The apoplectic, international protest of importing more crude oil from friendly Canada via TransCanada's proposed Keystone XL pipeline is a stunning contrast to what the oil and gas industry will find in Canadian, Texas.

Wind farms, cattle- and horse-ranching, and oil and gas cohabit in the hills along the Canadian River in Hemphill County and on the vast prairies of the greater Texas Panhandle and western Oklahoma area.

From the air, approaching the Hemphill County Airport, where a kitten greets passengers on the tarmac for this month's cover story, all the pretty rigs, wellheads, frac-fluid ponds and oil- and saltwater-collection tanks dot the countryside. Along the roads, collection trucks carrying oil make their way to pipelines.

In this hub of thousands of old vertical—and now hundreds of new horizontal—Granite Wash, Cleveland and Tonkawa oil and gas-liquids wells, the business of extracting and shipping hydrocarbons is as Canadian as a mesquite-grilled steak dinner at the Cattle Exchange restaurant.

There, on the first floor of the century-old Moody Hotel, a five- by six-foot painting explains the Canadian, Texas, way: "When Word Was Bond," by the late Don Ray, a Texas Plains native of nearby Clarendon, depicts two ranchers, each on horseback on the prairie, shaking hands over a cattle deal.

Upstairs, prints of early 20th-century photographs by Edward S. Curtis, such as "Story of the Washita," of Native Americans who once thrived in the region, line the walls of Abraham Trading Co. There, Salem Abraham, a fourth-generation Canadian and one of the world's original e-commuters, trades commodities, currencies and securities for his more than $600-million hedge fund he founded in 1988.

The firm posted the first e-trade on the Chicago Mercantile Exchange in the late 1990s and has averaged a 19% return annually, including a contrarian 28.8% posted in financial-crisis-marred 2008.

Outside, brick paves the newly renovated Main Street and, a few paces away at the 102-year-old Palace Theater, which Abraham and his wife, Ruth Ann, renovated in the late 1990s, films are in 3-D, the sound is THX certified, and the popcorn machine is circa 1940.

Breakfast at the Cordillera Energy Partners III LLC field office is from The Bucket, which supplies fresh-made bread to many of the town's restaurants, and the ladies' room offers a whopping can of hair spray for keeping up a Texas-size hair day in Panhandle-size winds that once blew away the region's topsoil in what became the Dust Bowl of the 1930s.

Much of that over-farmed land is now a part of the Black Kettle National Grasslands across the state line in Roger Mills County, Oklahoma, where Chesapeake Energy Corp., Cordillera and other operators are laterally surfacing oil and wet gas anew from the region's rich, stacked pays.

Sun Oil Co. made the first well in Hemphill County in 1954 and the Ray Wilson 1-53, drilled in 1957, was still producing as of 2009. The deep-gas potential of the Atoka, Morrow and Hunton formations was confirmed soon by the Gulf No. 1 Helton in Buffalo Wallow Field that came in at 588 million cubic feet of gas per day fron Hunton dolomite. It remains one of the biggest gas wells ever drilled in the world and catapulted Hemphill County to one of the Top 10 gas producers in the U.S.

By 2000, the boom was over and the population declined again to approximately 3,000. "Boom times weren't far behind though, and today Canadian and Hemphill County are home to more drilling, more production and more oil and gas company employees than ever before," the town's website announces.

In the midst of all of this oil and gas, "(the citizens) put as much time and thought into questions of developing water and wind energy plans, development and housing challenges, education and workforce training as their ancestors did, determined not to be the last generation in the remote, romantic Canadian River Valley."

From abroad, the Dalai Lama and eight other Nobel Peace Prize winners are urging the U.S. to reject import of oil derived from Canada's prolific oil sands via the half-million-barrel-a-day Keystone XL pipeline from Hardisty, Alberta, to the Texas Gulf Coast.

From Canadian, Texas, the oil is already more than halfway there.

For more commentary on current events, see Nissa's blog at OilandGasInvestor.com.