Kettleman North Dome Oil Field in Literature and Film
Wildcatting The Hills of Kettleman is a fictional account of oil being discovered in the Kettleman Hills.}}
Boom Town the 1940 epic film about wildcatting in the early oil industry, and about those maverick 'wildcatters' turned loose upon the tundra of those windswept plains of Oklahoma starring screen giants Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy as the oilmen. The film spans years, and the breadth of the continent, as each man gets rich and goes bust with regularity. It also portrays the extraordinary period in history that the early decades of the 20th century provided for the industry. A time when a man with a dream, desire, and some skill, combined with a bit of luck, could overnight become one of the richest and most successful people in America. The movie also appears to incorporate in fascinating pieces of the actual histories of a number of the great wildcatters of the era.
The film ends with the Gable and Tracy characters preparing to be the first oil men to drill on The Kettleman Dome. Interestingly, in light of how history has played out, the Gable character who had been brought up on charges of attempting to create an oil monopoly was just cleared based on testimony supplied by the Tracy character who spoke about how the Gable character, without actually realizing it, was an environmentalist who had been attempting to control the speed by which oil was harvested so that the oil reserves wouldn’t be depleted and America would have oil well into the future when it was needed.
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