I was out having a pint or two with a couple of drilling buddies the other night. Talk turned boastful as it often does in the company of drillers. Phrases like "only punching postholes" and "you call that a . . . " hovered over the table. My mind drifted back to Gib Morgan, a driller to beat all drillers. If my buddies had only known.

Consider the case of the rig Gib Morgan used to drill that well down in Texas for Standard Oil. John D. himself was worried about the well. A number of previous wells had failed when they were drilled into a shallow "cavey" formation that could not be cased. But Gib, when shown the logs, promised John D. he could do it. His solution was insightful. Gib would start with a 24-in. hole cased to 22 in. followed by smaller cased sections at short intervals until he reached the target.

First, Gib commissioned the tools. Then he went to Texas to build the rig. According to Mody C. Boatright, who chronicled Gib's many accomplishments, the rig covered an acre - immense for a turn-of-the-century rig. As he expected to be on location a while, Gib enclosed the whole rig and had the inside walls plastered to create a more pleasant environment. The derrick was a monster - "it was so high that he had it hinged in two places so that he could fold it back to let the moon go by." It took a rig hand 14 days to climb the derrick to the crown and a crew of 30 - 15 going up and 15 coming down - was required to keep the crown sheaves greased.

Work began on the 24-in. tophole section. At the first sign of caving, Gib cased it with 1,000-bbl oil tanks riveted together. Numerous strings followed and, at 2,000 ft (610 m), Gib was drilling with specially made small bits and casing the hole with 1-in. tubing. But, as Boatright explains, "he hadn't figured it quite fine enough, for he hadn't got the oil sand when the smallest drill he had wouldn't go through the tubing." Never a man to be beat, Gib brought in the well with a needle and thread.

Then there is Boatright's story of the ultimate driller. Working for Antipodal Petroleum Company, the fellow did the unimaginable. The well was advertised thusly. "The well is drilled entirely through the earth, extending from Oil Creek, Pennsylvania to Hoang Ho, in the Celestial Empire."

But perhaps even that can be bested. Take the Munchausen Philosopher's Stone and Gull Creek Grand Consolidated Oil Company. AUS $4-billion company with a working capital of $37.50, the company, according to legend, had vast holdings with wells that produced, among other things, cooking butter, XXX Ale, cod liver oil, quinine and the milk of human kindness. However, as Boatright notes, the company was not always so fortunate. "On the Ananisa and Sapphira tract, the company struck a vein of lawyers."
However, nothing goes right for drillers all the time, including Gib Morgan. On a job in India, Gib and the crew's boots wore out. Unable to find replacements, Gib cleverly invented the rubber boot by coating his and the crew's socks with readily available rubber. However, one day Gib's derrickman fell out of the derrick. When he hit the ground, he bounced about twice the height of the derrick. On the second bounce, he did not come down for 2 hours and on the next for 2 days. Gib did some figuring and concluded that, on the next bounce, his hand wouldn't come down in less than 24 days. Gib knew that no rig hand could go 24 days without eating and he reluctantly shot the fellow on his next bounce to keep him from starving to death.

Mody Boartight chronicled the early days of the industry, and its folklore, in Gib Morgan: Minstrel of the Oil Fields (Southern Methodist University Press, 1945) and Folklore of the Oil Industry (Southern Methodist University Press, 1963). If you can get your hands on a copy of either, it is well worth the time and effort.
Gilbert (Gib) Morgan, by the way, was no legend. Rather, he worked in the oil fields of America from the 1870s to the 1890s, undoubtedly collecting his tall tales from his fellow oilmen.

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