In this composite picture, The site of the Escalante No. 2 oil well explosion is unmarked today and on Utah SITLA land, Photo by Reuben Wadsworth. Insert: The Arrowhead Petroleum Company’s Escalante No. 2 well, circa early 1930s | Photo courtesy of the Washington County Historical Society, St. George News
FEATURE — There is hardly anything noticeable upon the Washington County landscape to remind anyone of attempts at oil drilling during the early part of the 20th century. It was a time when these early oil entrepreneurs and local residents themselves hoped to see a jolt to the local economy from “black gold.”
That optimism proved unfounded, especially when tragedy struck one of the oil drilling operations in 1935.
Early Oil Drilling
In 1907, oil was discovered approximately 2 miles northeast of Virgin. Soon after the discovery an active time of oil exploration began with about 15 wells drilled, most of them around Virgin. Most wells were failures, producing only small amounts of oil and gas. It was said that one of those wells produced up to 36 barrels a day, but most agree those claims were exaggerated. There wasn’t much of a market for oil at the time except as fuel for further drilling. Financial panic at the time reduced the capital necessary for more exploration, so it ceased, the Washington County Historical Society website notes.
Nothing happened with the wells again until 1918, when the Virgin Dome Oil Company incorporated and started operating three wells that were producing. The company began pumping and established a small local refinery. By September 1920, one of the wells reached a depth of 2,200 feet and total production from the four producing wells (the other three of which were only 550 to 600 feet deep) was only about 20 barrels a day. The bulk of this production was from one well with the other three pumping more water than oil, the WCHS website explains.
“The refinery could handle 800 gallons of crude oil per 8-hour shift, and the products found a ready local market,” the WCHS website notes. “But the relatively small amounts of oil produced and the lack of transportation (roads and railroads) did not justify sending the oil outside the local area.”
At this time, oil drilling was expanding to other places, from Bloomington to the Arizona Strip. In the early 1930s, the Arrowhead Petroleum Company also cropped up and actively drilled what it called the Escalante wells as well as the Punch Bowl Well.
“In contrast to the ‘outsider-insider’ relationship that existed in the silver mining days of Pioche (Nevada) and Silver Reef, the oil-drilling effort directly involved local employees as employees and shareholders,” Douglas Alder and Karl Brooks wrote in their book “A History of Washington County: From Isolation to Destination.” The book said that “The St. George Chamber of Commerce promoted local investment in the companies, held meetings to court outside investors and organized field trips to the drilling sites.”
Stories in the Washington County News provided encouragement for investment in oil exploration and drilling. One inspector working in the Virgin oil fields said he’d stake his reputation on the area becoming an important oil field, seeing “gusher production” in its future, Alder and Brooks noted. All of this was encouraging to Washington County residents in the early 20th century as they were excited at the prospect of diversifying as well as boosting their economy.
Unfortunately, one event dashed all of these high hopes for the future of oil production in Utah’s Dixie.
The Escalante No. 2 Tragedy
In the early 1930s, the Arrowhead Petroleum Company emerged as the leader in oil drilling in Utah’s Dixie. By then it had just bought a well from another company, the Escalante Exploration Corporation. It kept the previous company’s name as the moniker for its oil wells. In August 1933, it initiated the Escalante No. 1 well, located just north of the Southern Parkway where it nearly straddles the Arizona-Utah state line in what is now the White Dome Nature Preserve.
Hopes were high that the second Escalante well would be a true “gusher.”
In his remembrance of the event, eventually published in St. George Magazine in its March/April 1992 issue, Arrowhead Petroleum mechanic, machine operator and welder Grant Harris wrote that the Escalante No. 2 well featured the most up-to-date drilling equipment at the time. It boasted a 120-foot steel tower while the other well’s derricks were wooden and only reached up to 84 feet in height.
“[It] was a monstrous beauty with [a] steel rotary table powered by several large electric motors,” Harris said of the No. 2 well.
In the afternoon of March 6, 1935, “workmen burst into the office with the news that with one more blast, they would bring in the oil,” Ellen Raye Brown, a relative of one of the deceased, wrote in her remembrance of the event.
That news gave the optimistic and confident Charles D. Alsop (the President of the Arrowhead Petroleum Company) the idea to make the blast that would “shoot” the Escalante No. 2 well a public spectacle, an employee party to which he also invited other townspeople.
Joseph Empey, the company electrician, and his crew, had been working on setting the charges that would “shoot” the well. Brown reported that by then, the company had drilled to a depth of 4,250 and that the drillers were “attempting to shoot the oil sand at the 3,200 foot level.”
The explosives used to “shoot” the well were six 10-foot-long “torpedoes” containing nitroglycerin. Each one was only five inches in diameter and were fastened together suspended on a string and hung from the derrick for lowering into the well. Each torpedo had two caps attached connected to wires for the future detonation via electric current. Harris was part of the team that started lowering the torpedoes down to the bottom of the well three days before and said everything went smoothly.
The group of spectators started to gather around the well to watch as the last charge was being set.
“The driller who was in charge of ‘shooting the well’ objected to having others there and told Mr. Alsop that this wasn’t party time,” Brown wrote in her account. “It was dangerous work and he didn’t want anyone there but himself as he set the charge and ignited it.”
“Maybe the whiskey caused the argument or too many invited townspeople,” Harris wrote of the incident. “However, the argument saved some lives as the derrick floor was cleared of visitors.”
According to both Brown and Harris’s accounts, Alsop dismissed the driller’s concerns and the two men exchanged some heated words.
“The driller made his decision,” Brown recounted. “If people other than himself were going to be there, he was leaving —and he did. Alsop, not to be thwarted in his plans, proceeded to get things ready to blast.”
After seeing the argument, one of the company’s secretaries, Lea Cottam, turned to her friend Rosamond Snow and said: “There’s a bad feeling here; let’s leave,” Brown wrote.
Ellis Pickett, a local attorney, and his wife, Ruth, came to witness the event, sitting in their car near the derrick to watch the proceedings. Ruth Pickett felt uneasy and insisted her husband move the car farther from the derrick. He eventually moved the vehicle 50 feet farther from the derrick.
Harris ended up not being at the scene when the blast occurred because Alsop had sent him and another employee, Del Sullivan (whom Harris called Sully), to check on the engine at the “Punch Bowl” derrick, which wasn’t working properly.
As Cottam and Snow started to leave at about 9:40 p.m., the crew started lowering the last torpedo in the well when it exploded.
“Just 16 minutes after we left, that shot accidentally exploded while still hanging in the derrick,” Harris recalled. “It was like a sonic boom where we were, five miles from the well, but we knew immediately what happened so we turned back.”
“So violent was the explosion that it was heard distinctly by the residents of St. George and many [rushed] out of their homes to try to determine what had caused it [and] saw flames billowing into the night sky,” Brown wrote. “Hundreds of townspeople hurried to the scene.”
The blast was so loud and noticeable, residents of Leeds and LaVerkin called friends and family in St. George to find out what happened, thinking it was an earthquake. The flames from the column of fire could be seen as far as Hurricane, 18 miles away.
Ellis Pickett was just about to get out of his car when the blast occurred. The explosion blew off the top of his car.
“Flames shot in the air, the derrick collapsed upon the heads of the watching crowd, and the air was rent by the screams of men, women and children,” Brown quoted Pickett in describing the blast.
“Total devastation greeted us, the derrick was gone, twisted and mangled,” Harris wrote. “Everything was on fire. Marrow chilling horror dominated the scene . . . a hole thirty feet deep was where the derrick had stood on concrete pillars.”
The explosion blew up the derrick and adjacent storehouse, which contained another 1,000 pounds of nitroglycerin. But more importantly, the blast instantly killed nine of the employees and spectators, four of whom were completely blown to bits. Cottam also suffered serious injuries and was rushed to the hospital, but succumbed to her injuries early the next morning.
Besides Cottam, those who died instantly included the following: Alsop, and his wife, Mabel, Joseph Empey, the company electrician, C.L. Flickinger, oil driller, Cail Nicholson, well employee, Olive Bleak Snow, the wife of Joseph Snow, a former Utah State Representative (and Rosamond’s mother), as well as spectators Joseph Kitterman, Ray Nelson and Billy Maloney.
Pickett drove two of the injured to the hospital then returned immediately to provide more help. Rosamond Snow lost her sight in one eye and suffered some embedded steel in her face, but she recovered.
As Brown explained, news of the tragedy quickly reached St. George residents. Initially, the many live high tension wires scattered by the blast handicapped rescue work. Thankfully, power to the site was turned off at approximately 10:30 p.m.
Five of the bodies were recovered, but four were literally in pieces. The bodies that were recovered were difficult to identify. For instance, Mrs. Alsop was identified by the scarf she wore around her neck while the others were established by bits of clothing, belt buckles and other means, the Salt Lake Telegram reported.
Within a few minutes of receiving the news of the oil well explosion, the Salt Lake Tribune dispatched two staff members to cover the tragedy, an article in the March/April 1992 issue of St. George Magazine explained.
“Through the cooperation of Western Air Express, which made an unscheduled landing in St. George to pick up photographic plates, the Tribune was able to get pictures back in time to run in the Friday morning, March 8 edition,” the St. George Magazine article noted. “The paper ran a long and detailed account of the tragedy and its aftermath.”
The community held a memorial service for the victims at the St. George Tabernacle under the direction of St. George Stake President William O. Bentley on March 8. The bodies of the victims that were recovered lay in state at the tabernacle. Approximately 2,000 were in attendance and businesses were closed for the occasion.
Maloney’s mother asked Harris and Sullivan to be two of her son’s pall bearers at the occasion.
“Six strong men carried a casket that contained only two bone joints from his lower back . . found 164 steps from the explosion,” Harris wrote of the remnants of Maloney’s body.
“A concurrent memorial of condolence to those intimately connected with victims of the St. George oil well tragedy, passed by the Utah state legislature, was extended at the memorial services,” the Tribune noted in its article on March 8.
An auditor for the Arrowhead company said was unsure how the explosion occurred while others suggested that friction had set off the cartridges.
“The Arrowhead Petroleum Corporation was blown out of business that day and none of the remaining crew members (although I believe Sully and myself are the only two left) were paid for the extra days,” Harris concluded.
“Any additional efforts to drill for oil in the area were abandoned,” the St. George Magazine article stated. “The search for prosperity from “black gold” did not materialize.”
No reminder on the landscape
There is nothing on the landscape to remind anyone about the tragic Escalante No. 2 oil well explosion on March 8, 1935. The location is reached up a dirt road that extends past the end of Quality Drive, adjacent to an industrial park at the south end of River Road near where it meets the Southern Parkway.
“There is no sign and no remnants,” David Peterson, former president of the Dixie Chapter of Sons of Utah Pioneers, said. “There is just the shelf where the oil well stood. I think there ought to be something.”
Peterson admits that his own interest in the site stems from the fact that Olive Bleak Snow, who was killed in the accident, is his daughter-in-law’s great grandmother.
Today the site is on Utah State School and Institutional Trust Lands (SITLA) property and is literally a dump, a repository for everything from piles of boards and tires to an abandoned car.
It’s definitely not a tourist spot, but at the very least, visiting the site provides the viewer with a geographical perspective of what the landscape looked like on what the St. George Magazine article deemed “Dixie’s Darkest Day.”
For more information on the Escalante No. 2 oil well explosion, visit the Washington County Historical Society’s web page about it.
Photo Gallery
This historic photo shows the an oil field near Virgin, Utah, circa 1907-1933 | Photo courtesy of Southern Utah University Sherratt Library Special Collections, St. George News
This historic photo shows the Arrowhead Petroleum Company’s Escalante No. 1 oil well, circa early 1930s | Photo courtesy of the Washington County Historical Society, St. George News
This historic photo shows how the Arrowhead Petroleum Company’s Escalante No. 2 well looked before the explosion, circa early 1930s | Photo courtesy of the Washington County Historical Society, St. George News
This historic image shows what an Arrowhead Petroleum Company stock certificate looked like, circa early 1930s | Photo courtesy of the Washington County Historical Society, St. George News
This historic image shows the graphic “The Salt Lake Tribune” ran with its article describing the oil explosion tragedy, March 8, 1935 | image courtesy of the Washington County Historical Society, St. George News
This historic photo shows what the Escalante No. 2 oil well looked like after the explosion, June 1935 | Photo courtesy of the Washington County Historical Society, St. George News
Washington County Historical Society members took a field trip to the site of the Escalante No. 2 oil well explosion, February 21, 2015 | Photo courtesy of the Washington County Historical Society, St. George News
The site of the Escalante No. 2 oil well explosion is unmarked today and on Utah SITLA land, Oct. 27, 2022 | Photo by Reuben Wadsworth, St. George News
Unfortunately, the site of the Escalante No. 2 oil well explosion has become a dumping ground as seen by the pile of tires show in this photo, Oct. 27, 2022 | Photo by Reuben Wadsworth, St. George News
About the series “Days”
“Days” is a series of stories about people and places, industry and history in and surrounding the region of southwestern Utah.
“I write stories to help residents of southwestern Utah enjoy the region’s history as much as its scenery,” St. George News contributor Reuben Wadsworth said.
To keep up on Wadsworth’s adventures, “like” his author Facebook page.
Wadsworth has also released a book compilation of many of the historical features written about Washington County as well as a second volume containing stories about other places in Southern Utah, Northern Arizona and Southern Nevada.
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