Editor's Note:

A fascinating account of the early days in the "search for Arabian oil" was published Tuesday by Selwa Press of California. It is the first publication of Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner's "Discovery!," written in the 1950s, in the United States, and the story of bringing it to your book store, as Thomas Lippman writes in the book's foreword, "is a complicated and murky tale, almost as interesting as the story recounted in its pages."

SUSRIS is pleased to bring you the Wallace Stegner's introduction from "Discovery!" today. We offer some of the photographs from the early days on the SUSRIS Web site. Take a look HERE. 

We thank Tim Barger of Selwa Press for permission to share the foreword, the introduction and the photographs. 

For more information on Discovery! and photos from the early days in the search for oil, click here.

Link to purchase the book

Discovery! The Search for Arabian Oil
A Book By Wallace Stegner

Introduction from the book

The Arabian Peninsula, technically a part of the continent of Asia, is actually almost a separate entity. It lies like a boot-shaped plug between Africa and Asia, surrounded except on the north by water: westward is the Red Sea, southward the Gulf of Aden and the Arabian Sea, eastward the Gulf of Oman and the body of water most people call the Persian Gulf but which is firmly called the Arabian Gulf in Saudi Arabia. Its heel is almost within sight of the African coast where Ethiopia and French Somaliland come together; its horned toe, as if by a hard kick, has dented in the coast of Iran across the Strait of Hormuz.

Of this enormous boot, a subcontinent in size, the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia occupies all but the heel, the sole, and the toe. The heel is Yemen, the sole is South Yemen (formerly Aden) and Dhufar, the toe is Oman and the Trucial States up to and including the Shaikhdom of Qatar. Along the top of the boot Saudi Arabia is partially buffered from Iraq by a diamond-shaped neutral zone.

A similar zone which once separated the kingdom from Kuwait is still maintained as an area where oil wealth is shared but has been recently divided between the two countries as separate administrative areas. The rest of the way the northern boundary runs through stony deserts as far as Jordan, and then, in a series of angles, jogs southward and westward to a twelve-mile strip of Jordanian territory along the Gulf of Aqaba. This strip was part of a recent territorial swap with Saudi Arabia aimed at rectifying some of the more awkward borders and providing Jordan with more access to the sea than could be provided by the Port of Aqaba. Along much of its south and southeast borders, Saudi Arabia�s boundaries remain politically imprecise and, in certain places, disputed. 

Despite such imprecision, however, something may be learned from the maps. On one of the most recent, Saudi Arabia shows as four great geographical regions: the Hijaz and Asir along the Red Sea, Najd in the desert heart of the Peninsula, and the Eastern Province, or al-Hasa, along the Arabian Gulf.

You will not see on that map any of the customary blue patches that indicate bodies of water, and the blue lines that look like rivers are only wadis, dry watercourses that run, if ever, only during a rain. Except in the mountainous southern coastal regions, the Arabian Peninsula is one of the world�s most barren lands � desert mountains, flint plains, salt flats, wildernesses of drifting sand. Throughout the land there is no river and no real lake; except in the Asir highlands the rainfall nowhere exceeds a few inches a year, and some of the uttermost deserts, such as the Rub� al-Khali, in the south, may see no rain for years on end. 

Yet look for a moment at the Eastern Province, the region along the Gulf from Qatar to the Kuwait�Saudi Arabia Neutral Zone. It shows, in the density and variety of its map symbols, a quite surprising number of the installations peculiar to modern industrial civilization.

By comparison with the rest of the Peninsula, and by comparison with much of the Middle East, this northeast corner of Saudi Arabia is fairly densely netted with both secondary and primary roads, including a system of paved highways from Kuwait south as far as Selwa, and another interior link toward Riyadh. The crossed line of the Saudi Government Railroad comes southwest from Dammam, on the coast, through Abqaiq and Hofuf and Haradh, where it turns due west toward al-Kharj and the national capital of Riyadh. 

And not merely roads. Other symbols are packed into the map of this region: a red ship to show the marine terminal and major port at Ras Tanura; red arrows to indicate eleven airfields between Riyadh and Ras al-Mish�ab, just under the border of the Kuwait Neutral Zone; at Ras Tanura the red tower symbol of a refinery; in all the area from al-Mish�ab south, and especially in the area southwest from Ras Tanura, a web of red that indicates pipelines, and all along the web the red squares that show pump stations or gas-oil separator plants. 

The red lines that indicate pipelines tie these fields to the major centers; to Abqaiq and Dhahran, the administrative center, to the refinery at Ras Tanura, and to the Bahrain Petroleum Company�s refinery on the nearby island of Bahrain. From Qatif a red line reaches northwest to Qaisumah, just under the Saudi Arabian and Iraqi Neutral Zone. From Qaisumah a continuation, a long continuation, heads into the high northern desert on its way to the tank farm and marine terminal at Sidon, on the Levantine coast south of Beirut, 1,070 miles from the pipeline�s beginning. This line marks the route of the Trans-Arabian Pipe Line � Tapline � an extension of the Aramco operation. 

Tapline, which crosses turbulent Syria and Jordan and a patch of territory seized by Israel in the 1967 war, has had a shaky time since the war. Yet whatever happens, Tapline has already left an indelible mark on Arabia. 

Since 1950, when the pipeline was completed, the life of those northern deserts has changed more than in the preceding thousand years. Its service road, now paved with asphalt, has become a new caravan route, radically altering the historic flow of trade, and used by trucks instead of camel trains. In its earliest days, wells drilled in connection with the construction and maintenance of the line changed, within a few months, the habits of Bedouins who in all the tribal memory had moved in certain directions at certain seasons, drawn by the gravitational pull of water.

By no means would or could all of the visitors move on, for within the first six years of its existence, Ar�arS � a town created entirely by the pipeline company and laid out by Tapline engineers � had a population of 5,000 Arabs actively busy in turning from wanderers into townsmen. The other pump stations saw the same sort of growth. The closest parallel in history, probably, is what happened in western Canada when the Hudson�s Bay Company, likewise a great company with a large concession in a mighty territory, established trading posts that quickly became the nucleus of Indian and Metis villages and that served as cores of European or Europeanized life within a radically different culture.

The pump stations themselves, a series of lonely, clean, prefabricated, air-conditioned suburban towns spaced 200 miles apart from Qaisumah to Turaif near the Jordan border, are a demonstration of how thoroughly industrial civilization overcomes the harsh natural conditions that would usually overwhelm a pastoral or agricultural people. Lacking water, Tapline�s people produced it by drilling; lacking building materials and supplies of all kinds, they imported them by truck or airlift (their supply list at one point contained 26,000 items); finding the summer heat often unbearable, they conditioned their air; being located at remote outposts, they tied themselves to each other and to the world outside by HF voice radio and teletype. Three round trips a week at first (now down to one) by the �Milk Run� planes, DC-3s operated in conjunction with Aramco, brought mail, supplies, and passengers (and gave as well a regular visual check of the whole pipeline). 

From Abqaiq, the center of Aramco�s gathering system, through Qaisumah, Rafha, Badanah, and Turaif, to Sidon, is a geography unfamiliar to most Americans yet important to them. For as each of those towns and stations was built, it became an outpost of the West and of America, a demonstration not only of American skills but also of American culture. Even the most trivial contacts and the most unthinking acts were significant, for the Saudi Arabs were then quite poor but very proud, and the partnership with the West, and all the landslide of change that it has since brought, were still very new. 

Thirty-five years ago there were few traces of westernization in Saudi Arabia anywhere outside of cities like Jiddah and Mecca, where pilgrims from outside the country had stimulated a relatively sophisticated mercantile class. 

The shock that oil riches have brought to Iran, Iraq, Kuwait, Qatar, Abu Dhabi, and Libya was particularly strong in Saudi Arabia, for of all the Arab states , Saudi Arabia beyond the Hijaz, was for a longer period the most isolated. 

Thirty-five years ago the network of roads that shows on today�s map was nothing but a scrawl of caravan trails and wandering tracks that disappeared in the first sandstorm. Dhahran did not exist, Ras Tanura did not exist, Abqaiq did not exist, the pipelines and pump stations, the ports, the marine terminal did not exist. What existed, outside Jiddah, Riyadh, and Mecca, was the barren land alone, with its scattered palm gardens and its coastal pearling towns and its desert oases, its wandering tribes, its holy places, its religious zeal and its austerity and its suspicion of foreigners. 

It was magical. The applied skill and power as well as the results are awesome in the mass, and the change that has come over Saudi Arabia, that dizzy and dangerous leap from �camels to Cadillacs,� to use the tiresome cliche that to this day writers seem compelled to employ, is quite as impressive and probably every bit as important. 

Every American, even if he could not place Saudi Arabia on the map, knows that Aramco is one of those �legendary institutions,� in the words of James Morris, and it would be remarkable if the ordinary American with his love of bigness and his respect for practical know-how did not take some satisfaction in a corporation like this. It demonstrates us, in one direction, at our best. But it would be quite as remarkable if some did not see Aramco and its sister corporations as a sinister force embroiling us, for dirty dollars, in the power struggles of the Middle East. 

This last characterization, which is the one proposed by emotional nationalists and the one consistently disseminated by hostile propagandists, reflects one aspect of the emergent unrest that has turned much of the Arab world away from the United States. It must be challenged, for unwilling as a democracy may be to take its own side in an argument, and meekly as it may believe the worst interpretations of its own motives, American oil development in the Middle East has been, all things considered, responsible and fair. 

The companies will certainly be under continuing pressure to enlarge even today�s sharing of the profits, especially as northern Europe�s dependence on Middle East oil becomes increasingly apparent. But whatever the uncertainties of the future, Aramco can congratulate itself on a record that is a long way from being grossly exploitative or �imperialist.� Its record probably contains both mistakes and inconsistencies, and it has indeed earned impressive profits, but in general its role and its intention have been to provide an alternative between willful foreign exploitation of the 19th-century kind, and willful nationalization such as has happened more recently.

Though the agreements and the policies of most of the Middle Eastern oil companies do not much differ these days, it was not always so; and it was almost inevitable that there should have existed in the beginning a certain competitive hostility between American and British oilmen, for they represented not only competing commercial interests but sharply differing philosophies of operation in underdeveloped countries. Their jockeying may have looked on some occasions like two western dogs quarreling over a Middle Eastern bone. Actually, it was both more and less than that. 

Aramco has been the exponent, though not the sole exponent, of what David Finnie calls �involvement� as opposed to �isolation.� Its concession agreement specifically prohibits it from political activity in Saudi Arabia, but it inevitably became deeply involved in the economic and social life of first the Eastern Province and then, as the impact spread, the country. Instead of living as an aloof enclave wielding great political power, as was the traditional and considered habit of the British, the Americans early on participated in local life, becoming teachers, advisers, and helpers, often getting stuck with responsibilities not properly theirs, often suffering from criticism that was emotional and unfair and badly aimed, giving generously and � by 1970 a familiar experience � often having their good intentions misunderstood and resented. 

One consequence of having rigidly eschewed political influence was that Aramco lived a very jumpy life, considering its ponderous economic weight. It had to remind itself constantly that a concession is often no more stable than the regime that grants it, and ultimately than the people that support the regime, and that a concession must adapt to changing times and conditions. But it was the old British system, as applied in Iran in the 1950s, that got into trouble first, and as the old system saw the handwriting on the wall and brought itself to change, it changed in the direction that Aramco had already taken. 

How long this approach will prove durable cannot be predicted now, obviously, but it would be shortsighted to discount it too soon. Despite important discoveries in Alaska and Norway, the West still needs Middle Eastern oil and still has the installations and the skills necessary to produce and market it. For their part, the oil-producing Arab states still need oil income to finance their ever-increasing development, and without foreign investment and foreign experts to practice and teach industrial skills, the pace of that development in most of these states would unquestionably be slowed.

To put it candidly, the only practical economic base for modernization of the Middle East now and in the foreseeable future is oil, and although some Middle Eastern statesmen have opted for nationalization or regionalization of the industry, the consequences can � as they did once in Iran � seriously damage the economy. 

There is no guarantee, naturally, that leaders in producing states will see the risks plainly; nations and individuals have before this cut off their noses to spite their faces. But the history of Aramco demonstrates that with great patience on both sides, the partnership system can work to the satisfaction of both parties.

Unfortunately, not enough Americans know anything about this approach. That is one of the justifications of this book, which attempts nothing more elaborate than the story of the earliest contacts between Americans and Saudi Arabs, and the earliest formulations, by necessity, of the partnership idea. That was before Aramco was even Aramco, when it was still the California Arabian Standard Oil Company, or Casoc. 

Aramco�s stock, being held entirely by its parent companies, is not offered for sale on any exchange, and no casual stockholders see its annual reports. Its field of operations is remote, and to most Americans not quite real. For most of us, it lives a documentary or statistical or newsreel life, not an actual one; its name summons to the mind images not of flesh-and-blood Americans and Arabs doing a job, but of pensive camels silhouetted beside a derrick, or the tracks of an exploration outfit across photogenic dunes. 

Those who actually visit the country, however, get a quite different view, particularly after they have landed at the Dhahran field, driven off past a pale, utterly barren reach of scabby rock and sand, the knobby hills called Jabal Dhahran, and the starkly handsome, concrete shapes of the new petroleum college, and entered the huge gateway to Dhahran, a rather dated archway built for a visit from the King. 

Inside the gate most visitors would feel as much at home as they would in any American bedroom suburb; it might as well be at one of the oil-discovery spots in the western United States � say Farmington, New Mexico � except that it is a great deal more attractive and has no motels. Bungalows, guesthouses, the dormitory-hotel called Steineke Hall, the plush quarters called Hamilton House reserved for royal visitors and high brass, would all be at home in the U.S.A. Nostalgia, with enormous effort, has created gardens, brought in soil to cover the nearly exposed limestone, blasted holes for the roots of oleanders and tamarisks, planted, watered, and nursed lawns and trees and hedges; and yards complete with Siamese cats and tricycles humanize every street. There is a community center with a swimming pool, tennis courts, terrace, library, movie theater. 

An American town. And yet not quite. The style of the buildings is, without being uniform, consistent. The gardens and lawns are the product not merely of the after-work shirtsleeve puttering of householders but also of local gardeners. Company maintenance crews come to fix the refrigerator when it goes out, or to repair the screen door that the dog has broken through. There are no commercials to interrupt the music played over the company�s station. The people you see are mostly company employees, unless they are company guests. The preoccupations are largely company preoccupations, the gossip largely company gossip. And although nearly a quarter of the kids in school are Arabs, and although to an American it looks faintly strange, so far as any Saudi Arab is concerned, this is America. 

It is not customary in most circles to value over-highly, or beyond its pragmatic usefulness, the loyalty that corporations extract from their employees in return for wages, benefits, and whatever varieties of soma are necessary for enjoyment of the brave new world. I confess that I can personally conceive of higher objects of loyalty than the great industrial corporation, and higher ambitions than to be a �good company man.� I doubt that I should like to live in Dhahran, or in any company town, and not simply because of Saudi Arab Prohibition, though that is unquestionably hard on American morale. For some tastes, the company town is too protected, too paternalistic, and ultimately too limiting. Yet in the early days there was a solid, pragmatic reason for developing Dhahran this way: to minimize the danger that individual peculiarity, irritability, or obtuseness would upset the delicate balance of mutual restraint. 

Such considerations have steered Aramco through its whole development. As it grew it was forced by its susceptible position to adopt policies that were then, at least, industrially eccentric or advanced. It had to be concerned about the total well-being of its employees, both American and Arab, as well as about the well-being of the local Saudi population, which was its only available raw labor force and also its uneasy host. 

On the edge of nowhere it had to provide the bulk of the housing, transportation, and entertainment for its employees, because American employees were hard to recruit, expensive to bring out, and difficult to hold, and Saudi employees had to be recruited from the coastal towns, some of them several days away by camel. Living by the sufferance only of a concession agreement, the company was hypersensitive to the terms of its survival. And the isolation of the country, the lack of contemporary skills and knowledge, made Aramco, whether it wanted to be or not, teacher, banker, surveyor, engineer, builder, scientific adviser, and general Big Brother to the Saudi Arabs. 

To put it more directly, the range and frequent altruism of its activities made Aramco worthier of a man�s loyalty than companies which could claim only the colder justification of profits. And the men who made Aramco, often thrown on their own resources, constantly tested by excruciating difficulties of terrain, climate, shortages, distances, and the handicaps of being the first strangers in a suspicious and stranger-shy country, developed quite without encouragement an unprecedented degree of loyalty. First of all, they had a loyalty to the job, a devotion to the very difficulties that threatened to break their backs. Beyond that, they found themselves spokesmen and carriers for a half-realized nexus of democratic ideas, and having themselves helped to build these notions into the company�s program, they respected the company for what they had put into it. 

A spirit of goodwill and generosity toward the Saudi Arabs as people, along with a sense of pride in this new sort of industrial relationship, is still surprisingly common at all levels of Aramco personnel in the field. And among the managerial people who are also veterans of the early difficult years in Arabia it is exceedingly strong: it has become with many the truest justification of their lives. Even Aramco�s public relations men, who as skeptical and possibly cynical writers of company blurbs might be expected to doubt their own statements, have expressed this spirit. 

Several years ago, for example, Michael Cheyney published the first book of personal reminiscence to come out of the Aramco experience, Big Oil Man from Arabia. In it Cheyney was flippant, irreverent, amused, and possessed of a sound sense of the ridiculous even when the ridiculous involved himself or his bosses. He understood that some Arabs, particularly the ones Aramco has helped to educate, found � and still find � the missionary spirit irritating. But he did not kid the company�s intentions or minimize the potential virtue of its welfare and training program. For that, as a sound implementation of the partnership ideal, he had only applause, the more persuasive for being the expression of a skeptic who was not, in all the ways usually desired by the front office, an impeccably good �company man.� 

What the welfare and training program amounts to now � or at least what it amounts to in the optimum statements that make their way into four-color printing jobs � may be gathered from the 1969 Report of Operations. Much of what is reported are standard means of keeping the employees physically contented, but other items, like Aramco�s training program, go deeper. 

Aramco has had a training program of a fairly extensive kind ever since 1939, but its coherent and integrated plan began in 1950. Since installing job training in that year it has steadily increased the number of Saudi Arabs in skilled jobs, so that in 1969 in its three Industrial Training Centers in Ras Tanura, Abqaiq, and Dhahran, it gave training in specialized courses to more than 1,300 Saudis, it included 346 Saudis in a managerial �grid� program in which participants tackled complex managerial problems, and it had enrolled in the Saudi Development program 722 high-potential employees. In addition it sent 209 Saudis abroad for study, 58 of them in universities, the others in schools of accounting, finance, electronics, and so forth. Aramco, moreover, picks up the tab for numerous Saudis who are chosen by the Saudi government for higher education abroad. 

This is one way to make a new world. And if some of these college-trained Saudis return to jobs with Aramco and find themselves dissatisfied, caught between traditional Arabia and the industrial West and fully at home in neither, that is the calculated risk any program of change must take, and at least the enlightened in Aramco�s management are perfectly willing to take it; it will test the practicability of the �involvement� to which Aramco and by now most Middle Eastern oil companies have committed themselves. 

Another way is to see to the health of the people. The Eastern Province is no health resort yet, but it is certainly better off today than it was thirty-five years ago. There is one of the best hospitals in the Middle East at Dhahran, and excellent clinics in Abqaiq and Ras Tanura. In 1969 doctors performed 242 operations on crippled children under a new specialized orthopedic service. For sixteen years Aramco has also helped sponsor a trachoma research project in partnership with the Harvard School of Public Health. 

And add to the training and health programs things more specifically economic. Some of them, such as severance pay, retirement pay, and death and disability benefits paid to employees, are now common in the Middle East, but were wildly unorthodox when introduced.

Other benefits, such as the thrift plan that encourages employee saving by payroll deduction and gives solid cash rewards to the thrifty (worth $12 million in 1969), are manifestations of the long-term company hope � almost wistful at times and almost certainly doomed to disappointment � of getting out of social engineering and back in the business of producing oil. The Tapline official who kept a bottle of black crude oil on his desk to remind him what business he was in has counterparts on the Aramco management committee.

Through what they call the Local Industrial Development Department (LIDD), the company has tried hard to speed up its return to the oil business. This division had as a goal assisting Arab enterprise � a chore which both self-interest and necessity would have forced upon the company even if it had not had the slightest impulse to be Big Brother. 

Its program recognized three stages. The first was employment of Arabs by the company, with company encouragement for savings and the accumulation of capital. The second was establishment of independent Arab contracting and merchandising to serve company needs � one of the standard instruments was a car or truck, contracted to the company for taxiing or hauling. The third stage was development of �home-grown� private industry, Arab-owned and Arab-operated. 

In a way it was like Europe�s Marshall Plan, and the results, in a smaller way, were not too dissimilar � as a look at the boomtown of al-Khobar would suggest. 

Thirty-five years ago al-Khobar was nothing but a couple of palm-thatch fishermen�s barastis. Now it is a solid half mile of glass-fronted, electric-eyed, mercury-vapor-lighted shops, bottling works, cement plants, garages, and whatnot. In al-Khobar nowadays Aramco housewives can buy, never at too ruinous prices and sometimes at bargains, things that a few years ago would have been available no nearer than Beirut, and perhaps London or New York. Shopkeepers who twenty years ago spoke no English and knew not the slightest thing about American habits will now provide French perfumes, Japanese cameras and tape recorders, Italian sports cars, Swiss watches, Danish furniture, television sets, and tranquilizers. 

The men who achieved this transformation were not oilmen; they were hard-working Saudis, many of whom, fifteen to twenty-five years ago, were untrained boys in gufiyas. But LIDD was an important factor. By quietly encouraging businessmen to form stock companies to assemble capital, by bringing ambitious contractors in from small individual plants to larger plants, by offering engineering advice, purchasing advice, geological advice, stimulating the easily stimulated local imagination � by giving, in brief, the Province�s economics a shot in the arm � LIDD led the Eastern Province into the American consumptive pattern and the productive patterns that supply it. Think of this as good or bad, as you will: it is what the Saudis themselves wanted � what, ultimately, they will not be denied. 

The dislocations inherent in such change were, of course, enormous. According to Cheyney, the national average earnings for a Saudi Arab in the 1950s were less than $50 per year. Today, the average pay of a Saudi worker with Aramco is $3,349, and 98 percent of Aramco�s nearly 11,000 Arab employees save part of that by the Thrift Plan. Already a small but solid middle class has been established with everything in the way of economic ambition and cultural change that the birth of such a class implies. By 1969 nearly 40 percent of Aramco�s Saudi employees had reached supervisory and management positions. Add to these the eager entrepreneurs of al-Khobar, Dammam, Hofuf, and elsewhere who have built company wages into private businesses, and you have a total of many thousands who have been galvanized, or catapulted, into relative affluence and growing awareness. 

This, whatever the intention was, has been one of Aramco�s most significant results, and however things may look to the parent company stockholders, or to young nationalists impatient of delay, to a historian, Aramco�s effect upon Saudi Arabia and its auguries for the future seem at least as significant as its annual production of crude or its annual distribution of dividends. It may even, as anthropologist Carleton Coon has predicted, �go on record as one of the outstanding jobs of social engineering in this phase of the history of the world.� 

With that much preliminary we may turn to the story of the men who began the process of imposing these new patterns of work and thought upon the blistered face of Arabia thirty-five years ago. 

Wallace Stegner

For more information on Discovery! and photos from the early days in the search for oil, click here.

Link to purchase the book

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Book Description (from Amazon.com)

Illuminating a little-known but extremely significant period in world history�the discovery of oil in the Middle East and the beginnings of what is now the Saudi Arabian Oil Company (Saudi Aramco)�this captivating history explores the birth of the Middle Eastern oil industry. From the king and his royal court to the desert guides, scientists, and mechanics who built the original oil company, Aramco, the distant and desperately poor world of Depression-era Saudi Arabia is vividly brought to life. Written more than 50 years ago, this detailed account serves as a kind of time capsule and features the author�s prescient insights into the cultural and technological consequences of King Ibn Saud�s deliberate decision to choose America as his commercial ally.

Link to purchase the book