The Volcanic Upheaval of 1894 at Coffeyville

In July 1894, a significant geological event occurred in Coffeyville, Kansas, where a volcanic eruption created a crater and displaced large quantities of earth and stone. Witnesses described it as comparable to a volcano, with debris cast up to 400 feet high. The explosion transformed a peaceful prairie into a scene resembling the stony landscapes of the Rocky Mountains. Investigations suggested that nearby gas wells might have leaked gas, creating immense pressure leading to the explosion. Despite various hypotheses, the specific cause remains unclear, with experts speculating about potential connections to underlying seismic activity.

Viewed from the standpoint of the geologist and the student of physical phenomena, in the entire history of the state of Kansas, from the days of Coronado to these opening years of the Twentieth Century, there has been no more interesting spectacle than was witnessed by those who visited Major Osborn’s pasture adjoining the city of Coffeyville in the summer of 1894. The location of the volcanic upheaval which occurred there on the night of Sunday, July 22nd, was only about four blocks north of the Eldridge House and the business centre of the city, and not more than seventy-five yards west of Ninth Street, which there marks the western limit of the town. Had the upheaval occurred fifteen hundred feet south of where it did, it would have made utter wreck of most of the business buildings of that city.

As compared with the underground disturbance on that July night, the Dalton raid which brought Coffeyville so much unenviable notoriety, was but a ripple on the surface of events. That affair was transitory and left no such abiding scars on the earth’s surface as did the elemental upheaval that occurred two years later. Aside from events which are of interest because they affect those of our own race, there has been no other happening in the entire history of Kansas so far out of the usual order of things, nor so significant in its suggestions. Elemental commotion above the earth’s surface we are accustomed to, and the violence and destruction wrought by cyclones and tornadoes do not excite our special wonder, as they would if they were new to our experience. But when the solid earth itself begins to rock and vomits forth stones by the ton from depths that have not seen the light for unnumbered aeons, people have reason to pause and question whether there is anything stable, anything abiding in this old world of ours.

The writer of this article visited Coffeyville two days after the explosion, and this is what he saw as he then recorded his observations:

The main crater extends in a northwesterly and southeasterly direction about a hundred feet. It is oblong in shape and varies in width from thirty to fifty feet. The pile of stone and earth that surrounds it is ten or twelve feet high at the southeast corner, but the crater is scarcely lower on the inside of this pile than the ground just south of it, so that the bowl-shaped or crater-like appearance is due in large measure to the piling up of earth and stone around the region of upheaval. Most of the central depression, as well as the surrounding elevation, is covered with jagged and irregular stones of various sizes, giving the scene a slight resemblance to some of the stone gardens among the Rocky Mountains. These stones are principally fragments of sandstone, but among them is some bluish soapstone. The gas men who have drilled here say that the latter is not found nearer the surface than thirty or forty feet. And yet right in the center of the crater is a great mass of this stone, consisting of four or five layers, all tilted up on edge, about six feet in thickness and fifteen feet long, with their lower edges concealed by the debris about them. This is the mass which has been repeatedly described as “about the size of a wagon box.” As a matter of fact there is stone enough in that mass to fill a good-sized wagon train and to weigh from fifty to one hundred tons.

The force required to tear this stone loose from the horizontal strata in which it lay so quietly imbedded a week ago, as it had been ever since it was mud and ooze in the bed of a great inland sea, to break up and lift all the layers of sandstone that lay above it, and to instantly raise the thousands on thousands of tons of rock and soil between it and the surface, is beyond all computation. It must have been something titanic — something compared with which the charges of dynamite used in shooting oil wells are as toy pistols to the great Krupp gun we saw at the Chicago Exposition. That an explosion of gas in a pocket scores of feet below the surface might have stirred the bosom of the sleeping earth and opened a seam to ease the pressure would be credible; but what kind of a force, how sudden the explosion, and how beyond measure the pressure, the force, required to produce so stupendous a result!

Yet this one miniature crater, where a bit of smooth, grass-grown Kansas prairie had been, in the twinkling of an eye, transformed into such a scene of stony desolation, by no means told all the story. Running thence southwest for nearly fifty yards were great cracks from six to eight feet deep and a foot or more in width. They terminated in another smaller crater where the eruption seemed to have been much less violent, the soil merely boiling up from the effects of the blow-out by the pent-up forces below. Still farther to the southwest, traces of the explosion and smaller fissures could be perceived for a thousand feet or more out into the pasture.

The main crater could have been little short of a full-fledged volcano at the time of the explosion. Eye witnesses say that stones and earth were thrown to a vast height — some think as much as four hundred feet, which I am inclined to believe is more nearly correct than the conservative estimate of one hundred and fifty feet. The ground from the center of the crater east to Walnut Street, a distance of seventy-five yards, is thickly strewn with stones varying in size from the smallest particle up to broken pieces of rock weighing two hundred pounds or more; and there is hardly a bit of ground large enough to place your hand upon that is not covered with this crumbled stone. There are plenty of pieces in the street, too; and so heavy were the rocks falling along its east side that a wooden sidewalk, not less than a hundred yards from the crater, built of plank two inches thick, was broken in several places by the falling fragments. For a block farther, more or less of the stony rain fell, some of the pieces of blue soapstone here being large enough for building slabs. In the lot directly east of the crater is a two-story residence probably twenty-five feet square. Here the window glass was all broken on the exposed sides, and in one place the weather boarding had been crushed by the bombardment. Mr. R. P. Kercheval occupied the upper story of this residence, and his bedroom window was shattered and stones thrown over on to the bed, fortunately without injuring anyone.

At the northeast corner of this house is a small cistern about six feet deep and eight feet in diameter. It is of the shape of an inverted bowl, and the native rock formed the bottom and a portion of the east side. Here the effects of still another explosion were perceptible, the rock in the center of the floor being torn loose and thrown up with such force as to crush the arch at the top, leaving a hole in the bottom where the firmest possible foundation had been before. Of course the cistern was drained, the water disappearing down the hole. Why the only break in the surface observable east of the main crater should have been made right in the bottom of this cistern is one of the many curious and inexplicable facts connected with this explosion.

Looking for something to throw light on the causes of such an upheaval, I note that a gas well had been drilled just northeast of the crater in the pasture and not more than fifty yards distant. That this well had something to do with the explosion is an almost universal conclusion. Indeed, Major Osborne, the owner of the property, is talking of suing the gas company which drilled the well, for damages. Again, two wells in the vicinity are reported to have behaved strangely before the explosion. One of them, only about a hundred yards to the southeast, is thirty feet deep and usually has six or eight feet of water in it. Here, before the explosion, the water is said to have risen to within four feet of the surface, a fact difficult to explain at such a dry season as had been prevailing. The water has subsided to the normal level since the explosion. Another well, a block farther away, had been bubbling with gas for two or three weeks, but since has become quiescent. The day after the explosion, while a hundred people were viewing the scene, one of those small boys who are never happy except when doing something unexpected that they have no business to, struck a match and ignited gas enough to cause an explosion and some trembling of the earth.

All these facts fit in very nicely with the theory that the gas well had been leaking into some fissures comparatively near the surface, and crowded them with gas until the pressure became very great, when the stuff exploded in some unaccountable way. In that case, though, it is naturally questioned why some of the force and effects of the explosion were not manifest in the well itself. That seems to be uninjured, and the gas escapes from it now with considerable roaring, burning at night with a great mass of flame and a noise that may be heard blocks away.

People who were awake at the time of the explosion say that it was preceded by a heavy rumbling and roaring that seemed to come from the southwest; that the earth rocked and then the dirt and stones were thrown high into the air. At the same time people living three miles to the northeast report that dishes were thrown from a table by the trembling of the earth.

The explosion occurred at two o’clock Monday morning. A few minutes before one o’clock Tuesday afternoon, the sound of a heavy explosion was heard at Caney, twenty miles to the west; dishes rattled, buildings rocked, and there were all the phenomena of an earthquake shock. The same afternoon several people from the neighborhood of Independence, who were attending a sale two miles north of Jefferson and about twelve miles northwest of Coffeyville, report having heard a loud explosion. Threshers in Rutland Township observed the same thing, and their machine was shaken as if by a rolling of the earth’s surface. Where this explosion heard by so many people in such widely separated localities actually took place, no one ever learned; and it seems hardly possible that it could have all been the work of the Coffeyville boy with his little parlor match, as the noise he made could not have been heard at so great a distance.

That the gas which exploded was far above the deep veins from which the gas wells draw their supply seems probable. That electrical or other conditions which accompany earthquakes could ignite subterranean gases is well known. Why an upper vein should be exploded and the lower ones remain undisturbed by the effects of an earthquake, whose tremblings are supposed to originate hundreds or thousands of feet below the surface, is hard to understand on the theory suggested. That the gases which filled the fissures comparatively near the surface could have been exploded by any other agency than one originating deep in the bowels of the earth seems unreasonable — the more especially as there was no thunder or lightning on that eventful night.

The years that have passed since the occurrence whose effects are detailed above have witnessed no other like phenomena anywhere in the gas belt; nor have they thrown any additional light on the cause which produced that blow-out. And I am still inclined to believe that it could only have been the frictional or electrical effects of a slight earthquake shock that could have exploded the gas in its underground chambers and produced the resulting volcanic upheaval.