Cushing, Oklahoma
2012.12.22
After the American Civil War, large-scale cattle drives began to move herds from Texas to rail depots in Missouri and Kansas. The most famous route through Indian Territory was named after Jesse Chisholm, who had built trading posts in Indian Territory but never participated in the cattle drives. The journey was long and arduous, and in time some stockmen began to practice open range ranching in Indian Territory, either leasing land from the tribes or squatting in the Unassigned Lands.
Before statehood, the largest operation was probably the Turkey Track Ranch, owned by the Saginaw Cattle Company of Saginaw, Michigan. It was established no later than 1885, on 290,000 acres of rangelands leased from the Sac and Fox. According to one former cowboy’s memoirs, it would take two or three days to drive cattle along forty-five miles of an old Indian trail to the nearest railroad depot at Red Fork (now part of Tulsa). In 1887 another railroad station opened about forty miles west in what would become the territorial capital town of Guthrie.
Charles “Black-faced Charley” Bryant worked for the Turkey Track Ranch before falling in with the Dalton Gang. During his outlaw days, he frequently declared his intention to die “in one blazing moment of glory”.
As the government began to open former Indian Territory lands to white settlement, most of the ranches were forced to close as their lands were claimed for homesteads. When the second land run offered “surplus” Sac and Fox territory in 1891, a former government trader named Billy Rae Little filed a claim at the old Turkey Track Ranch round-up grounds, built a house and laid out town lots.
The town was named for Marshall Cushing, private secretary to U.S. Postmaster General John Wanamaker, and the post office opened in November, 1891. Farming was the center of the economy (particularly cotton), and in a few years Cushing had six blacksmiths, two cotton gins, eight general stores, three lumber yards, and five saloons, mostly along Main Street. The Eastern Oklahoma Railway (part of the Santa Fe) arrived in 1902, and the post office moved about half a mile south to Broadway Street, the new center of town. The Missouri, Kansas, and Texas Railway reached Cushing in 1903.
The first crude oil boom in the United States began in Pennsylvania in 1859, when Colonel Edwin Drake drilled a well at Titusville. The first recorded well in Indian Territory was drilled the same year, but accidentally. More (intentional) wells followed in the 1890’s, just as Pennsylvania production was peaking.
Thomas B. Slick, born in Shippenville, Pennsylvania in 1883, headed west to Oklahoma Territory in 1904, determined to become an oil baron. After a number of dry holes, he finally struck a gusher in 1912, a few miles east of Cushing on Frank Wheeler’s farm. The town of Drumright soon developed nearby. People poured into the area as the Cushing—Drumright Field transformed a sleepy agricultural community into the center of national oil production.
By 1915, there were twenty-three oil companies in Cushing with over 3,000 wells producing 300,000 barrels a day. This accounted for 17% of national production that year. Nine refineries were scattered around town. White and Sinclair built the world’s largest petroleum tank farm, covering 160 acres and holding 60 million barrels. Pipelines stretched to Texas, Louisiana, Missouri, Indiana, and Illinois. Rail cars also transported refined and unrefined Cushing oil as far away as the east coast.
Meanwhile, the town had grown from about 800 to 7,500, with four banks, four cotton gins, three department stores, five drug stores, four hotels, a foundry, three furniture stores, a shoe factory, three theatres, and even an opera house. The post office was often three days behind in sorting mail, and a $94,000 bond was passed to construct desperately-needed water and sewage lines.
The frenzy ended quickly with overproduction of the field, but the established oil infrastructure made Cushing the logical storage and distribution center for oil coming from Oklahoma, Texas, Louisiana, and New Mexico, long after the local boom had faded away. It remains, as the signs around town proclaim, the “pipeline crossroads of the world”.
The New York Mercantile Exchange began trading oil futures in 1983. Even though most of the wells around Cushing had stopped pumping, the trains stopped coming, and the last refinery had just shut down, the tank farms and pipelines were and still are an important hub for the oil industry. When you see today’s price of oil on the financial news, it is the theoretical cost of a barrel of West Texas Intermediate Crude as delivered to Cushing, Oklahoma.
When we lived in Cushing, Mom ruefully referred to these scenes as “our beautiful tank gardens”.
Guthrie Trolley Tour