Forty-niners who'd passed through the gold rush and now swaggered to Oil Creek expecting a rather panty-waist operation with effete Easterners and rubes, complained that conditions here crazier than anything they'd ever seen. One miner said that if a new well brought up huge gold nuggets, the owner would throw them back and go on drilling -- for oil. This may have been a slight exaggeration.

--- from The Great oildorado (1959)