The Sooner Queen — And the Oklahoma Oilmen Who Built the State Around Her
Some labels survive because someone decided they mattered enough to keep. The Sooner Queen is one of them.
Bert Montgomery Salyer Jr. arrived in Oklahoma City in 1934 with nothing but the will to build something. He organized the Salyer Refining Company that year, and not long after, the Salyer Oil Company — a chain that grew to more than thirty-five retail gasoline stations across Oklahoma and the surrounding states. His economy product was re-refined motor oil, reclaimed and resold at a price postwar motorists could afford while the major companies fought him on every front. He put a cowgirl kneeling beside a campfire on the can, a Hereford calf grazing behind her, rolling plains stretching out to the horizon. “Guaranteed Re-Refined Motor Oil.” A comparable can sold at Morphy’s Hershey auction in October 2024 for $6,150. Most of them were thrown away. This one wasn’t.
Salyer wasn’t building in a vacuum. He was one name among a generation of Oklahoma oilmen who turned a young state into the center of the American petroleum industry — and the labels they left behind are the reason brands like The Faded Label Co. exist at all.
Wirt Franklin and the Healdton Field
Wirt Franklin arrived in Ardmore in 1905 and opened a law practice. By 1913 he had pivoted to oil entirely, playing a pivotal role in establishing the Healdton Field, one of the richest oil discoveries in southern Oklahoma. He went on to found the Independent Petroleum Association of America, standing at President Hoover’s Oil Conservation Conference to fight federal production restrictions on behalf of independent producers — the small operators who didn’t have the lobbying weight of Standard Oil or its successors. The town of Wirt, near Healdton, carries his name to this day.
The refinery he helped establish in Ardmore went through several identities — the Cameron Refinery, then the Wirt Franklin Refinery, then the Ben Franklin Refinery, carrying his legacy forward on the pump island even after his name came off the building. That same refinery eventually became Valero. It is still running today.
E.W. Marland and the Triangle That Covered the State
Ernest Whitworth Marland came to Oklahoma from Pennsylvania in 1908 and built an empire almost as fast as he lost it. He assembled the 101 Ranch Oil Company, struck big in Kay County by 1911, and by 1921 had consolidated everything into the Marland Oil Company, headquartered in Ponca City. The red triangle with “Marland” across it became one of the most recognized symbols on Oklahoma roads — by 1926 the company operated more than six hundred service stations across eleven states. Marland brought in J.P. Morgan’s financial backing to fuel the growth, and Morgan’s people eventually took the company out of his hands entirely, merging it into a small Colorado outfit called Continental Oil. Continental Oil became Conoco. The triangle is still part of the logo.
Bill Skelly and the Oil Capital of the World
William Grove Skelly came to Oklahoma from Pennsylvania with experience as a mule skinner and tool dresser in the oil fields around Ardmore and Duncan. He partnered with Jack Sankey to form Skelly-Sankey Oil Company in Duncan in 1915, then incorporated Skelly Oil Company in Tulsa in 1919 — the same year Tulsa was calling itself the Oil Capital of the World, and meaning it. By 1929 his crude production had climbed from under two million barrels to nearly nine million annually. By 1930 the company operated 471 bulk and service stations with more than four thousand franchise dealers across eleven states.
Skelly didn’t stop at oil. He founded the Spartan School of Aeronautics in Tulsa in 1928, helped build Tulsa’s municipal airport, and spent decades as the public face of the independent petroleum industry in Washington. The company he built lasted under his name until it fully merged into Getty Oil in the 1970s — but for half a century, Skelly’s branded gasolines and motor oils were a fixture on Mid-Continent highways.
The Million Dollar Elm
None of this happened in isolation. Marland, Skelly, the Phillips brothers, and a rotating cast of Oklahoma’s oil pioneers gathered in the shade of a single elm tree next to the Osage Nation Tribal Council House in Pawhuska, bidding against each other for drilling leases auctioned by Colonel Elmer Ellsworth Walters. The auctions there generated roughly $157 million for the Osage Nation by 1928 — and launched or fed the fortunes of nearly every major name in Oklahoma oil history. It became known as the Million Dollar Elm, and the legend wasn’t an exaggeration.
What Gets Left Behind
Most of what these companies built is gone. The stations closed, the refineries changed hands or shut down, the independent producers got absorbed into larger names or disappeared entirely. What survives is the labels — the globes, the cans, the signs that collectors like my father have spent decades tracking down before they end up in a landfill or a scrap pile.
The Sooner Queen is one small piece of that bigger story. An Oklahoma City refiner nobody outside the collector world remembers, putting a cowgirl on an oil can because he had a product to sell and an eye for what would catch someone’s attention at the pump. It’s not a triangle that became a Fortune 500 logo. It’s not a name that ended up on an airport or a college stadium. It’s just a label that someone decided was worth keeping — and worth carrying forward.
The Faded Label Co. — keeping the golden age of American roadside art alive, one product at a time.