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To the Stars: The Story of Kansas
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del.icio.usKansan's failure at pharmacy led to oil
The Wichita Eagle
This is one in a series of vignettes celebrating Kansas history. The series' name comes from the state motto, Ad astra per aspera: "To the stars through difficulties."
BY BECCY TANNER
By the time he was 20, Harry Sinclair had failed miserably at his family's pharmacy business.
Within a decade, however, Kansas newspapers were boasting that Sinclair was the richest man in Kansas. By the end of the 1920s, he had become one of the most powerful tycoons in the oil industry.
His oil pipeline across Kansas proved to be the inspiration for the invention of the world's first bulldozer, builtby Washington County farmer James Cummings.
Nearly penniless in 1901, Sinclair speculated on the oil industry and began selling lumber to build oil derricks. He also bought and sold oil leases, primarily in southeastern Kansas and in the Osage Indian territory in Oklahoma.
In 1904, Sinclair made nearly $100,000 from leases in Kiowa, Okla. He invested in the Oklahoma Canary field and then Oklahoma's Glen Pool.
His success in oil prompted Wall Street to invest heavily in Sinclair's midcontinent pipeline, which was used to transport oil between refineries.
In 1923, Cummings was watching the laying of a pipeline across Washington County that started in the oil fields of Teapot Dome, Wyo., and ran to Freeman, Mo.
Workers were using mule teams and scraping blades to fill in the trenches after pipe was laid.
Cummings believed that workcould be mechanized.
Using a Model T, windmill springs and other odds and ends, Cummings and a draftsman from Morrowville, J. Earl McLeod, built the world's first bulldozer.
Sinclair's company embraced the invention and the two men won the contract to backfill pipeline from Deshier, Neb., to Freeman, Mo.
McLeod would later tell newspaper reporters: "The bulldozer was crudely constructed, but solidly built.... It was not overly pretty, but it was... stout!"
A replica of the men's invention sits in the city park at Morrowville.
Reach Beccy Tanner at 316-268-6336 or btanner@wichitaeagle.com.
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