C. M. (Dad) Joiner, a 70-year-old Oklahoman, persisted in his belief that Rusk County held oil. With driller E. C. Laster and crew members Dennis May, Dave Cherry, Glenn Pool, Jim Lambert, and Dave Hughes, he continued after two early failures, one caused by a jammed bit and another by stuck drill pipe. The rig was then skidded 300 feet down slope, where Laster said, "This is as good a place as any," and on May 8, 1929, Joiner No. 3 Daisy Bradford was spudded in. The equipment was an old rotary rig powered by a single-cylinder engine, one 45 hp boiler, and one old cotton gin boiler fired with soggy oak and pine chunks by roustabout Dan Tanner. During the Depression, with money scarce, the crew often went without pay, and Joiner sacrificed much of his 10,000 acre block of leases. At last, on Sept. 5, 1930, a drill stem logged at 3536 feet into the Woodbine Formation showed oil. A better rig had to be brought in, and on Oct. 3, 1930, the well blew in and oil went over the crown block. A boom followed, with cars bumper-to-bumper on all access roads and derricks rising in all directions. In its first 30 years, this great field produced more than 3.5 billion barrels of oil and came to cover some 200 square miles, the largest in the world.