Bryan Burrough Read Online Free PDF

Kansas, and Texas, a few of which were actually true. Southwestern oil fields were “making millionaires at . . . a dizzy rate,” Scientific American noted in 1917, mentioning Oklahomans such as Tom Slick and Harry Sinclair, who founded Sinclair Oil. “Men who three or four years ago were in the down-and-out class are millionaires many times over today.” Oil fields, the Saturday Evening Post told readers in 1918, are “where fairy tales come true,” where “new kings of oil appear upon the stage, and fortunes by the hundreds—yes, even by the thousands . . . all spring up like magic overnight.” 1
    Spurring much of this publicity was Texas’s first genuine set of gushers since Spindletop. They erupted around the drowsy country town of Ranger, west of Fort Worth, in October 1917. The Ranger wells were a fluke, discovered by engineers working for the Texas Pacific Coal Company, who drilled a hole looking for coal but found traces of oil instead. Town fathers offered the company twenty-five thousand acres in return for the drilling of four wells. The first produced only natural gas, but the second and third were epic gushers, geysers of a type of greenish black crude that produced high levels of gasoline. The rush was on.
    Ranger and a series of smaller finds drew thousands of newcomers into the Texas oil fields. The vast majority became laborers, working as “roughnecks” on drilling rigs, hauling pipe or working in the broiling heat laying the pipelines that began to snake across the state. Many, however, sought to find oil themselves, an activity that until now had mostly been the province of large companies. These men were called “independent” oilmen or “wildcatters,” for their propensity to drill unexplored areas, known as wildcat wells. The first independents were businessmen who made their money in other realms—cotton or cattle or dry goods—and looked upon oil as a sidelight.
    Many, however, were farmers and ranchers who were sure, absolutely sure, there was oil beneath their back forty. All across Texas, men who sank water wells for a living were besieged with offers to try their hand at discovering oil. A few actually found some. The 1918 boom around the North Texas town of Buckburnett began when a beleaguered cotton farmer, S. K. Fowler, pressed by creditors to liquidate his spread, decided to drill a well before giving up. He raised twelve thousand dollars from a group of townspeople, hired a contractor and, to his amazement, struck oil, the discovery well pouring out a strong twenty-two hundred barrels a day.
    The barrier to entry, as economists would put it, was low. In those early years drilling a shallow well to sixteen hundred feet could cost as little as ten thousand dollars, the kind of cash a group of local businesspeople could assemble from savings. Anyone, it seemed, could become an independent oilman, and by the early 1920s wildcatters born during the booms at Ranger and Buckburnett constituted a burgeoning new middle class of Texas commerce. Making a living as an independent, however, was a more complex task than drilling a single well.
    For many wildcatters, success was defined by one’s relationship with the large oil companies, including Gulf and the Texas Company; Magnolia Petroleum of Dallas, later gobbled up by Amoco; and especially the savvy operators at Houston’s Humble Oil, half-owned by the Rockefellers’ Standard Oil of New Jersey. The majors were the Greek gods of Texas Oil, corporations of enormous power who could and often did dictate the destinies of mortal wildcatters. Men such as Humble’s chief geologist, Wallace Pratt, or L. P. Garrett, Gulf’s man in Houston, were the Zeuses and Apollos of Texas Oil, their leasing and oil-purchase policies the lightning bolts that, when flung across Texas, could enrich or ruin almost any independent.
    Everyone understood the game. Few independents had the money to build the infrastructure necessary to refine and sell