OKlahoma and Oil

The Petroleum industry has been problematic for Indian communities since oil was discovered as a source of fuel and other energy. This has included murder, extortion, and mob-style intimidation. The irony is that Indians used oil in a variety of ways for centuries or millennia.

The domestic petroleum industry that began in 1859 with a well drilled just 69.5 feet deep forever changed America’s economy, standard of living, and culture. The earliest exploration companies began seeking oil for refining into a newly invented lamp fuel called kerosene. This “rock oil” fuel was cheaper than whale oil,. Source: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-discoveries/

American oil history begins in a woodland valley along a creek in remote northwestern Pennsylvania. Today’s U.S. petroleum exploration and production industry is born on August 27, 1859, near Titusville when a well specifically drilled for oil finds it. A former railroad conductor drilled it for New Haven Connecticut investors. Even more early petroleum history came on the banks of Oil Creek.

Oil ushered Oklahoma into the twentieth century and gave it an economic base that for decades allowed continued development. The state's petroleum deposits lie within a vast reserve called the Mid-Continent Region, an area that also encompasses Kansas, Texas, Arkansas, Louisiana, and New Mexico. For twenty-two years between 1900 and 1935 Oklahoma ranked first among the Mid-Continent states in oil production and for nine additional years ranked second. Source: https://www.okhistory.org/publications/enc/entry.php?entry=PE023. Before it became a state, Oklahoma was divided up into a number of Indian reservations (The name is taken from a Choctaw Word Okla-humma or Red People. Also notice that the panhandle was not yet part of the state, because no one wanted it and it was technically part of Texas.

OKLAHOMA'S oil history dates back to a decade before statehood, back to 1897-to the townsite of Bartlesville, where the State's first commercial oil well was drilled in what was then Indian Territory, the domain of the Five Civilized Tribes . Certain surprising facts and sidelights are revealed from a search of old records. Ordinarily, one would expect that a boom of tremendous proportion would immediately follow discovery of oil in Indian Territory. But little attention was paid at the time to that well standing on the Cherokee reservation. This apparent indifference was due to strong legal obstacles, inadequate transportation and the then prevalent cheapness of crude oil . But the well was important since its existence precipitated the allotment of the Five Tribes, accelerating Sooner oil history several years.

Source: https://digital.libraries.ou.edu/sooner/articles/p272-273_1932v4n8_OCR.pdf