When a young mining engineer by the name of Thomas Barger, Minnesota born but raised and educated in North Dakota, arrived in Arabia in 1937, in Dhahran to be exact, it was, of course, a simpler age. It was then that the “modern” Arabian world was “invented,” and the solitude and the poverty of the desert world were both disturbed and ameliorated by new means and possibilities. It was the Great Depression at home; Barger, twenty-nine years of age, was madly in love with Kathleen Ray, a young rancher’s daughter from Medora, North Dakota. The work of a mining engineer was hard to find; he had worked as a miner to make ends meet. An offer came from Standard Oil of California to go prospecting for oil in Arabia and to do geological surveys. He took it and went to Arabia without his bride.
It would be several years before she could join him. He was to know adventure and to rise to the rank of chief executive officer of Aramco, the Arabian American Oil Company, and chairman of its board. He and this band of pioneers would bring forth a whole new world. A steady stream of letters he sent to his young bride back in North Dakota catches the wonder of that encounter in its early years of innocence. (The letters have been assembled and superbly edited by the Bargers’ son, Timothy. The Bargers would have six children in Arabia; by a twist of fate, I would teach one of their daughters, Norah, at Princeton. I could not have known then what yearning and adventure went into her parents’ life.) Here is Tom Barger on January 19, 1938, rendering to Kathleen, back on the ranch in North Dakota, the simplicity of the world he had ventured into:
January 19, 1938
Jabal Dhahran
The soldiers are curious about everything. When Walt told them about winter in America, they couldn’t understand why anyone would live in a country piled in ice and snow half of the year. Often when he tells them something particularly astounding, especially if it is man-made, one of them, usually old Salih, will say, “Allah Akbar,” God is the greatest. The others follow suit and say, “Allah Akbar,” presumably to show that after all it doesn’t amount to much…. These poor people have no doctors and only the simplest and crudest of remedies. Despite their “Enshallah,” if God wills, they are desperately eager to be doctored. A geologist out here has to be an amateur physician.
And from a letter dated February 20, 1938:
Jerry and I spent the night swapping stories with the soldiers around the campfire. Jerry told about Daniel Boone throwing tobacco in the eyes of his Indian captors and swinging over a river gorge on a vine to make his escape. I stumbled through Custer’s Last Stand. The Indians are called the “American Bedu” and the soldiers, “the Army of the Government.” Khamis and the rest are used to my terminology and especially love the Indian names such as Crazy Horse, Red Cloud and Rain in the Face.
Abdul Hadi hadn’t heard of the Indians before and was fascinated by them. He wanted to know where they lived and finally ventured his opinion that they must be related to the tribes in Iraq. Salim Abu Ar-Ru’us doesn’t take much interest in our stories because he can’t understand our Arabic, so he sits crooning softly to himself. This can be disconcerting to the storyteller, but is apparently good Arabian etiquette.
Men did not know each other then, but there was less rancor. It hadn’t been perfect harmony then. A young Wahhabi cleric, who would come into great authority in the years to come, one Abdulaziz ibn Baz, was heard from in 1939 lamenting that Ibn Saud had sold the land to the unbelievers. There is no need to prettify that desert world, and Barger didn’t. I hazard to guess that his Saudi counterparts and men and women of his and his wife’s age didn’t either.
There is a memory older still than the time of Dhahran and the American oil prospectors, a time when America, in the Arabian Peninsula, was only the story of a distant land and of a benevolent leader. It was 1922: a visitor from the Levant, Ameen Rihani, a Christian Lebanese author who would fall under the spell of Ibn Saud, had come to the desert to meet the rising Arabian chieftain. Rihani knew the outside world, and Ibn Saud was curious to know about the “fall” of President Woodrow Wilson. It was hard for the desert ruler to understand how the Americans chose their leaders. Rihani had sketched for him the basics of the American way: parties, elections. “Strange! And does it not lead them to war?” the ruler asked. “What of Wilson?” he added. He was gone “because the majority was not with him in the last elections,” his visitor replied. (Wilson had of course served two terms and had left office an ailing, broken man. But such was the answer Rihani had given Ibn Saud.)
“I do not think they did well,” Ibn Saud observed of the American electorate. “Wilson is a great man. And his is the credit for awakening the small oppressed nations of the world. Wilson showed them the way to freedom and independence. He has infused, especially into the people of the East, a new spirit. He has also made America known to us…. America is the mother of all weak nations, and we Arabs are of them…. I liken Europe today to a great iron door, but there is nothing behind it.”
It was easier then between nations—before the resentful dependence and the entanglements. This was a good generation before Thomas Barger and the other American prospectors and oilmen ventured into the Peninsula, forever altering its rhythm and its ways.