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The Sooner Magazine

Joseph A. Kornfeld combined engineering and jour-nalism at the university and now does technical articles for variousmagazines . On the opposite page : Bringing in the Moncrief-Farrellwildcat on the Lathrop farm in Gregg county, Texas, last January .When it, like the discovery and the Bateman-Grim well to the south,proved a gusher, the East Texas «play» was given its greatest impetusas majors and independents alike commenced leasing up the entirebelt, thirty miles in length, in the belief that the three wildcat gusherswere tapping the same pool of oil

Staking well locations

BY JOSEPH A. KORNFELD, '30

ONE bright morning at Ty-ler, Texas, my crew chief phoned meshortly after breakfast ."Say Joe!" he exclaimed, "we've got

to go out into the field and move thatNo . 2 location for the Sinclair ."

"Is it much of a change, 1-1 . F.?" Iqueried ."No, just 21 feet to the north," was

the reply.We evidently had found and used the

wrong corner . That meant a forty miletrip and a few hours extra work downin a swamp in the southwest part of theEast Texas field . What price accuracy .The afternoon before, the Sun Oil

Company was building a steel derrick

October

on the east offset to the Sinclair No . 2 tion, the Sun Company's men wereand had laid the foundation girders by working high above the crow's nest,sunset. By the next noon, when we nearly thru with construction . "Fastcame back to change the Sinclair loca-

and snappy" is the keynote to field work

Above : Atypical drilling scene in EastTexas . The derrick is 122 feethigh . To the left : A close-upof the machinery on the der-rick floor of an East Texaswell

in East Texas-the land where 60,000-barrel gushers are drilled in 10 days .On another job in the middle part of

the field, west of the Bateman pool, wewere working for the British-AmericanOil Producing Company. The plat giventhe instrument man showed three lo-cations to be placed on the 11-acre tract.When we arrived at Willie Ector's farm,!the locale for our day's work, we called

1931

on the dusky farmer to show us the"corners" of the tract.

Willie looked to me more like Cru-soe's Friday than Daniel Defoe's char-acter might have appeared in the orig-inal . He was clad in a black broad-brimhat, a sleeve-torn coat and weather-torntrousers . But he was certainly happy ashe went about his task chopping fire-wood in his backyard .He was the most obliging darkie we

ever came across in our surveys through-out the entire East Texas field ; heseemed fairly intelligent . There was nodoubt that Willie had endured a prettydifficult winter to say the least; but wassmiling all the time despite his meagrecircumstances-the result of two cropfailures .

Since "Dad" Joiner brought in his dis-covery well that memorable October 11last, the colored farm owners took it forgranted that "the suvayah's'll be comin'roun' soon."

"It suah look lik' dos dahricks comin'dis way mighty quick," he commencedas we approached him.

"Yeh see," he elaborated, "de Bright-well's got dem a big one and dey donecame dis way a quawtah mile . Mybruddah's got a location on his'n . Somuch for de north.

The Sooner Magazine

"Cast youse eyes eastwahd . Dat rignear Uncle Andy's farm comes neartouchin' my eleben acres."We made "short work" on the bound-

ary survey on the Ector tract and startedstaking the three locations, 150 feetapart. No. 1 was placed right in Willie'sbackyard near the wood pile ."How come you all puttin' a well

heah? De state law's against it . Youcan't drill a well closer den 150 feet frommy hencoop, let alone de house. 'Ceptif you'se all goin' to agree wi' me othah-wise .We explained to Willie that putting

No . I right in his backyard was the onlyway the British-American was going toplace three big gushers on his land .Otherwise he would be getting royaltyfrom only two wells, we pointed out."Three gushahs! Three gushahs!" Wil-

lie repeated in anticipation . "I guess I'llbe rich 'nough to move to de city by dattime . Thus was concluded the difficulty ."

After we staked the other locations,Willie joked about the way we identifiedthe !stakes . We had tied alternatepieces of red and white flagging to apine branch driven into the ground nearthe stakes so the teamsters would knowwhere to unload the derrick timbers.

"Lawdy," exclaimed Willie, "if dem

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teamstahs can't see dat spot and dat spotand dat spot, dey musta be sure 'noughblind."As we left the tract after finishing the

Ector assignment Willie looked aroundhis farm boundaries and noted the whiteand orange square we had tied to thefences every 200 feet as we chained thetraverse, permitting easy identificationby the superintendent ."Folk aroun' heah goin' to think I

got town lots," perked up Willie . MrsEctor took in the situation with a broadgrin .

Believe it or not, all locations westaked for companies weren't drilled .We had just finished a neat job for theBritish-American on the Maud Smithtract west of Longview, when a drillingwell nearby between us and the Lathropfield "struck Georgetown ." Ask anydriller in East Texas what that meansand he'll tell you that the well will bedry as a bone . On the east side of thefield, the Woodbine sand pinches outand the bit goes directly from the Eagle=ford shale into the non-productiveGeorgetown lime . Another operatorwas in the same predicament on his welljust west of the M. Smith.

Staking locations in the E-Tex fieldTURN TO PAGE 23, PLEASE)

1931

give admirable services to the students .Each has its atelier or studio where onemay read, talk, play bridge or dance.These churches sponsor Thanksgivingand Christmas dinners and do much toalleviate an occasional twinge of home-sickness .

Socially, living in Paris is like attend-ing your state university, only the west-tern hemisphere is now your field. Iwant to mention a few of my specialAmerican friends met over there, whodo outstanding work in their special lines.These include Anna Mae Sharpe, violin-ist and Wilda Griffin, voice, former O.U. students ; John Rex Cunningham, ar-tist, of the faculty of Oklahoma Agricul-tural and Mechanical college ; Ethel Wal-lace of San Francisco, winner of the fres-co prize at Fontainebleau ; Hugh Beggs,pianist, of Jacksonville, Illinois ; Ruby

Of course I went to the Louvre, NotreDame, Sainte Chapelle, various muse-ums and had many interesting ramblesin what Watson White calls "The Paristhat is Paris" meaning the Paris of yes-teryear. But I have neither the spacenor the inclination to tell you about thesethings now. I shall close with a littletid-bit from my diary.

"I am impressed by the flatness ofthings . After New York everythingseems in miniature-flat cars, flat build-ings, flat dogs, flat heels!

Everything Stems to be in pastelshades ; cream, lavendar, grey and rose .With the exception of the green trees,the whole country looks like the Frenchfive franc piece, and even the green isa background .The artistic sign and lamp posts, the

flowers, and the way in which the boul-evards are arranged in order to evaluatethe attractive buildings, gives one an in-sight into the Frenchman's love of beau-ty. It is remarkable how the five sensesare developed. Beautiful music, exquis-ite flowers, delicious food, inspiringmonuments and wonderful gardens arethe breath of every-day life to a Paris-ian."

Ca me donne le nostalgie de Paris!

AAA

STAKING WELL LOCATIONS(CONTINUED FROM PAGE 21)

calls for a lot of hard marching and car-rying of heavy instrument loads. On oneassignment in the Bateman pool, wewere forced to park our car five milesfrom the field on account of the bad

The Sooner Magazine

roads. Add to that the carrying betweenus three of two complete sets of instru-ments ; a transit set for surveying theboundaries and an alidade set for deter-mining the sea-level elevations . It's theboiling Texas sun that gets a fellowdown, too. And then the five-mile hikeback to the car with the instruments atthe end of that day.When it comes to swamps, the Ever-

glades have nothing on East Texas.Near Overton, on a small piece of work,we just couldn't chain the swampy northboundary . We tried it for fifty feetover, but we sank in above our knees.So we had to figure out that gap bygood old "math."Many times after finishing a job in

the field., the rush for completing thework is so pressing that much nightwork was in store for us . That was

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what we called "office work," plattingthe field notes on drawing paper, com-puting the areas and making the ink-tracing. In E-Tex, this platting of fieldnotes is plenty tedious. Even to my boss,a surveyor with fifteen years experience,it was disheartening . Up in Oklahomaand Kansas it's townships and sections,but here in the wilds of East Texas 'tissurveys and hodge-podge of what areknown as "tracts." Tracts with meand-ering streams for boundaries ; tracts withall kinds of shapes far from rectangular ;and tracts as small as four acres!

I remember the Alexander job whichcalled for eighty-nine angles and sides fora 40-acre tract. That meant the compu-tation afterwards of several hundred tri-angles before the exact area of the tractis determined . And exact it must be, inall licensed surveyor's offices .

Stone, portrait painter of Dallas, Texas;Pansy Arnold, sculptor of Philadelphia .I wish that I might introduce you toothers .