The Cushing-Drumright field of Creek County is one of the most consequential oil fields in American history. Opened by wildcatter Tom Slick’s Wheeler No. 1 in March 1912, it boomed so violently that by 1915–1916 it supplied roughly a fifth of the petroleum sold in the United States. The pipelines, tank farms, and refineries built to handle that flood made the town of Cushing a storage crossroads — and today the Cushing hub is the delivery point that prices West Texas Intermediate crude for the world.
Tom Slick and partner C. B. Shaffer completed the Wheeler No. 1 on Frank Wheeler’s farm on March 12, 1912, flowing about 400 barrels a day from roughly 2,300 feet. Slick famously kept the strike quiet for nearly two weeks — hiring every livery rig in the area so rival lease men could not reach landowners — while he and Shaffer leased the surrounding country. When word escaped, one of the wildest lease scrambles in Oklahoma history followed, and boom towns like Drumright, Oilton, and Shamrock sprang up almost overnight.
Production climbed as drillers found deeper pays, culminating in the prolific Bartlesville and Wilcox sands. At its May 1917 peak the field produced on the order of 300,000 barrels a day — for a time roughly two-thirds of the refinable crude in the Western Hemisphere. Cumulative recovery ultimately ran to hundreds of millions of barrels, commonly tallied at more than 450 million, before the flush era gave way to settled production, proration, and eventually waterflooding of the old sands.
The field’s greatest legacy is infrastructure. So many pipelines converged on Cushing to move the boom-era crude that the town remained a storage and trading center long after flush production ended. When the New York Mercantile Exchange launched its crude oil futures contract in 1983, Cushing was chosen as the delivery point — which is why "Cushing, Oklahoma" still headlines every WTI price quote and weekly inventory report today.
Cushing production comes from a stack of pays on the Cherokee Platform, draped over the Cushing anticline. The Pennsylvanian Bartlesville sand and the deeper Ordovician Wilcox sand were the giants, with the Layton and other shallower sands contributing. The structure is straightforward by Oklahoma standards — a well-defined anticlinal trap — which is one reason the field was drilled up so quickly during the boom. The old sands still support stripper production and waterflood units a century later.
After the flush era, Cushing’s operators turned to the standard toolkit for mature sandstone fields: infill drilling, proration-era pressure conservation, and eventually waterflooding of the Bartlesville and other sands, which continues on various leases today. No large-scale tertiary project defines Cushing the way CO2 defines some giants; instead, its long tail is the classic Oklahoma stripper-and-flood profile — hundreds of modest wells whose collective output, and royalty payments, have persisted for over a hundred years.
Cushing-area minerals combine a very long production history with heavily fragmented ownership: interests here have typically passed through three or four generations since the 1910s leases were signed, and many owners hold small decimals across several old units. Valuing them means reading lease status, flood activity, and plugging liability tract by tract — not applying a rule of thumb. We buy minerals and royalties in Creek County directly and provide free written offers, handling title research at our expense.
County-level well data, production charts, and selling guides for the counties this field spans:
They are related but distinct. The field is the 1912-era Cushing-Drumright producing area in Creek County; the hub is the tank farm and pipeline complex around the town of Cushing that grew out of the boom and now serves as the WTI futures delivery point. Owning minerals in the field does not involve the storage business.
Yes. The flush days ended generations ago, but stripper wells and waterflood units still produce from the Bartlesville and other sands across the old field, and royalty checks — often small ones — continue to be paid on those leases.
Send us whatever you have — a check stub, division order, or the legal description. We will identify the leases and units your interest sits under, review their production and flood status, and give you a free written offer with the reasoning shown.