Word: muskeg
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Manitoba during the summer of 1926 was a 6-ft. 4-in. American medical student named Ben Spock, who owned a resplendent red handlebar mustache and an oilcloth blackboard. After a ten-hour day of shoveling gravel and sand to keep the railroad track from sinking into the muskeg, Spock would wipe the sweat from his mustache, wolf a huge supper, and unroll his blackboard. His afterhours task: teaching basic English to 40 sunburned Galician laborers. "I didn't get very far," recalls Dr. Spock, who has since lost the mustache, become a pediatrician and won wide fame...
...world's biggest gas well blew in, and it was enough to wow even the most blase of engineers-"This is one helluva big well . . . the biggest." That it was. Drilled by Shell Oil Co. of Canada, Ltd. and the British American Oil Co, Ltd., in the muskeg 150 miles northwest of Edmonton, Alta., it roared in with a fabulous open-flow potential of 1.5 billion cu. ft. per day. Its closest competitor is a 500 million-cu.-ft. well owned by Phillips Petroleum Co. in Pecos County, Texas, and the nearest thing Canada has seen is a dwarf...
...liked to boast that he had taught William Lyon Mackenzie King, Canada's famed and durable (1921-48, except for five years) Liberal Prime Minster. When John was eight, father Diefenbaker took his family to a Saskatchewan crossroads where the northern prairies turn into a subarctic wasteland of muskeg, timber and lakes. There one day father Diefenbaker tied a red bandanna to the rim of a wagon wheel and, counting the turns of the wheel, measured off a 160-acre homestead. That spring he broke the virgin sod to the plow and put in his first crop of wheat...
...Great Slave Lake area 540 miles north of Edmonton, where Canada's timberlands fade into bleak muskeg swamps stretching northward toward the pole, the signs of oil are as persistent as the mosquitoes. The first Canadian explorers found lakes covered with oil seeping from holes in the ground. Indians and traders skimmed it off for their cook fires, scooped up fistfuls of the rich black muck to waterproof their boots. But to commercial oilmen, the potential of the Great Slave oil has long been only a tantalizing dream. No one had much encouragement until this year. Then Phillips Petroleum...
Last week northwest Canada's barren muskeg was crawling with oilmen. To get in on the continent's hottest oil play, well over 200 companies will spend $160 million for exploration this year alone, and they are just getting started. Says Home Oil Geologist Alexander Clark: "This region is where Texas was 30 years ago. In the next 25 or 30 years, it is not unreasonable to expect there will be found hundreds of fields, some small, but others as big as anything yet found...