A wildcat oil well shows how to skin Calgarians
Friday, 20 August 2010 05:00
For more than a year, Calgarians were absorbed in the fate of a well slowly pounding down through half a kilometre of rock in search of oil at Turner Valley, 50 kilometres southwest of the city. When in mid-May, 1914, a small flow of oil was encountered it set off an unprecedented speculative spree, as some 500 hastily formed wanna-be oil companies sold shares to eager buyers.
“It was the wildest, most delirious, must uproarious, most exciting time that had ever entered into human imagination to conceive,” theAlbertan reported. The News Telegram warned that the city “had a population of 80,000 people, mostly lunatics.” “All day and all night the crowds fought and struggled for precedence in the offices of the most prominent oil companies,” the Calgary Herald reported. “There was never a moment when the would be purchasers were not lined up three deep, buying, buying, buying.”
For those not fortune enough to buy any of the oil shares, a letter writer in the Albertan offered an alternative, surefire investment:
“Seeing by The Albertan that there is not going to be oil stock enough to go round to all the investors, perhaps some of those having money to invest in a profitable undertaking would be pleased to know of our company.
“We expect to operate a large cat ranch near Sedgewick, Alberta, where the best farming land in the province can be bought, at least the surface rights, which will be all we need, for less than the oil barons would ask for the mineral rights.
“Now to start we will collect, say, 100,000 cats, each cat will average 12 kittens a year which will means 1,200,000 skins. The skins will sell from 10 to 15 cents for the white ones and 75 cents for the jet black ones, making an average price of 30 cents apiece, thus making our revenue about $10,000 a day gross. A man can skin 50 cats a day and he will charge $2 for this labor. It will take 100 men to operate the ranch, therefore our profit will be about $9,800 per day.
“We will feed the cats on rats and will start a rat ranch adjoining the cat ranch. The rats will multiply four times as fast as the cats so if we start with say 1,000,000 rats we will have four rats a day for each cat, which is plenty. We will feed the cats on the rats and in turn will feed the rats on the stripped carcasses of the cats, thus giving each rat one-fourth of a cat. It will be seen by these figures that the business will be self-acting and automatic. The cats will eat the rats and the rats will eat the cats and we will get the skins.”
It was Calgarians, however, who got skinned. The well that set off this fever found only a very small pool of oil. Much larger accumulations of oil and natural gas lay more than anotyher kilometre deeper, but it took another 22 years before drillers discovered the full extent of Turner Valley’s petroleum wealth. Meanwhile, fewer than 50 of the 500 companies formed in 1913 and 1914 actually drilled any wells, and very few of these found any oil or gas. Calgarians were wiped clean of more than $1 million ($20 million in today’s money) of their savings. Some of the thousands of worthless share certificates were used to wallpaper homes and the lobby of at least one hotel.