The wildcat well on the Porter farm at Arbon, 1969

In the summer of 1969 a hundred-foot derrick stood in a farm field in Arbon Valley, Power County, Idaho. It was on the Donald Porter farm, a mile and a half northwest of the Arbon post office, and its crew was drilling for natural gas or oil. On Sunday, July 6, the Idaho Sunday Journal put the well on its front page. Four weeks later the same paper reported that the drillers had stopped.

Between the wells

Arbon Valley had been drilled for oil before. In 1921 the Idaho Research and Development Co. put down the valley's first oil well on Thomas S. Toyn's ranch, and from 1924 until at least 1929 the Gem State Petroleum Co. drilled beside the Central school, probably on the Tom Evans place. Neither made a producing well. In 1949 and 1950 Standard Oil Company of California took leases in the valley and spoke of a seismic survey, but that post could not say whether the survey was ever made.

A later report answers part of that question. On July 5, 1956, in a page on Idaho's oil hunt, the Idaho State Journal said that Standard Oil geologists had "shot" Arbon Valley in 1951. They set off dynamite in drilled holes and took seismograph readings of the blasts to work out the rock layers underneath. Standard, the paper added, had not come back in the five years since. The same page listed Phillips Petroleum's No. 1 Juniper well, about 42 miles south and west of Pocatello, finished as a dry hole on February 9, 1951. That was probably the Juniper wildcat announced in 1949.

A gas company goes looking

The next search came from a gas company. Intermountain Gas Co. of Boise had been in business only twelve years, and all the gas it delivered across southern Idaho came from other suppliers, the bulk of it by pipeline from the San Juan field in the Four Corners country. It wanted a supply of its own. Over the previous few years it had gathered oil and gas leases on Arbon Valley land, about 55,000 acres in all. Of all the places in southeastern Idaho that geologists had studied, Arbon Valley looked the best bet, said L. W. "Red" Hawk, the company's land manager. Under the lease terms, an eighth of whatever came out of the ground would go to the owner of the land.

On March 7, 1969, Intermountain signed with two Denver firms: States Oil Co. would explore and Signal would drill. Any gas or oil found would be divided among the three. No one promised much. Allen Cook of States Oil called the venture a "rank wildcat operation" and put the odds at one in a hundred or worse; Hawk put the chance of usable gas at about one in ten.

On the Porter farm

The rig came from Farmington, New Mexico; the front-page photo caption of July 6 said it had been driven in from Snowville, Utah, which may have been the last leg of the trip. It reached the valley over the weekend of June 28 and 29, and on Monday, June 30, with the rig standing ready, the first turn of the bit was planned for the afternoon. The July 6 article, retold below, described the work. Signal reported on Wednesday, July 9, that after roughly a week of nonstop work through stubborn ground the hole had passed 2,500 feet, still without any sign of oil or gas.

The July 6 article also placed the earlier attempt. That hole, by the paper's reckoning, lay just a short walk, some hundreds of yards, from the Porter rig, on ground Lee Newport farmed in 1969; Hawk could say little more about it than that it was an old "cable-tool hole." Lee and Gena Newport bought Tom and Susannah Evans's farm in 1940, and in December 1923 the Gem State company was hauling in equipment to "sink a well on the Tom Evans place." The old hole Hawk meant was very probably the Gem State well.

A dry hole

On Sunday, August 3, the paper reported that drilling had stopped. The hole had reached 3,677 feet, short of the 3,800 or more hoped for, when Signal packed up and left. "There was not a show at the depth we went," Hawk said. In his view the test had neither ruled the valley out nor proved it. The ground had been harder than expected, a deeper test would need a bigger rig, and oil companies were wary because Congress might cut their depletion allowance and money was tight. Intermountain was still paying rent on its leases and hoped to drill again, perhaps within a year. As of Friday, August 1, Signal had not yet hauled its rig away.

No later report has been found. The papers do not say whether anyone drilled again, how long the leases ran, or what the landowners were paid, and they give nothing about Donald Porter beyond his name and his farm. In September 1980 a Journal correspondent at Malad, writing about seismic crews working across Oneida County along the Overthrust Belt's western margin, mentioned that a well near Arbon had once turned up a little oil, according to old newspaper accounts. Nothing in that report places the 1980 crews in Arbon Valley itself.

On this site: the first oil well, the Toyn ranch well of 1921–1922, the Gem State well, Standard Oil's leases of 1949, and the Arbon area history.

The story as reported

Idaho Sunday Journal, July 6, 1969, page 1, continued on page A-3. The original article is under copyright; this is our own report of what it said.

ARBON VALLEY — A test well for gas and oil on the Donald Porter farm had Arbon Valley talking in early July 1969, Journal staff writer Paul Smith reported. No one had yet found oil or gas in paying amounts anywhere in Idaho.

The hole was a mile and a half northwest of the Arbon post office. The idea was Intermountain Gas Co.'s: it hoped for gas close to home that could stretch, or even stand in for, what came to it by pipeline. Intermountain brought in States Oil Co. of Denver to handle the exploring, and States Oil hired another Denver firm, Signal Drilling Co., to run the rig. Any profit from a strike would be split three ways. Intermountain held about 55,000 acres of leases over an area roughly 12 miles by six. Gas was what the company was after, Stan Day, its district manager in Pocatello, told the paper, but it would be glad to find oil too.

Two reasons for the choice came out: geologists had found in the valley the same kinds of rock layers that yield oil across the line in Utah and Wyoming, and a well sunk there about four decades before had struck some oil, just not enough to be worth pumping. Intermountain's land manager, L. W. Hawk, had few details on that first try, except that it was drilled with cable tools. The paper put it within some hundreds of yards of the new rig, on what was by then Lee Newport's farm. Whatever this hole turned up, the companies planned to say as little about it, for as long, as they could. Other test sites had reportedly been chosen as well, though whether they would be drilled hung on how the first hole looked. "The drill bit is going to tell the tale," Hawk said.

About a dozen men worked the rig, seasoned hands who followed the work from one oil field to the next. The goal was 3,800 feet or more. A bit 12½ inches across would cut the top 300 feet, and a narrower 7⅞-inch bit would take over from there; plenty of spares waited for when bits wore out. Pressing the bit down was the kelly, roughly 35,000 pounds of steel tubing wrapped around the drill shaft. A single diesel engine did double duty, turning the drill at the site and driving the portable rig down the road, with the 100-foot derrick folded flat for the trip. Into the hole went a mud made of dirt and water, the water piped from a well about 300 yards away; it kept the sides from caving and carried the cuttings back up.

Those cuttings went to James Meinsohn, a Denver geologist who worked independently, renting out his skill and equipment to exploration companies, and in a trailer on the site he looked them over under a microscope and ultraviolet light. An electronic detector told him if gas was coming up and of what kind. Audie Jones of Farmington, New Mexico, was the rig's pusher, the oil-field term for the boss of a drilling crew. Signal vice president Larry Stone would serve as engineer in charge. The men expected to know within a month or so.