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A Rainbow of Leases in the Oklahoma Panhandle.
A striking relic of the Oklahoma Panhandle gas boom of the late 1920s, this locally printed map documents the complex patchwork of oil and gas leases in Texas County as of April 26, 1927. The map reduces the county's full extent, townships 1 through 6 North and ranges 10 through 19 East of the Cimarron Meridian, into a dense grid of 40-acre parcels. Over this base, the publishers applied thirteen separate color passes to indicate leaseholds by company, keyed in the lower margin to Sinclair, Marland, Amerada, Roxana, and other players of the period.
Each overprinted color represents a separate relief block or electrotype, registered with surprising accuracy given the limitations of small-town job-printing equipment. The result is a kaleidoscopic checkerboard that conveys precise lease and drilling activity at a glance. Standard oilfield symbology is also included. Black derricks mark producing gas wells, circles with a dot identify spudding or drilling sites, and slashed-through circles indicate dry holes. Many wells have been annotated in manuscript with notations such as "spudded" or "3000+ Gas."
The map was published by The Panhandle Herald of Guymon and sold for fifty cents, part of a series intended for use in lease speculation and field operations. Its visual density and technical ingenuity, in particular the improvised use of multi-pass relief printing to emulate full-color lithography, make it one of the more compelling regional petroleum maps of its time.
![Mapa et tierra q[u]e yos pedro Vial taigo transitau en St. Tafee este dia 18 de Octubre de La ao 1787](https://storage.googleapis.com/raremaps/img/small/3645.jpg)