. He’s a really good man and I think you’ll like him,” Eli said firmly.

Corinne stood up from her chair, shook her long dress out, fluffed her hair, and with her shoulders back, she stood straight and walked out with Eli.

Smitty was sitting on the front steps when they walked out on the porch. He stood and looked at Eli, then Corrine.

“Smitty, I want you to meet a good friend of mine, Corinne Vasher.

“Corinne, this is Smitty. That’s the only name I got for him, I reckon he’ll tell us if he’s got another one,” Eli said.

Eli watched as the two looked at one another, not smiling, but not looking away either.

“Miss Corinne, it sure is good to meet you. I saw you the other day and was hoping I’d get to know your name,” Smitty said as he took her hand and held her long slender fingers in his.

“I saw you too, Smitty, and I was afraid of you at first. I mean ... I wasn’t really afraid of you, I was afraid of how you made me feel when you looked at me. You’re such a big man, but I’ve decided that I like big men now,” Corinne said. She wasn’t afraid of Smitty anymore, but she knew she was talking like a young girl.

“Miss Corinne, I like tall skinny women and you sure are a fine, handsome woman – if I may tell you that.”

“Thank you, Smitty. Will you tell me your name, now that we’ve met?”

“I’m Harold. Harold Dean Watson. I kinda like Smitty though, since Eli started calling me that. But you can call me what you like.”

They had started walking down the slope toward the river, when Eli stopped and told them he’d forgotten something.

“Y’all go on and I’ll catch up to you,” Eli said ... When he got to the porch and looked back down the slope, they were walking side by side, talking like old friends.

Eli started in the door and all the women were peeping through the door glass at Smitty and Corrine. Lorene was there with Howard and they were both smiling that her younger sister was talking to a man for the first time in years.

“She’ll be alright, Eli. She might take that big man down on the ground right there on the river bank in broad open daylight, but she’ll be alright now,” Lorene said, smiling.

The next morning when the men met for coffee before breakfast, they were planning their first drilling site.

“Eli, Leon and me have been thinking about where we’ll set up the first derrick. We both agreed that it would be a lot better to get away from the railroad far enough that we don’t have a lot of nosy onlookers,” James Petersen said.

“He’s right, Marshal. When we first started drilling back east, we had so many folks walking around asking what we were doing, we had to make them leave to so we could do our work,” Albert said.

“If we move back to the far northeast side of our land, we’ll need a water well for sure and we’ll have lots of equipment to move back there too. Do you think we need to go that far?” Eli asked.

“Eli, we need to be out of sight of the railroad, if we can. As far as we know, no one has drilled for oil in these parts before. We sure don’t need this to get out and folks start pouring in here like they did back east. Once we hit oil, the news will get out anyway and folks will be coming from everywhere to Tulsa to start their own drilling companies. You may want to start buying up oil and mineral leases,” James said.

“We already got plans to do that as soon as we can. What will we do with the oil, once we drill down and hit a big one way back there?” Eli asked.

“We’ll need storage tanks back there and pipelines buried to bring the oil to the loading point on the front side. We can be doing this while we set the first derrick.”

“Are all of you that sure we’ll hit oil back there?”

“Marshal, we’ll hit oil on your place, no matter where we stick a drill in the ground. We need to order storage tanks and pipe to be shipped in. We’ll drill a big water well first, then we’ll start laying transfer pipe for the oil.”

“How will we make the oil run all the way to the railroad spur to load it?” Eli asked.

“We’ll need steam pumps to run the drilling rigs, since we don’t have electricity here yet. Eli, you may want to think about buying some small steam engines and even some of them big steam tractors. The tractors can also run the pump jacks from the flywheels with wide leather belts. We can use them to pump the oil from the storage tanks to the rail loading facility too. You’d have the tractors to plow with later, when we get electricity out here.”

“I saw two of them big steam tractors when we went up to Kansas City, I’d like to have a few of them anyway. Y’all make a list of all we’ll need, be sure we got what it takes. I want to hit oil in a big way and I want to be ready to load it in barrels and tanks on the train.”

“Eli, we can buy some used railroad tank cars back east. There’s plenty just sitting on side tracks back there, good ones too.”

“So if we buy our own tank cars, the freight will be cheaper?”

“That and we’ll never have to wait for empty tank cars. We can have them parked on the loading spur and the side track. Once we get to moving a lot of oil from here, we’ll have loaded cars leaving and empty cars returning all the time. We can ship them anywhere there’s a railroad, so we get the best price too. We won’t have to take another man’s price just to empty our tank cars.”

“How many do we need to buy, to start with? Jon David can get the names from you and get started makin’ deals on them now.”

“I suggest fifty. If we buy in big lots, we can get better deals and we’ll need that many before the first year is over. From there, I see your company owning as many as five hundred and upwards to a thousand tankers to handle both the Tulsa, and Little Tree, Texas, loading points.”

“Dad, if we strike oil down on the Pecan Ridge location, do you think the railroad will run us a spur over there from the Frisco?” Jon David asked.

“Jon David, check on that for us. They’re already setting the roadbed to grade right up to the edge of unassigned lands. You can bet, they’ll not stop there. See when they’ll have that part of the railroad finished into Texas and how close it will come to Pecan Ridge. Tell them we just moved twelve thousand head of cattle from down there and we may need a spur for our other businesses too,” Eli said as they all smiled. This was about to get big.

“Jon David, I have some friends in Kansas City who can put us in touch with the right people in the Frisco Railroad,” Howard told him.

“Find out their names and I’ll send them a telegraph message asking for permission to propose a spur. I’m sure they’ll want to keep that new railroad busy, to recover their expenses,” Jon David said.

“If we start drilling the water well now and laying pipe to bring the oil up to the spur, when will we drill the first oil well?” Eli asked.

“We should be ready to set the derrick and drilling platform by the time your hired hands get here. It will take us quite a while to dig a ditch to bury the pipe all the way up here. But when we get through, we’ll have connectors and shut-offs in place to connect the other storage tanks along the main pipeline as we drill more wells.”

“I’ve been thinking about that, Leon. What if I build a really big plow and we plow a deep furrow all the way from the back side to the front side, then lay the pipe as we connect the joints?” Smitty asked.

“We’ll need the pipe at least a foot deep; can you build a plow that will plow a clean furrow that deep?”

“I can build it, but we may need to buy some more mules to pull the thing.”

“You build it, we’ll put a twenty-mule hitch in front of it if we have to,” Eli told him.

“Eli, if Smitty can build that plow, we can have the pipe laid and all the connectors in place in less than a month’s time. With no rain to speak of, that is,” James said.

“I’ll start on that tomorrow,” Smitty told them.

“Eli, I hate to ask this, but the three of us are flat busted. Is there anyway you can advance us enough to keep us going, until we start making money?” James asked.

“You just sit tight. I never thought to ask if any of you needed money. I’ll be right back,” Eli told them.

He went upstairs to his stash and got four of the bundles of hundred dollar bills he’d taken from T. F. Miles, and gave a bundle to each of them.

“Here’s enough to see you through until we can start selling oil. When you get ready to buy something for the oil drilling rigs, tell me and I’ll pay for it with Crow Oil Company money,” Eli told them.

“Eli, this is five thousand dollars! I was thinking of more like a couple hundred,” James said as he looked at the money.

“You’ve already earned this much and we’re not even started yet. If what you four men have told us is true, I figure all four of you will be millionaires in a few years.”

“Eli, we already know you’re right. We just can’t make ourselves believe all this is really happening. We worked our asses off back home, hoping to make enough money to live on the rest of our lives when we got old. Just about the time we got it all going good, the boom went bust and we were back working twelve hours a day for someone else again,” Leon said.

“Men, we’re gonna ride this oil boom all up and down Indian Territory. We’re gonna work our asses so hard, you won’t have time to spend your money. We’ll let Jon David and his wife handle all the money when it starts coming in. That way, when we get it all up and going, we can sit on this hill and watch that river run south and them trains leaving here pulling Crow Oil Company tankers loaded with our oil.”

Smitty started working on his idea of a huge plow the next day. He envisioned one that would plow a deep furrow in the soil from the Barkley brother’s land on the backside of Crow Lands, all the way to the loading spur. It took a week to build the heavy wheels and running gear for the big plow, then another week to heat and fashion a plow point and plow share, with a moldboard big enough to roll that much soil out of the furrow.

He built a depth gauge with a long lever that took three men to raise the plow share off the ground. He made a hitch at the back, just in case they had to pull the plow backwards, when it went too deep. When he had it built and assembled, he knew it was too heavy to pull across the river. He dismantled the plow and they hauled it across on wagons, making five trips to get the heavy plow across.

Albert had helped him put together trace chains and double-trees for a twenty mule hitch. By the time Smitty reassembled the plow and was ready to try it out, Eli, Moses, and Duncan had brought forty mules over. They’d use a twenty mule hitch, with an additional twenty mules standing by to spell them.

With full leather harnesses on twenty mules, collars and hames in place on each mule’s shoulders, they hitched ten teams to the giant plow. The men, women, and kids of the Crow family, Iron Hammer and his Cherokee brothers and kids, and the Barkley brothers and wives were all there to watch the big plow work.

Smitty walked beside the huge steel wheel on the right side of the plow, as Moses, Joe, Leon, and James all pulled the lever back to release the catch on the depth gauge. Smitty had his mules walking by the time the shiny plow point sliced into the rich red soil. Deeper and deeper it went, as the mules leaned into the harnesses.

When the shiny point of the plow share leveled out, the mules already had a good step going. Leaning harder into their harnesses when they felt the load, the mules walked toward the windmills at the loading pens, far in the distance. The big plow was rolling out a long wide ribbon of dirt on the right side of the deep furrow, leaving it open and clean on the bottom.

The boys and girls ran to jump down into the furrow, standing waist deep as they all cheered and clapped their hands. Corinne ran over to where Smitty was walking at a fast step beside the giant plow. Walking beside him, she pulled him over and kissed his cheek. He handed her the leather reins and let her walk with him as the mules and plow did the work.

The women laughed at Corrine, but they were proud for her and Smitty. Miranda ran over to Eli and hugged him as he walked beside Smitty and Corrine.

Leon, James, and Albert were walking on the opposite side, next to the big, wide steel wheel, as they looked the plow over. They were smiling that they didn’t have to dig this deep trench by hand. They looked across the wide, slow rolling iron wheels and grinned at Smitty as he beamed a smile back at them.

The next week and a half was spent laying sections of two inch, cast iron pipe. They’d started on the Barkley brothers land, then down through Crow Lands, and on out to the loading spur.

They put tee connectors in the pipeline every two hundred yards and capped them, to be connected to more storage tanks, as they drilled more oil wells later. Another long trench was plowed, this one across Cherokee lands then, on across Crow lands to the loading point by the railroad. They laid pipe there too, so they’d be ready when the drilling started to expand, and the oil began to flow from all the wells.

By the time they had the pipeline in place, the storage tanks were arriving on flatcars. They hauled them two at a time on flatbed wagons, hooked in tandem and rolled them off at the places they had marked to set them.

Before they started driving the water well on the north side of Crow Lands, Eli and the other marshals had to leave on a trip up toward the Kansas border.

When they were packed and ready to leave out, all the women lined up just as they had in Fort Smith, to send them off with a hug and well wishes. This was the first time Miranda saw them leave on a trip. This was the first time she wouldn’t be with Eli since she arrived here. Miranda was crying as he held her and told her he loved her.

They had hoped her parents would have been here by now, but they’d been delayed when her grandmother became ill.

“Your parents will be here by the time we get back, we’ll get married and start our family then,” he told her.

“Eli, we already have a baby in my belly. You be careful out there. Come home safely to me and our baby,” she cried.

“I’ll be back in a week or so. You get your schooling started and you and Sissy plan for them babies.”

Crow Ridge Cattle Company Tulsa, Indian Territory June 12, 1884:

“Eli, we saw that big package we got in the mail, what all was in there?” Duncan asked as the four of them rode north at a fast lope.

“Looks like we got us another one of them big land owners who wants to have it all. Any of y’all ever heard tell of dynamite?”

“I heard tell of it, never did see or hear it blasting personal though,” Duncan answered.

“I saw it one time, over at Fort Supply. The cavalry was digging up stumps to build a new supply house next to the fort, and they used some dynamite to blow the stumps out of the ground,” Moses said.

“What does it do, Moses? I never even heard of it,” Joe said as they rode four abreast at a fast walk.

“When they set that stuff off, you’ll think your ears are gonna bust open, it’s so loud. They made us get way back from it before they set the charge, they called it.”

“What does it look like, Moses, you ever see any of it?” Eli asked.

“It’s just a round stick near ‘bout a foot long and as big as two fingers. One man said it was just wrapped up paper, holding the explosive stuff in place.”

“How did they make it explode? Did they just throw it at the stump?” Joe asked.

“No, they had a blasting cap and some long rope-like fuses. They clamped a blasting cap on the end of fuse, then pushed that cap into the stick of dynamite. When they lit the fuse, they run like hell. The fuse had powder in it and it burned right up to the cap, setting it off. Then that little explosion set the dynamite off.”

“What happens then? I mean how bad is that stuff?” Duncan asked.

“They’d put one stick down a hole under a stump, and it would blast a stump loose from the ground. Two sticks would blow that stump up in the air like it was a feather.”

“WooooWeeee, that sounds like some bad stuff. Eli, why did you ask us if we’d ever seen or heard of it? I reckon the men we’re after uses dynamite, is that it?” Duncan said.

“The warrant papers said the man was using dynamite to clear the land south of Coffeyville, Kansas, and dam up the Verdigris River for his own water. It even told about his men blowing up folk’s houses with them inside, if they didn’t sell off their land to him.”

“Some folks just ain’t satisfied are they? They just want it all no matter what they’ve got to do to get it,” Duncan said, shaking his head in disbelief.