Texas of the North

A tall, feathery column of black spray shot into the air and a throaty roar echoed over the grainfields outside Edmonton. Within minutes, a bumper-to-bumper line of cars was moving out of the city along the westbound Jasper highway, heading for the new Acheson oilfield, seven miles away. There a crowd gathered to relish a familiar but stirring sight. Alberta's newest oil well was blowing in wildly, gushing up 200 feet and spitting blobs of copper-black crude for half a mile around.

Rampaging wells and eager people are signs of the times in booming Alberta. All Canada has expanded amazingly since World War II; discoveries of iron ore, nickel, copper, uranium and titanium are cracking open a dozen new frontiers. But the biggest boom of all is in Alberta's oil, the most significant new find on the continent since Texas' Spindletop roared in, 50 years ago.

First Tide. Since 1947, when Imperial Oil, Ltd.'s Leduc No. 1 gushed from a snow-covered Alberta plain, 45 new oilfields have been spudded in across the province. Portable derricks, lumbering over the land like giant steel giraffes, have drilled more than two new wells a day. More than 300 million U.S. dollars, one of the freest and fastest streams of American private capital ever sluiced into a foreign country, have been invested in Alberta oil. Reserves of 2 billion bbls. are already proved, and experts say that that is only the first tide from a great oily sea buried deep under the province's fields, lakes and mountains.

With characteristic Canadian reserve, Alberta has suppressed most of the roistering atmosphere of a traditional oil boom. But the physical evidence of a changing frontier is visible everywhere. In Edmonton, the provincial capital, steel skeletons of new skyscrapers rise against a background of frame buildings, false-fronted stores and old log houses. The city's population, up from 113,000 to 160,000 since 1946, has spread out beyond the reach of existing sidewalks, plumbing and telephone lines.

Full-fledged towns such as Redwater (pop. 3,600), Leduc (pop. 1,500) and Devon (pop. 2,400) have mushroomed in the countryside. Pipelines crisscross the grainfields; grazing cattle placidly drink out of the safety pools around burning-off oil wells. Oil exploration teams roam tirelessly on the rolling, almost treeless prairie of the south, among the mixed farms and forests of mid-province and through the wilderness of northern woods and lakes. The brisk, winy aroma of prosperity is in the air.

First Prize. Like Texas, Alberta was prosperous even before its oil wells spouted their new wealth. The southern plains country, where the warm Chinook blowing off the Rockies keeps the rich range grasses clear of snow, is one of North America's great pasture lands. Its sleek, black Aberdeen-Angus, white-faced Herefords and square-built red Shorthorns provide more than a quarter of Canada's beef supply; steaks from Alberta steers are eaten as far away as Karachi, capital of Pakistan, half the circuit around the globe.

The grainfields, some of them tilled in fertile grey-black loam, grow some of the world's finest cereals. Alberta wheat has won 16 international championships. In the rich and sparsely-settled Peace River district, wheat grows 73 bushels to an acre (1950 national average 17.1), and the region is fertile enough to support another million farmers, more than the province's present population. Canneries have moved to southern Alberta, where Canada's sugar-beet industry is centered and the country's tastiest melons and vegetables are grown on irrigated fields.

Coal & Scenery. The Rocky Mountains, along the southwest border, are another of the province's great assets. Three-quarters of Canada's coal, one-seventh of the world's known coal reserve, lie in the Rockies' foothills. The wooded slopes bear 15,000 square miles of tall Douglas firs, one of the finest timbers. The mountains yield yet another resource: scenic beauty that brings a million visitors a year to such playgrounds as Banff, Jasper and

Waterton Lakes for the bracing air, spectacular glacial lakes and year-round skiing in the perpetual snows.

Even ten years ago, Alberta's people had the highest farm incomes in Canada, based on record-price crops. The whole rich province seemed already on the crest of prosperity when the oil boom struck. To Alberta's farm folk, a God-fearing collection of Baptists, Mormons and other practitioners of strict oldtime religion, the surfeit of bounties was a well-deserved miracle.

Alberta's Premier Ernest Charles Manning, 43, heartily approves the strong spiritual note in his province's reaction to its added wealth. Said a wheat farmer's wife in Medicine Hat: "God knew that Mr. Manning would use the oil wisely, so He let it be discovered."

Manning's government is the nearest approach to a theocracy in the Western Hemisphere. The slight (5 ft. 9 in., 135 Ibs.) premier, who practices his own brand of Baptist-fundamentalist evangelism, has been blending religion and politics throughout his public career. Says Manning: "Religion isn't to be kept on a shelf and only taken down on Sundays." A well-thumbed Bible is always open on his desk in Edmonton's Parliament Building. In every public speech, religion, not politics, is the dominant theme. "I abhor the word politician," Manning has repeatedly told Albertans. "I am not here by choice. I would much rather concentrate on my Bible work."

Money & Religion. His interest in the Bible, however, actually got Manning into politics. As a farm boy of 17, he heard a broadcast sermon by William ("Bible Bill") Aberhart, a Calgary evangelist with a persuasive social message. Bible Bill later became premier of Alberta as head of a Social Credit party that promised to pay a $25 monthly dividend to every citizen. Manning had joined Aberhart's Prophetic Bible Institute as a student and helped his chief sell Alberta on the fuzzy Social Credit theory by stumping the province, singing hymns and reciting prayers at political rallies. When Aberhart was elected, Manning, at 26, became a cabinet minister; he took over as premier when Aberhart died in 1943.

Helped along by the World War II boom and the unparalleled prosperity since, Social Credit's odd mixture of economic theory and religious puritanism has sewed up the loyalty of Alberta's fanners in much the same way that William Jennings Bryan's fundamentalism-cum-free-silver captivated the U.S. Midwest in the '90s. Manning's party has won four straight elections and has all but blotted out the opposition in the legislature. "We don't need an opposition," Ernest Manning has said. "They're just a hindrance to us. You don't hire a man to do a job and then hire another man to hinder him."

Neither his thriving political fortunes nor Alberta's booming business expansion have changed Ernest Manning's ascetic private life. He lives in a middle-class home in Edmonton's Garneau district;

Mrs. Manning does her own housework. The premier mows the lawn in summer and shovels the snow in winter. Manning neither drinks nor smokes, and has no use for card-playing. "The family altar," he dourly comments, "has been replaced by the bridge table." On Sundays, the premier and Mrs. Manning travel 187 miles to Calgary, where he conducts a Bible class and broadcasts a sermon from the Bible Institute. His wife plays the organ for the hymns.

Pay-as-You-Go. Premier Manning has been less rigorous in his devotion to the woolly formulas of Social Credit. His public speeches still include occasional vague references to monetary reform, but there is no more talk of the $25-a-month bonus, although Alberta's current $70 million cash surplus would presumably permit a few token dividends. When some diehard

Social Crediters called for stricter adherence to the old creed two years ago, Manning sternly read them out of the party. The government-run University of Alberta no longer studies Social Credit as a political theory. From a hot-eyed economic reform movement, the Social Credit Party has changed into one of Canada's most conservative provincial governments, with a strict pay-as-you-go tax policy and a debt-retirement program.

Alberta's oil policy, bossed by Mines Minister Nathan Tanner, a Mormon bishop in private life, is a model arrangement between government and industry. Since 93% of all oil rights in Alberta are owned by the province, there is little of the feverish scrambling for land or the cutthroat competition that marked the oil booms of Texas and other areas where mineral rights were privately owned.

Rent in Advance. A company ready to invest in Alberta oil can lease the rights on almost any amount of land by paying an advance yearly rent of $1 an acre and signing an agreement to go ahead with immediate exploration. When a company strikes oil, it has three months to map out its entire lease in alternate blocks, usually in checkerboard pattern. The company keeps half the blocks, and pays land rent to the farm owners (up to $1,500 a well), plus a government royalty averaging 14% on all oil produced. The alternate blocks of the checkerboard revert to the government. These government-held squares, some of them adjoining producing wells, are a lure to smaller or more cautious companies that dare not risk the big gamble on unproved land. The blocks are auctioned to the highest bidders, and have brought as much as $1,800,000 for 160 acres.

Oil companies appreciate Alberta's setup because they can acquire big blocks of land at low cost, and can plan their development programs over wide areas without expensive and time-wasting jumps from one small patch to another. Since Alberta normally permits only one well on each 40 acres, and sets a flow quota for each producing well, there is little indiscriminate wildcatting and practically no chance for a fly-by-night operator to move in on a good thing, sink a well near by and siphon off his neighbor's oil.

Few Great Fortunes. The policy is shrewdly beneficial to Alberta. The bargain rates for risk capital, plus the offerings of proved and semi-proved oil land for more reticent investors, provide something for everybody and have helped make Alberta's the world's fastest developing oilfield. This incentive to outside capital has not cost the province a penny. Its income from royalties and lease sales is just over half the oil-income dollar, roughly the same as the standard 50-50 split of profits instituted by U.S. companies now operating in Venezuela and the Middle East.

One thing that Alberta has missed because of its government oil policy is a bumper crop of Texas-type millionaires. Few great personal fortunes have been amassed. One of the rare exceptions is Eric Harvie, 59, of Calgary, who held the mineral rights on some 500,000 acres of Alberta land. Harvie got the rights seven years ago as payment from a company that could not raise cash to pay a legal fee. They are now worth about $50 million. But Multimillionaire Harvie goes in for no big-rich gestures. He drives a two-year-old Studebaker and lives in a modest house. Only one Calgary oilman, Frank McMahon, has got around to building a private swimming pool--and it is nothing to impress Hollywood.

Widespread Bounties. Alberta's oil bounties are spread thinly but widely among its 900,000 people. Upwards of 10,000 Albertans, whether $75-a-week roughnecks in the fields or new office boys in Calgary's bustling stock exchange, now make a living directly from Alberta oil. New schools, hospitals and highways, financed with government oil revenue, are abuilding up & down the province. Alberta has cut its taxes 7%, the first substantial provincial tax cut in Canada since the '20s. Its debt has been cut in half, and the province expects to be completely debt-free within twenty years.

Industry Imported. Aside from direct revenue, Alberta has reaped other lush benefits from her oil boom. Great pools of natural gas have been probed by the oil drills, raising Alberta's total gas reserves to 4.5 trillion cubic feet, supplying 90% of Canada's gas. So far, the Alberta government has banned gas exports, hoping to entice new industries to move into the province. The plan has worked to some degree. An affiliate of Celanese Corp. of America is building a $50 million acetate mill at Edmonton. The province's first pulp & paper mill is under way in the same area. Du Pont and other chemical companies are planning big Alberta plants.

Alberta will probably release gas for export soon, setting off a rush of pipeline building that will rival the railroad era. Edmonton is already flooded with applications to pipe Alberta gas to eastern Canada, the Canadian West Coast and the U.S. Pacific Northwest. Delhi Oil Corp. of Dallas has bid to build a $253 million pipeline from Princess, Alta. to Montreal, a distance 400 miles longer than the world's longest pipeline (1,840 miles), from Rio Grande to New York.

Oil Exported. Enthusiastic oilmen envision the Alberta of the future as a northern Texas whose oil and gas pipelines will fan out over the top half of the continent, driving the expanding industries of Canada and the northern U.S. as the oil and gas of Texas now power the South and East. Such a development would make a blockaded North America largely self-sufficient in petroleum in case of war.

As yet Alberta's production (28 million bbls. in 1950) is a splash in the tank compared to Texas' 1950 output (933 million). But the vision of Alberta's future is not farfetched. Area alone is not a definitive factor, of course, but Alberta's oil lands are larger than Texas' great oil basin. And in the north are the great Athabaska tar sands, where an estimated 200 billion bbls. of oil, more than double the world's known reserve, lie locked in an asphalt-like sand-bed. Already, Alberta oil is flowing fast enough to fill a third of Canada's needs. It is pipelined across the continent for industrial Ontario; soon, through refineries at Superior and Duluth, it will pour into the oil-hungry areas of Wisconsin and Minnesota. And all this has been accomplished in four years, with only the first big gush from the wells. For Alberta, the brimming best is yet to come.

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