Ellis, Roger Mills and Custer Counties, on the north shelf of the Anadarko Basin. Mewbourne and a short list of others have quietly drilled hundreds of Cherokee wells out here, and most owners have no idea their section was included.
The Cherokee is the least publicized active play in Oklahoma. There is no ticker symbol attached to it, no analyst coverage, and no acreage race in the trade press. There is just Mewbourne, quietly drilling wells in Ellis and Roger Mills Counties, and a handful of others working the same interval around them. Roughly 320 Cherokee wells have been spudded in the state since 2020, and nearly all of them sit in three counties.
Two numbers say more about it than any description. Of the roughly 295 Cherokee wells currently producing in Oklahoma, 136 first produced since January 2025, with Roger Mills alone accounting for 76 of those. And there are 40 drilled but uncompleted wells and 42 approved permits sitting in the play right now, eighty two wells in the queue against 295 producing. Statewide, Roger Mills County is tied with Grady for the most rigs running in Oklahoma.
That silence is the problem for mineral owners. A play nobody writes about is a play where offers arrive without context. We track Cherokee permits, spuds and completions weekly out of Tulsa, and before you sign anything, with us or anyone else, we will show you what the drilling around your section actually means for your interest. Free, and with the arithmetic shown.
One correction worth making plainly, because it costs owners money: the Cherokee Shale play discussed here is western Oklahoma. The Cherokee Platform is northeast Oklahoma, a century-old shallow oil province that is not being horizontally developed at any meaningful scale. If you own around Bartlesville, Nowata, Vinita or Claremore, your minerals may still be worth real money in existing production, but any pitch built on a drilling boom there is wrong. Our northeast Oklahoma county pages price that legacy production for what it is.
We wrote the play up in detail in The Oil Scout: The Cherokee Nobody Is Writing About.
The Pennsylvanian interval, Desmoinesian in age, that operators target horizontally across the Anadarko shelf. Locally the Red Fork, Skinner, Prue and their equivalents, stacked and often developed several benches at a time.
The shallower horizontal oil targets sitting above the Cherokee across the same counties, frequently held by the same units.
The deeper section under much of this acreage. A Cherokee well does not exhaust what your minerals cover, and a valuation that ignores the deeper rights is leaving money on the table.
Ellis, Roger Mills and Custer carry the overwhelming majority of Cherokee drilling. Beckham, Washita, Caddo and Dewey sit on the southern and eastern flanks, where the interval is thinner and operators usually take it alongside a deeper objective. We buy across all of it.
Everything a Oklahoma owner needs in one place: who owns what under state law, how royalties must be paid and by when, what a buyer can and cannot deduct, the tax treatment of a sale, and the deadlines that quietly cost people their minerals. Free, and no sign-up.
Read the Oklahoma guideEvery oil and gas operator in Oklahoma, with contact information, refreshed from the state regulator. Free to search, and useful whether or not you ever sell anything.
The things owners here most often wish they had read first. All free, none of it gated.
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