Word: biggest
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Rising at dawn one brisk November morning, Joe York, a middle-aged dairy farmer in Scurry County, Tex., shoved aside his patched blue jeans and scuffed working boots and put on his fanciest rancher's garb. Until then, the biggest day in Joe York's life had been a calf-roping contest in which he won $150. Now he was after a far bigger prize...
...royalties of it and other wells. It had also proved up another big area in Scurry County's incredible Canyon Reef oilfield, where movie stars and other hopeful wildcatters had been prospecting for months (TIME, Oct. 10). To oilmen it looked as if the Scurry pool was the biggest since the East Texas field came in in 1930. Estimates of its riches ranged upwards of one billion barrels...
...wells were already in and producing at the maximum allowable rate of 35,374 barrels a day, 133 new ones were in the process of drilling, and wildcatters were everywhere. Said one old Texas oilworker, who had followed the rigs through all the great Texas fields: "This is the biggest thing yet. It's the last time I'll see it in my lifetime. They just don't come like this very often...
...industry's geologists and geophysicists, who had long since reduced oil prospecting to a science, had been completely fooled by Scurry County. None of their blasts and echo-measurements had shown the existence of its oil-laden limestone reef some 6,500 ft. down. Humble Oil & Refining Co., biggest oil leaseholder on the continent, had once held leases all over Scurry, but had let most of them lapse. Even the first wells drilled in what later proved to be the heart of the pool did not turn out well. Not until November 1948 did Standard of California...
...handsome, fortyish widow, who began buying up leases iff 1945 when she got out of the armed services. Soon she controlled 86,000 acres, now has seven producing wells. She gives dinners of pheasant and venison in her oil-lamplighted farmhouse, where some of the field's biggest oil deals have been closed. Veteran Oilman C. T. McLaughlin came to Scurry County 15 years ago to get away from the business, struck it rich also. He found that his 5,200-acre Diamond M ranch was right above the heart of the Canyon Reef...