"The Biggest Thing Yet"?

Rising at dawn one brisk November morning, Joe York, a middle-aged dairy farmer in Scurry County, Tex., shoved aside his patched blue jeans and scuffed working boots and put on his fanciest rancher's garb. Until then, the biggest day in Joe York's life had been a calf-roping contest in which he won $150. Now he was after a far bigger prize.

In a corner of his 286-acre farm, Joe joined a crowd of several hundred oil scouts, brokers, geologists and gawking neighbors around the tin-hatted crew working the rig on a 128-ft. oil derrick. As Joe and they watched, there was a cough and a sputter; then a stream of oil shot out 30 ft. and poured into the mud sump pit. Joe York rubbed his hands in the oil, smelled it and smiled. "I guess I won't have to go back to milking those Jersey cows," he said. The oil scouts took but one look and one sniff, jumped in their cars and raced for telephones.

The Canyon Reef. The Joe York No. i well last week was important not only to Joe York, his wife and four children, who would soon be getting an estimated $10,000 to $15,000 a month for life from the royalties of it and other wells. It had also proved up another big area in Scurry County's incredible Canyon Reef oilfield, where movie stars and other hopeful wildcatters had been prospecting for months (TIME, Oct. 10). To oilmen it looked as if the Scurry pool was the biggest since the East Texas field came in in 1930. Estimates of its riches ranged upwards of one billion barrels.

By last week, some 6% of all the oil rigs on the North American continent had moved to Scurry County, 200 wells were already in and producing at the maximum allowable rate of 35,374 barrels a day, 133 new ones were in the process of drilling, and wildcatters were everywhere. Said one old Texas oilworker, who had followed the rigs through all the great Texas fields: "This is the biggest thing yet. It's the last time I'll see it in my lifetime. They just don't come like this very often."

Boomtown. Scurry's county seat, the once sleepy little cotton and cattle town of Snyder, had never seen anything like it, either. In the crowded lobby of its dingy Manhattan Hotel, the air hummed with talk of royalties, acreage, porosity. Leases changed hands so fast that new maps of the county had to be issued twice a month (at $15 each). In nine months, Snyder's population had shot up from 3,000 to 15,000. To handle the overflow of schoolchildren, the town bought an empty schoolhouse 175 miles away and hauled it to Snyder. But it was still having trouble solving the multitude of other new problems--sanitation, housing, hospital facilities.

Hundreds of the boom's new families were living in trailers; many were sleeping in automobiles. Drillers, riggers, roughnecks and roustabouts packed the juke-joints and short-order cafes (dry Snyder has no bars). Trucks hauling oil derricks half a block long kept the courthouse square grey with dust. With new motor courts, hotels, office buildings and theaters abuilding, bug-eyed citizens of Snyder were predicting a population of 30,000 by next year.

Baffled Experts. Until a year ago, the U.S. oil industry's geologists and geophysicists, who had long since reduced oil prospecting to a science, had been completely fooled by Scurry County. None of their blasts and echo-measurements had shown the existence of its oil-laden limestone reef some 6,500 ft. down. Humble Oil & Refining Co., biggest oil leaseholder on the continent, had once held leases all over Scurry, but had let most of them lapse. Even the first wells drilled in what later proved to be the heart of the pool did not turn out well. Not until November 1948 did Standard of California's subsidiary, Standard of Texas, bring in its first big well to start the boom.

Another who believed in Scurry's future was Edith McKanna, a handsome, fortyish widow, who began buying up leases iff 1945 when she got out of the armed services. Soon she controlled 86,000 acres, now has seven producing wells. She gives dinners of pheasant and venison in her oil-lamplighted farmhouse, where some of the field's biggest oil deals have been closed. Veteran Oilman C. T. McLaughlin came to Scurry County 15 years ago to get away from the business, struck it rich also. He found that his 5,200-acre Diamond M ranch was right above the heart of the Canyon Reef.

Smart Amateurs. Owners of small farms were also cashing in. George Parks, a meatcutter who did a little ranching on the side, is now reportedly worth $250,000. Farmer Herman Huckabee is getting $3,500 a month in royalties. Farmer Jackson Ellis could not afford to hire a drilling crew. So he and five of his strapping sons took jobs as roughnecks until they learned how to drill an oil well. Then they bought some secondhand equipment and drilled five shallow wells on their own place, where the sixth and youngest son worked with them as a water boy. Now, with an income of about $5,000 a month, Ellis has bought a new tractor and pickup truck, a complete electric kitchen for his wife, a linoleum rug for the parlor.

Outside of buying such necessities, most of Scurry County's new-rich were living much as before and saving their money. As Joe York's neighbor, Arthur ("Booger Red") Townsend put it: "A man don't need no million dollars, all he needs is some comfortable circumstances."

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