Oil in Texas: The Gusher Age, 1895–1945

By Diana Davids Hinton and Roger M. Olien

The dramatic story of the oil boom that transformed the history of a state, drawn from archives and first-person accounts.
 
As the twentieth century began, oil in Texas was easy to find, but the quantities were too small to attract industrial capital and production. Then, on January 10, 1901, the Spindletop gusher blew in. Over the next fifty years, oil transformed Texas, creating a booming economy that built cities, attracted out-of-state workers and companies, funded schools and universities, and generated wealth that raised the overall standard of living, even for blue-collar workers. No other twentieth-century development had a more profound effect upon the state.
 
This book chronicles the explosive growth of the Texas oil industry from the first commercial production at Corsicana in the 1890s through the vital role of Texas oil in World War II. Using both archival records and oral histories, they follow the wildcatters and the gushers as the oil industry spread into almost every region of the state. The authors trace the development of many branches of the petroleum industry: pipelines, refining, petrochemicals, and natural gas. They also explore how overproduction and volatile prices led to increasing regulation and gave broad regulatory powers to the Texas Railroad Commission.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Mar 15, 2002
• ISBN: 9780292778863

Book preview

Oil IN TEXAS

NUMBER THREE

Clifton and Shirley Caldwell Texas Heritage Series

Oil IN TEXAS

The Gusher Age, 1895–1945

DIANA DAVIDS HINTON AND ROGER M. OLIEN

Publication of this work was made possible in part by support from Clifton and Shirley Caldwell and a challenge grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

COPYRIGHT © 2002 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

First edition, 2002

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work

should be sent to Permissions, University of Texas Press,

P.O. Box 7819, Austin, TX 78713-7819.

The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Hinton, Diana Davids, 1943–

Oil in Texas : the gusher age, 1895–1945 / Diana Davids Hinton and Roger M. Olien.

       p. cm. — (Clifton and Shirley Caldwell Texas heritage series)

Includes bibliographical references (p.) and index.

ISBN 0-292-76056-6 (cloth: alk. paper)

1. Petroleum industry and trade—Texas—History. 2. Petroleum

engineering—Texas—History. 3. Oil wells—Texas—

History. I. Olien, Roger M., date II.Title. III. Series.

HD9567.T3 0447 2001

338.2’7282’09764—dc21                                  2001027993

CONTENTS

PREFACE

1. The Road to Spindletop

2. The First Great Boom

3. After the Boom

4. Oily Water and Black Gold

5. The Rising Tide of Oil

6. Oil in Cow Country

7. The Colossus of Texas Booms

8. Survival and Growth

9. Texas Oil Goes to War

NOTES

GLOSSARY

BIBLIOGRAPHY

INDEX

PREFACE

As the new millennium begins, it is worth looking back over the twentieth century and considering how oil changed Texas. If cattle and cotton helped define the history of nineteenth-century Texas not only through the state’s economy but also through its life, institutions, and politics, then petroleum has had as much influence in twentieth-century Texas. Texas without oil? The notion is near inconceivable. One might as easily image Los Angeles without freeways, Manhattan without skyscrapers, or Washington, D.C., without politics. Oil is central to the economic and social identity of modern Texas.

Within a half-century of the industry’s birth in Texas, the state’s vast petroleum reserves dwarfed those of most other producing states. In 1932, the giant East Texas field alone yielded more than the total annual production of most of the other states. Fettered by regulation, in 1940 Texas still produced twice as much oil as California, the next largest producing state and one where production was unlimited. Producing over one-third of the nation’s oil in 1940, Texas dominated the price of crude oil in national and international markets. Thus, once the Texas Railroad Commission became the industry’s regulatory agency, it assumed the dominant position in crude oil markets. By the end of the first half-century, the Railroad Commission’s influence over crude oil prices far exceeded that exercised today by the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC).

The major objective of this book is to explain how the massive growth of the petroleum industry in Texas came about. Beginning on the upper Gulf Coast, one region after another was opened to oil and gas production. Wildcatters did not succeed in finding oil in every part of the state, but that was not for lack of trying. By the end of the first halfcentury, which we have called the gusher age, petroleum had been discovered and was produced in 80 percent of the counties in Texas. The hallmark of the first fifty years is the driving force of exploration and discovery, the upstream sector of the industry. All of the other significant aspects of the industry—the operation of business circles, the increasing importance of science and technology, the creation and expansion of refining, manufacturing, service, and supply activities—spun off of the finding and production of crude oil. Similarly, the social and political impacts all followed from the expansion of field activity, and incidental problems stemming from exploration and production were dealt with through the political and regulatory processes.

As we tell the story of oil in Texas, we have generally followed a regional approach because it would be confusing to try to describe events in all regions in a single year, or even in a single decade. It would also be misleading. Different regions experienced different developmental patterns and confronted different problems. What was true on the Gulf Coast did not pertain to North Texas or the Permian Basin. As we cover the regions, we have not tried to include every oil field or every oil town, but rather to discuss important or typical examples. Similarly, we introduce individual oilmen and firms, as industry leaders or as typical of their times and places, but have not talked about every important oilman or every significant firm. We have also provided more information about relatively neglected parts of the state, Southwest Texas, for example, to add to the store of general information on our topic.

Generally speaking, our history of oil in Texas also follows a time line, organized by decades, within which we cover regional growth and development. Chapter 1 begins with Texas before oil and the preconditions of development, emphasizing the first commercially viable production at Corsicana. Chapter 2 moves to the Spindletop boom and the initial era of Gulf Coast exploration. Chapter 3 offers an overview of the aftermath of Spindletop and Gulf Coast development. Chapter 4 covers the opening of North Texas and the regional growth it fostered. Chapter 5 takes us to discoveries in Southwest and Central Texas, as well as to continued Gulf Coast exploration and the increased application of geoscience. Chapter 6 turns to the discovery of vast reserves in the Panhandle and Permian Basin, the impact of these discoveries on state institutions such as the University of Texas and Texas A&M University, and attempts to manage mounting overproduction of oil. Chapter 7 focuses on the great East Texas oil boom—the problems it caused, the fortunes made in it, and its impact on regulation. Chapter 8 describes what happened to the oil industry in other parts of the state while East Texas boomed and during the remainder of the 1930s. The final chapter is largely concerned with the impact of World War II on the Texas petroleum industry. There our story ends, for the time being, largely because the second half-century is a very different story indeed, and it deserves separate and detailed description.

Closely allied to the growth of the oil industry is urban growth, both in established metropolitan centers and in new locations. Oil broadened the economic base of cities such as Houston, Fort Worth, Wichita Falls, and Beaumont and brought sharp increases in population. It also took small cattle towns like Amarillo, Midland, and Odessa and turned them into cities, as well as centers for regional oil industry management and service. In all of these towns and cities, oil broadened and diversified economies that had been based almost entirely on agriculture. Oil activity also prompted the creation of new towns, and it turned tiny county seats like Kermit in Winkler County into bustling centers with several thousand inhabitants. Paradoxically, oil also moved people into the countryside. It brought drillers and pumpers to remote leases; it brought company camps, large and small, to developing oil fields. Last but not least, as industry activity boomed from place to place, oil created a substantial transient population, workers and their families in motion from one oil field to the next. In short, during the first half-century of industry growth in Texas, oil determined where a tremendous number of Texans happened to be. One could work in the industry and live in a city or in the country, or be often on the road.

The story of the petroleum industry’s first half-century in Texas must include its sequential spread over vast areas, but there is much more to the history than a sequence of gushers in unlikely places. Between the mid-1890s and 1945, Texas evolved from its predominantly agricultural roots into an industrial and managerial society. Petroleum was far and away the most important element in that profound change. Oil brought industrial employment on a grand scale to rural Texas. It offered an immediate and potently attractive alternative to life down on the farm or ranch, and thousands of Texans took that alternative. Many of them did not even have to drive to town to do so.

Simply put, the oil industry created economic opportunities. These opportunities, however, were not distributed through the whole population. During the industry’s first half-century, the most direct beneficiaries were Anglo men. For benefits that reached women, African Americans, and Tejanos, one must generally look at the spin-off businesses, commonly demanding few skills and paying much less than other positions in the industry. On this topic, in particular, there are still significant questions to be answered in future research: What effects did millions of dollars in royalty payments and lease rentals and bonuses have on farmers and ranchers? What did petrodollars do in banking and business circles in places such as Houston, Fort Worth, and Dallas? What effect did petroleum fortunes have on philanthropy and charity? Each of these topics is worthy of a book in itself.

We address some issues because they have emerged as significant in previous studies of the industry. Thus, we will refer frequently to the growth of major oil companies and the expansion of communities of independent oilmen in Texas. A survey of the first half-century of the industry in Texas provides ample opportunity to describe the working relationships between these two sectors and, thus, to determine if they were more likely to be cooperative or adversarial.

We also address the scholarly argument advanced by some historians of the American West, Walter Prescott Webb an early leader among them, that the American West, including Texas, was an exploited province, in which Eastern capital plundered resources, leaving regions poorer and natural resources depleted. With respect to petroleum in Texas, this argument does not hold up. Rather, the reverse: by controlling politics, Texans were able to use outside capital on their own terms and to control the industry within the state. In fact, they exploited outside capitalists and ended up the richer for it. So much for the idea that the story of oil in Texas might be compared with one of colonization and exploitation by an outside power.

We will have frequent occasion in the story of oil in Texas to delve into the topic of politics and regulation. Texas did not elect an oilman as governor until Ross Sterling won the general election in 1930, but long before that date, petroleum-related issues had significant political dimensions. Once the elected Texas Railroad Commission secured a regulatory role in the petroleum industry, it was inevitable that politics and regulation were never very far apart. Conflicts in business strategy often surfaced as political or regulatory issues—for example, in the controversies over town-lot drilling, pipeline outlets, use of casinghead gas, or more oil production than markets could absorb. The Texas Railroad Commission had to handle such questions not only as problems in industry operation but also as political disputes. As it managed them, it progressively defined its regulatory role; we will describe the most important stages in that evolution.

The Railroad Commission’s regulatory role also touches on a final significant topic, that of the emerging recognition of environmental issues. Problems such as how to store gusher production and how to handle oil-field brine and cut oil were not new when the industry emerged in Texas, but in Texas they took on vast dimensions. For example, the problem of disposing of the huge quantities of brine produced in the gigantic East Texas field in the late 1930s far outstripped difficulties in other fields. The problems were not new, but as we shall see, technology and engineering could not readily resolve them. Nor could the Texas Railroad Commission. Indeed, in some instances, the most up-to-date practices led to results that are unacceptable today.

Our work has been made easier and more efficient by the generous assistance of numerous librarians and archivists, especially D. Ryan Smith, director of the Texas Energy Museum, Beaumont, Texas, and the staffs of the Barker Texas History Center, University of Texas at Austin; the Southwest Collection, Texas Tech University; the DeGolyer Collection, Southern Methodist University, Dallas; the Houston Area Research Center; the East Texas Oil Museum, Kilgore; the Permian Basin Petroleum Museum, Library and Hall of Fame, Midland; and the Panhandle-Plains Historical Museum, Canyon.

We also wish to acknowledge the extended support provided by the J. Conrad Dunagan Chair in Regional and Business History at the University of Texas of the Permian Basin, and by grants from the Abell-Hanger Foundation, the Hunt Oil Company, and the Strake Foundation. Some of these funds were administered by the Communities Foundation of Texas, in its customarily efficient manner. Ernest Angelo, Jr., provided valuable advice early in our project.

We also appreciate the critical reading that Leo G. Byerley, Robert M. Leibrock, and Nicholas C. Taylor have given the manuscript and the suggestions they have provided in their specific areas of expertise: geology, petroleum engineering, and law. Whatever errors remain are most certainly ours.

1.

THE ROAD TO SPINDLETOP

Was there enough oil in Texas to bother with? As misconceived as this question seems today, it was uppermost in the mind of Joseph Stephen Cullinan as he stepped off a train in Corsicana in the fall of 1897. Local oilmen had erected looming wooden derricks to drill more than a hundred wells, some of them completed in less than two days. The small field yielded sufficient crude to warrant refining and marketing facilities, but its production was modest by the standards of the day, and local entrepreneurs had neither the capital nor the connections to process and sell their crude. They needed Cullinan’s help to develop their assets. But, would it be worth his time? Cullinan had good reason to be skeptical: there had been earlier finds in Texas and none of them had proved to be commercially important.¹

Long before there was a Standard Oil or an American petroleum industry, crude oil had been found and used in Texas. The survivors of De Soto’s expedition went ashore somewhere between Sabine Pass and High Island in 1543 and caulked their boats’ seams with petroleum tar they found floating on the tide. Much later travelers on the Spanish Trail are said to have used crude oil gathered from oil seeps to lubricate wagon axles. Indian, Hispanic, and Anglo settlers knew of numerous springs where oil seeped into water or shallow holes dug in the earth, and they experimented with petroleum for therapeutic or medicinal purposes, much as Americans in other parts of the country bought bottled rock oil from patent medicine hucksters. By the time Frederick Law Olmsted traveled in Texas in 1854, some enterprising persons in Hardin County had established a rudimentary spa and were exploiting petroleum seeps at Sour Lake. Visitors drank acidic, sulfury spring water and bathed in pools on which Olmsted saw floating a dense brown, transparent liquid.² A settlement with a similar seep thirteen miles away came to be called Saratoga, after the more fashionable nineteenth-century New York spa. In all these instances, people simply made opportunistic use of natural phenomena. No one had set out to find oil in quantity.

The Pennsylvania oil rush generated by Edwin L. Drake’s discovery in 1859, however, put a new light on the economic potential of land with oil seeps, and that probably led some ambitious Texans to prospect for petroleum. The earliest Texas wildcatter on record, Lynis T. Barrett of Melrose, leased a tract near Oil Springs, about fifteen miles southeast of Nacogdoches, in 1859. The Civil War interrupted Barrett’s enterprise, but when the Confederate veteran returned to Melrose in 1865, he and several associates organized the Melrose Petroleum Company and began to drill a well, using an augur eight feet long and eight inches wide. By September 12, 1866, they had reached 106 feet, and oil bubbled up to the surface, making the well the first producer in Texas. But, as so many subsequent episodes in Texas petroleum history demonstrate, it is one thing to find oil and quite another to produce it in commercially profitable quantities. What Barrett needed was developmental testing, preferably on the part of experienced oilmen more amply supplied with capital. He went to Pennsylvania for help, and there he succeeded in tempting John F. Carll, who later wrote for the Pennsylvania Geological Survey, to try his luck in Texas. Drilling near Barrett’s well, Carll tried twice, finding some oil in his first test and none in his second, whereupon he returned to the more lucrative oil arena of Pennsylvania. That apparently ended Barrett’s aspirations.³

Thereafter, others tried their luck in the Oil Springs area and along Bayou Vistador but without enough success to make their oil finds of more than local interest. Between 1870 and 1890 several companies drilled wells, none deeper than roughly a hundred feet, and either bailed or pumped what oil they found. As many as one hundred wells may have been completed, but there were no gushers among them. Worse yet, from the point of view of attracting wider attention, the oil was high in sulfur and low in paraffin, which meant that it would not be desirable for refining into kerosene, the petroleum product then most in demand. The oil could serve as either lubricant or boiler fuel, and as such found application in lumbermills. By 1890 there was enough local demand to prompt construction of both a 14.5-mile pipeline from Oil Springs to the railroad at Nacogdoches and a small refinery near Bayou Vistador, but this activity had little impact outside its corner of East Texas. As nearly as anyone could see, Texas petroleum was of minor commercial value, though there had been many sightings of it.⁴

As a result of both random drilling and accidental encounters with petroleum in holes sunk for water, by the end of the nineteenth century oil and gas had been found at a great many places in the state. As William Battle Phillips, director of the Texas Mineral Survey, noted in 1901, Time would fail us to enumerate all the localities at which small quantities of oil were obtained. Sometimes, as in Washington County in 1879, a householder put the accidental discovery of gas to work for fuel and illumination. In southwestern Liberty County, at Dayton, where most householders’ water wells bubbled with gas, T. M. McGowan sank a six-inch pipe three feet deep in his backyard, put a funnel over the top of the pipe, attached another pipe from his house to the funnel, and used the gas for heating, cooking, and lighting. Texas first appeared in national statistics on oil production in 1889 when two wells originally drilled in 1886 in search for water on the Bexar County ranch of George Dullnig produced a yearly total of forty-eight barrels of heavy crude. Dullnig barreled and sold the crude as a lubricant, for the grand total of $7.08, and he used the gas from yet another well as fuel on his ranch.⁵ Most of the time petroleum thus encountered was put to no commercial use. For farmers, ranchers, and the residents of many a dusty small town in late-nineteenth-century Texas, water was far more valuable than dribbles of oil and puffs of natural gas. Finding oil when drilling for water was a grave disappointment and a waste of money.

Nevertheless, the continual search for water eventually led to commercial oil production in Texas. In 1894, after several years of distressingly low cotton prices, Corsicana civic leaders recognized that as long as their economy relied on cotton and the majority of the farmers were tenants, prospects for local economic development were bleak. Businessmen, headed by lawyer James L. Autry, decided that Corsicana needed to attract industry. Were industry to locate in Corsicana, however, the city would have to increase the available supply of water. Autry and his associates organized the Corsicana Water Development Company in May 1894 and contracted with the American Well and Prospecting Company to drill three artesian wells inside city limits. The first site was on South Twelfth Street, about one block south of the Cotton Belt Railroad’s tracks. On June 9, 1894, at a depth between 1,025 and 1,035 feet, oil began to seep into the well shaft, an event neither expected nor desired. The drillers cased off the oil sand and continued to drill until they found water at 2,470 feet, but oil seeped upward outside the casing, soon saturating the earth around the well. Not long thereafter, the first of what would become a frequent event in the early Texas oil fields occurred: someone tossed a match carelessly and the spilled oil caught fire. After a second fire, the oil was drained through a ditch into an earthen tank.⁶

Though the Water Development Company had no use for the oil it found, two local businessmen, Ralph Beaton and H. G. Damon, decided to have the oil’s potential for refining tested by a laboratory in Oil City, Pennsylvania. When the chemist’s report was encouraging, they joined with Pennsylvanian John Davidson to form the Corsicana Oil Development Company and leased acreage around the water well. To go further, however, they needed capital and expertise, so little more happened until September 1895, when veteran wildcatter John H. Galey of Pennsylvania visited Corsicana. Galey agreed to drill five test wells for the Corsicana company in return for an undivided half interest in the company’s leases. In assigning half of that interest to his partner, James M. Guffey, Galey brought in another veteran prospector, one who would play a decisive role in the first decade of Texas oil.⁷

By industry standards, the five wells were modest. The first, coming in on October 15, 1895, produced only 2.5 barrels of oil per day (bopd). Four of the five wells produced oil—but only between 2 to 25 bopd, not enough to encourage more drilling by the Pennsylvanians or to attract investors to put capital into the Corsicana Oil Development Company. By October 1897, Guffey, Galey, and Davidson had all sold their interests in the venture. Thereafter, the company was dissolved, and Beaton and several other Corsicana businessmen formed the Southern Oil Company to pursue additional work. Though there had been no Corsicana oil bonanza, as a result of random drilling all around the Corsicana area, the small field had forty-three producing wells by the end of 1897 and had yielded almost 66,000 barrels during the year. Compared with the oil fields of Ohio and Kansas, this was not impressive, but it was a great deal more oil than had ever before been produced in Texas.⁸

It was also a great deal more oil than Corsicana producers knew what to do with. By the end of 1897, existing storage facilities were full, and producers started to run oil on the ground, a reflection not only of shortage of storage but of low prices and the prevailing fear of choking back wells.⁹ The basic problem was lack of industry infrastructure: Corsicana producers had oil, but they did not have pipelines, refineries, or marketing systems. Their crude oil could yield a high percentage of illuminating oil, but there was no refinery within affordable distance. To sell the crude for fuel oil required shipment out of Corsicana; there were railroads, but they had an inadequate supply of tank cars. Even if one could move the crude out of Corsicana, the market for fuel oil in Texas was still small; most fuel users still consumed coal or cordwood. In short, by the end of 1897, the efforts of Corsicana producers to develop the field on their own, without outside capital, had reached virtual impasse.

The crucial breakthrough came when Corsicana mayor James Whiteselle invited J. S. Cullinan, managing partner of the Petroleum Iron Works in Washington, Pennsylvania, to view the field. After his visit, Cullinan interested Standard Oil directors Calvin N. Payne and Henry C. Folger, Jr., in investing through him in Corsicana development. He bought production, built gathering lines and storage tanks, and constructed a refinery, which began operation in January 1899. Cullinan worked aggressively on marketing. He urged area railroads to convert to fuel oil; he persuaded the Corsicana City Council to coat unpaved streets with oil to keep down dust, which led Fort Worth, Waco, and other towns to experiment with oiling streets; and he pushed the development of Corsicana natural gas as fuel for local consumers. Most important, he reached an agreement with the regional Standard Oil marketing affiliate, Waters-Pierce Company of St. Louis, to handle the refinery’s output. That agreement not only solved his marketing problem but also enabled Cullinan’s refinery to operate at its full 1,000 bopd capacity.¹⁰

J. S. Cullinan, far left, and associates in Corsicana. API photo. C. C. Rister Collection, Southwest Collection, Texas Tech University.

With Cullinan buying, selling, and refining Corsicana oil, local drilling and production soared. In the month of December 1898, alone, production exceeded that of the whole previous year. Production peaked in 1900, when yearly output of the field reached 829,559 barrels as the field was defined in an area about five miles long and two miles wide on the eastern side of town. Smaller pools, like the Mildred, Burke, and Combest fields, were discovered nearby. Typically, drillers hit oil at 1,000 to 1,100 feet, and wells on average cost only $1,000 to complete, a bargain. On the down side, average well production by 1900 was only 8 bopd, with very few wells making as much as 39 bopd; production was relatively steady but modest. These were conditions, however, in which small contractors and producers thrived; in fact, in 1900, of eighty well owners in the field, fifty-one owned only one or two wells. Corsicana provided abundant opportunities for small-scale capitalists to gain experience in exploration. Town-lot drilling meant many small tracts were available for lease, and oil at shallow depths brought quick well completions. How readily one could enter the industry at Corsicana can be seen in the example of local lease trader Claude Witherspoon, who began contract drilling with ten 1,000-foot wells, each for $400. With the profit from that contract, he bought his own rig for $2,000 and drilled for others and for himself.¹¹ The small operator who kept costs down and did much of his own work found attractive opportunities at Corsicana.

In terms of immediate impact on the petroleum industry, Corsicana oil was modest indeed compared with later Texas oil fields. In the longer term, it was tremendously important, for it showed that petroleum development could be profitable in the state, something that earlier exploitation of oil seeps and accidental discoveries had not demonstrated. While its development was not dramatic enough to command industry attention, it drew veterans like J. S. Cullinan, John H. Galey, and James M. Guffey, who would play leading roles in Texas exploration and development in the following decade, and it brought the state’s potential to the attention of men in the nation’s industry leader, the Standard Oil Company. For these reasons, Corsicana is the effective birthplace of the Texas oil industry.

A long view of the Corsicana field in 1898. Permian Historical Society Collection, University of Texas of the Permian Basin.

In a number of other important respects, what happened at Corsicana was a harbinger of things to come. While Corsicana did not experience a level of activity or excitement at all comparable with Texas’s first major oil boom at Beaumont in the next century, it did have what amounted to a mini-boom. Many persons from out-of-state oil fields came to Corsicana; hotels and boardinghouses filled up, housing grew tight, saloons proliferated, and local merchants prospered. Town-lot drilling brought the state’s first forest of derricks, and wells were drilled in vegetable gardens and backyards. That meant living with noise and grime, and occasional oil spills. One Corsicana resident recalled seeing oil flow off the roofs of houses. In the end, local leaders were somewhat disappointed that Cullinan’s small refinery employed only a few dozen people, as opposed to hundreds, but development did create many other employment opportunities.¹²

Corsicana also marked the entry of significant numbers of Texans into the oil industry. Farm boys, mechanics, and water-well drillers learned oil field skills at Corsicana, and when the big Gulf Coast discoveries came in, these Texans entered the itinerant work force, joining the Pennsylvanians and Midwesterners already in it. The Hamill brothers, who brought in the great discovery in 1901, began drilling at Corsicana. Similarly, once Corsicana businessmen and property owners like James Autry, James A. Garrity, and William J. McKie learned the business, they became the first generation of Texas oilmen. Water-well driller Walter B. Sharp, for example, drilled unsuccessfully for oil at Beaumont before the Spindletop discovery, prospered as a contractor at Corsicana, and later emerged as president of the Texas Company affiliate, Producers Oil Company, and as a director of both the Texas Company and the Moonshine Oil Company after Spindletop came in. Walter W. Fondren began drilling at Corsicana and went on to become one of the founders of Humble Oil.¹³ Texans initially needed the expertise of experienced industry personnel, but at all levels they were quick to profit from what outsiders taught them.

In terms of industry technology, Corsicana also foreshadowed future development when rotary drilling proved a quicker, more efficient way to drill than the cable tool rig. In 1895 M. C. and C. E. Baker arrived in Corsicana. They had been using a hydraulic rotary system to put down water wells in South Dakota. To facilitate drilling they pumped mud-laden fluid into the well bore to remove cuttings. When their equipment was used in Corsicana, wells that had taken weeks to drill reached pay in a matter of three to five days, an enormous savings in time and money. The Baker brothers got together with N. G. Johnson, E. H. Akin, and Charles Rittersbacker, the American Well and Prospecting partners who had settled in Corsicana and had a machine shop, and undertook production of rotary drilling equipment. Their American Well and Prospecting machine shop inaugurated the oil tool manufacturing industry in Texas.¹⁴ From Corsicana, rotary drilling came to be used almost exclusively on the Texas Gulf Coast.

Corsicana development introduced familiar oil field problems as well as benefits to Texas. As in oil fields elsewhere, operators spilled crude and stored it in tanks that leaked. When drilling through aquifers to find oil, the operators were not meticulous about casing off waterbearing formations. Worse yet, if they got dry holes, they usually salvaged casing to use elsewhere and abandoned the holes unplugged. No one worried about aquifer damage, but water that could migrate from abandoned wells to ruin producing wells alarmed operators, and by early 1899 many Corsicana wells, especially on the edges of the field, produced more and more brine with their oil. J. S. Cullinan and a number of other Corsicana oilmen pushed Robert E. Prince, their state representative, to secure Texas’s first oil field regulation, House Bill No. 542, on February 14, 1899. The measure, which became law on March 29, required operators to case off upper oil- or water-bearing formations before drilling into oil pay; prohibited abandoning wells without plugging them with rock, earth, or cement; provided penalties for an operator or owner who did an inadequate plugging job; prohibited gas (but not oil) producers from letting gas flow without use for more than ten days; and restricted flaring gas in the field. Certainly this was a step toward responsible oil field operations, but its significance should not be exaggerated. The measure provided no monitoring or enforcement agency, leaving it to individuals to bring suit against offenders, and its focus was on avoiding damage to production rather than on concern for conservation or the environment.¹⁵

Though the Corsicana development began significant activity in Texas, it was still modest by national standards, producing less than 2 percent of U.S. crude oil in its peak year, 1900. With a daily average of 2,275 bopd, it was of minor importance in the industry, compared with the newer Appalachian fields in Pennsylvania and West Virginia and even with the declining Lima-Indiana field in Ohio. Most experienced oilmen believed that there was commercially useful oil in Texas, but the major action was obviously elsewhere.¹⁶

In 1900, it hardly seemed likely that the new industry would have a widespread impact in Texas. Whether in the cotton farms of East Texas or the ranches extending over vast grasslands in West Texas, most people either worked in agriculture directly or their fortunes were tied to it. Politics was still dominated by local elites that found ways of exploiting national issues such as monopoly and antitrust, but antifencing measures were more likely to