At 1,000 feet, the coffers ran dry, but the mayor said he would find more money and ordered the drilling to continue. Ten feet later, the drill hit gas, spitting the drill bit out of the ground like a watermelon seed. The mayor was just getting dressed and ran down to the well with his suspenders hanging around his knees, according to a city historian.

Remarkably, the city turned down a bid by a private company to buy the gas franchise and instead decided to develop it as a public utility. The city raised money to install gas lines that ran through buildings and from home to home. Street lamps burned around the clock because the gas was so plentiful it was less expensive than turning them off and relighting them daily, a reality that earned Medicine Hat a mention in “Ripley’s Believe It or Not!” (The gas mantles in the lamps have since been replaced by light-emitting diodes.)

Learning how to safely harness the invisible, odorless resource took some time. Many a building was blown to matchwood because of leaking gas. In 1908, a mattress factory exploded.

Medicine Hat, by then incorporated as a city, started offering industry tax holidays, free building sites and free natural gas; thousands of factories came. Vincent Scully, a former Irish politician, declared that Medicine Hat would become “the Pittsburgh of Western Canada,” and for a while, it looked as if he might have been right. By the time the Great War began, Medicine Hat factories were producing dozens of products, “from manhole covers to candy,” according to Medicine Hat’s history museum.

One of the first was a brick factory, the largest in Canada at the time, which took advantage of the region’s other natural resource: rich deposits of clay along the South Saskatchewan River basin. But the city’s real heyday came during the energy crisis of the 1970s when fertilizer, methanol and other petrochemical plants moved to “the Hat” to take advantage of the affordable fuel.

The prairie that stretches out from the city is dotted with gas wells today, marked by U-shaped pipes sticking out of the ground like abandoned hitching posts. Some of the wells have been producing gas for over a hundred years.