God Save Texas: A Journey Into the Soul of the Lone Star State(8)

Texas has been steadily closing the gap in both population and economic growth, however. Texas exports nearly outrank those of California and New York combined. Yes, a lot of that is from petroleum products, but Texas also tops California in exporting technology. Between 2000 and 2016, job growth in Dallas and Houston expanded 31 percent, which is three times the rate of Los Angeles. Austin employment expansion was over 50 percent during the same period.

All that vigorous growth in Texas had a rope thrown around it when oil prices, which had climbed to $145 a barrel in 2008, slumped in 2014, ultimately falling below $30. In 2016, for the first time in twelve years, Texas job growth lagged behind that of the nation as a whole. Houston alone lost as many as 70,000 energy-related jobs. California’s gross domestic product outpaced that of Texas in the first two quarters of 2016. In the third quarter, however, when oil prices began to stabilize, Texas once again leaped ahead. Critics of the Texas economic model would say that’s proof that it’s not magic—it’s oil.



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THE MANY LAYERS of subterranean Texas have names that resonate among oilmen and even form a part of the ordinary Texan’s consciousness. The Barnett Shale, the Wolfcamp, the Austin Chalk—each held a buried treasure waiting to be discovered. The grand story of Texas oil, however, is really about three wells.

At the beginning of the twentieth century, near Beaumont, on the Gulf Coast close to the Louisiana line, there was a sulfurous hill called Sour Spring Mound. Gas seepage was so noticeable that schoolboys would sometimes set the hill on fire. Pattillo Higgins, a disreputable local businessman who had lost an arm in a gunfight with a deputy sheriff, became convinced that there was oil below the gassy hill. Wells weren’t drilled back then; they were essentially pounded into the earth using a heavy bit that was repeatedly lifted and dropped, chiseling its way through the strata. The quicksand under Sour Spring Mound defeated several attempts to make a proper hole. Higgins forecast oil at a thousand feet, a totally made-up figure.

Higgins hired a mining engineer, Captain Anthony F. Lucas, a Croatian American who had studied mining engineering in Austria. Captain Lucas’s first well got to a depth of only 575 feet before the pipe collapsed. Lucas then decided to use a rotary bit, a novelty at the time, which he thought more suitable for penetrating soft layers. His drillers also discovered that by pumping mud down the hole, they could form a kind of cement to buttress the sides. These innovations created the modern drilling industry.

Lucas and his team hoped to bring in a well that could produce 50 barrels a day. On January 10, 1901, at 1,020 feet, almost precisely the depth predicted by Higgins’s wild guess, the well suddenly vomited mud and then ejected six tons of drilling pipe clear over the top of the derrick. No one had ever seen anything like this. It was terrifying. In the unnerved silence that followed, the flabbergasted drilling team, drenched in mud, crept back to the site and began to clean up the debris. Then they heard a roar from deep in the earth, from another era, millions of years earlier. More mud flew up, followed by rocks and gas, and then oil, which shot 150 feet into the air—a black geyser that spewed from the arterial wound that the drillers had made in the greatest oil field ever seen at the time. For the next nine days, until the well was capped, the gusher blasted 100,000 barrels of oil into the air—more than all the wells in America combined. After the first year of production, the well, which Higgins named Spindletop, was producing 17 million barrels a year.

In those days, Texas was almost entirely rural; there were no large cities and practically no industry; cotton and cattle were the bedrock of the economy. Spindletop changed that. Because of native Texas suspicion of outside corporate interests—especially John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil—two local companies were formed to develop the new field: Gulf Oil and Texaco (both now merged with Chevron). The boom made some prospectors millionaires, but the sudden surfeit of petroleum was not entirely a blessing for Texas. In the 1930s, prices crashed, to the point that, in some parts of the country, oil was cheaper than water. That would become a familiar pattern of the boom-or-bust Texas economy.

In August 1927, Columbus Marion Joiner, a prospector and beloved con man widely known as Dad, began drilling in East Texas, near Henderson, on the Daisy Bradford lease, named after the widow who owned the land. Joiner had practically no money and even less luck. His first two wells went bust. To entice investors to back yet another well, he drew up fake geological reports indicating the presence of salt domes and oil-bearing anticlines. The phony report predicted that at 3,500 feet the well would tap into the greatest oil field in the world. Once again, a wild prediction would turn out to be absolutely true.

Dad Joiner was targeting the Woodbine sand, which sits above a layer of Buda limestone, thick with fossils of the dinosaurs and crocodiles that had plied the shallow Cretaceous seas. Over millions of years, plankton, algae, and other organic materials buried in the sandy layer transformed into oil or gas. Joiner scraped by for three and a half years, paying his workers with scrip and selling $25 certificates to farmers to raise enough money to complete the rickety well. When Joiner reached 3,456 feet, a core sample showed oil-saturated sand. Thousands gathered to watch the roughnecks drilling and swabbing through the night. Imagine the scene: farmers in bib overalls, women in dresses sewn from patterns out of the Sears catalog, all of them dreaming of a life in which they would be strolling down a grand boulevard in fine clothes, pricing jewels and weighing investments—a dream that was about to come true for many of them. In the late afternoon on October 3, 1930, a gurgling was heard; then, two nights later, oil flew into the air in a great and continuous ejaculation. People danced in the black rain; children painted their faces with it.