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Closing the Western Frontier
Black Gold: The Oil Frontier
Period: 1880-1920
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The great southwestern oil boom began January 10, 1901 at Spindletop,
four miles south of Beaumont, Tex., a prosperous sawmill and farm
produce shipping town. Since late October, a three-man crew, working
18-hour shifts, had been searching for oil. With $300,000 from
financier Andrew Mellon of Pittsburgh, they drilled a pipe 880
feet into the ground. Repeatedly the pipe had gotten stuck. Sand
and even quicksand blocked the hole, slowing the drilling. At
880 feet they hit solid rock. The men decided to try a new drill
bit.
A low, rumbling sound rose up from the earth. Huge columns
of mud and water blasted from the hole, followed by four tons
of pipe that they had drilled into the ground. The eruption briefly
stopped, and then suddenly a column of oil, 200 feet high, exploded
from the earth.
The discovery of vast quantities of cheap liquid fuel at Spindletop
made the era of the internal combustion engine possible. Cheap
oil also fueled the allied victory in World War II. Drilling for
oil had been pioneered earlier in the oil fields of Pennsylvania
and Ohio. In 1859, Edwin L. Drake had drilled the nation's first
oil well, 69 and a half feet into the ground near Titusville,
Pa. It had taken him six months to drill, but the well only produced
10 barrels of oil a day.
In 1901, the most successful oil wells in the United States,
located at Corsicana, Tex., produced at most 50 barrels a day.
Huge amounts of oil had been found in Russia in 1893, but transportation
and refining costs made it prohibitive to get the oil to market
at an affordable cost.
Spindletop produced 100,000 barrels a day--more than all the
rest of the wells in the world combined. It was, as a newspaper
headline read, "An Oil Geyser." It took more than a
week to cap the well. By then, the well had spewed more than 900,000
barrels of oil on the ground. Within a month, Beaumont's population
of 8,500 had quadrupled. By the end of 1901, almost 140 wells
at Spindletop gushed oil. Because Beaumont was just 30 miles from
the Gulf of Mexico, it was easy to transport the oil to refineries.
Since 1901, the field at Spindletop has produced more than 153
million barrels of oil.
Before Spindletop, most of the country's oil production was
controlled by John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company. But
Standard Oil was barred from Texas by the state's anti-trust laws.
Andrew Mellon would build a refinery in nearby Port Arthur, Tex.,
that evolved into the Gulf Oil Company. Other companies that handled
oil from Spindletop became the oil giants Texaco and Mobil.
Spindletop was only the beginning of the great Southwestern
oil boom. Thirty years later, a 70-year-old wildcatter named Columbus
"Dad" Joiner, discovered the East Texas Field spread
across five Texas counties. With 7 billion barrels of oil, it
was the largest reservoir of oil in the Americas. At a time when
the area's water cost $5 a barrel, oil sold for a nickel a barrel.
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