Wildcatters: The Story of Pacific Petroleum and West Coast Transmission

by Earle Gray

Francis Murray Patrick McMahon, diamond core drilling contractor, oil and gas wildcat explorer, pipeline builder, and business entrepreneur, inherited the boldness of his father, a wanderlust prospector and hotel keeper whose quest for fortune took him to boom towns from Dawson City in the Klondike gold rush to San Francisco when the great earthquake and fire demolished 80 percent of the city. But Frank Junior had a clearer vision of how build an enterprise and acquire a fortune, and the tenacity to stick with it through spectacular failures and hard times in the Great Depression of the 1930s, when he didn’t have enough money to pay the bill for the coal gas that heated his house.
Success was built on the strength of a $100 option to acquire an 80-acre lease near the expanding number of wells in the Turner Valley oil field southwest of Calgary. That was the seed of Pacific Petroleums, one of Western Canada’s pioneer independent oil companies.
Frank had another vision, to supply Vancouver with natural gas, a quest he pursued for 27 years. His first effort, in 1930, was drilling for natural gas in a small sedimentary basin covering the nearby Fraser River Delta. He found only enough gas for heat and hot water for one farmhouse for 12 years. A dozen years later, McMahon turned his attention to the Peace River country of northern British Columbia, where some natural gas had already been found, but in what quantity no one knew. A report from a consulting geologist speculated that a pipeline to bring the northern gas 650 miles to Vancouver could relieve householders “from the tedious hours of stoking furnaces and carrying out ashes,” improve health, and remove the coal-burning scum that made the city “one of the dirtiest on the continent.” It took yet another 15 years of wildcat drilling, promotion, fundraising, and 357 days of public hearings, spread over four years, before regulatory bodies in Canada and the United States, to tap the northern gas. When it was completed in 1957, Westcoast Transmission had built Canada’s first long-distance gas pipeline, and supplied the first natural gas service to towns throughout the interior of British Columbia, to Vancouver, and to the U.S. Pacific Northwest.
Success transformed McMahon from a grime-covered worker on the floor of a drilling rig in the most rugged and inaccessible areas of British Columbia, to a suave financial sponsor of Broadway musicals (Pajama Game, Damn Yankees) and breeder whose horses ran in the Kentucky Debry, Britain’s Epsom Downs, and a winner at the Irish Derby.
Wildcatters is “A finely honed portrait of one of Canada;s gutsiest and most successful trailer blazer,” says a Toronto Star review.

306 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1982

About the author

I began writing during my high school years in a village on the west coast of British Columbia, for the local weekly newspaper and as a stringer for the Vancouver Sun. After high school I followed a common enough path at a time when newspaper reporters liked to think that five years on the job provided a better education than university and a bachelor’s degree, and a journalist was said to be a reporter without a job. I worked as a reporter on a weekly newspaper in West Vancouver, on the Vancouver Sun, and the Albertan, one of two daily newspapers in Calgary, Alberta. These were the early years of the Canadian oil boom. For a time I spent my days writing about oil for the Albertan, and my evenings as a sports writer. Then I joined an oil industry publication as writer and sub-editor.
I changed my career from writer to publisher, launching a small-town weekly newspaper in Invermere, in central British Columbia. It took a year to go broke, in a manner once described in a Hemmingway novel: first slowly, then all of a sudden.
Returning to Calgary, I was editor of Oilweek magazine, one of Canada’s premier trade publications, from 1956 to 1971. This was when I wrote my first two published books, one a layman’s guide on how the petroleum industry functions, and its economic impact; the other, a history of the Canadian petroleum industry.
From mid-1971 to the Fall of 1977 I was stationed in Toronto as director of Public Affairs for Canadian Arctic Gas, a consortium of major U.S and Canadian firms that spent about $200 million on engineering and environmental studies, and regulatory hearings in both countries, for a proposed multi-billion dollar pipeline to transport natural gas from Prudhoe Bay on the North Slope of Alaska and the Mackenzie River Delta in Canada, to cities across both countries. A competitive proposal won government approvals, but the pipeline has never been built; this despite the assurances of a U.S. President and a Canadian Prime Minister that it would be. It was, at the time, thought urgently needed. Prudhoe Bay is the largest oil field ever found in North America, but also one of the largest natural gas fields. Most of the Prudhoe Bay oil has now been produced, but all the natural gas is still there, frozen in the Arctic, as it were.
Since 1977 I have worked independently as an editorial consultant, speechwriter, publisher (two small periodicals), and author of eight more non-fiction books. My awards include a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Petroleum History Society (Canada) and the Samuel T. Pees Keeper of the Flame Award from the Petroleum History Institute (U.S.), one of just two Canadians to receive the latter award.
I am just starting work on my most ambitious, and possibly my last book. The working title is Fossil Fire: The impact of prehistoric fuels in the era of global warming, a history of coal, oil, and natural gas from the start of the Industrial Revolution. It will focus on the social, environmental, and economic impacts, good and bad. Fossil fuels have done more than any other resource in the last 300 years to advance human welfare, but now pose the greatest threat to human life in the form of global warming.
On a personal note, my interests include hiking, cooking, photography, and, of course, reading. I am also a bit of an exercise fanatic and a healthy eating zealot, both stemming from a cardiac arrest that almost took my life at age 58. Joan, my wife, drove me to the hospital as I felt, for the first and only time, the searing pain of angina. A cardiologist suggested I stay overnight for “observation.” During the night I was hit by two major cardiac arrests, and would not have survived but for defibrillation within a very few minutes.
After that, I determined to exercise more consistently, building up slowly, and follow a rigidly healthy diet. At age 78, I was one of thousands to climb the 1,776 steps to the top of one the world’s tallest building, Toronto’s CN Tower, in an an