Mary Connealy

In my research for Gingham Mountain’s oil story angle I found out so many interesting things that I could have written the whole book about it. First how come my bad guy recognizes the oil seeping up out of the ground as valuable while the guy who owns the land just thinks whatever it is fouls his water? It’s because oil was still in it’s infancy in 1880. There wasn’t much market for kerosene because coal oil was inexpensive and wood and candles provided heat and light so simply, why consider another source. It reminds me just a little bit of us, now in American…well all over the world. These days oil seems simple and other sources of power seem complicated and expensive, like solar power and nuclear power. So we don’t make much use of them.

Here’s why my bad guy knew and my cowboy hero didn’t. He was from Pennsylvania. In the early 1850s, a Pittsburgh druggist named Samuel Kier began selling bottled oil from his father’s brine wells as “Pennsylvania Rock Oil”, but met with little success. One day a whale oil dealer, processed a small amount of Kier’s “tonic” to make a lighter oil that burned well in a lamp. When Kier heard about this, he began using a one-barrel whiskey still of his own to convert his rock oil into lamp oil. After Kier upgraded his still to five-barrel capacity, Pittsburgh forced him to move his operation to a suburb out of fear of an explosion. In or around 1854, Benjamin Silliman of Yale University successfully distilled oil into several fractions, including an illuminating oil – kerosene.

I thought this was really interesting. One barrel. Get that? His ‘refinery’ was one whiskey barrel in which he converted rock oil into lamp oil. So in Gingham Mountain, the third book in my series that begins with Petticoat Ranch, I felt like it was safe to have a small time refinery. But I didn’t want my bad guy to set up the refinery himself because he needed to sneak in and out of the oil seep to steal the oil and he wouldn’t want to leave a trail. So he hauls his stolen oil to the nearest town and ships it to someone who refines it.

For years they ‘harvested’ the oil by skimming it off a creek, producing at the peak, six to ten gallons a day, so this is how my bad guy is harvesting his oil. But the twist that came after the skimming was drilling. In the summer of 1859 the experiment with drilling began. Although progress was slow, usually three feet a day in shale bedrock, they reached a depth of 69½ feet by August 27. When the drilling tools were pulled from the well one morning, they noticed oil rising in the hole. After installing a hand-operated lever pump borrowed from a local kitchen, the first day’s production was about twenty-five barrels. Production soon dropped off to a steady ten barrels or so a day, and the well is said to have continued at that rate for a year or more. Although this well was no gusher, it was the beginning of an idea. Titusville transformed almost overnight from a quiet farm town to an oil boom town of muddy roads, hastily constructed wooden derricks, and noisy steam engines. The Pennsylvania oil boom was on! This was in 1859, two years later the first oil well was drilled in Calfornia. Sites continued to be discovered steadily through 1878, the year Thomas Edison invented the light bulb and overnight the demand for kerosene plummeted as electric lights caught on. The oil industry entered a recession that didn’t fully recover until the invention of the first practical gas powered automobile in 1886—I could write a whole blog about this too. Fascinating. Even with the car appearing, it wouldn’t be affordable until they began rolling off the assembly line. The first to do this was Ransome Eli Olds in 1901, followed quickly by Henry Ford.

And also in 1901, the Spindletop gusher came in near Beaumont, Texas. Spindletop was not the first nor the biggest, but  it was one of the great gushers of all time, and, most important, it heralded the birth of the Texas oil industry.

Spindletop blew in when Anthony Lucas, a Louisiana mining engineer, drilled a well to 1,020 feet on a lease owned by Texas businessman and amateur geologist Patillo “Bud Higgins”. Lucas placed his well on a low hill that he and Higgins thought might be a salt dome, and when the ground began to tremble on that fateful day in January and a great spout of oil exploded into the air, it confirmed their belief that oil accumulated around salt domes. The well produced an astounding 800,000 barrels of oil in just 8 days.

By September, there were at least six wells producing from the crest of Spindletop, with many more on the way. Total production from the field in 1985 stood at 153 million barrels.

One of the reasons the oil and the cars is so interesting is because of the innovation of it all. I read on one of the research sites that there are over 100,000 patents that led to the invention of the first automobile. There was a fortune to be made if you were first, if you made a tiny improvement in an old patent.

Watch the History of the Gun sometime on the History Channel. It’s like the story of America. The race to patent improvements, cars are like that, and oil…finding uses for it made people rich. Thomas Edison, the Wizard of Menlo Park, had an INVENTION FACTORY. People would come in and say, “Can you make this egg beater electric?” And he’d do it.

Think about the way we’re surrounded with technology now and think back to…smoke signals…the pony express…telegraph lines…airmail…the phones with cranks and operators with wires to plug in to connect people. Now, we can’t make cell phones small enough.

Could any of us really survive in the rugged west or are we too soft and too far removed from the chicken coop to the cut up chicken on the styrofoam plate in your grocer’s freezer.

What’s the most amazing invention to you? What’s your favorite?

Wearin’ a Dress

   Fred Astaire is one of the most acclaimed dancers in American history. Ginger Rogers, too, but she never earned the fame Astaire did. I heard Ginger Rogers said, “I did everything Fred did, only I had to do it backward, in high heels, wearing a dress.

           And yet Astaire was the big star. 

           And that brings me to Sacajawea. Yes, there is going to be something about the west in this, it’s NOT about ballroom dancing.

This teenager, age estimated at 17-years-old, accompanied this group of rugged soldiers all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Saved their lives more than once, probably had to do all the cooking (oh, maybe not) and she did it with a baby strapped on her back wearin’ a dress.

            But do they call it the Sacajawea Expedition? No-o-o-o-o-o!

            I couldn’t even find for sure how to spell her name because Lewis and Clark kept journals and spelled it differently, phonetically I suppose. Sacajawea didn’t speak English. How could she tell them how to spell her own name? She wouldn’t have known where to begin spelling it.

           I read the book Sacajawea by Anna L. Waldo years ago and I just loved that story of the young woman, sold into slavery, one of two wives to this…by most accounts, abusive drunken French fur trader, Charbonneau, leading Lewis and Clark through the Rocky Mountains.

           Man, I think I’ve got it hard when my car’s air conditioning goes on the fritz.

           The Lewis and Clark expedition recruited Sacagawea’s husband, to accompany them westward, expecting to make use of Sacagawea’s ability to speak to the Shoshone. The expedition expected that they would need to trade with the Shoshone for horses. Sacagawea spoke no English, but she could translate to Hidatsa to Charbonneau, who could translate to French for Francois Labiche, a member of the expedition, who could translate into English for Lewis and Clark. It had to be like a multi-cultural game of Telephone, passing the words back and forth through those translations.

             They really wanted Sacagawea, even more than Charbonneau, yet he got hired, and you know he got the money.

             Accompanied by her infant son, Sacagawea set out with the expedition for the west.

             This reminds me of an episode of Walker Texas Ranger.

              Have you ever noticed that when someone is insanely tough, the writers have to weaken him before they bring the enemy in. Superman and Kryptonite? John Wayne with a bullet lodged in his spine. Walker and oh, say, an army with automatic weapons.

Her memory of Shoshone trails proved valuable, according to some sources; according to others, she did not serve as a guide to the trails so much as to find useful foods and medicines along the way. Her presence as an Indian woman with a baby helped to convince Indians that this party of whites was friendly. And her translation skills, however indirect from Shoshone to English, were also invaluable at several key points.

The only woman on the trip, she also cooked, foraged for food, and sewed, mended and cleaned the clothes of the men. Yes, the expedition members hunted for food, too. But that means mainly they shot deer. Once they were crossing the Rockies in treacherous winter weather, her knowledge of edible plants saved the day. To their credit, Lewis and Clark treated Sacagawea as a valuable member of the party, even giving her and York, Clark’s enslaved black servant, a full vote in deciding where to spend the winter of 1805-6. It would be more than a century later when women were given the right to vote. 

So she fed them, sheltered them from hostile Indians and led them through the

In recent years more has been written about Sacagawea and the dollar coin honoring her helped everyone see her contribution.

I’ve thought it would be an interesting series of books to write about the women who were standing right beside the men making history.

           Daniel Boone was married, Davy Crocket, too, and Kit Carson. Who were these women? What were their lives like? Often they got left behind, but even so, many were left in unsettled places. They seem like fertile ground for novels and a part of the largely untold story of taming the west, wearin’ a dress.

              What historical western women, real or fictional, most interest you? Who would make a good character in a novel? How can we get their stories told?