Alfred von Hammerstein

Following the lead of the Dominion government, private speculators entered the Athabasca region to drill for the elusive oil reputed to lie beneath the oil sands. Between 1893 and 1924, approximately thirty-six wells were bored, some of them by the German immigrant Alfred von Hammerstein (d. 1941). Perhaps the most active, and certainly the most storied, early private speculator in Alberta’s oil sands, Hammerstein, like his contemporaries, was guided by the mistaken belief in a basement oil reservoir. Nonetheless, his conviction that Alberta’s oil sands were worthy of development resulted in his being the first to attempt extracting oil from the sands commercially and the first to collect significant amounts of investment capital for such efforts.

Hammerstein arrived in the Athabasca region in 1897 on his way to the Yukon to strike it rich in the Klondike gold rush. After hearing rumors of the oil riches that might be found there, however, he traveled no further. A spirited entrepreneur, Hammerstein had initiated multiple business ventures in the area before even beginning his quest for a pool of free oil; he ran a lodging house, traded goods, transported goods and mail, wrote as a freelance journalist and even hauled cargo scows.

He also educated himself on the topic of petroleum, reading old geological reports by Robert Bell and George Dawson and examining the gas well at Pelican Rapids, before beginning his search in earnest.

In 1903, Hammerstein became the first private interest to bring drilling equipment into the Athabasca area and submit an application for petroleum reservations. In supporting his continued claim to these reservations in 1909, Hammerstein claimed to have drilled fourteen wells, erected five complete derricks and brought in more than a hundred tons of equipment, all at a cost of $85,000 over the previous six years. Not the least of his arguments was that he had “worked against big odds and tremendous natural difficulties,” an apt description of having ferried that equipment on scows down a 129 km (80 mi.) stretch of the Athabasca River, including rapids. While his persistence never resulted in the “large flow of petroleum” he was certain could be found, it did win for him and the group of investors supporting his activities, land titles in the Athabasca oil sands region that included surface, petroleum, natural gas and asphalt rights, authorized by the federal government. In 1914 six freehold properties were patented to The Athabasca Oil and Asphalt Company.

With the land patents secured, Hammerstein stopped actively searching for oil and shifted instead to promoting, leasing and trying to sell the properties. Without a railway or a pipeline to Edmonton such as he had proposed in 1905, there was no economical way to transport any petroleum that might be found to market. No company showed real interest in the land, however, until 1959 when Sun Oil Company made an unsuccessful claim on it. It was 1970, years after Hammerstein’s death in 1941, before the land was actually sold to

Standard Oil Company of British Columbia Ltd. for $1,900,000.

Over the years, Hammerstein’s reputation has suffered from accusations of fraud and unscrupulous business practices, yet his efforts were significant first steps in the development of the massive petroleum industry that operates in Northern Alberta today. As Hammerstein, himself, argued, he “undertook with private means, [what] the Dominion Government with all its tremendous resources had given up, to do.”