Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
It was the first
gusher:
the violent fountain of oil that in the old days would explode
out of the ground when a new well broke through to a rich deposit. (Go see
There Will Be
Blood
if you don't know what I'm talking about.) Nowadays, drillers understand how to
control such things, but the gusher remains an archetypal American moment, as central to
our folklore of wealth as gold rushes and tech IPOs.
Beginning on that January morning, the well called Lucas No. 1, or the Lucas Gusher,
ran for nine days, spewing millions of gallons of oil onto the ground before it was brought
under control.
PURE OIL SPOUTING HIGH IN THE AIR—MUCH EXCITEMENT IN THE CITY
ran the
headline in Beaumont's
Daily Enterprise
on that first day. Just how much excitement can
be traced in the work of the
Enterprise
headline writers over the following week:
January 12:
MANY OIL PROSPECTORS ARRIVED TODAY.
January 14:
FEVERISH AND EXCITED…BIG THINGS PLANNED WHICH WILL BE CARRIED OUT.
January 15:
EXCITEMENT STILL HIGH
.
EVERYBODY GRABBING FOR LAND—PRICES SKY HIGH.
Their best effort, at once breathless and circumspect, ran on January 16:
CROWDS STILL
COME!…VARIOUS RUMORS OF IMMENSE TRANSACTIONS BUT VERIFICATION WAS NOT OBTAINABLE.
Within months, the population of Beaumont had quintupled; the sleepy town of Port Ar-
thur, twenty miles down the road, was on its way to becoming a petrochemical mecca—and
the Texas oil boom was on.
An oil industry already existed in the United States at the time. It had been built by
John D. Rockefeller and his contemporaries, following discoveries made in Pennsylvania
starting in the late 1850s. But oil had nothing like the dominance it has today. The internal
combustion engine barely existed, plastic was decades away, and gasoline was considered
an uninteresting refinery byproduct. Kerosene, the world's first bright, clean-burning lamp
fuel, was the real game.
The Lucas Gusher produced more oil than anybody knew what to do with. Well after
well was sunk into Spindletop in an orgy of drilling and speculation, and hundreds of
new oil companies sprang up; you may recognize names like Texaco, Humble (now
ExxonMobil), and Gulf (now Chevron). In Beaumont, the price of a barrel of oil dropped
to below that of a barrel of water, so severe was the oversupply. Complicating this dilemma
was the fact that this new Texas crude was ill-suited for making kerosene. Even if it
had
made for good kerosene, the writing was on the wall: kerosene lanterns were being replaced
by electric lightbulbs.
The oil industry needed new markets. But what they eventually found—and foun-
ded—was a civilization. The dominoes began to fall almost immediately. First were the
railroads: in 1901, the Santa Fe Railroad had a single oil-powered locomotive; four years
after the Lucas Gusher, it was running 227 of them. Steamships in the Gulf of Mexico wer-
