Oil companies sank the first commercial oil wells in Indian Territory between 1895 and 1901. Crude State traces the origins of the industry that sprang up in the aftermath, focusing on the settler culture that helped foster the growing petroleum industry, the various political entities that attempted to govern oil extraction, and the environmental changes and social tensions that intensive oil production created in the region into the 1940s.
Throughout this period, Indian Territory and Oklahoma oilfields were among the most productive not only in the United States but around the world. But territorial and state officials often sought to ensure that the most socially and politically desirable groups of extractors maintained favored access to crude-bearing land. Lawmakers touted regulatory measures as a bulwark against the monopoly power of consolidated corporations, outspokenly condemning the multinational status of the oil corporations they intended to contain even as they sought to erect exclusionary policies to stymie the arrival of foreign-born migrants, undermine the flourishing of Black residents, and eliminate the sovereign power of tribal nations. These political goals became increasingly conjoined in the era surrounding World War I, when a new settler state was founded just as petroleum’s force in public life began to take on real significance.