Kemp Morgan

Also Known As: also Gib Morgan; the tales descend from Gilbert “Gib” Morgan, 1842 to 1909, known in the oil fields as the Minstrel of the Oil Fields
Region/Culture: North America
Mythos: Urban Legends & Contemporary Folklore
Primary Type/Nature: Heroes and Mortals
Mythical Attributes: He can smell crude oil through solid ground and put up a derrick single-handed on a scale no crew of mortals could manage.
Role in Mythos: He is the oil patch’s own occupational giant, the figure the drilling crews made for themselves the way the logging camps made Paul Bunyan.
Relation to Humans: He is not worshipped, petitioned or feared; he is quoted, by working men, on night tour, to other working men who know perfectly well it is all lies. The point of him is not belief but company, which is why his stories survive as jokes told straight rather than as legends told solemnly.

The derrick covered four acres of hardpan at its base and climbed so far that it had to be hinged in two places to let the moon go by. Men said this at four in the morning with the boiler ticking and the coffee going cold in the can, and nobody laughed, because laughing would have spoiled it. The oil fields of Oklahoma and Texas ran on two things in the first decades of the last century. One was cheap muscle. The other was a very particular kind of lying, and Kemp Morgan is what the second one produced.

He was a driller. Nothing more exalted than that, no altar, no offerings, no priesthood. What set him apart was his nose. He could walk a lease with his hands in his pockets, stop halfway across a quarter-section, tip his head back like a man reading weather, and tell the crew to set the rig down right there because the oil was underfoot and smelling ready. No divining rod, no doodlebug peddler, no geologist with a hammer and a theory. The sniff was the survey. Frost cracking under forty pairs of boots, the mules blowing steam, and a whole crew standing at the wagons waiting on one man’s sinuses.

The real man behind this is documented, which is unusual for a figure of his type and worth saying plainly. Gilbert Morgan was born at Callensburg, Pennsylvania, in 1842, served through the Civil War, and came home to the Venango County fields, where he worked as a tool dresser, driller, roustabout and pipeline hand. His young wife died. His children were adopted out. After that he wandered from field to field for the better part of thirty years, carrying nothing much except a talent, and he told his stories about himself in the third person, which is the mark of a man who knows his own material. He died in 1909 and lies in Mountain Home Cemetery in Tennessee. The nickname he earned while alive was Minstrel of the Oil Fields.

His tales travelled faster than he did. Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio crews carried them south and west after 1900, into Texas, Oklahoma, California and Illinois, and somewhere in that migration the name came loose from the man. By 1930 he was turning up in print in the Southwest, in B. A. Botkin’s *Folk-Say* and in the Texas Folklore Society’s *Man, Bird and Beast*, as a hero of the Oklahoma and Texas rigs. In 1939 Olive Beaupré Miller put a chapter called “Kemp Morgan, the Hero of the Oil Fields” into a widely read collection of American popular tales for young readers, and that spelling stuck to a generation of schoolchildren. Gib had become Kemp. The tales stayed exactly the same.

And they are good tales. He drilled a champagne well in the Fiji Islands, which went flat and turned to vinegar. He brought in a buttermilk sand, the best he ever tasted, and lost it by drilling on into a flow of alum that shrank the hole until the tools would not go down, so the lease had to be abandoned. As chief driller for the Scarcely Able and Hardly Ever Got Oil Company he bought a cow that gave two ounces of milk a day, fed her twenty quarts of nitroglycerin, and had her flowing ten gallons a day thereafter. Somewhere in a South American jungle he ran out of drilling cable, found a boa constrictor a mile long, spliced the snake into the string and went on drilling. The well came in at thirty thousand barrels an hour. He named the snake Strickie, and when it shed, he had the skin made into a pipeline to run the oil down to the coast.

The boarding house is the one that gives the best sense of him. He built it in West Virginia, mostly as a favour to friends, and his buckwheat cakes drew such crowds that he had to industrialise. Concrete mixers turned the batter. Steam engines turned the mixers. The griddles were the bottoms of forty-three-thousand-barrel oil tanks with gas wells burning underneath them, and the men who greased those griddles did it by skating across the hot iron on slabs of bacon fat strapped to their feet, followed by a second crew working the batter hoses and a third turning cakes with shovels. Butter and maple syrup came along the half-mile counters through pipes, with a spigot at every seat. He was feeding twenty-five thousand men at a sitting before he put up a sign restricting the place to drillers and tool dressers.

Nobody ever drew him. There is a photograph of Gilbert Morgan, a compact bearded man who looks like exactly what he was, but the legend has no face at all, and the tellers never bothered to give it one. Scale does the work a body would normally do. You know how big he is by the acre of derrick, the mile of snake, the tank bottoms doing duty as skillets, and by the flat unbothered way a man says he capped a blowing gusher by himself because he heard a thunderstorm coming and did not want the rig struck.

What he can do is essentially what a driller wishes he could do. He finds oil without instruments, works without a crew, improvises a tool out of whatever the jungle provides, and never gets hurt doing it. What he cannot do is turn any of it into money. Look at the pattern under the jokes and it is relentless: the champagne goes to vinegar, the buttermilk is ruined by alum, the hole shrinks, the lease is abandoned, and the greatest strike of his career happens on somebody else’s lease for somebody else’s company. He has the gift and never the lease. That was the joke, and the men telling it at four in the morning were not the ones getting rich either.

His other limitation is the one that caught up with him last. Richard Dorson coined the word fakelore in 1950 for manufactured folk heroes dressed up as inherited tradition, and Kemp Morgan is routinely filed under it, sitting on the same shelf as Pecos Bill and Febold Feboldson. The charge half sticks. The name is a re-christening, and the children’s-book career is genuine popularisation rather than transmission. But the tales themselves are not invented, and Mody Boatright proved it: his 1945 study for the Texas Folklore Society collected fifty-one of them and tracked the whole cycle back to a real man who really told them in real camps to real crews. Which leaves an odd result. Kemp Morgan is a fake name attached to true stories about a man who spent thirty years making things up.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Kemp Morgan?

Kemp Morgan is the tall-tale hero of the American oil fields, a legendary driller from the rigs of Texas and Oklahoma who could smell crude oil through solid ground. He is the oil industry’s counterpart to Paul Bunyan in logging or John Henry in railroad work. The name is a Southwestern variant of Gib Morgan, the form used in the older tellings.

Was Kemp Morgan a real person?

The tales come from a real person, though not one called Kemp. Gilbert “Gib” Morgan, born in Callensburg, Pennsylvania in 1842 and dead in 1909, was a Civil War veteran and a working driller, tool dresser and pipeline hand who spent about thirty years telling these stories in oil camps across Pennsylvania, Ohio, West Virginia and beyond. The folklorist Mody Boatright collected fifty-one of his tales and published them in 1945.

What is Kemp Morgan’s most famous tall tale?

The best known is the derrick he built for a Texas well, which covered four acres at its base and had to be hinged in two places to let the moon go by. Almost as famous is the South American well where he ran out of drilling cable, spliced in a boa constrictor a mile long, brought in a gusher of thirty thousand barrels an hour, and then used the snake’s shed skin as a pipeline.

Is Kemp Morgan fakelore?

Partly. The name Kemp is a later re-christening of Gib Morgan, and it was fixed in popular memory by a 1939 children’s collection of American tales rather than by the oil crews themselves, which is why folklorists group him with invented heroes like Pecos Bill. The underlying stories, however, are genuine oral tradition from the oil patch, traceable to a named teller and documented in the field.

Why could Kemp Morgan smell oil underground?

The ability is the oil field’s own wish turned into a joke. Locating a well in the early decades of drilling was expensive, unreliable and frequently wrong, so the tales gave Morgan a nose that removed the problem entirely, letting him walk a lease and pick the spot without instruments, geologists or luck.