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Whereas many incredible miracles occur in the Babylonian country, there is none such as the great quantity of bitumen found there. Indeed, there is so much of it that…the people who have gathered there collect large quantities of it. And although the multitude is without number, the yield, as with a rich well, remains inexhaustible.
—Diodorus of Sicily, Bibliotheca Historica
Bitumen has been in use for far longer than Alberta has been a province, or Canada a country. There are numerous places in the world, including Baku in Azerbaijan, Hīt in Iraq, Pitch Lake in Trinidad, Guanoco Lake in Venezuela, and Sakhalin Island on the east coast of Russia, where bitumen is found in open deposits, in both solid and liquid form. During the past six thousand years or so, in most places and markets where it occurs, bitumen’s traditional uses have been in construction, waterproofing, and paving. At various times, it has also been used as an adhesive and for embalming the dead. The first golden age of bitumen began about four thousand years ago in Mesopotamia, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers, where it was used to most memorable effect as mortar in massive construction projects. Until relatively recently, great bergs of solid bitumen would appear spontaneously on the surface of the Dead Sea, where it would float due to the water’s exceptional buoyancy. This phenomenon occurred so predictably that, in ancient times, the Dead Sea was known as Asphalt Lake.
Prior to European contact, Indigenous peoples in the Athabasca region used bitumen for plugging holes in their canoes and sealing water vessels, much as their counterparts did in the Middle East. To this day, northern Alberta is inhabited by the Dene people, who live widely across the western subarctic. They are members of the Athapaskan language family, and they now share northern Alberta with more recently arrived Cree and several other Indigenous groups, including the Métis, a federally recognized population of mixed Indigenous and European heritage (which, in 2016, included Fort McMurray’s mayor).
Historically, the Dene people subsisted on hunting, trapping, fishing, and berry picking. Several different Dene tribes overlapped in the region, and their presence was a determined but tenuous one: the winters were brutal, starvation was commonplace, and, prior to European contact, populations tended to be in the low hundreds, if that. So strong was their desire to trade that the hardiest among them would travel eastward, all the way to the Hudson’s Bay Company trading hub of Fort York, in present-day Manitoba, a hazardous journey of nearly seven hundred miles. It was there that the first written reference to Alberta bitumen appeared, in the journal of James Knight, the trading post’s chief factor (manager). On June 27, 1715, Knight reported a conversation with Indigenous hunters who told him of a “Great River” that “runs into the Sea on the Back of this Country & they tells us there is a Certain Gum or pitch that runs down the river in Such a bundance [sic] that they cannot land but at certain places.”
It would be another sixty years before a European laid eyes on it.
The river those hunters were referring to was the Athabasca—specifically, the area around present-day Fort McMurray, where bitumen forms a black and sandy stratum through the river valley. On particularly hot days, it will trickle down the south- and west-facing cliffs and pool up on the riverbank; in some places it will flow into the river itself, causing temporary slicks. If the weather is hot and the wind is right, you can smell it before you see it. In winter these drips freeze in place, giving the impression that the cliff faces are weeping black tears, but even at twenty below, they carry an odor of roofing tar. Once they arrived, European explorers and traders would note this acrid goo in their journals as one would a hot spring, a waterfall, or any other local curiosity. But they were there to make money, and, while there was a killing to be made in the boreal forest, it wasn’t in bitumen, not yet.
Long before Syncrude, Suncor, Exxon, or Shell, there was the Hudson’s Bay Company. “The Company,” as it came to be known, was the continent’s first industrial-scale resource extractor, and it pioneered an approach to business, markets, employees, and the natural world that together could be called “wildfire economics.” Using furs as fuel, the European market as fire, and credit as oxygen, the Hudson’s Bay Company burned its way across the North American continent, altering it forever while generating extraordinary wealth for a handful of men an ocean away.
The Company was granted a Royal Charter by King Charles II in 1670, three years after John Milton published Paradise Lost. In return for actionable intelligence on the Northwest Passage, the king gave this “Company of Adventurers” exclusive trading and mineral rights to the Hudson’s Bay watershed, a 2-million-square-mile swath of a continent none of these men had ever seen. This region was appealing because it was known to be rich in fur-bearing mammals, and the beaver, which had been wiped out in Europe, was still in heavy demand for hat making. So lucrative was this trade, and so central was it to the new boreal economy, that beaver pelts became a unit of currency. This “fur standard” was well established by 1778 when Peter Pond, a British loyalist, soldier, and twice-implicated killer from Connecticut, arrived in the Athabasca region—the first recorded European to do so. Pond, who one biographer described as “a fist in the wilderness,” was a bare-knuckle entrepreneur and commercial explorer. Operating outside the purview of the Hudson’s Bay Company, Pond had been seeking a Northwest Passage himself when he found Dene hunters eager to trade what turned out to be the finest beaver pelts in all of Canada. Nothing has been the same there since. Following Pond’s arrival, beaver, along with just about anything else that could grow fur, was packed out of northern Alberta by the ton.[*1]
It is hard to fathom the sheer number of dead animals that passed through Canada’s trading posts during the boom years of the fur trade, but the legendary commercial explorer, navigator, and fur trader Alexander Mackenzie kept meticulous records on the subject. Mackenzie, a Scot from the Hebrides, was a partner with Peter Pond in the North West Company, which dominated trade in the region before being absorbed into the Hudson’s Bay Company. In 1798, Mackenzie reported a staggering annual take of 106,000 beaver pelts, 32,000 marten, 6,000 lynx, 3,800 wolves, 2,100 bears, and 500 wood bison (among many other species).[*2]
These numbers are all the more astonishing when one considers the fact that each animal had to be killed, collected, and skinned individually, before being transported by foot or canoe to the nearest trading post, which could be a hundred miles away from the hunter’s village or killing site. And that was only the beginning of the journey: the Athabasca region is so remote that, during the early days, a full trading cycle—by canoe from the Athabasca eastward across the continent to the port in Montreal and then by ship to England, returning with an equal load of trade goods, again by canoe, on waterways that were frozen half the year and lethally cold and fast the other half—took three years. Slow as it was, the logistics, planning, and brute optimism of the Athabasca fur trade was, for its time and technology, as formidably ambitious and effective as any global enterprise today.
The delivery vans of the day were birchbark canoes, and, delicate as they were, they could match a UPS truck pound for pound. A signal difference between the United States and Canada is that, with the exception of the Rockies, it really is possible to canoe across Canada. However, journeys through its intricate network of rivers and lakes required occasional portages, some of them miles long, over steep and slippery terrain. In 1800, a common eastbound portage load for one man was two ninety-pound packs of furs, bound into bales, plus his personal gear—and then back for another load, until the entire cargo had been transferred, along with the canoe. These loads, which would give a linebacker pause, were borne barefoot, or in wet moccasins, both of which have negative traction.
Between the rivers, lakes, rain, and snow, it was an amphibious world these men traversed where chronic saturation was simply a condition of existence. One can only imagine the chills, rot, and rash these men endured, to say nothing of the mosquitoes and biting flies. These voyageurs were typically French and Iroquois, or combinations of the two. They were paid a pittance for their superhuman labors, and many were injured or killed en route—not by enemies, but by drowning, busted guts, or falls beneath their brutal burdens. Some particularly arduous portages came to look like graveyards, so many were the crosses that lined the way.
Both trappers and traders had things the other desperately wanted, and a fragile peace was maintained beneath a surface tension of trust, fear, and desire. While there was room for some negotiation, credit, and even friendship, a muzzle-loading rifle still cost forty beaver skins, and it was useless without powder and shot—another twenty skins. Then there were tools, traps, flour, blankets, sewing supplies, and gifts to consider. It all added up, and the bottom line was a hard one: anyone who wanted to participate in the modern world of iron, gunpowder, cotton, and alcohol had to play by Company rules. Anyone who didn’t was effectively marginalized and, ultimately, doomed. If the technical disadvantages didn’t destroy you outright, the public shame for refusing to participate would finish the job. Some things haven’t changed; in Alberta’s bitumen industry, a man will not be taken seriously if he drives anything less than a Ford 150 pickup, or its equivalent. Tantalizing options are available, just as they were at an eighteenth-century trading post, and a young man can, with a week’s wages and a signature, put himself on the hook for $75,000 with alarming ease. It took (and takes) an extraordinarily determined person to resist these pressures. Consider the social and professional costs of not having a cell phone—the muzzle-loader of our day.
At its peak, during the first half of the nineteenth century, the Hudson’s Bay Company enjoyed a virtual monopoly, operating hundreds of trading posts from coast to coast, with satellite “offices” as far away as Alaska, Hawai’i, California, and the High Arctic. The Company’s vast domain fit perfectly the description used by the Irish philosopher and politician Edmund Burke to describe its southern counterpart, the East India Company: “A state in the guise of a merchant.” Encompassing nearly 10 percent of the earth’s landmass, the Company’s territory was—geographically speaking—the greatest commercial empire the world has ever known, and its network of trading posts effectively staked out the boundaries for what is now the world’s second-largest nation after Russia.
The profits once reaped by the Hudson’s Bay Company’s remote and secretive “governors” in London were spectacular, in part because the Company’s practices and policies, dutifully enforced by its Scottish proxies, were so ruthless. As a longtime employee named John M’Lean wrote in 1849:
Since [1840], the dividends have been on the decline, nor are they ever likely to reach the same amount, for several reasons,—the chief of which is the destruction of the fur-bearing animals. In certain parts of the country, it is the Company’s policy to destroy them along the whole frontier; and our general instructions [were] that every effort be made to lay waste the country, so as to offer no inducement to petty traders to encroach on the Company’s limits. Those instructions have indeed had the effect of ruining the country, but not of protecting the Company’s domains.
As barbaric as this policy might seem today, it is no different, in practice or principle, than the competition-killing tactics used by Standard Oil, Walmart, Amazon, Netflix, or Uber. In this way, corporations and wildfires follow similar growth patterns in that, once they reach a certain size, they are able to dictate their own terms across a landscape—even if it destroys the very ecosystem that enabled them to grow so powerful in the first place.
The Hudson’s Bay Company’s potent combination of offshore capital (often borrowed) and indebted local labor is how modern Canada—a continental beaver farm and trading company serving Europe’s hat industry—came into being. By making beaver skins a standardized unit of currency, and offering irresistibly attractive and useful things in return, the Company and its aggressive competitors turned the inhabitants of the boreal forest, human and animal alike, into a huge, surprisingly efficient profit-making machine—until they exhausted the resource. In so doing, the fur trade shaped Canada’s creation myth and set the tone for how extractive industries continue to operate there. Through this lens, Canada in general, and Alberta in particular, could be seen not as “a state in the guise of a merchant,” but as a merchant in the guise of a state. This colonial model, which systematically commodifies natural resources and binds local people to the trading post system with company store–style debt, has replicated itself in resource towns across the continent.
In the post–fur trade world, banks, big-box stores, and car dealerships have taken the place of the all-purpose trading post.[*3] Employees in Alberta’s bitumen industry are among the highest-paid petroleum workers in the world; nonetheless, heavy debt is rampant, and bankruptcies, layoffs, and foreclosures are common. (In 2019, Canadian household debt, expressed as a percentage of GDP, was the highest in the Group of 7.) This legacy is keenly felt across the boreal, particularly in extractive industries. When it comes to rapidly and radically altering a landscape along with the lives of those who live upon it, only a few things compare to a big boreal fire, and one of them is the profit motive. In May 2016, Fort McMurray was the rare place where one could witness both of these energies unleashing simultaneously.
Before the multinational giants and their armies of workers move in, the visionaries must pave the way. One of those intrepids was Sidney Ells, a bronze bust of a man who, in 1913, dug, drilled, and blasted nine tons of bitumen samples in the vicinity of Fort McMurray. In those days, the all-but forgotten trading post was a backwater consisting of “a dozen primitive log cabins, a bug-infested hovel proudly referred to as the ‘hotel’ and during the summer months many Indian tepees and tents. Everywhere, starving [sled] dogs roamed at will.” Ells, the young engineer with the Dominion Department of Mines who penned those words, was glad to leave. After gathering his hundreds of bitumen samples into sacks, Ells loaded them onto a forty-foot barge and hauled them 240 miles up the Athabasca River to a railhead using a primitive method called “scow tracking.” Travel and transport have never been easy in the north, but scow tracking (a verb not found on the internet nor in any dictionary) may be a uniquely Canadian torture. It involved harnessing a dozen men—in this case, local Métis and Dene rivermen—to a barge or scow with five hundred feet of heavy manila line, and then driving them upriver, like sled dogs. In an account written for the Department of Mines, Ells described it this way:
Dene and Métis rivermen in harness, scow tracking up the Athabasca River, October 1913. Note the scow downstream with men aboard.
Scow tracking south of McMurray was anything but child’s play. Harnessed to the heavy tracking line, men fought their way grimly along the rough boulder-strewn beaches or through a tangle of overhanging brush often ankle deep in mud or waist deep in water. The ceaseless torture of myriads of flies from daylight until dark and the heavy work, which only the strongest could long endure, made tracking one of the most brutal forms of labour.
Their journey took more than three weeks. When they came to impassable rapids—and there were miles of them—they had to portage the tons of bitumen samples and gear around them. Northern rivers are always cold, but it was October, the beginning of winter in the north, and the weather during that last fall before the Great War was particularly poor. The men, including Ells, who had destroyed his feet in ill-fitting boots, were shod in leather moccasins, which wore through almost daily and were replaced from a gunnysack filled with spares. This and the accompanying sackful of mildewed tobacco plugs offered cold comfort. To those in his employ, Ells must have seemed obsessed, if not insane. After all, the scow they were tracking was not filled with furs, fish, or salt—all proven moneymakers from the Athabasca region—but with tons of tar-clotted sand, a substance that, despite two hundred years of trade involving many players and products across two oceans, no one had ever been interested in buying. This obstinate fact has dogged the bitumen industry ever since.
In North America, crude oil has always been accessible, it just took us a while to figure how to ignite it and domesticate it. Historically, it occurred much like bitumen—at random, in natural seeps, and as a noxious contaminant in springs and wells. Prior to the 1860s, the potential seen in crude oil was not so different from that seen in olive oil, seal oil, or whale oil before it: a dubious liniment, a messy lubricant, and, perhaps, a source of light. It was the latter, coupled with crude oil’s unbeatable combination of abundance and accessibility, that scuttled the whale oil industry.[*4]
Following the drilling of the first productive New World oil wells in Enniskillen, Ontario, in 1858 and, more famously, in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in 1859,[*5] it was optimistically assumed that petroleum (a neologism meaning “rock oil”) must be valuable. But, like bitumen during the same period (and internet companies more recently), no one was quite sure how to manage or monetize it. So poorly understood was this smelly, viscous, irridescing substance that, prior to 1860, people drank it, rubbed it on their bodies, recoiled at the stink, and dumped the excess in the river. That didn’t stop it from being bottled and sold. “Seneca Oil” was recommended for burns, bruises, sprains, and wounds. “It penetrates, purifies, soothes and heals,” claimed one enthusiast. “Try it on barking children.”
A handful of chemists, however, saw petroleum’s combustive potential, and speculators sensed it, too. Following “Colonel” Edwin Drake’s legendary strike in August 1859, farmland around Titusville began selling for staggering sums. So many wells were dug, so quickly and in such close proximity, it seemed as if the local fields had suddenly produced bumper crops of wooden oil derricks. Containing these wells once they’d been tapped was not an exact science, and, in Titusville, the aptly renamed Oil Creek flowed—and sometimes burned—with a surface layer of shimmering petroleum. Meanwhile, wagonloads of leaking barrels turned the surrounding roads into reeking quagmires through which draft horses slogged and staggered, blackened to the withers by a slurry of urine, feces, and crude oil. The combination was toxic, and a notable feature of these sorry animals was that, below the neck, they had no hair. But horses were cheap and, with money flowing as freely as oil, this was considered a small price to pay. Even if they couldn’t explain exactly how, those in its presence sensed petroleum’s volatile potential with a nerve-jangling intensity. If the future had a smell, it was this: sweet tar laced faintly with rotten eggs.
Oil derricks near Oil Creek—Venango County, Pennsylvania, 1866
As abundant as it was, the crude oil being discovered in Ontario and Pennsylvania was not a lamp-ready alternative to the coal- and whale-based illuminating oils already on the market. Crude is not particularly useful as energy or illumination in its raw form, but its constituents are. These constituents, known as “fractions,” are rendered from oil much the way whiskey is rendered from mash in a distillery: when heated in a sealed vessel, the volatile fractions will evaporate off at different temperatures. “Lighter” fractions (gases like naphtha, propane, benzene, etc.) will come off first, at temperatures below 500°F. Among these lighter fractions are the main ingredients of gasoline, but in the 1860s, with the automobile still decades away and no obvious use for such a dangerously explosive substance, they were discarded, usually into the nearest creek. Meanwhile, heavier fractions such as heating and lubricating oils need higher temperatures—up to 1,000°F—in order to separate. Left behind, virtually un-distillable, are heavy fuel oils such as bunker fuel, and also bitumen. In order to glean any remaining hydrocarbons from these ultraheavy residues, they must be put through a second, more rigorous heating process in a pressurized tank called a coker. There are a number of these huge vessels at the plants north of Fort McMurray, and their purpose is to “crack” the remaining longchain hydrocarbon molecules into smaller, more useful fractions. Left over at the end of this hellacious and energy-intensive process is a fused mass of ash and carbon called petroleum coke, or petcoke. Petcoke burns like coal, only hotter, but because it is also significantly dirtier, it has fallen out of favor as a fuel for domestic power plants and blast furnaces.[*6]
Occupying a sweet spot on the crude oil fraction spectrum, close to diesel, is kerosene. First produced from coal oil in the 1840s by a Canadian physician and geologist named Abraham Gesner, it was kerosene’s utility as a lamp oil that launched the petroleum industry. Gesner really did have lightning in a bottle, and he expanded into the U.S. at his first opportunity. But once there, he and his pioneering refinery were soon bought out by an American investor who would join forces with John D. Rockefeller, the Jeff Bezos of his day, making Gesner’s Kerosene Gaslight Company one more acquisition en route to Standard Oil’s hegemonic control of the oil industry.[*7]
By 1870, it was clear that the same energy and ambition that had so recently driven fire-powered steamships across the Atlantic, and bound the continent with a fire-powered railroad, could accomplish virtually anything a motivated mind might seize upon. The following decade was as pivotal for energy and fire as the 2000s were for information technology and digital communication. It was then that the heyday of petroleum—what could be described as the Petrocene Age—began in earnest: the period of history in which our Promethean pursuit of fire’s energy, most notably crude oil, in conjunction with the internal combustion engine, took a quantum leap to transform all aspects of our civilization and, with it, our atmosphere. This period covers, roughly, the past 150 years, and it is peaking now.
Standard Oil, which would beget Esso (“SO”), among many other oil majors, was founded in 1870, the same year as the hamlet of Fort McMurray (where Esso would one day build one of its biggest operations). By then, it was only a matter of time before the coal-fired steam engine was replaced by petroleum power because the advantages were too great to ignore: a ton of coal oil could generate as much steam in a boiler as four tons of solid coal. Engineers had been paying close attention, and, by 1860, they were already designing the future. That year, on page one of the September 22 issue of Scientific American, directly above a recipe for Canadian rhubarb wine, a notice appeared concerning a new “explosion engine.”
A Parisian, by the name of Lenoir, is creating a great sensation among his countrymen by the exhibition of a caloric engine…[His] little shop, in a bye street, is every day besieged by a crowd of curious people from all classes…According to Cosmos, and other French papers, the age of steam is ended—Watt and Fulton will soon be forgotten.
The idea that such an engine might one day move people individually—the way a smartphone now moves ideas and commerce—was just a short step away, and Étienne Lenoir was already taking it: later that same year, he mounted his engine on a three-wheeled wooden cart. It was noisy and slow, but it marked the first time in history that liquid fuel had been combined with an internal combustion engine and a wheeled vehicle for the purpose of individual mobility, thus achieving a kind of self-powered, “automotive”—not flight, exactly, but arguably transcendence, especially when you consider how most people got around in those days. This era-defining, world-changing invention took a more recognizable shape in 1863 (twenty years before Daimler and Benz), when Lenoir unveiled his Hippomobile, a four-wheeled, multi-passenger vehicle equipped with a steering wheel up front and an engine in the rear. Not much has changed: the only difference between Lenoir’s Hippomobile and a twenty-first-century Ferrari is one of refinement.
Scientific American’s praise for Lenoir’s explosion engine was wholehearted save for this: “The practical objections to such motors are the jerks of its action and the accumulation of heat.” The problem of jerking action was quickly solved, but the accumulation of heat—in the broader sense—was not, and it haunts us to this day.
As the almost medieval fur trade gave way to the industrial age, interest in petroleum and its combustive properties reached the ears of commercial prospectors. It wasn’t long before the Athabasca fur traders’ offhand references to the methane bubbles they paddled over and the bitumen seeps they stumbled across were followed up in earnest. For more than a century now, the province of Alberta has seen its future writ in oil and, to this end, it has had almost as many holes poked in it as Texas. Most of those holes were dry, but every now and then, some combination of saltwater, oil, and/or natural gas would come burping and boiling to the surface. Once in a great while there would be a direct hit, and one of the first of these occurred on the banks of the Athabasca River at a place called Pelican Portage, eighty miles upstream from Fort McMurray. There, in the summer of 1897, drillers with the Geological Survey of Canada hit a void at eight hundred feet, releasing a spectacular jet of methane (natural gas), peppered with walnut-sized chunks of iron pyrite that blasted skyward at the speed of bullets. The sound—something like a fighter jet—was audible three miles away. The well was estimated to be producing more than 8 million cubic feet of gas per day—enough to heat every house and building in modern Fort McMurray. But in 1897, with no place to sell it, no way to capture it, and no way to put this explosive genie back in its bottle, the drillers did the next best thing: they lit it on fire. Before being finally capped, it burned, intermittently, for twenty-one years—a blast furnace in the wilderness, roaring like a rocket booster day and night, winter and summer, while the great river froze and thawed, the low sun wheeled, the northern lights shimmered, and passing hunters marveled and warmed their hands.
It was just a glimpse of what was to come.
One fantasy nurtured by early prospectors in the Athabasca country was that under that layer of worthless bitumen lay a massive reservoir of oil and gas, but even if there had been, it would have made little difference to their fortunes at the time. In 1913, as Sidney Ells slogged southward in heavy harness and rotting moccasins, crude oil was already abundant in Ontario, Pennsylvania, Texas, and most recently, Oklahoma. Alberta was about to make a major strike of its own far to the south of Fort McMurray. Furthermore, the automobile was still a decade away from being the number one consumer of crude oil products in the form of gasoline, motor oil, axle grease, and rubber tires.
Taking all this into account, Ells understood that bitumen was at best a long shot, and, even as the motorcar rose to prominence in the 1920s, the most plausible future he could see for Alberta’s bitumen was in road paving. As he explored ways of “upgrading” bitumen into more viable petroleum products, he came to the prescient conclusion that the only way this could be achieved on an industrial scale was with substantial government assistance. Since then, both the Alberta and federal governments have sought partners wherever they could find them. Often, those partners have been foreign corporations, but, one way or another, taxpayers have always picked up the slack. In this way, Canadian citizens have been in harness alongside Sidney Ells and those rivermen, scow tracking Alberta’s bitumen industry upstream for more than a century now. And the burden remains a heavy one: according to a 2019 International Monetary Fund report, Canadian taxpayers contributed more than $40 billion (U.S.) in subsidies to the fossil fuel industry in 2015 alone (approximately $1,200 for every man, woman, and child). In the same year, Americans contributed more than $2,000 per person, while China (a nation of 1.4 billion citizens) contributed the equivalent of $1,025 per person to support the fossil fuel industry.
The dramatic transformation of Fort McMurray from trading post to petroleum hub has been as rapid and radical as any on the continent, and it has followed the manic-depressive pattern of all petroleum boomtowns before it. Boomtown stories are part and parcel of American lore, but Canada has its share, and some of the most exuberant examples come from Alberta. This report from 1914, following a bonanza of natural gas that erupted from the Dingman well in the Turner Valley, paints a vivid picture:
Calgary never saw such a Saturday night (May 16th). It was the wildest, most delirious, uproarious, exciting time that it ever entered into human imagination to conceive. If the city was oil crazy on Friday, on Saturday it was fairly demented. Money fairly spouted from the ground. All day and all night the crowds fought and struggled for precedence in the offices of the most prominent oil companies and clamoured for shares and yet more shares. Relays of policemen barely kept a clear passageway, and there was never a moment when the would-be purchasers were not lined up three deep in front of the counters, buying, buying, buying. No one knows how much money was taken in. The officials of the companies have not had time to count it. They scarcely know themselves how many shares they have sold. Wastebaskets were filled to overflowing with bank notes and cheques, emptied and filled again and again. Clerks and salesmen went blind and dizzy writing out receipts and filling in application blanks…Business men, clerks, car conductors, women, shop girls, anybody, everybody, almost begged the oil men to take their money.
In that single day of incendiary trading, investors drove up the share price of the Calgary Petroleum Products Company by more than 1,600 percent. In such frenzied moments, the utility of the product becomes secondary, and baser motives are laid bare.
Explosive growth of this kind mimics that of fire, and humans seem particularly prone to it. Fire is known to physicists as an exothermic reaction—that is, a reaction that unleashes more energy than was required to initiate it. Just as a single match or cigarette can burn down a house or ignite a landscape, a handful of men with novel trade goods, a drilling rig, or an IPO can set off a commercial explosion of buying and selling. Each of these events has the power to change the fortunes of a region and its inhabitants overnight.