I am working on a book on the history of oilfield fiction. Two of the first novels I read in doing my research were Elmer Kelton’s Honor at Daybreak and Cole Thompson’s Chocolate Lizards. The books are different in almost every way except for their dealing with oil exploration and drilling. They raise interesting questions about being an insider or outsider and the results of those designations. Oil fields are strange places and the towns, boomtowns, that grow up around them are stranger. A West Texas oil field is even strange to a West Texan. One of the two main protagonists of Honor at Daybreak is Slim McIntire, a young cowboy, who has lived all his life in West Texas. But ironically, he is a naïve outsider in his own country as he is driven into the boomtown of Caprock with its surrounding oilfield. When he sees the gas flares, he asks, “Is the whole oilfield afire?” He then says, “I'm glad I didn't doze off and just now wake up. I'd think I'd died and gone to hell." The talkative man who has given him a ride into Caprock responds. "You'd've thought hell if you'd been here a while back and seen that wildcat well burnin' out yonder a ways. Taken two men with it, it did. Snuffed 'em out just like that.” (16) So Slim is an outsider in his own country and comes into the boomtown with little experience with the corruption of the world though he has been once to Kansas City. Another irony is that the people who have come in from the outside, both the oil field workers and the camp followers are insiders, having been in other oil towns in other places. These boomers have followed the gushers from place to place, many of them since Mexia and Spindletop at the turn of the century to Caprock in the mid-twenties. They are accustomed to the gambling, prostitution, and bootlegging—the price gouging, the holdups, the brawls, the cutting scrapes, the shootings, the general lawlessness. Slim discovers the dangers of walking innocently through an oilfield town. He is hit over the head, and his saddle, bed roll, and bank roll are stolen—everything he owns. He has quickly learned about life in the boomtown. When the ranching job he has come to Caprock for is not available and he is without means of support, he begins to find out about the oil business. He says to the sheriff Buck Buckalew the other protagonist of the novel, “You could spread the word that I'm lookin' for a job. Any kind of a job. I don't know beans about the oilfield, but I've got willin' hands and a strong back.” The Sheriff and Tracy Whitmore, later to be Slim’s girl, discuss Slim. Tracy says,

"I'd feed a stray pup that was lost and couldn't find its way home. He's got that look about him, like a lost pup."
"He may not find his way home, but I have a notion he'll find a way to fit in wherever he's at."
"He looks like a fish out of water around here."
"There's a lot of us like that. Caprock used to be home to me. Now sometimes I feel like I've been dropped into a foreign country."

Slim takes the first job offered him and begins work unknowingly with a man who uses nitroglycerin to blow up oil wells in hopes of increasing their productivity. Though it’s highly dangerous, Slim does this for quite a while gradually accustomizing himself to the strange life style. Then, his boss is killed in an explosion and he is wounded. While he is rehabilitating, he works as a dishwasher at the cafe where Tracy serves. She is attacked by one of the gangsters trying to run an extortion racket in the oiltown. Slim defends her and is threatened by the gangsters. In encouraging him to leave town to avoid the revenge of the mob, Victor Underwood, a wildcatter, tells him, "This is your first boomtown, Slim. You don't know about people like that. You don't know about Big Boy Daugherty and the men he keeps around him." So Slim leaves town and goes to work for Underwood. Underwood cannot pay him, but Slim goes in with several other outsiders working with this outsider of the oil business, Underwood, the wildest of Wildcatters, drilling out on the fringe of the oilpatch, after having two dry holes nearby, and almost penniless. Slim works with three other outsiders on the oil well. One of these is Trinidad, an ironic outsider as the narrator explains,

There was another point. Trinidad was Mexican, at least by blood. He had been born in Texas, as had his father and his grandfather, but whatever that might have meant in the eyes of the law, it meant little in the eyes of most other Texans. He was and always would be an outsider except within his own little group . . . an outsider, even a foreigner, despite the place of his birth. So far as he had seen in his limited observation of the Caprock oilfield, Mexicans had found little place, certainly not in the drilling crews. He had seen a few building pipelines, which was crushing, backbreaking work, and he had seen a couple on a muleskinning job, handling the large teams sometimes required to pull equipment through the deep, clutching sands where even the heavy trucks could not always go.

Trinidad is out of work and willing to work for shares in the well, too.
Another of the band of wildcatters is Choctaw, a longtime employee of Underwood. He has a platonic love for Underwood’s wife, Elise, and remains to work out of allegiance to her. He doesn’t like cowboys but gradually warms to Slim.

A small grin crossed Choctaw's round face. "I always had a suspicion it was Mrs. Underwood you was interested in. So there really is a girl in town."
"I told you once."
"People been known to lie. Cowboys especially." Choctaw sat down on the bench, his weight causing Slim's end of it to rise a little. He mopped up what was left of the molasses and shoved the final bit of biscuit into his mouth.
"Pretty sunset," he commented.
"Same thing she said."
"Indians notice things like that. Did you know Mrs. Underwood has got a drop or two of Cherokee in her blood?"
"Nobody ever said."
"She's from Oklahoma, like me. Everybody in Oklahoma has got a little Indian blood, or claim they do." He gazed at the sunset. "Us Indians, we're brought up close to nature."
"You think cowboys aren't?"
"Never got to know any of them well enough to tell. Never wanted to. We're natural enemies, cowboys and Indians."
"I never wanted to be an enemy to you."
"Then let's smoke a peace pipe, us two. Since you're a Texan, we might even pull that Mexican Trinidad in on it."
"You got a pipe?"
Choctaw pulled a sack of Bull Durham tobacco from his pocket. "All I got is the makin's. I reckon a cigarette will have to do."

The final member of this band of outsiders is Autie Whitmore, a drunk. Autie had been a highly proficient driller, the top skill job on a drilling crew. But after a well exploded and killed his son, he had done nothing but drink until the group shanghaied him to work with them.Slim becomes proficient at his job. And thus a part of the oil field. The narrator explains,

Slim McIntyre was gratified at how quickly he learned the basic operation of a cabletool rig and the various tasks associated with it. He learned the difference between the bullwheel and the calfwheel, between the Sampson post and the headache post. He learned to fire the boiler and keep it running, to ram and sledge a new point onto a drill bit. He learned how to bail out the hole when the mud at the bottom became thick enough to impede the dropping of the bit, then run a bailer of fresh water to the bottom and release it without muddying the sides and risking a cave-in. He learned how to set casing, its diameter decreasing as the hole deepened.

Slim has changed from his cowboy boots to work shoes and his cowboy hat is smeared with oil. After the group make their strike, it appears that Slim is fully converted into an oilfield man.

He wiped his hands futilely upon his drenched trousers. "How'll we ever wash all this stuff off of us?"
Choctaw said, "You never will. It soaks to the bone. You've got the mark on you now, cowboy, like a tattoo. I'll bet you never punch another cow the rest of your life."

All of these outsiders agree to stay with Underwood when he drills his next wells. After the Sheriff is wounded, they and others decide to clear the town of the gangsters. They round them up group by group and ship them out. The gang leader is handed over to the Texas Rangers, also outsidersElmer Kelton says in his author’s note that his father and father’s family were farmers and that his mother’s family was in the oil business. He grew up near Crane Texas, an oil town much like caprock, so he is at least somewhat of an insider, and he paints an accurate picture of what life was like in a West Texas Oil Town.Chocolate Lizards is a different sort of book. It’s a farce, full of larger than life characters. It is more farcical than Larry McMurtry’s Texasville. The novel, published by St. Martin’s, is obviously designed for non-Texas audiences, designed also with a movie contract in mind. So as a reader, I’m an outsider. So is the protagonist. He is an actor on the way back east from Hollywood, having failed there and been cheated of his money by a fellow traveler. He arrives in Abilene and meets Merle Luskey, a drilling contractor about to lose all his rigs in a default to the evil bank aided and abetted by a corrupt Sheriff, who seems to have nothing to do but harass Merle in order to help the bank get his rigs. The whole plot is absolutely unbelievable. Merle dubs our hero Harvard because he graduated from Harvard, marking him as an outsider since apparently there are no educated people in Abilene in spite of the three Universities there. Harvard is treated as an outsider too by the drilling crew, a group of adolescent acting adults who call him yankee. All the Texans speak a dialect unrecognizable to me, a teacher of dialect. I have here a page from the book to show you something of the nature of the dialect. The sheriff even arrests him on suspicion of being a communist because he is a yank.Merle gives Harvard a pair of Chocolate Lizard boots, which should mark him as an insider, but in spite of all of the skullduggery he does for Merle he has no share in the gusher Merle brings in, and ultimately he takes a small bonus and heads for Hollywood. Along the way the reader learns a good bit about the oil business.These two novels like many other oil novels start with a naïve young person, usually called a boll weevil, and show him learning about the oil business. One of these is taken in, the other not.

Oilfield Literature

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