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Is this oil drilling?

Yup.... Pennsylvania (sp?) style.... Rotary rigs were needed in the rocky soils of California.

Aaah the good old days. Bet people then didnt complain about a job or a job not being good enough for them then. But you usually earned your money a bit harder then

Looks pretty rocky there in both locations.
Cable Rigs could work through rock also.

i worked over 5 years on the rigs out of Casper Wyoming drilling for deep oil anywhere from 10,000 to 28,000....even today being a roughneck is very hard work not to mention ,very dangerous......it appears to me they maky be running casing as that pipe looks to big for drill pipe, however maybe it was that big back then, but i doubt it....

I guess the authors, of the books I read while doing my research, didn't know what they were writing about. Thanks for clearing that up for me bob.

Definitely a western photo. Texas, Wyoming, California.
All three are of the same location.
I worked 4 years on Drilling rigs. 3 in Texas and 1 in California in the early 80's.
Got to see an old cable tool rig in operation once. Pretty neat to watch. The pipe hanging in second photo appears to be the BIT. (can't be positive without seeing the end of it) Surface pipe is set in the bottom photo with the cable running down.
Rigs generally had 2 bits. They would sharpen one, while the other was drilling.
roadrelics is so right about it being hard, dangerous work, even today.

Had an old timer tell me, Oil Drilling was one of three occupations during WWII, that the government didn't expect women to work in, to replace men sent to war, because it was so dangerous and vital to the war effort. Having a job in those fields would keep you home. He said Coal Mining and Steel Worker were the others. Don't know how true, but makes sense.

Thanks for posting hillsideshortleg. Love these old pics.
Chuck

Terriffic piece of history there ! Im going to tell my father in law about it . He was a geologist for Shell Oil back in the fourties and fifties . Ed Shaver

They could be drilling a water well by the looks of it. Not much casing 2 joints, no valves for well control or wellhead anywhere in site and also looks to be a small cable tool drilling rig compared to the ones I have seen in Montana and Canada. They are using Conoco grease by the looks in last pic.

Hey minuteman: You are a step ahead of me. That landscape looks like eastern Montana

The photos could be most anyplace in the western
portion on the US. Could also be Mexico.
Without a reference on the photo, impossible to tell.
All the western states have hills and patches
like those shown in the photos and all
have at least small deposits of oil.
At first it looked to me that they have a
water drilling rig, but I'm no expert on
either water or oil drilling.