Wildcatters : the story of Pacific Petroleums and Westcoast Transmission / Earle Gray.

Francis Murray Patrick McMahon, diamond core drilling contractor, oil and gas wildcat explorer, pipeline builder, and business entrepreneur, inherited the boldness of his father, a wanderlust prospector and hotel keeper whose quest for fortune took him to boom towns from Dawson City in the Klondike gold rush to San Francisco when the great earthquake and fire demolished 80 percent of the city. But Frank Junior had a clearer vision of how build an enterprise and acquire a fortune, and the tenacity to stick with it through spectacular failures and hard times in the Great Depression of the 1930s, when he didn’t have enough money to pay the bill for the coal gas that heated his house. Success was built on the strength of a $100 option to acquire an 80-acre lease near the expanding number of wells in the Turner Valley oil field southwest of Calgary. That was the seed of Pacific Petroleums, one of Western Canada’s pioneer independent oil companies.