The
oil fields of the Texas Panhandle
in the 1920s and ‘30s were a place where a man who knew how to use nitroglycerin
could make a good living for himself. Ward A. “Tex” Thornton was such a man. He
learned all about nitro when he went to work in 1913 for an Ohio company that
manufactured torpedoes. He brought that knowledge along with a steady hand and
no small degree of courage to the oil fields around Amarillo
in 1920. Thornton
was sent to Amarillo in 1920
as a branch manager for U.S. Torpedo Company of Wichita
Falls where he learned about the peculiar nature of those oil fields and how
nitroglycerin, which he knew all about, was in high demand. The problem was handling
and using nitroglycerin without blowing everybody and everything around it to
atoms.
Nitroglycerin, first developed in Italy in 1847, was adapted commercially
by Alfred Noble of peace prize fame as a high explosive, which meant that it was
highly unstable and could be set off with just the slightest jolt; numerous explosions
of the spectacular but tragic variety attested to this and led to it being widely
banned, which was bad for Nobel’s nitroglycerin factory. He experimented with
it some more and eventually stabilized it with the use of diatomaceous earth in
the manufacture of an explosive he called dynamite. (Yes, the man for whom the
Nobel Peace Prize is named invented dynamite.)
Nitroglycerin in its raw
form was used in the Panhandle
oil fields in a couple of ways. Well shooters like Tex Thornton would put it into
promising holes to create an explosion intended to shake the oil loose and bring
it to the top; the thick limestone formations in the fields made it necessary
to use a lot of nitroglycerin. The fields also held large amounts of natural gas,
which made dropping little canisters of nitroglycerin into well holes occasionally
problematic.
Demonic gas vapors sometimes caught the canisters and forced
them back up the well hole. When that happened it helped to be able to (a) run
very fast, or (b) catch the canister when it came back up. Bobble the nitro and
the well shooter and everyone and everything in his immediate vicinity would be
toast. Thornton was said to be one of the best at catching the nitro when it came
back up.
The
high levels of natural gas also made the fields susceptible to fires. One way
to extinguish such a fire was to drop a charge of nitro into the fire and explode
it; the explosion sucked all the oxygen from the fire and snuffed it out. When
the threat of starting additional fires was too great to use the nitro, Thornton
would smother the fires with massive amounts of steam and water, which took about
three weeks, 20-30 men, and 50 steam boilers; but it worked. Tex Thornton was
known as the king of oilfield firefighters.
Later,
during the Dust Bowl, he picked up a reputation as a rainmaker or charlatan, depending
on your point of view. There’s no evidence that Tex Thornton did not believe that
explosions properly placed in the clouds would produce rain. Napoleon believed
it, World War I soldiers believed
it, and in the 1930s everybody in Dalhart,
at the cold, flat and windy northwestern tip of Texas,
was ready to believe it, too. Thornton probably believed the theory that rain
follows artillery but if he tried such a thing anywhere other than Dalhart
it hasn’t been widely reported.
Dalhart
was hit especially hard by the Dust Bowl. The bank failed on June 27, 1931, a
day when the temperature reached 112 degrees. That began the first of eight years
with very little rain and the beginning of the most destructive dust storms in
history. Dalhart was one
of the worst-hit communities in the nation.
Tex Thornton showed up in
Dalhart right the middle
of the town’s misery, in 1935. He told the city he believed he could make it rain.
He certainly tried. He set off explosives in the clouds for several days, battling
dust storms and high winds much of the time. People came from miles around to
watch him but the blowing dust drove most of the spectators away. Thornton stayed
at it. Finally, it snowed. Then, as the temperatures warmed, it sleeted.
For
all anybody knew, Tex Thornton had coaxed moisture out of the sky in Dalhart,
though places like Kansas and Colorado, way out of range for Tex Thornton’s nitroglycerin,
also got snow and rain in roughly the same amount at roughly the same time.
His reputation as a well shooter, firefighter and rainmaker made Tex Thornton
something of a legend in the Panhandle
but he met with an unfortunate ending that had nothing to do with a large explosion,
as we might expect. Thornton was murdered by two hitchhikers he picked on June
22, 1949.
The man and woman charged in the murder – the hitchhikers – were
not convicted. The trial was of the sensational variety, and aspersions were cast
on Tex Thornton’s character, an ignoble end for a legendary character of both
oil field and Dust Bowl lore.
©
Clay Coppedge
May 1 , 2012
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