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March 2017
March Events...
St. Patrick’ s Day Celebration
Friday, March 17th, 2017 • 12:30 pm
Please be our guest for St. Patrick’ s Day! Enjoy live music and a delicious chef-prepared Irish meal featuring corned beef and cabbage. Wear your best green outfi t and join the fun. We look forward to seeing you here!
Cowboy Hoedown Thursday, March 30th, 2017 • 12:30 pm
Here’ s your ticket to an exciting country event at The Rio Grande! Enjoy a delicious barbeque rib meal, along with live country music. Grab your hat and boots- this is one fun event you won’ t want to miss!
For more information and to RSVP, please call 505-994-2800
© 2017 HRG
2331 Westside Blvd SE, Rio Rancho, NM 87124
Tales From The Oil Patch
By Shannon Wagers
Oil and gas production is one of New Mexico’ s most important industries, pumping billions of dollars a year into our state’ s economy, and funding public education through lease royalties and severance taxes. Today the industry is well-regulated and largely corporatized, but in the heady days of its youth, 90 years or so ago, it was a wild and colorful business in which a man could become a millionaire overnight and go broke just as quickly.
Oil seeps have existed in many parts of the world since antiquity, but apart from hucksters who bottled the oil for sale as a patent medicine of dubious value, no one considered it anything but a nuisance. It wasn’ t until the latter half of the 19th century that people began to find industrial uses for the stuff.
In 1857, a process was developed for refining kerosene from crude oil. Further refinement produced gasoline and other fuels. Suddenly there was a demand for petroleum to power the machinery that was transforming the U. S. from an agrarian to a manufacturing economy, and later, of course, to power automobiles.
In the beginning, petroleum geology was largely guesswork. Many early pools were discovered accidentally by drillers looking for ground water. Gradually it became apparent that oil tended to accumulate in upfolded rock strata called“ anticlines,” but these underground structures weren’ t always obvious from the surface topography. Drillers looked for telltale rises and ridges in otherwise flat terrain and took a chance that there might be oil below. Often these
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“ wrinkle chasers” guessed right. If not, they just moved on.
It was also noted that productive wells usually followed one another in the same general direction, called a trend line. Wildcatters followed these trend lines as they tried to get a jump on their competitors by sinking the first well in a new field. It was in this way that oil was discovered in Southeastern New Mexico by oilmen following the westward trend of West Texas’ Permian Basin just after the turn of the 20th century.
Although the first wells showed enough oil to keep interest alive, none was commercially viable until 1924, when the partnership of Flynn, Welch and Yates brought in a gusher in a field about eight miles south of Artesia. Other discoveries followed, and the three counties of southeastern New Mexico- Lea, Eddy and Chaves- became known as the Oil Patch.
Boomtowns sprang up wherever new pools were discovered. Early photographs of oil fields in New Mexico and elsewhere reveal what a chaotic free-for-all the industry was in those days. Hastily-erected wooden derricks stand clustered just a few dozen yards apart, with shacks, tents and vehicles crowding the space in between. Sometimes there were unexpected consequences. One company put up a bunkhouse for its workers near the town of Jal without carefully inspecting the site beforehand. Very soon it became infested with rattlesnakes. It turned out that the bunkhouse had been built atop a den where large numbers of the snakes were hibernating. It was quickly relocated.
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