‘Before Oil, After Oil’
A century has passed since Alberta’s fortunes became tied to petroleum.
1914-1947 Dingman No. 1 strike at Turner Valley first of many booms, busts in province
“Calgary is oil crazy,” declared the front page of the Calgary Herald in 1914.
The newspaper probably understated things.
Police were needed to control volatile crowds of investors. Money poured in so fast it was collected in wastepaper baskets. Stock values quadrupled in hours. In offices, streetcars and shops, one word was on everybody’s lips: oil.
The Dingman No. 1 well was the talk of the town.
It spurted to life on the evening of May 14, 1914, and flowed with a gasoline-like liquid that the newspaper declared “the most remarkable discovery in the history of the world.”
The discovery of Western Canada’s first commercial oilfield at Turner Valley southwest of Calgary ignited a fervour that would burn for decades and change the prospects of an entire province.
It’s the opening chapter in the history of the Alberta oilpatch, a century-old story that’s punctuated by tenacity, courage, success and controversy.
“This really is a tipping point in Alberta,” says historian David Finch, an authority on the Turner Valley discovery. “Turner Valley is the great granddad to all … other oil industry in the West.”
Stewart Herron was an Ontario native who spent time in the Pennsylvania oilfields before he settled on a farm near Okotoks in 1905.
Herron had “a consuming interest in petroleum geology,” says author David Breen in his book, William Stewart Herron: Father of the Petroleum Industry in Alberta.
In 1911 Herron stopped along Sheep Creek to check out seepages thought to be swamp gas.
Herron returned with an overturned tub, siphoned the gas into bottles and shipped them to labs in the United States. They confirmed Herron’s suspicions and he began quietly acquiring land and mineral rights in the region.
He convinced some of Calgary’s most prominent citizens— Sen. James Lougheed, rancher A.E. Cross, and future prime minister R.B. Bennett — to gamble on his venture. Thus, the Calgary Petroleum Products Company began drilling early in 1913. Archibald Dingman, a partner in the company, was named general manager.
The company used cable-tool drilling, which involved plunging a heavy, chisel-like steel bit down a hole — over and over. A rig might only drill a few feet per day.
Thursday, May 14, 1914 was unseasonably warm; the temperature topped 25 C in Calgary. Around noon, the driller got a whiff of gas and something more — the smell of oil.
Around 5:30 p.m., there was a heavy flow of natural gas saturated with a strawcoloured fluid observers described as “pure white gasoline.” Eighteen tanks, holding about 150 litres each, were rushed to the well site to collect the liquid. Turner Valley had its first “gusher.”
“Every few minutes a great body of oil is shot fifty or sixty feet into the air, and then the flow dies down, only to spout forth again when sufficient gas has collected to send it up,” company director Oscar Devenish told the Herald. Calgary went berserk. “In oil offices the money came in so fast they had no time to sort it,” former Herald writer Torchy Anderson recounted 50 years later.
“In one place they were cramming bills into wastebaskets and issuing grocery store receipts.”
Hundreds of Calgarians made their way to Turner Valley to see the rig.
“Some of the crude oil taken from the well was put in the tank of the car … which Mr. Dingman’s chauffeur drove to the well,” the Herald’s Chester Bloom wrote. “The machine went up the hills like a shot.”
Within days of the discovery, thousands of Calgarians had withdrawn almost $500,000 in savings to sink into nearly 500 oil companies, most of them brand new. Investors reached out from England, New York and California.
People from Edmonton, Vancouver and Winnipeg arrived daily to see the Dingman.
Even the Duke and Duchess of Connaught and their daughter, Princess Patricia, visited. The Herald reported the crew opened a valve on the well and let the oil spout like an “inexhaustible gasoline fountain 40 feet high.”
“Isn’t it pretty?” remarked the 28-year-old princess.
But like the geyser, the oil boom soon came back to earth.
The happy news of July’s royal visit was overshadowed by Austria-Hungary declaring war on Serbia. Within days, the First World War began and, by 1915, the flow of outside investment capital dried up.
Many of the nearly 500 new oil companies disappeared, leav i ng ma ny Ca lga rians holding useless stock certificates.
Even the company Herron helped launch — Calgary Petroleum Products — didn’t survive. After a costly fire in 1920, the owners sold to Imperial Oil (part of the Standard Oil empire) and took a minority share in the new company called Royalite.
As North America emerged from the First World War, economic prospects improved. Further mechanization of industry and farming secured oil’s place as a vital resource.
Imperial sank more of its money into drilling in the Turner Valley area and it paid off on Oct. 14, 1924, at Royalite No. 4.
Royalite’s gas well earned notoriety due to an epic blowout. The fire at the well ran wild for weeks and its glow was visible for hundreds of kilometres at night.
After the blowout, the “sour” gas — containing toxic hydrogen sulphide — was piped to a nearby coulee and flared. The area became known as “Hell’s Half Acre.”
A second oil boom began. Petroleum firms and drilling companies set up their headquarters in Calgary. People could catch an airplane shuttle from Calgary to the oilfields.
“The kind of attention Fort McMurray gets today, that’s what Turner Valley got during those booms,” Finch says.
“It was an exciting place to go. People would go there as tourists. People would go there looking for work.”
After years of lobbying, Ottawa transferred mineral rights to Alberta in 1930, giving the province control over the development of its natural resources.
But, in a pattern that repeated itself throughout Alberta’s history, the boom came to a painful halt.
The Great Depression hit and in Alberta wheat prices were tumbling.
Turner Valley and Black Diamond initially continued growing. Royalite, the biggest player, had 26 rigs working in Turner Valley in 1930.
The impressive Black Diamond Hotel opened the same year — and quickly became known as a place where even the women fought.
But in April 1931, disaster struck.
A fire in the village’s business district burned a hole in the heart of Turner Valley, razing nearly two blocks.
“Behind the gaudy veneer of the exaggerated storefronts and excited activity, oilfield life was less than glamorous. What the fire revealed was a village of shacks,” Finch chronicled in his book, Hell’s Half Acre. “In the background, wooden rigs — once testimony to a booming town — sat idle and abandoned.”
Black Diamond and Turner Valley both declared bankruptcy.
By the 1930s, many people believed the Turner Valley field held no oil, just wet gas and salt water.
But Robert Brown, the head of Calgary’s transit system, had a “crazy” theory. He believed Turner Valley had oil, but it was between the gas cap and the water, accessible with deeper drilling.
Partnering with newspaper publisher George Bell, he formed Turner Valley Royalties in 1934.
They started drilling on April 16, 1934. Brown borrowed thousands of dollars and equipment; he mortgaged his house and sold his car.
In March of 1936, Bell died, never knowing if the well would be a success. Three months later — at a cost of more than $1.5 million in today’s dollars — Turner Valley Royalties No. 1 made the oil strike that established the field once and for all.
“It is the first time in Canada’s history that anything approaching a crude oil gusher has been struck. It was a great time for Brown to be right,” Finch says.
Three years after Royalties’ strike, Home-Millarville No.2 became the most prolific oil well in the British Empire.
The province’s newly elected Social Credit government watched the new exuberance with a wary eye.
During the 1920s and 1930s, vast quantities of gas at Turner Valley were burned off. Imperial and the province were both concerned about maintaining the pressure in the reservoir.
In 1938 the provincial government created the Alberta Petroleum and Natural Gas Conservation Board.
Some people hated the idea. Many oilmen preferred the old “law of capture” — or the finders-keepers system — that had companies fighting to get rich quickest by drilling first and producing discoveries fastest.
The government, including its young industry minister Ernest Manning, bristled at the notion of unfettered development at Albertans’ expense.
“Alberta and my father were quite familiar with what had been done and what hadn’t been done in the United States,” says Preston Manning, founder of the Reform party and president of the Manning Centre for Building Democracy.
“Not just the sort of absence of orderly regulation but the corruption of the regulatory bodies … and they didn’t want to repeat those mistakes. They were also conscious that Alberta’s fields were not as prolific as those, say, in Texas and if you allowed everybody to drill a hole you would de-pressure our reservoirs far faster than some of those in the United States.”
Canada entered the Second World War on Sept. 10, 1939. The new conflict would push the industry’s limits.
Alberta oil was used to construct the Alaska Highway. The natural gas condensates produced at Turner Valley were used to make aviation fuel for aircrews training in Alberta. An ammonia plant, which used Turner Valley gas, was built in south Calgary to support war munitions programs.
At its peak, the Turner Valley field produced nearly 30,000 barrels a day, about 95 per cent of Canada’s total oil output. But it came at a cost. “They produced it too fast,” Finch says. “It’s not good engineering principles.”
Annual production at Turner Valley peaked in 1942 at 10 million barrels but was down close to three million by 1945. The Turner Valley oil boom was nearing its end.
Royalite drilled its last Turner Valley well in 1950. The gas plant, however, operated until 1985 and is now a designated historic site.
The area is no longer a hotbed for exploration but companies still work in the field in the hope Turner Valley will deliver for them.
Today, the field produces more than it did a half-century ago — at its 50th anniversary — due to modern horizontal drilling practices, Finch says.
The legacy of Dingman No. 1 stretches well beyond southern Alberta.
“There really was Before Oil and After Oil,” Finch explains. “Oil allowed us to do a lot of things in Alberta that we wouldn’t have been able to do if we hadn’t found it.”
It spawned companies that went on to find bigger fields in Alberta and made Calgary their headquarters.
It was a proving ground for equipment and workers who taught the next generation of workers at Leduc, Pembina and Golden Spike.
It helped develop new and better methods of drilling for and producing oil.
“The whole industry had a philosophy and it came from Turner Valley,” says Daniel Claypool, historian at the Leduc #1 Energy Discovery Center.
“The tough jobs we’ll do right now. The impossible takes 10 minutes.”
The industry would need that tough-minded philosophy as the next era of oil exploration and development swung north to Leduc and Fort McMurray.