Hard Oiler! This page intentionally left blank Hard Oiler! The Story of Early Canadians' Quest for Oil at Home and Abroad Gary May DUNDURN PRESS TORONTO • OXFORD Copyright © Gary May 1998 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press Limited. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Reprography Collective. Editor: Dennis Mills Design: Scott Reid Printer: Transcontinental Printing Inc. Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data May, Gary, 1951- Hard oiler! Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 1-55002-316-0 1. Petroleum industry and trade — Canada — History. HD9574.C32M39 1998 338.2'7282'0971 C98-931615-7 1 2 3 4 5 DM 02 01 00 99 98 We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the THK CANADA COUNCII LE CONSFH DES ARTS support of the Ontario Arts Council and the Book Publishing "R™7 ™™"A Industry Development Program of the Department of s Canadian Heritage. Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions. Printed and bound in Canada. Printed on recycled paper. Dundurn Press Dundurn Press Dundurn Press 8 Market Street 73 Lime Walk 2250 Military Road Suite 200 Headington, Oxford Tonawanda, NY Toronto, Ontario, Canada England U.S.A. 14150 M5E 1M6 OX3 7AD Contents Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 8 Part 1: The Early Story of Oil 13 Chapter 1: Out of a Swamp 15 Part 2: Discovery 25 Chapter 2: The First of the Hard Oilers 27 Chapter 3: The Man Who Made Boom-Town Boom 41 Chapter 4: John Henry Fairbank: Putting Down Roots 59 Chapter 5: Rascals, Heroes, Blasts, and Blazes 77 Part 3: A Golden Age 93 Chapter 6: The Oil Barons 95 Chapter 7: This Business of Oil 107 Part 4: To Distant Shores 119 Chapter 8: The Travellers 121 Chapter 9: The Petroleum King of Austria 135 Chapter 10: Escape from Destruction 151 Chapter 11: The Persian Solution 167 Chapter 12: Expedition to Sumatra 177 Chapters 13: They Sought Adventure 193 Part 5: The Legacy of Oil 213 Chapter 14: Farewell to the Barons 215 Chapter 15: Looking Ahead 223 Appendices 230 Notes 249 Bibliography 260 Index 263 Acknowledgements I offer my special thanks to Charles Whipp of Kincardine, Ontario, for helping me to work through the concept of the book, for pointing me in all the right directions and to all the right people, for critiquing my research and writing, and for all his encouragement and support. He knows more about this subject than any journalist anywhere, and I still think Charles should have been the one to write this book. Thanks to Donna McGuire, curator of the Oil Museum of Canada in Oil Springs, Ontario, for opening up the museum's resources, finding and directing me to the appropriate materials, pointing me to the many people around the Lambton County with connections to the foreign drillers, for the photocopying, the hunting up of pictures, and for regularly offering coffee on those cold winter days. To Helen Maddock of the Lambton Room at the Lambton County Library in Wyoming, Ontario, for guiding me through the acres of files and documents and peering through old microfilmed newspapers, and to her staff, for their patience, direction, and words of encouragement. To Petrolia Discovery manager Betty Popelier for lending materials from her files, and to guide Don Wilde for the tours, for explaining the early oil technology, and for all those great stories. To librarian/historian Edward Phelps of London, Ontario, for his guidance, wisdom and encyclopedic knowledge of the Hard Oilers' story, and for his suggestions and ideas. To Charles Oliver Fairbank for sharing four generations of experiences in the petroleum business as well as his infectious enthusiasm for the story of the Hard Oilers. To Paul Miller of the Lambton Heritage Museum in Grand Bend, Ontario, for searching for early pictures of the oil fields at home and abroad. To Bob Cochrane of Cairnlins Petroleum Services in Komoka, Ontario, for explaining and critiquing my description of oil's formation. To Terry Carter of the Ontario Oil, Gas, and Salt Resources Library, in London. And to Doug Gilbert, manager of the Ontario Petroleum Institute, in London. In Austria, my thanks to Dr. Hermann F. Spoerker, managing director for Oil & Gas Tek International of Leoben, Austria, and Christian Hannesschlager of the Technisches Museum of Vienna, for helping to track down pieces of William McGarvey's story. Thanks to all the people who contacted me with amazing anecdotes and information about their fantastic and daredevil relatives, including Maureen and Mildred Bradley of London, Murray Brown and Jim and Bette Lackie of Petrolia, Jean Mearce of Corunna, and Fay Bertrand of Vancouver. I'm grateful to those who answered my pleas for family histories and anecdotes, including Jane Day of Bury St. Edmunds, Suffolk, England; Lorna Mays of Mississauga, Ontario; and Pete McGarvey of Orillia, Ontario; as well as Lambton residents Dorothy and Charlie Stevenson, Laurence Oliver, Margaret Gregory Smith, Bertha Gleeson, Kathleen Gillespie, John Mclntyre, Millicent Woods, Mary Wallen, Marion Berdan, and Gary Mater. Thanks to Fritz Skeries of London, Ontario; Bill Wilson of Chicago, Illinois; and Arlene Gehmacher of Toronto for help in translating German-language documents. And finally, thank you to all my friends and family, who endured listening to my regular updates without appearing visibly bored. Introduction A hard-luck Yankee fortune seeker. A Hamilton wagon maker hoping to sell cars to the new railways. And a howling swamp so isolated and foul that pioneer farmers had steered it a wide miss. An unlikely combination indeed. And yet this trio, seemingly unconnected, came together at just the right moment in time, to create one of the great but little known stories of Canada's early years. It is the story of how the first commercial oil well in North America was dug into the heavy blue-clay soils of Lambton County in the far reaches of southwestern Ontario 140 years ago. That discovery set off a frenzy of land speculation and drilling that created both wealth and heartache. And it led to the training of a class of men who later introduced their expertise and equipment to new oil fields around the world, earning for Canadians a leading place among the pioneers of petroleum. It is a story, too, about the invention of an industry, one that has changed our lives. Today, Canadians are the biggest consumers of energy of any people in the world. It seems only fitting, then, that the energy source that at the turn of a new century remains the world's most important — petroleum — was first captured and spun into a viable commercial enterprise in this country. However, Canada's seminal part in opening up our modern-day oil industry has received little attention from historians and writers. Just what was that part? I began to ask that question back in the mid-1970s after being posted to a newspaper reporting job in Sarnia, Ontario. Why and how had that city become the petrochemical and oil-refining capital of Canada? After a preliminary search, I was astonished by what I found. Over time I became privy to one of the best kept secrets in Canadian history: the story of how oil had been discovered in Lambton County near Sarnia and how the subsequent exploitation of that oil gave birth to 8 Introduction what is arguably the world s most important industry today. It is the story of the men who to this day in Lambton are called the Hard Oilers. After returning some twenty years later to continue the search, I unearthed an amazing chapter of Canadian history and accomplishment I had not even dreamed existed. I found that, contrary to American claims that Pennsylvania was the home of the modern oil industry, it was in Lambton County that James Miller Williams dug the first commercial oil well in North America — if not the world — and began refining and marketing his product as machine lubricant and lighting oil. Williams thus set off a chain of events that resulted in the establishment of an industry on which our way of life today is so heavily dependent. What was the allure? Why would men leave their homes and travel, under very primitive conditions, into the stinking, mosquito- infested swamps of Lambton County, in search of oil? The search for adventure is as old as human existence. Something in the stories these men heard tapped into one of our species' most powerful emotions, the thrill of discovery and the quest for success. Like the early explorers who braved the uncharted oceans, trekked to the South Pole, or dared the fates in search of the fabled Northwest Passage, these early wildcatters, who came to be known as the Hard Oilers, were in search of the unknown. The story, however, does not begin with Williams and it certainly does not end with him. It begins in the Paleozoic Era, and it continues through the gold-rush-like frenzy that sees the overnight rise and decline of the frontier town of Oil Springs, the creation of the much more permanent community of Petrolia, which still flashes its Victorian charm to this day, and then takes a more exotic twist. As early as 1873, Lambton oil drillers started to travel the globe and open up oil fields from Java to the Ukraine, from America to Venezuela, and in the Middle East. It was said that during the latter part of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, no major oil field anywhere in the world was without its Lambton drillers — its Hard Oilers. I came across one account of a Petrolia man sitting in a park in Singapore in 1899 as he waited for the arrival of the steamship that would take him from the Asian field, where he had been a supervisor, back to his family in Canada. The man looked up to see a familiar face coming his way, another Petrolia driller who was on his way to the rain forests of Sumatra. Certainly these adventurers who came to be known in Lambton as the "foreign drillers" were among the best- travelled Canadians of their day. They, as well as their wives and children — both those left at home and those who travelled with the men to distant lands — could later recount fascinating stories of their escapades. This book relates the astonishing story of the circumstances that 9