Mary-Jane Deeb: Good afternoon.   I'm Mary-Jane Deeb.
I'm the Chief of the African and Middle Eastern Division
at the Library of Congress.
Thank you all for coming, and this is,
this promises to be a very exciting and certainly a timely presentation
on the history of the discovery of oil
in Saudi Arabia by American geologists.
A few months ago when Bill Sittig, Chief of the Business, Science
and Technology Division asked if I wanted to cosponsor this program
with his division, I immediately agreed,
as the subject fascinated me, and I also knew many of the people working
for Aramco, the Arabian American oil company that's
at the core of the story.
And I have to add that Bill Sittig has organized one
of the most successful lecture series in the Library's history,
and so it was a privilege to work with him.
Since Bill retired late this summer, Ron Bluestone and Margot McGuinness
[ spelled phonetically ]
have been in charge of this wonderful lecture series,
and I want to thank them for all the work they have done on this
and all the other programs that Bill had in the pipeline.
Today we have two great speakers
who will be presenting Wallace Stegner's book, Discovery:
the Search for Arabian Oil, which was commissioned in 1955 by Aramco
to tell the story of the arrival to the Arabian Peninsula
of the first American geologists in the 1930s when Saudi Arabia was one
of the poorest countries in the world.
This is a tale of adventure and daring-do.
It is the story of the creation of a legendary oil company
with a wonderful cast of characters, right out of a "Lawrence
of Arabia" movie, including Saudi princes, American scientists,
larger than life businessmen and many, many others.
There is passion, intrigue and thrill throughout all,
a vision of the future and of the importance of oil
as a critical source of energy for the world,
and not just for Saudi Arabia.
The author, Wallace Stegner, died in 1993.
His book, which had been commissioned
by Aramco, was completed in 1956.   Because of the political turmoil
in the Middle East following the 1956 Suez crisis, it was shelved
until 1967 when it was serialized
and published in the Aramco magazine.
In 1971 an abridged version was published in Beirut.
Tim Barger here, whose father, Thomas Barger, was the CEO of Aramco
between 1960 and 1969, came across references
to the manuscript while collecting letters written by his father.
Among his father's papers, he found wonderful photographs
that he did not know existed and decided to seek permission
from the Saudi government eventually,
because it now owns Aramco -- to re-publish this book,
which is the topic of today's presentation.
And now a word about the author and the presenters.
The author is Wallace Stegner, and he was born in 1909 in Lake Mills,
Iowa, Wallace Earl Stegner, and grew up poor in Saskatchewan, Canada.
He grew up and eventually had graduated with a B.A. in 1930,
and earned his Ph.D. from the University of Iowa,
and in '45 he began teaching--
well, in '45 he had been teaching for awhile at Harvard.
He established a creative program at Stanford University
where for 25 years he taught a generation of future writers how
to write, and he himself became a Pulitzer Prize winner
for his novel, Angle of Repose.   He passed away in 1993.
But the real hero today is Tim Barger the publisher.
Tim Barger, the publisher of Selwa Press, was born in 1947
in Dhahran, Saudi Arabia.
As we mentioned, his father Thomas Barger arrived in the kingdom
in 1937 as a junior geologist
and spent the first three years exploring the uncharted deserts
of the Aramco concession in the company
of another American geologist,
and more than a dozen Bedouin guides and soldiers.
Tim Barger learned Arabic quickly and was fascinated
by these desert people who lived a way of life
that is basically unchanged since the days of Abraham.
Growing up Tim met many Saudis from Bedouin guides to princes
to merchants who visited the Barger household,
and that became a life passion.
Following graduation from the University of Santa Clara in 1969,
Tim worked as a filmmaker creating TV commercials
and producing wildlife documentaries
for the World Disney Company before returning to Saudi Arabia
to produce medical films at the King Faisal's Specialist Hospital
in Riyadh.
Three years, he later established the first Saudi video
and cable TV operations company in Jeddah.
In 1980 he returned to California and produced films
and scientific videos for the next 20 years.
In 2000 he founded Selwa Press and produced a book
about his father's first three years in the desert entitled,
Out in the Blue: Letters from Arabia, 1937-1940,
and I went to that book signing as well, when the book came out.
The other speaker of course is a very well known author, journalist
and scholar, Thomas Lippman, who is now a scholar
at the Public Policy Center of the Middle East Institute.
For over 30 years, Tom Lippman was a reporter
and editor for The Washington Post.
He has written numerous books including, Inside the Mirage:
America's Fragile Partnership with Saudi Arabia, that came out in 2004,
Madeleine Albright and the New American Diplomacy,
that came out in 2000, Egypt after Nasser, that came out in 1989,
and Understanding Islam, in 1995.
So it is my pleasure and my privilege
to introduce first Tom Lippman, and Tim Barger will follow later.
Thank you.   [ applause ]
Thomas Lippman: Thank you very much Mary-Jane.
Good morning ladies and gentlemen.   Thank you for being here.
I want to thank our hosts and the organizers from the Library
of Congress who've arranged this event and invited me to participate.
Take a look at that photograph.
It actually looks kind of charming doesn't it?
It looks like a nice place.
It's one of the oases in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia,
a part of Saudi Arabia known as Al Hassa.
That photograph is very deceptive
because at the time the first Americans arrived in Saudi Arabia
to look for oil, there was a population.
People lived in those oases, growing dates and tending some livestock,
but it was hideously malarial.
The public health conditions were appalling and people were,
had very -- how shall we say --   they had very short life spans
because of the physical health conditions found
in those waters there.
But most of Eastern Saudi Arabia doesn't look like that at all.
And I'll ask Tim to put up the cover photograph from the book
because when you put that up, when you put out that
up you'll see what most of the terrain actually looked
like when the Americans arrived there.
You see empty sand, basically is what you see.
Those photographs -- those gentlemen in the Arab headdress
that you see there are not Arabs.   They're Americans.
They wore that because basically to avoid offending the natives.
They were expected to dress like that.
If you go today to that of cities of Al Khobar and Dammam
over in the oil region of Eastern Saudi Arabia
as I did most recently last May,
you would see fully modern world-class cities with fine hotels
and excellent restaurants and clean, well-lighted streets,
and everything is computerized and electrified, and you can do things
on your ATMs there that you can't even do in the United States yet.
But when the first oilmen arrived, it was just 75, about 75 years ago.
Seventy-five years is a single lifetime, a single lifetime.
None of that existed when these gentlemen arrived,
and the story that Wallace Stegner tells is the story
of the early years of going essentially from a landscape
that consisted almost entirely of the kind of barren sand
that you see here in this photo, and you would see in other photos,
to build the modern industry,
industrial complex that you see today.
It's sort of as if you could go to what is now Las Vegas,
let's say, 125 years ago.
I don't know what was there in Las Vegas, but not much I guarantee you.
The difference is that you could get
to Las Vegas by road from California.
In Eastern Saudi Arabia you couldn't get there by road
because there were no roads, and had there been any roads, they didn't go
to anywhere that you wanted to go
or that provided anything that you needed.
There were a few, as I said, a few oasis communities and a handful
of flyspeck fishing villages along the coast.
Some of the local people made their living diving for pearls,
and through no fault of their own, the people of Saudi Arabia
at that time were among the least advanced industrially
and commercially in the world.
It had been an economic and commercial backwater for centuries.
Remember that Eastern Saudi Arabia --
you're talking about more than 1000 miles from Jeddah
and the pilgrimage sites and the holy sites of Islam.
You're talking all the way on the other side of the country
as far distant as Maine is from Louisiana, let's say.
So that the eastern provinces were extremely isolated from the rest
of the world, and there was no modern commerce
or services of any kind.
It required an act of some courage for Standard Oil Company
of California, later known as Chevron, to invest the capital
that it would take to develop, to look for oil and bring it
to market in Saudi Arabia.
Remember that the oil -- Chevron got that concession in,
I guess it was 1933, and began to look for oil.
It took them four years, I believe,
to find oil in commercial quantities.
There were doubts at all times
about whether the venture would prove fruitful,
and whether they should keep at it, because they were halfway
around the world, spending millions upon millions of dollars
in the middle of the Depression.
Industrial investment was really risky and,
but Chevron was an oil company that's known
in the business as "crude short."
That is to say, their access to guaranteed supplies
of crude oil was limited and inadequate to insure a prosperous,
a thriving future for the oil company.
They had to go someplace where they could find new sources of crude oil
that they could bring onboard.
And so under an agreement that Chevron officials negotiated
with the King of Saudi Arabia, and his very small cadre of advisers,
Chevron got a concession that gave the company the exclusive rights
to explore for, produce, and ship whatever oil could be found
in an area of more than I think 300,000 square miles,
a vast tract of essentially roadless, empty landscape
of camel tracks and sand and rock
in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia.
Anywhere else in similar circumstances
in the 1930s some organization
of the host government would have provided certain basics.
They would have run some power lines out there for electricity.
They would have run a road.
They would have deepened the harbor, and the local people
of the region would have flocked to this new enterprise
to provide services for the people who worked there --
somebody would have opened a laundry.
Somebody would have opened a barbershop.
Somebody would have opened a brothel,
the things that you really have to have --
[ laughter ]   -- you know?
None of that was available in Saudi Arabia.
You couldn't run power lines
because there were no electric power generating stations.
You couldn't run roads because the government didn't,
the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, a brand new country
in the early 1930s didn't have any money, and so every last bolt
and wire and tool and vehicle had to be imported.
Furthermore, the agreement the King in his wisdom extracted
from Chevron, an agreement that said that to the maximum extent possible,
the Americans had to instruct the local people and bring them a long
and educate them so that they could eventually do this
business themselves.
Even from the beginning the Americans were there essentially
with the long-range vision that they would work themselves
out of their jobs, as indeed has happened.
Everyone in the company -- there's still plenty of Americans
who work there, but everyone who runs Saudi Aramco today,
the world's largest oil company is a Saudi citizen,
beginning with the CEO, Abdallah Jum'ah,
whose father was a pearl diver, and is today the CEO of Saudi Aramco.
This was the sort of tale that appealed to Wallace Stegner.
I mean, it's a wonderful story, but you have this frontier: harsh,
dangerous but promising, and tamed by strong men and intrepid women.
And that's what happened in Eastern Saudi Arabia in the 1930s.
In the beginning, the early days when --
this is what transport looked like -- the Americans brought in cars
and the local people found it very amusing
to watch the cars sink in the sand.   The area was unmapped and trackless,
and the Americans had navigational equipment.
The local people -- all their navigational equipment was in here.
It worked better than what the Americans had,
and you had an enterprise in which the Americans came
in under the protection of the King into a hostile environment
where the summer temperatures would frequently exceed 120 degrees,
and they went out hauling stuff by camel and cars to the extent
that they could make them go out there, and they had to go in caravan
because some car was always being disabled, and the Americans
and Arabs live together in tents and they educated each other, really.
And they created a modern country out of not thing.
It's sort of like the mines of Leadville, Colorado that you read
about in Stegner's great novel, Angle of Repose, and in my view,
one of the most, some of the most interesting passages in Discovery,
the book that Wallace Stegner wrote about this,
are about the pioneer women who went out there in the early days.
You know, the Americans who went
to Saudi Arabia were essentially just ordinary Americans except
that they were geologists and engineers, but they were from places
like Oklahoma and Texas, and they were family people,
and beginning in the mid to late 1930s, they created enough
of a community out of prefab housing with rudimentary air-conditioning
that they could begin to bring their wives out there.
And Stegner has lovely passages, for example,
about a woman named Anita Burley.
I don't know if he ever met Anita Burley, but he probably did.
But she was one of the first American women to live in Jeddah
which was the diplomatic capital where Aramco maintained a kind
of embassy to the King, you might say, over on the other side
of the country, and his description of Anita Burley's first trip
across the country -- I mean,
it doesn't have covered wagons, but it might as well.
I mean, it's a really wonderful story,
and Stegner clearly admired the women who did this,
just the way he wrote admiringly
about the narrator's grandmother in Angle of Repose.
And just to emphasize what we're talking about here,
I'd like to read briefly from the beginning of chapter three
of Discovery: From the point of view of the men who made the beachhead,
what they came to do was a job like other jobs.
From the perspective of history, and with the map in mind,
it was an assignment to challenge the most rash.
Seen in retrospect, it has the nostalgic, almost mythic quality
of an action from the age of giants.
The job was the exploration above ground and below
of some 320,000 square miles of desert, most of it barely known,
most of it casually mapped; some of it visited by Westerners only two
or three times in all its history.
Some of it so arid that the Bedouin tribesmen who wandered across it
on their annual migrations went for weeks without water,
living on the milk of camels,
which in turn could drink the brackish water of the few wells.
And they were there to do the job in the face of enormous difficulties:
a transportation system consisting only of a handful of cars,
supplemented by camels and donkeys, roads when they found any roads
at all that were braiding caravan trails
across the gravel plains and among the dunes.
They were furthermore, half a world away from their base of supplies,
and with hardly a shop or store or warehouse where they could buy
so much as a nail or a pair of pliers,
much less the complex spare parts of a mechanized civilization.
And that's the terrain and the environment
in which these intrepid gentlemen found themselves working,
and all that in summer heat.
Take it from me; the summer heat is so intense
that it fries your eyeballs.
And how they did that is the story that Stegner tells.
It is in my opinion, and I say this in the foreword that Tim asked me
to write to the first American edition of this book,
it's in my opinion as a literary critic -- I'll put that hat on --
it's a little bit breathless.
On the other hand, it was a breathless tale.
These were, these men were operating under in effect,
tight deadlines caused by the doubt and uncertainty
at the oil company headquarters in San Francisco
about whether this was really a good idea,
whether they were going to really find anything.
They were operating under very harsh conditions.
They were under pressure, constant pressure from the king
and his advisers to do more, more quickly for their Arab workers
and for the local people, and once the king discovered in effect
that because he held the ultimate lever of power
into this arrangement, namely the ability to revoke the concession
and give it to some other company, he could extract
from Chevron benefits for the people of the region that Chevron,
which after all was there to make money, was not,
would not normally have been in the business of providing.
Chevron wound up creating the schools and medical clinics of much
of the eastern province of Saudi Arabia, first for its own staff
and their families, but then for everybody else
because the King said, "Hey, why not?
They have money and we don't.
They can bring in schoolteachers and we can't.
Let them do it."   And that's part of the story.
And you'll see as you go through Stegner's narrative
that in the beginning, you had a few guys in Arab headdress,
and bringing in some tools and surveying the terrain to look
for likely places where they might drill.
And within a short time, they brought in an airplane,
and that's a whole separate story in the book because apparently,
they didn't actually have the King's permission to do that,
when they brought in the airplane so that they could do aerial surveys,
but they went from that to actually discovering oil in, I guess 1938.
And I love the photos, some of which you'll see in the book,
of the early town that --
the Americans created a town because they needed places to live.
I mean, they couldn't bring their families over and put them in tents
out there with their Arab counterparts.
They created a town, American can-do.
They shipped in all this stuff, and there was,
they built essentially a community out of nothing,
much as I guess Las Vegas was built based
on a different business, different line of work.
Although this was a pretty big gamble that Chevron was taking here.
And the first shipment of oil for export was loaded into a tanker
in the spring of 1939, and so that's like six years have elapsed now,
that this enterprise had been going on.
It hadn't brought in any money.   It's all been outgo.
Stegner tells all that story.   It had been punctuated
by a catastrophic fire in one of the wellheads.
There's a whole, very dramatic chapter
about that in Stegner's book.
All by itself it would make a terrific
like hour-long TV documentary.
People in Texas knew how to fight oil well fires
and they had equipment on hand to do it.
This was on the other side of the world, and they had fatalities
in that fire, set them way back sort of commercially and emotionally.
The first shipment of oil for export was loaded, I guess it was
in the spring of 1939, and six months later Germany invaded Poland
and World War II began in Europe.
And as a result of that, the oil enterprise instead of growing,
shrank because you couldn't get industrial --
especially after the United States entered the war --
it became harder and harder to get industrial supplies and equipment
and vehicles and the sea lanes were dangerous, and Saudi Arabia was sort
of cut off from the rest of the world and Britain,
which was involved in the war from the beginning got its oil from Iraq
and Iran and other countries around the region, not from Saudi Arabia.
So Stegner's narrative runs through that period,
and into the period during World War II, when essentially Aramco,
the oil company over there, hunkered down to try to wait out the war.
It was the period known in company history as the time
of the hundred men, because that's about what they were down to.
All the women went home, and a few guys hung on waiting for the war
to end because they, like President Franklin Roosevelt,
had a pretty clear vision of what was going to happen
when the war ended and this enterprise could be unleashed
to develop a modern country.
And I would just say that there was a certain amount of dissent
in the early years among the local workers because they could see
that Americans had air conditioning and swimming pools
and vehicles and they didn't.
They lived in palm huts, to a certain extent.
But I personally, I give the oil company people full marks
for doing what was not their mission in life, namely education
of an entire population, and when you see the OPEC Summit
on television and Saudi Arabia's represented by the Minister of Oil,
Ali al-Naimi, Ali al-Naimi was a diminutive, illiterate teenager
when he got a job as essentially a gofer
in this new enterprise over there.
The Aramco people spotted him as promising.
They sent him to Lehigh to get his college degree.
Today he's the Oil Minister of Saudi Arabia.
The country's is full of people like that, people with long memories
of what their country was like in their father's day and the knowledge
of what their country is like now, and it's not a political judgment.
It's essentially a personal judgment about the conditions
in which they live and their families,
about whether this was good for them or not,
and the answer is always yes.
That story is told by Wallace Stegner with a great deal
of panache, and there are a lot of very interesting characters
in there whom you'll enjoy reading about.
On that note, I'm going to turn this over to Tim Barger.
Thank you.   [ applause ]
Mary-Jane Deeb:   [ Unintelligible ]
. Tim Barger: It's not -- there we go.
Sorry about that.
I'd like to thank Mary-Jane and Ron and Margaret and all the people here
at the Library of Congress for having us.
And I'd like to thank all of you people for coming,
and I hope you enjoy what Tom and I have to say.
I was born in that Daharran in 1947, so in many ways the story
of Discovery is part of my heritage.
And I dearly loved being able to put this book together
and being able to publish it.   One of the most enjoyable parts
of doing this whole project was selecting the photographs to use.
I have maybe, in the last ten years, I've collected
about 11 separate collections, and I have hundreds of photographs all
from the mid-1930s to basically the early fifties.
It's just my avocation, so I have a lot to choose from
and I honed it down, and I'd like to share some of these --
I'd just like to expand on the captions
that are in the book already.
As we've shown this picture, but life in Saudi Arabia
in the early 1930s moved at a pace as old as time, literally.
Camel caravans like this, this one east
of Medina crisscrossed the country.
On both coasts the traditional Arabian dhow was built by hand
to a very ancient design plied the waters.
In the eastern side of the country, on the eastern coast
in the Persian Gulf, great fleets
of pearling dhows searched the reefs off have Al Hassa for pearls,
and I don't have a picture of it, but I have movies of these things,
too, because I'm obsessed, and so I have a picture of a pearling dhow
from a movie, and there's a detail on the oar on the pearling dhow,
and you look at the oar and the oar's straight
and then it's got basically a square diagonally on to the oar.
And I'm reading a book about ancient Egypt,
and that's the exact same oar design that's found in a tomb of a boat
that was planted with a mummy in 2000 B.C.
And so things hadn't really changed a lot.
[ laughter ]   If that's
[ unintelligible ]   if it worked, you know.
So -- and then this is the oasis of Hofof, Hofof that Tom showed,
and Hofof Hofof is now the world's biggest, largest inland oasis.
And it's always been that way, and I imagine it was much larger
in the times of Abraham and at Babylon.
I mean, Hofof has been producing dates for the Persian Gulf region
for at least 3,000 years, if not more.
And so that's a long time ago too, and the small villages like this one
in Qatif -- this picture's taken 1938.
These small villages look --
life was pretty much the same as it always was,
and in about 700 A.D. these people became Muslim, but other than that,
nothing really had changed in the day-to-day living of society.
In the town of Hofof itself, this is the Suq al Kamees
[ spelled phonetically ]   , the Thursday market.
It's held every week under the walls of the --
excuse me, under the 500 foot wall of -- excuse me --
under the 50 foot walls of what's called the Al Qut, and it's a fort
that was built in, or actually completed in 1453.
It's a 500-year-old fort.
And I presume that at this time, Hofof was much larger
and had even more dates then but, so it's just sort of mind-boggling.
This way of life just keeps going on and on and on.
And then in Riyadh, the capital city of Riyadh,
this is a very rare picture actually and nobody has really seen it,
but this is from the suburbs.
There's these mud brick buildings that go out, and then in the very --
up here you can see these are the turrets
of the original walls of Riyadh.
And these walls went up about 1820, and then this here is the minaret
of the great Mosque in Riyadh.
Outwardly, it doesn't look like anything's changed in Saudi Arabia,
but what you can't see are the effects
of the worldwide economic depression.
Basically the pilgrim receipts of the pilgrims to Mecca --
during the Depression people quit traveling
so the pilgrim receipts just tanked.
They went down to about 15 percent of what they had been before,
and this is a main source of foreign currency
into the country, and it disappeared.
The pearling fleets of course were a luxury item and they disappeared
in the Depression, and then the export of dates didn't do so well
because there was no cash or credit to buy externally to export,
so as Tom said, an already poor country was becoming much poorer.
Through warfare, diplomacy and the sheer strength of his personality,
after 30 years, Eben Sahud   [ spelled phonetically ]
had unified the Arabian Peninsula,
but now a collapsing economy jeopardized the future
of this kingdom.
This picture is taken on the eve of his appearance in rastaneer
[ spelled phonetically ]   to load the first oil tanker.
This is also a very rare picture, and you can see he's relaxing
in the evening and he's got a look on his face like,
it's almost like he's been wondering what --
he's looking back at the 30 years of his reign,
and it's very contemplative in my opinion.
Sheik Abdulla Suliman, he was the King's minister of finance
and he joined the Eben Sahud service in the early twenties.
In those days they traveled exclusively on camel
and sometimes they had to move quicker than other times,
depending how the war or the combat went,
and so he carried the kingdom's exchequer in a big steel trunk.
When the King granted somebody some money,
the men would be handed a chitty to redeem from Sheik Abdullah,
and then when Sheik Abdullah had a trunk full of chitties and no money,
he made himself scarce, and that was basically --
[ laughter ]   -- basically how it went.
But now, now the king, now he's in charge of the entire kingdom
and they really desperately need money, and after a lot of thought,
they invited Chevron to come
and discuss a concession in Saudi Arabia.
The man on the left here is Lloyd Hamilton.
When he arrived in Jeddah on February 15, 1933 --
he's a representative of Chevron --
when he had arrived in Jeddah on February 13, 1933,
Chevron wasn't doing that well either,
almost as poorly as the kingdom.
Oil was at that point was selling for $.75 a barrel,
and I'm told that Texas crude at that time was $.20 a barrel.
Nobody, very few people know this.
The employees at the Standard Oil or Chevron headquarters
in San Francisco were being paid in script,
just like Abdullah Suliman's chitties, and they had had a string
of failed foreign ventures that had just cost them a ton of money.
They had a slight taste of oil in Bahrain,
but Lloyd really didn't have a real strong hand either
in these negotiations.
The man to the right is Harry St. John Philby.
He was a colleague of T.E. Lawrence and Gertrude Bell,
and he left the British political office in 1925 to serve as a friend,
confidante and adviser to Eben Sahud.
Philby always believed that there was oil beneath the kingdom's
desert, and he hounded, he hounded
and pursued concession seekers all the way up to and including Chevron.
His son Tim Philby would become the most notorious Soviet spy
of the Cold War, and I think probably everyone's heard of him.
After three months of negotiations, a concession was settled,
and five months later the first geologists landed
in Jebaal on the eastern coast.
To blend in the better in public they grew beards and dressed
like Saudis, and in private within their compound,
they made the best of their accommodations.
This is the dining room of their Jebaal compound.
It's a very cheery place.
This particular photo -- when I went to the University of Utah
to do some research for Tom, and to sort of look into some
of the front story of this manuscript, this photo was in a file
of Stegner's personal files of photos for the book,
and when you read Discovery, it's really, really plain to see
that Stegner studied this photograph closely,
absorbing the dining room's ambiance and closely looking at the details
in the picture, down to the fan in the window sill,
and if you read the book, you'll see this portrayed
in words by Mr. Stegner.
This is the outside the Jebaal compound and they've,
the geologists, have lined up their Ford 1932 touring cars
to explore the Saudi Arabian Desert.
Nowadays, no one will go 10 miles unless it's
in an 18 wheel drive Hummer.
These are Ford touring cars, straight off the factory,
and they're assembling for a trip to go down to what was called
at that time, the Dammam Dome.
This is about 100 miles, a little more than that south of Jebaal.
June 5, 1934, the field party landed at the base of,
landed at the Dammam Dome and pitched their camp at the base
of Jebaal Daharran, and they started the camp.
This camp, as humble as it is, would grow into a town and then
into a city and then into the center of the global energy economy,
and it's now home to a million and a half people.
This is the origin of Daharran, and it's a pretty amazing transition.
It's like Tom said; this is Las Vegas 150 years ago.
This is in June.
Of course, the field season ended in June and then
in summer the geologists took themselves up to the mountains
of Lebanon, became sightseers, wore spiffy clothes and stayed
at the Medawar Palace Hotel.
One night at the Medawar Palace Hotel, a young debutante,
Lebanese debutante, Annette Rubeal   [ spelled phonetically ]
appeared in the dining room and Krug Henry
[ spelled phonetically ]   was instantly smitten.
By summer's end they were married and Annette would be the first woman
to join her husband in Daharran.
When the summer was over, it was time to begin drilling.
The earliest wells were drilled with cable tools
and a giant machine called the spudder.
Basically a large heavy chisel was attached,
was suspended by a wire cable over the hole and the spudder lifted
and dropped that bit continuously,
and literally they were chiseling the well into the rock below.
Though it was painfully slow, the spudder didn't require water
and could operate just about anywhere.
The man behind the post here is the infamous Jack Schlossen
[ spelled phonetically ]
, who is infamous for many reasons, but as Stegner wrote
about Jack Schlossen, he went about his business with a wad
of tobacco the size of a tennis ball in his jaw, and in defiance of all,
he offered a chew to any Arab who expressed the slightest interest.
[ laughter ]
And Jack's just one of the many characters in this book.
Discovery really is a character driven book and it's, there's dozens
of these characters, and Jack was one of them, and you can read more
about Jack in Discovery itself.
It was much quicker to drill with a rotary tool, but that required lots
of water and drilling mud, and lots of drilling mud.
This first-generation Saudi pool tool pusher stands surrounded
by drilling mud porters.   He's the only one wearing boots,
and though he probably hasn't been working around the rigs
for very long, already he stands with the macho swagger
of a wildcatter from Texas or Oklahoma, and you can see part
of what Stegner writes about is the American influence
in this Muslim, ancient society.
There's a technological impact and there are various things happening,
and they didn't have the word yet but at that time, I mean,
the term now is culture shock, and when Stegner wrote this book
that hadn't been coined yet, but basically we're talking
about culture shock, and even the Saudi here is standing
in a way that, I don't know if it's culturally but, I guess culturally
or behaviorally or something; I mean, already you can see the impact
that the American culture is making in this Saudi culture,
and things are changing at all levels,
from this subtle body posture all the way up to electrification,
the use of DDT, central water etc., things like that.
So at any rate, after three years of drilling,
in 1938 Dammam Well Number Seven blew in with a roar
and maintained a rate of 3000 barrels a day, which it continued
for 40 years, and Dammam number seven produced something
like 16 million barrels in its lifetime.
With the commercial production, Daharran began to grow,
the oil company finally had something to show
for all its investment up to this time,
and things were looking pretty good.
Anyone who's been in Daharran or knows that area,
to the left of this picture here, to the left here --
this is about 12 miles to the Persian Gulf.
And in these days you could walk in a straight line from the edge
of town to anywhere in the Persian Gulf with not one house,
one fence -- there was nothing there.
There was a small fishing village, and that's it.
Nowadays, if you show this to a young Saudi,
they would never believe it.   It would be like, "Huh?"
Now it's houses, apartments, Kentucky Fried Chicken stands,
car shops, shopping malls that are beyond the most incredible thing
that, you know, they used to show on "Dallas" in the old days.
I mean, it's all   [ unintelligible ]
. So, with the prosperity came the women.
This, this woman -- unfortunately I could not locate her name,
and I really try to find out who each and every one
of these persons are, but I presume that this woman was driving that car
and she drove around camp just as American women or all women,
not even American women in Daharran today drive around camp.
They say that women can't drive in Saudi Arabia,
but if you go Daharran, which is a fairly large town now --
maybe a mile and a half, two miles in diameter --
women drive around all over the place.
And this is sort of a case of culture shock contained
with in a boundary, I guess.   I don't know.
This is the aftermath of an Italian dinner in 1939.
Now it's quite a contrast to the less than fine dining room in Jebaal
from years earlier or five years earlier.
The people here -- I might as well --
well, I like all these people -- this is Esther Altiesti
[ spelled phonetically ]
. She's an Austrian woman married to Bill Altiesti.
Bill Altiesti was the mastermind behind the salvation
of the Well Number 12 when it caught on fire.
He devised the engineering for it, and he also put himself
in harm's way to extinguish that fire.
This is a lady named Jean Cochran   [ spelled phonetically ]
, and that's her husband on the right.
Here in the center is a very rare picture of Lloyd Hamilton.
Now you always see Lloyd Hamilton in a suit,
three-piece suit with this stuffy collar.
He's in Jeddah.   It's 120 degrees.
The humidity is 120 percent if it can be,
but this is the first picture where you can see
that he actually was a hands-on oil man,
and he's got a very severe crew cut and he's in business-these two,
three people I don't really know, these three men here.
Well that's Mr. Cochran.
But at the end here is Babe Dreyfus, and she's the wife of Felix Dreyfus.
Felix was one of the very first people to go to Saudi Arabia
and fortunately for all of us, he took a lot of pictures;
more than half of the photographs in Discovery's plates are taken
by Felix Dreyfus, and the best thing of all
about Babe Dreyfus is she is the woman who took out the pencil
and captioned on the back of the photograph who it was, and you know,
having done archival work, you know, we all know who those people are,
but our children don't, so please write it down on the back,
because somebody, you know,
it only takes a generation, and it's all lost.
In the spring of '39, the company had put together what's called a
teapot refinery; just a small refinery for sort
of the local needs, and then they put up the storage tanks here.
And they were just about ready to accept oil, to ship oil,
and a month later, the king arrived
to celebrate the first shipment of oil from Rasteneer.
This is sort of the critical moment, and this is the moment
that Stegner saw as the tipping point in his story,
the moment when Saudi Arabia would be an entirely transformed,
and he wrote something that I'll share with you because I think it's,
I think it's just so incisive.
He writes, Then Eben Sahud reached out the enormous hand
with which he had created and held together his kingdom
in the first place, and turned the valve on the line
through which the wealth, power and responsibilities
of the industrial 20th-century would flow into Saudi Arabia.
It was May 1, 1939.
No representative of the United States was present,
even as an observer.   The United States had not
yet accredited any representative to Saudi Arabia.
And this really just is an incredible statement
because there's two things at work here; Stegner completely grasped --
even though this is '55 --
he grasped the two-way nature of this concession,
and it wasn't just Saudi's going to make oil.
It also say's, "Saudis, now you have a place in the world
and you have responsibilities," and I --
very few people in 1955 saw things that way.
And then the second part of that paragraph is
that there was no representative of the United States there.
Now you can imagine if Eben Sahud had made a deal with England
or France or Italy or something, there would be a host of worthies:
admirals, diplomats and generals and engineers and planners.
It's exactly what Eben Sahud did not want.
He wanted nobody except the people doing the work,
and so this is a very strange relationship.
It's a contract between a government and a private corporation,
and I have to say I think that's probably why it lasted so long.
And that particular commercial agreement,
has to be one of the most important,
certainly one of the most lucrative contracts ever signed
in the 20th-century.   So things are looking good.
They're shipping oil.
They're making money, and things are bright.
Nine weeks later tragedy strikes.
July 10, Dammam number 12 burst into flames, killing two drillers;
one American, and one Saudi.
The derrick here collapsed within an hour, and the fire--
it threatened number 12 well obviously,
but more significantly it threatened the pressure of the reservoir,
and as Tom said, the people that could fight this fire were available
but they were all in Texas, and Texas to Saudi Arabia with tons
of gear was at least a three or four week prospect.
So what happened is that the men there, just normal oil man,
they took ownership of this fire.
They said, "Well we're going to fight it ourselves," and they did.
In this lower picture you can note the complete lack
of protective gear of any sort.
The American possibly dipped his hat in some water, felt hat,
and the Saudi here, he probably deep dipped his gutter in some water
and wrapped around his head and they got to work.
This fire threatened both their livelihoods, both cultures;
Saudis and Americans would be out of luck if this field went down,
and so they fought together against it, and after ten days
around the clock, the flames went silent.
Three months later, the Germans rolled into Poland,
and the world was at war.
I do have the third page here somewhere.
So wartime shortages of transport, supplies
and equipment had already slowed Daharran's expansion.
On the night of October 19, 1940,
a squadron of Italian bombers stopped it cold.
These are a couple bombs.
Though the bombs had probably been intended for Bahrain,
because American and Saudi Arabia were both neutral countries,
it didn't matter.   The war had come to Aramco.
The -- excuse me -- the hospital was sandbagged
and the wellheads were sandbagged,
and Aramco prepared for a long time, war.
The man on the left here is really remarkable man.
His name is Phil McConnell   [ spelled phonetically ]
. He was one of the main chief engineers
of the Aramco operation at this time.
He was an adviser to Stegner and he was a writer in his own right,
and he was the husband of the indomitable Gertie McConnell
which you'll read about in Discovery, a strong-willed woman;
and he, this man he was -- played the guitar.
He was a poet.   He was just so full of energy.
He loved life throughout his 96 years,
and he had a girlfriend when he was 95.
[ laughter ]   He's an amazing guy.
So with the war, the population plummeted.
The women and children and probably 80 percent of the men left.
Christmas 1940 wore a brave face, but that was all.
Within a month only 100 Americans would remain.
Daharran was cut off from spare parts, equipment
Rastaneer was closed.
Mail might take three weeks from America.
These men relied on their ingenuity to continue the skeleton operation
at Daharran and managed to barge 12,000 barrels of high crude
to Bahrain every day of the war.
Not a lot of oil, but consistently 12,000 makes a lot of oil
over the course of a war.
As Stegner might have put it, Aramco had gone bunkhouse again,
and every day each man was perfectly aware that he was
on the exact opposite of the world from his wife, his children,
his family, separated by war in both directions.
He just didn't know that it would be that way for four long years.
Thank you.   [ applause ]
[ music ]   [ end of transcript ]