The Boom: Oil, Popular Culture, and Politics in Alberta, 1912-1924

The story of the first Turner Valley boom and the charlatans, frauds, and evangelists who made and lost fortunes in the early days of Alberta oil.

When the Calgary Petroleum Products’s Dingman No. 1 Well began operation in Turner Valley on May 14, 1914, it unleashed a spectacular frenzy of greed and excess. In a fever of free-market capitalism over 500 oil companies were created, selling fortunes on paper to eager investors. But fewer than fifty ever drilled for oil, and the Alberta oil industry suddenly began to look like one big swindle.

The public, and investors, demanded answers. Enter George Edward Buck, a charismatic revival preacher and self-proclaimed oil tycoon who made himself and his company the centre of every conversation while he salted his wells and misled investors. Far from the only person to profit from the sensational publicity of the Turner Valley Boom, Buck became the public face of all unscrupulous businessmen and an international scapegoat to preserve the integrity of Alberta oil.

The Boom is a history of the Turner Valley era that rescues the miscreants and charlatans from obscurity. Industry historian Paul Chastko returns the larger-than-life promoters, wildcatters and oil evangelists to the story. He shows the ways that Albertans, determined to overcome the obstacles of economics, geography, geology, and the market, made a conscious choice to pursue petroleum development and created an oil culture that continues to this day.

Paul Chastko is an associate professor of History at the University of Calgary. He is a recognized expert in the history of the North American petroleum industry, with a focus on political, social, economic, and environmental challenges. Paul is the author of Developing Alberta’s Oil Sands: From Karl Clark to Kyoto.

With a deft scholarly touch and rare storytelling abilities, and complete command of the archives, Paul Chastko unearths the stunning range of colorful characters (George Buck supreme among them!), shady as well as lofty corporate aims, and wild clash of interests that fueled oil’s rise to prominence in early-twentieth-century Alberta. As both a riveting biography of a region’s most important resource and a learned chronicle of the province’s wildcat culture and populist heritage, The Boom is a timely must-read.

—Darren Dochuk, author of Anointed With Oil: How Christianity and Crude Made Modern America

In the annals of the history of oil in Alberta the discovery of oil (and mostly gas) in Turner Valley in 1913 stimulated a short-lived frenzy of drilling and speculation that has a special place in Oil Patch lore. In The Boom, Paul Chastko provides a fascinating account of these events that in some degree challenges the “oil patch legends” but more importantly places them in the context of the social, economic and legal developments that shaped Alberta through the 20th century.

—Graham Taylor, professor emeritus, Trent University