CHAPTER 4
THE PERMIAN BASIN
In 1915, L. A. Wilke, a young man originally from Austin, started a newspaper in Big Lake, a water stop along the Orient Railway that ran from Kansas City to Alpine. At the time, if a man did not work for the railroad or operate a business in town, he ran a ranch or cowboyed on one.
As was a common journalistic practice at the time, Wilke met each train to see who had come to town, running their names in his next issue. One day, a man who said he was a geologist arrived at Big Lake. Smelling a good story, Wilke asked him if he thought oil would be found in West Texas. Nope, the rock scientist said in so many words. Not around here. Indeed, though there had been some modest exploration in that part of the state, it had the reputation of being a wildcatter's graveyard.
Dry as it has always been during recorded history, very few people at the time understood that much of West Texas had once been covered by a vast inland sea. The former seabed is called the Permian Basin, a scientific description that would eventually become a significant place name.
Throughout the first two decades of the 20th century, the belief continued to hold that West Texas did not have any oil beneath it. It was cattle country, and that was that. "The Permian rocks of Texas," geologist L.C. Snider opined in 1919, "have not yielded any oil or gas…and their nature is such that it seems improbable that any will be found in them."
By 1916 the state's "University of the first class," a term dating to the state Constitution of 1876, had been matriculating students on its 40-acre campus at Austin for 33 years. But whether the institution had achieved first class status was doubtful, mainly because funding for the University of Texas depended on tax dollars and tuition.
On June 21, 1916, Dr. Johan August Udden, the newly hired director of the school's Bureau of Economic Geology, submitted a report to the Board of Regents. Whether the men who set policy for the university paid much attention to the report is not known, but in carefully measured language, the geologist presaged the future.
"Looking at the ancient Marathon mountain structure as a whole," he wrote, "it does not appear unreasonable to regard it as suggesting the possibility of the existence of buried structures in which oil may have accumulated….The trend… would run through the southeast part of Pecos County into Upton or Reagan counties."
While ever so cautiously asserting that there were "natural chances for finding accumulations of gas as well as oil" on university land, the geologist suggested that drilling for oil not be undertaken "before a thorough geological examination has been made whereby the exceedingly small chance of making the right location for a test may be materially increased."
That theory naturally generated some buzz, so in 1918 a group of hopeful Mitchell County ranchers and professional men formed a company and spudded a test well on February 8, 1920. That July, the Underwriters' Producing and Refining Company's Texas and Pacific Abrams No. 1
1920 blew water, oil and gas over the wooden derrick. But despite a headline in the Colorado City newspaper proclaiming "Struck the Golden Flood!," the well was no gusher. Still, by 1922, Mitchell County had a modestly producing oil field. The slow-but-steady production never received anything but local media attention and routine mention in trade publications, but that Mitchell County well has the distinction of being the first producer in the Permian Basin. (In fact, the well still makes around 100 barrels a day.)
Rupert R. Ricker, a young Big Lake attorney fresh out of the Army, knew more about the letter of the law than he did geology, but no matter the nay-sayers, he believed the find in Mitchell
