by Bruce Wells | Oct 10, 2025 | Petroleum Pioneers
After months of hard drilling, a North Texas oil well roared in at Ranger in 1917.
As World War I continued in Europe, the “Roaring Ranger” oilfield discovery well of October 1917 in Eastland County, Texas, revealed a giant oilfield that would help fuel the Allied victory.
Residents of the town of Ranger — about halfway between Dallas and Abilene — had been eager to find oil, especially after reading newspaper accounts of an oilfield discovery on April Fool’s Day 1911 at Electra in neighboring Wichita County. A decade earlier in southeastern Texas, the “Lucas Gusher” at Spindletop Hill had launched the modern U.S. petroleum industry.
Detail of a photo showing “Roaring Ranger,” the McCleskey No. 1 well, erupting oil in Eastland County and launching a North Texas drilling boom. Photo courtesy Ranger Historical Preservation Society.
As the area’s cotton farmers struggled with severe drought, Ranger town officials hoped to strike “black gold.” For help, they turned to William K. Gordon, vice president of the Texas and Pacific Coal Company in Thurber. His company mined shale from hills near Thurber.
“Roaring Ranger”
After one failed test with a shallow well, Gordon agreed to drill the second attempt up to 3,500 feet deep. Drilling with basic cable-tool technology, Gordon and contractor Warren Wagner spudded the exploratory wildcat well on July 2, 1917, on the McCleskey farm, two miles south of Ranger.
After more than three months of drilling, the J.H. McCleskey No. 1 well erupted a geyser of oil on October 17, 1917, from a depth of 3,432 feet.
Following the October 1917 oilfield discovery, the Texas and Pacific Railroad transported people, equipment, and petroleum in and out of Ranger. A circa 1920 postcard shows the depot, future home of the Roaring Ranger Oil Boom Museum.
When completed, “Roaring Ranger” initially produced 1,600 barrels of high-gravity oil per day. Later oil gushers yielded up to 10,000 barrels of oil daily. Within 20 months, Texas and Pacific Coal Company stock jumped from $30 a share to $1,250 a share.
The suddenly wealthy petroleum exploration company added “oil” to its name, reorganizing as the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company.
“Almost overnight, you couldn’t even see the homes for the derricks,” said Ranger historian Jeane B. Pruett. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.
Eastland County oil discoveries brought economic booms to Ranger, Cisco, and Desdemona — today a ghost town. As leasing intensified in and around Desdemona by 1918, convincing the congregation of a Baptist Church to allow drilling proved to be a challenge (see Oil Riches of Merriman Baptist Church).
Among the veterans visiting booming Eastland County after the war was a young Conrad Hilton, who visited Cisco intending to buy a bank. When he witnessed the long line of roughnecks waiting for a room at the Mobley Hotel, he decided to buy the hotel (see Oil Boom Brings First Hilton Hotel).
The Abilene Reporter-News reported Ranger’s population swelled from less than 1,000 to more than 30,000 — mostly men. Opportunities for illicit financial gain also attracted notorious oilfield hucksters like J.W. “Hog Creek” Carruth (see Exploiting North Texas Oil Fever).
The 2016 Roaring Ranger Day Parade took place on the 99th birthday of the town’s famous oil gusher. Photo courtesy Ranger Historical Preservation Society.
Eastland County’s drilling and production boom grew rapidly as petroleum companies rushed to Ranger to develop the giant oilfield, according to historian Damon Sasser.
By 1919, the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company had 22 oil wells — and eight refineries open or under construction. More freight was unloaded in Ranger by the railroad than at any other place upon its line, including stations in Fort Worth, Dallas and New Orleans.
The J.H. McCleskey No. 1 discovery well of October 1917 created a mammoth oil boom at Ranger and across Eastland County, Texas. Photo courtesy Library of Congress.
The flood of people also brought Texas Rangers to the boom town, which had begun as a Ranger camp in the 1870s. When Ranger jails overflowed, the lawmen handcuffed prisoners to telephone poles.
Meanwhile, independent and major exploration companies discovered nearby oilfields, including the Parsons, Sinclair-Earnest, and Lake Sand fields.
Photos courtesy Sarah Reveley and Barclay Gibson, who have photographed Texas Historical Commission markers and helped locate hundreds of historic sites from Louisiana to New Mexico.
Production from the Breckenridge oilfield in neighboring Stephens County was 10 million barrels of oil by 1919. It peaked at more than 31 million barrels of oil in 1921.
“Wave of Oil” wins WW I
“Roaring Ranger” and the region’s production had proved essential to the Allied victory in World War I. When the armistice was signed in 1918, a member of the British War Cabinet declared, “The Allied cause floated to victory upon a wave of oil.”
Ranger’s boom ended in the early 1920s when excess oil production caused wells to fail, but the discoveries confirmed the existence of a large petroleum-producing region, the Mid-Continent, with hundreds of oilfields stretching from Texas into Oklahoma and Kansas.
Eastland County oil discoveries, which began with the “Roaring Ranger” well of 1917, brought economic booms to Ranger, Cisco, and Desdemona. Photo courtesy Jeane B. Pruett and the family of W.K. Gordon Jr.
Established by the Ranger chamber of commerce in 1982, the Roaring Ranger Oil Boom Museum — inside the original Texas and Pacific Railway’s depot — exhibits drilling equipment, historic photos and a vintage cable-tool rig.
Ranger residents annually celebrate their 1917 oilfield discovery with a festival and parade down Main Street. When the parade crosses the historic train depot’s tracks, participants pass a small, gray granite marker dedicated to the “First Oil Well Drilled in Eastland County.”
The 1936 Texas Centennial marker remains “a highly cherished monument that Ranger should be very proud of,” according to Eastland County resident Sarah Reveley, who documented many Texas Historical Commission sites.
Other dedicated advocates for preserving local petroleum history included Jeane B. Pruett (1935-2022), a longtime friend of the American Oil & Gas Historical Society.
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Recommended Reading: Ranger, Images of America
(2010); The Prize: The Epic Quest for Oil, Money & Power
(2008); Trek of the Oil Finders: A History of Exploration for Petroleum (1975). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.
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The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
Citation Information – Article Title: “Roaring Ranger wins WWI.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/roaring-ranger-wins-wwi. Last Updated: October 10, 2025. Original Published Date: July 1, 2004.
by Bruce Wells | Oct 8, 2025 | Petroleum Pioneers
Navajo Nation wells produced oil, natural gas, and helium in the 1950s.
Reports of natural seeps in the late 1890s encouraged exploration for commercial quantities of oil more than a decade before Arizona statehood in 1912. Finding a productive oilfield would prove elusive.
At the start of the 20th century, Joseph Heslet, a part-time prospector from Pennsylvania, drilled several unsuccessful wells that showed traces of oil. His efforts caught the attention of other exploration companies, including several that arrived from the 1901 giant oilfield discovery at Spindletop Hill in Texas.
The cover of a 1961 Arizona Oil and Gas Conservation Commission report featured a painting by E.M. “Buck” Schiwetz. Image courtesy Humble Oil and Refining Company.
A 1905 wildcat well drilled in the Chino Valley, 20 miles north of Prescott, reached a depth of 2,000 feet before being abandoned as an expensive failure. Another well drilled one year later in Graham County was abandoned at a depth of 1,400 feet.
More exploration attempts followed, most lacking knowledge of the emerging science of petroleum geology. The result would be five decades of drilling unsuccessful wells — Arizona dry holes.
“A series of speculative ventures and explorations in oil drilling occurred over the ensuing decades, followed by the discovery of helium, an industrial gas that has become a major industry in the state,” noted a 2004 article at Tucson.com.
Better known for abundant copper deposits, it was the search for petroleum that led to helium discoveries in Arizona.
Although normally low, the concentration of helium in natural gas has been measured from 0.01 percent to 7 percent. Helium content would be enough to confuse residents of Dexter, Kansas, in 1903 when a natural gas discovery well would not burn (learn more in Kansas “Wind Gas ” Well).
In Arizona, Kipling Petroleum Company discovered helium 20 miles east of Holbrook in Navajo County in 1950, but “commercial production of helium in Arizona began in 1961 with the state’s first helium extraction plant producing 9 billion cubic feet of gas over 15 years,” the article explained.
Gas in 1954, Oil in 1959
Arizona became the 30th petroleum-producing state on October 13, 1954, with a natural gas well.
Shell Oil Company completed the state’s first commercial well south of the Utah border on Apache County’s Navajo Indian Reservation. Natural gas flowed after drilling to a depth of 4,540 feet.
Arizona’s first natural gas well in 1954 (top) and first significant oil well in 1959. Image from “Oil, Gas and Helium in Arizona: Its Occurrence and Potential.”
“The first producing well in Arizona was drilled by Shell Oil Company in 1954 on a surface structure known as the East Boundary Butte anticline,” proclaimed a special report by the Arizona Oil and Gas Conservation Commission. The Shell Oil discovery well found natural gas and a small amount of oil.
Shell Oil’s East Boundary Butte No. 2 well indicated gas production of 3,150 thousand cubic feet per day; daily oil production was 3.6 barrels of oil (plus 8.4 barrels of salt water per day) from part of the Pennsylvanian geologic formation, the Hermosa, according to the commission’s report.
The 1961 report, Oil, Gas and Helium in Arizona: Its Occurrence and Potential was published by the Arizona Development Board to encourage further exploration. The cover featured a painting by artist Edward “Buck” Schiwetz (1898-1984), courtesy Humble Oil and Refining Company.
Well site on the Navajo Reservation in Apache County, Arizona. The 16-million-acre reservation extends into New Mexico and Utah. Circa 1965 photo courtesy Shell Oil Co.
One candidate for the first Arizona oil well, according to the report, was Humble Oil Company’s No. 1 E Navajo well, drilled in 1958 near the Shell Oil natural gas well. Although initial oil production was from the same formation (Hermosa), “subsequent production showed increasing gas,” and by 1961 it was considered a natural gas well.
“Additional drilling on this structure resulted in completion of three more wells producing mostly gas with some distillate and oil,” noted Lee Feemster of the Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company.
“Oil and gas shows were encountered in the Hermosa, Mississippian, and Devonian but to date the production is confined to the Hermosa,” Feemster added.
Learn about the earliest oilfield discoveries in other petroleum-producing states in First Oil Discoveries.
Seismic Anomaly
In 1956, the Franco Western Oil Company drilled a well based on a seismic anomaly in the Mississippian formation and found more natural gas. A well completed a year later by Superior Oil Company also produced significant amounts of gas from the Hermosa geologic zone.
“Encouraging shows of oil and gas were recorded in the Mississippian and Devonian in this test,” Feemster noted in the commission report. It was his company, Texas Pacific Coal and Oil, that drilled a test well that finally found commercial quantities of oil in Arizona in 1959.
Founded in 1888, Texas Pacific Coal and Oil Company had established the mining town of Thurber, Texas, and by the early 1900s provided almost half of the coal supply for Texas. In 1917, the company drilled the state’s famous McCleskey No. 1 “Roaring Ranger” well in Eastland County.
“The People’s Field”
Texas Pacific Coal and Oil’s 1959 first Arizona oil discovery, the Navajo No. 1 well, was completed in the extreme northeastern part of the state.
Arizona’s oil and natural gas fields are in its northeast corner: (1) East Boundary Butte; (2) Bita Peak; (3) Toh-ah-tin; (4) Unnamed Paradox gas and distillate; (5) Dry Mesa; (6) Unnamed Devonian oil; (7) Pinta dome helium area.
The Navajo No. 1 well produced 240 barrels of oil per day at a depth of 5,566 feet in the Mississippian geologic formation, according to Feemster, who added, “The nearest Mississippian production at that time was in the Big Flat field more than 100 miles north in Utah.”
In 1967, the Kerr-McGee Company’s Navajo No. 1 well revealed an oil-producing geologic anticline about 4,000 feet deep. That well joined the others producing on the Navajo Reservation in Apache County (reservation land includes 16 million acres in Arizona, New Mexico, and Utah).
By 2012, the Navajo Reservation’s Dineh-bi-Keyah — “The People’s Field” — would produce more than 18 million barrels of oil. Recognizing the importance of advancements in horizontal drilling technology, in 2013 the Arizona Geological Survey issued a report, Potential Targets for Shale-Oil and Shale-Gas Exploration in Arizona.
By 2016, Arizona had 32 operating oil and natural gas wells, according to the state commission. Of the 1,129 wells drilled in the state since 1954, almost 90 percent were dry holes (2014 data). Apache County in the northeast corner of the state has remained the only petroleum-producing county.
By 2023, the state had “no significant proved crude oil reserves, and the state’s few oil wells produced only about 6,000 barrels of crude oil in 2023,” according to the Energy Information Administration (EIA). Arizona produces more copper than any other state.
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Recommended Reading: Arizona Rocks & Minerals: A Field Guide to the Grand Canyon State
(2010); Helium: Its Creation, Discovery, History, Production, Properties and Uses (2022). Your Amazon purchase benefits the American Oil & Gas Historical Society. As an Amazon Associate, AOGHS earns a commission from qualifying purchases.
_______________________
The American Oil & Gas Historical Society (AOGHS) preserves U.S. petroleum history. Please become an AOGHS annual supporter and help maintain this energy education website and expand historical research. For more information, contact bawells@aoghs.org. Copyright © 2025 Bruce A. Wells. All rights reserved.
Citation Information: Article Title – “First Arizona Oil Well.” Authors: B.A. Wells and K.L. Wells. Website Name: American Oil & Gas Historical Society. URL: https://aoghs.org/petroleum-pioneers/first-arizona-oil-well. Last Updated: October 10 2025. Original Published Date: October 9, 2018.
