Jim Bradshaw: When bear tracks led to the oil patch
Sticky bear paws may have led to one of South Louisiana’s earliest oil discoveries. But it took a while to put two and two together and make them add up to anything worth counting.
The oil was seeping into a little pool of water midway between Sulphur and Vinton in western Calcasieu Parish and, according to an old story, the goo on a bear’s paws roused the curiosity of some hunters who, unfortunately, did not realize the value of what they had found.
Eli Perkins, who was one of the first to catch on to its worth, related that tale to a newspaper writer many years later.
“Some time in the [1840s] a party of hunters … killed a bear and were surprised to find his paws covered with heavy oil,” Perkins recalled. “Just for curiosity they took the back trail and shortly came to a piece of ground that was saturated with oil that flowed slowly from a spring higher up on the ridge. These simple … woodsmen knew not what to think of a land that produced oil, … [it] being only a low ridge running out from the swampy woodlands into a floating prairie of vast extent. … Little dreamed the hunters of the great wealth stored beneath their feet.”
Perkins, his brother William, and Dr. Willam H. Kirkman were probably the first to try to find the source of that oil, although none of them had any drilling experience.
Eli Perkins operated a sawmill and store at Rose Bluff, a steamboat landing on the Calcasieu River where the Citgo refinery now stands. William was a farmer and preacher in the Big Woods area of western Calcasieu. Dr. Kirkman lived in Lake Charles and was one of the pioneer physicians in the parish.
William Haynes, who chronicled early mineral exploration in the U.S., suggests that “the medical man’s interest in the oily seepage was quite natural since petroleum first came into commerce as ‘rock oil,’ widely advertised as a … remedy for gout, constipation, palsy, kidney complaint, ringworm, and whatnot.” (The Stone That Burns, New York, 1942)
That is probably unfair. Kirkman was no quack and appears to have been a shrewd land speculator. Lake Charles historian Maude Reid wrote in a biographical sketch that he was one of the largest landowners in the parish. (“Early Calcasieu Doctors 1850-1912.” Lake Charles, 1969)
Their well was drilled in the early 1860s, using a tree trunk as a makeshift derrick and equipment used to dig water wells. They didn’t have much to show for the effort when the Civil War ended the project. According to an account given years later, “It reached the depth of about 500 feet … but [found] scarcely a trace of petroleum.”
The Louisiana Petroleum & Coal Oil Co. was formed in 1867 and had the same luck. The company sent James Munn, an experienced engineer, to drill an exploratory well close to the Perkins well, coincidentally at the same time that University of Mississippi professor Eugene Hilgard was studying the geology of southwest Louisiana. He “examined minutely” the rocks pulled up as the well was drilled and decided that the site was “unlikely to furnish a large, or at least a lasting supply of petroleum.”
But there was good news, too. The drilling uncovered an immense bed of sulphur that he said would be “highly remunerative” if it could be mined.
Louisiana Petroleum was the first of several companies to go broke trying to dig a shaft to the sulphur. A thick layer of quicksand foiled every attempt until chemist Herman Frasch found a way to melt the sulphur in the ground and pump it up.
Hilgard was right about its worth. It would be a huge understatement to say that the bed of sulphur was “highly remunerative.” In 1920 Frasch’s Union Sulphur Company was characterized as “the most valuable … in Louisiana and one of the most valuable in the United States.”
And the professor was only partly right in downgrading the oil prospects. Munn’s well just missed a big pool of it.
In early 1911 a newspaper reported that “southern Louisiana has not seen such an oil boom in years as is taking place at Vinton and vicinity. New wells are being brought in every few days and there are scores of persons rushing to the field. Buildings are going up like magic and hundreds of tons of materials of all sorts are going to the oil companies that have been organized to develop this proven territory.”
You can contact Jim Bradshaw at jimbradshaw4321@gmail.com or P.O. Box 1121, Washington LA 70589.