The "Rest of the Story"

by Bob Porter

December 16, 1998

This is really three stories related to a single book. The book, The 101 Ranch by Ellsworth Collings and Alma Miller England [University of Oklahoma Press, ISBN: 0-8061-1047-3], was part of my father’s library. I knew that my parents had taken the two hour drive due north of Oklahoma City to visit it on many occasions and believed that it earned its name by boasting more than 101,000 acres (157 square miles). But I had not thought of the book as particularly special, rather it was one of those books I "planned to read someday" and it barely escaped being thrown out in each of five house moves. When I finally read it this summer, I found it to be very special indeed. In fact, it initiated a personal adventure which took me into what the announcer for the Lone Ranger called, "those golden days of yesteryear."

As I thought about "yesteryears," I also reflected on the extraordinary nineteen twenties. This was my father’s world in his thirties, and I added some anecdotes about him and his times. It was a time in the oil business of big monopolies and exploited Indians, of a great economic crescendo which was soon to culminate in the "Crash" and the "Great Depression." A time when his life crossed paths and fortunes with the legendary and outrageous 101 Ranch.

Next, I’d like to peek under 101's big top (as recorded in the book) to see what’s going on and who’s there. Finally, I’d like to tell you about some coincidences which make the 101 Ranch particularly special to three generations of our family.

The Twenties and the Oil Business

My father was a "wild catter" who drilled for oil on the frontiers (where the "wild cats" roamed). Looking for oil in Oklahoma in the 1920's was a larger-than-life experience. Those who lived through this era had to be rugged to survive. For example, when Dad broke his leg in seven places, there was no doctor for fifty miles. But it wasn’t an insurmountable problem. They just tied him to the head board of a sturdy bed, found a strong "roughneck" (the name for men who worked on the oil rigs) and had him stretch the leg while his friends manipulated the bones back into line. It was a compound fracture and a bottle of gin was the only available antiseptic. But in the "oil patch," everything had its risk.

There were a lot of hard days even if your legs were whole. My father drove 50,000 miles a year in a succession of faithful Buicks. A good spare tire was the oil man’s best friend. A jack, tire patch kit, and bicycle pump weren’t many votes behind. Much travel was over "section lines" on dirt roads which were built to define a one mile grid. These were the early Dust Bowl days. In the summer when the "wind came sweeping down the plains," it blew over the red clay, dried it up to form black, choking dust clouds which cut visibility to a few feet. When it rained, the roads became "slicker than a peeled grape" and even more dangerous than the winter snows. Imagine trying to change a tire when it was 110 degrees (before air conditioning) in the middle of a dust storm and you have part of the picture. Imagine sitting in your car in a ditch hoping a car with a chain will come along, and you have another part. Dad spent many nights in his car at the rig and then drove into the town of Perry or Pawnee, Oklahoma, where he could order some fresh eggs and home grown bacon for breakfast.

He had to carry the payroll, in cash, of course; consequently, he also carried a .380 caliber semi-automatic pistol in his car’s glove compartment. A lot of people carried guns. In fact, in 1939, my Dad was shot and almost killed by a deranged man who came into his office to talk about "my land." The man thought he had sold Dad some worthless land and became irritated when Dad discovered oil on it. He sat down across the desk and kept messing with something in his right pocket. Dad walked over towards him as he pulled out a .38 caliber pistol, which Dad managed to get a weak grip on. The man fired and the bullet passed so close to his heart that the doctor said he only lived because his heart was contracting. It hit a rib, left his body, then ricocheted off the air conditioner and hit his secretary, Willa Mae Simmons, in her breast bone. Dad seized the gun and hit the man in the jaw, knocking him cold. As his strength bled away, he resolutely sat on him until the police came. Not your everyday experience, even in the wild west.

Even horse play sometimes involved gun play. For example, there was the day in the little town of Watchorn (if you can consider six houses, a warehouse, and a country store "a town"). There was a store with a sign painted on its side of an eight foot in diameter gold pocket watch with two six foot horns protruding out of the top. My "Uncle Robert," who was chairman of the company, had sent a telegram saying that two English friends would be paying the town a visit and they should be entertained. Now there wasn’t much entertainment in Watchorn so Andy Krow, a legend for inventiveness in his own time, set about to arrange some entertainment. He took the Englishmen into the store for dinner. Just after sitting down, he calmly advised them "If there’s any gunfights, get down on the floor as fast as you can." Then he gave the signal to his friends to come in shooting. The Englishmen hit the floor and tried to "think themselves invisible." The only problem was that in the ruckus a kerosene lamp was knocked over which burned the building down.

You had to be smart and wily to survive as well. Many big companies drilled offsets adjacent to new discoveries draining the discovery well’s reserves while taking a "stop me if you can, sell to me cheap if you can’t" attitude. Furthermore, as soon as the news got out that oil had been discovered, the land around it became much more valuable and hundreds of men hustled out to the area to buy up land around the discovery. This required an accurate survey so the legal description was correct. There is a famous story about one of the largest fields in Texas which was surveyed incorrectly leaving a strip open right down the center.

It was very difficult for a small company to obtain rights to the entire field which it discovered, or even the immediate offsets, because they lacked the manpower to react on short notice and seldom had enough cash on hand. Further, one faced larger company competition which had both. Earl Slick, a relative of my friend Rod Frates, pulled a great maneuver which outfoxed his competition and assured him of a place in Oklahoma history. He discovered what was later known as the Cement(?) Field in central Oklahoma. He knew that as soon as the word got out that he had struck oil, "land men" (the name for professional lease buyers) with their survey crews would blanket the area and gobble up all available land. Sure enough, for the next few days the trains arriving at the railroad station were loaded with land men and their support teams. But Earl had outsmarted them. For you see, there were very few cars at that time and very few roads, and it was a long, long way from the railroad station to the discovery site. Transportation to the well discovery area was difficult and depended on horse and buggies. The first thing Earl did was to hire all the available transportation in the area near the railway station and move it to a protected place until he brought in his own land men who went out to rather casually lease all the land he needed. He had been well named.

After the first week, business transactions and lease brokering moved into the hotels. I vividly remember three of the classics which survived into my lifetime: The Huckens in Oklahoma City; the Mayo in Tulsa; and the Brown Palace in Denver. They all exhibited a multistory central lobby so one "could see who was in town" and a mezzanine with big stuffed chairs that one could sink into so deeply he felt walled off in privacy to negotiate. Each chair had a highly polished brass spittoon next to it where a gentleman could spit his chewing tobacco if he so desired. The most serious hotel problem in the twenties was fires. As long as he lived, whenever our family would go to a hotel, the first thing Dad would do was locate the fire exits and point them out to us.

Oil well fires were a real threat too. The oil industry was pushing the limits technologically and the pressure of the gas and oil reservoirs was often much greater than the state-of-the-art valves intended to contain them. Dad had several close friends killed in oil well fires and underground mine explosions.

The difference between success and disaster was a matter of inches at the bottom of a 2,700 foot hole. If you go in too far or too fast, the gas cap may blow you away. If you are successful in drilling the gas cap but drill too deep and penetrate into the water below the gas and oil, you can decimate the quality of production. In brief, even though they have found oil and gas, the success of the well is still in doubt. Among the newspaper clippings, I found references to two fires at Watchorn wells over a period of six years: one caused by a cigarette and the other attributed to lightning.

The Watchorn wells on the 101 Ranch all avoided fire. But my father’s fears were realized when, four years later in south central Kansas, Watchorn Oil’s biggest new discovery well caught fire. It was drilled to a record one mile depth. It had an estimated open flow of 225 million cubic feet a day. This would challenge even today’s safety equipment. A large fortune literally burned up before its owners very eyes.

The 101 Ranch

When one thinks about the 101 Ranch extravaganza today, it seems very strange, particularly considering the subject matter, to have a show depicting events in which the actors play themselves. For example, Buffalo Bill and Geronimo actually killing real buffalo (while Geronimo was on leave from a military prison), or participation in mock re-enactment of battles or massacres between former enemies using as actors the actual combatants who originally fought each other. The Calvary continued to win, perpetuating a myth, and the poor Indians continued to relive their humiliation, with no mention (I’ll bet) of the white man’s perfidious trickery with the treaty.

One of the show stoppers was the Terrapin Derby. According to the 101 Ranch book (starting on page 148):

"Thus the second derby was run in 1925 with 1,679 entries; the third in 1926 with 2,373 entries, and down through the following years, always with increasing entries. Only land terrapins were permitted in the derby — the kind common throughout the Southwest.

"The many diversified resources of the 101 Ranch made it the natural show place of the Southwest. There was ranching with all its old-time picturesqueness. There were thousands of cattle and horses, the unblocked trails and the cattle pastures, the unchanged cowboys, the round-up camps, the rodeo, the corrals, the buffalo, and many tribes of Indians, living undisturbed in wigwams, lodges, or rough houses.

"'It was,’ says Corb Sarchet, ‘one continuous entertainment of guests, social, political, business leaders, writers, explorers, actors, the prominent men and women in every line.’ Presidents of giant railway systems mingled with the cowboys and donned their regalia, pleased at the chance. Admiral Byrd rode the elephants; John Philip Sousa joined the Ponca Indian tribe; Mrs. Mary Roberts Rinehart came for atmosphere when she was ready to write her Lost Ecstasy; Walter Teagle sat on the floor with a bust of Geronimo, the Apache chief, in his arms to be enlightened on the price of crude oil; Will Irwin and his wife, Inez Haynes Irwin, came for a day and remained a week; William Jennings Bryan shook hands with Tony, the monkey; Sidney Smith drew Andy Gump on the White House walls; Teddy Roosevelt was delighted; Will Rogers sang cowboy songs all night long with Mrs. Pawnee Bill at the piano; Fred Bonfils came to see the terrapin derby; Jack Mulhall was on hand to star in the moving picture--Nancy Astor, John Ringling, Randoph Hearst, William S. Hart, Irvin Cobb, Rex Beach, Richard Bennett, General Bullard, Charles Curtis, William F. Cody (Buffalo Bill), William Allen White, Helen Gibson, Bacon Rind, Art Gobel, Will Hayes, General Savitsky, John D. Rockefeller, Jr., James E. Garman, Warren G. Harding, Roy Howard, Ezra Meeker, Colonel Zack Mulhall--what an array! Unceasingly they came--each found the same welcome, each was enchanted, each had seen a fairyland." [From Daily Oklahoman, December 16, 1934.]

Furthermore, their values were evidently shared by a lot of people. It is remarkable that although it was located in the middle of nowhere, they still had large attendances. They depended heavily on the railroads. The 101 Ranch was founded in the 1890's and ran strong into the mid-nineteen thirties. They put on the first "rodeo," which they preferred to call a "roundup," and originated the event called "bulldogging" in which a cowboy leaps from his horse onto the steer and then wrestles it to the ground and ties three feet together. The cowboy wins who accomplishes this in the shortest time. This is a standard event in today’s rodeos.

The "Wild West Show" traveled to Europe and entertained an estimated 800,000 people in London alone, but when the British declared war in 1914, they confiscated their horses. The book itself is a fascinating portrait of entertainment on the American frontier. It was a true extravaganza, disproportionately larger than the larger-than-life daily toils of the wildcatter. Whether a creator or product of the twenties, it was a noteworthy part of the scene. It was a "circus" in many senses.

Reflections on our Family and the 101 Ranch

The 101 Ranch book served as a stimulus for me to think about the 1920's, to think about my father’s life, and to realize how different it was from my own. I wondered why this period seemed unknown to me previously. The 101 Ranch was playing on the public’s romanticizing of the "wild west" as it might of been earlier, e.g., when Buffalo Bill and Geronimo were in their prime, that is, before the Indians surrendered and suffered through their "trail of tears." Outside the circus, in the real west of the 1920's, there was still a high risk environment. If not for the Calvary and Indians, then for the wildcatter. Frontiers always exist somewhere. Each decade has, within its numbers, people who survive and even thrive on the frontiers. People able to "live by their wits." Why is this ranch and this book special to me? Let me tell you the "rest of the story."

Perhaps some of the readers have heard me talk about my "Uncle Robert" Watchorn of whom I am very proud (even if his stated goal in life was to provide "a Bible for every Chinaman"). Actually, he was my father’s uncle and my great uncle. My wife calls him the "family relative," meaning the one whose relatives tend to brag about. In 1920, he visited my father in Mt. Hope, West Virginia. Uncle Robert was characteristically direct. "The future’s in oil, not coal, John. I’m going into oil. Are you with me or against me?" Needless to say, Dad went "with him." "Uncle Robert," as I called him, was very tough and very principled. He had strict rules, set forth in signs on his oil rigs, such as, "There will be no cussing nor spitting on the drill rig floor." Another sign, which survived to my day from a warehouse, stated simply, "Nothing for sale - don’t ask." That was Uncle Robert; moralistic, no nonsense, who held a strong belief that God had a mission for him.

The 101 Ranch was important to him, as he was to it, because it was where he first discovered oil. The "Watchorn Field" changed his financial situation. It was what oil men refer to as a "company maker." It also became the principal source of assets for The Watchorn Foundation. In turn, this gave him the opportunity to repay his debt to the community where he was born. He bought that part of the town where he had lived in abject poverty and built each family a separate house and a Methodist church on the place his mother was born. The discovery was correspondingly important to the Miller brothers who owned the 101 Ranch because it financed their zenith.

When I opened the book, I discovered a letter, written seventy-five years ago. I hadn’t realized until this summer that the Watchorn field was actually on the 101 Ranch, or that my dad had leased the land from its owners, the Miller brothers, or that he almost lost it at the last minute. It is said that "everything gets done through people" and the truth of that statement in this case was revealed in the next to last paragraph of the letter contract I found dated August 10, 1922, written to my great uncle by the owner of the 101 Ranch. I discovered it inside the cover the 101 Ranch book! The paragraph reads as follows:

"I could have made a deal yesterday with a man from St. Joseph, Mo., to have had a well drilled immediately on their’s but I prefer to give our people a square deal and the first opportunity on anything I am letting out down there and I realized after talking with your Mr. Porter that it would work an injustice on you to let one of these wild catters come in on that 10 acres, and force about three off-sets from you people."

This is a telling reflection on the ethics of Mr. Miller. It shows how much one depends on friendships, particularly in frontier environments where legal protections are few. He is recognizing that if he sold to the outside group that they would have forced Dad to drill immediately which would have put him at a severe disadvantage of "drill now or be drained." (The laws have changed now so as to control spacing in order not to lose oil by producing it too fast.) Needless to say, had this turned out otherwise, my family’s history in the oil business may have read much differently.

My father’s reputation, and that of his company, clearly made a difference in their business dealings. I came across a story in the October 28, 1928 edition of the Wichita Eagle. The first part was a conventional report of a new gas discovery concerning flow rates and geology on a new Watchorn discovery. The story had large pictures of Dad and his associate, Frank Harper. What amazed me was the next to the last paragraph which reads as follows:

"The public, unacquainted with the oil man, has long held the belief that they are crooks. Protection and Ashland haven’t got this idea. They hold John Porter and Frank Harper in the highest esteem and as expressed on the streets of Protection Saturday, ‘Should a fellow make a statement like that in this section of Kansas he had better qualify it by excepting the Watchorn company.’"

(It’s evident the man who later shot my father 20 years later never read this article.)

What did this book mean to me? It showed me a perspective of the twenties my father had shared with me but which had not been examined until this moment. It stimulated me to open old envelopes, letters, trunks and books which led to new discoveries about my father which attested to his modesty. As we approach the end of this millennium, I wonder if our sense of political correctness will change as much in the next century as it has over the past seventy-five years? And how will it change in another thousand? The 101 Ranch was a monument to a few moments in the history of our country. The book captures these almost forgotten moments, their spirit, and I wanted to obtain copies I could share with some friends. Naturally, I called my daughter, Amy, "the book sleuth." To my great surprise, the responses started coming in only a few hours from William F. Daily’s rare book store in Los Angeles. By skillfully applying a tool of her generation, the Internet, she turned up five copies of different editions.

Finally, not all stories make it to the printed page. Uncle Tut was married to one of Dad’s sisters. He invited Dad to go to a convention in Chicago. Tut was a great shot with a rifle or pistol and valued his own reputation at this accomplishment highly. It turned out there was a shooting gallery on the convention floor. Before long, Uncle Tut was showing off and had a pretty large audience. Dad commented that one of the girls who was watching was a pretty good shot herself. He said he would even bet ten dollars that she could out shoot Tut who roared defiantly and leaped at the proposition. After he lost, Dad introduced him to Annie Oakley, "an old friend from the 101 Ranch."