The True Story of the Wildcatters Who Transformed Texas

The
Lone Star State may have been founded by pioneers, cotton farmers, railroad
industrialists, and trailblazing cowboys, but Texas is not Texas without sweet
crude. Oil remains among the most important commodities in the state. When the
oil markets dip, so does Texas’s economy. When the fields are booming, the
empty roads running through the flat West Texas plains become as dangerous as
any major city. For better or for worse, oil drives Texas, and it has been that
way since abundant supplies were discovered beneath the state’s geological
formations.

But how did oil come to dominate Texas, and who were the original wildcatters who discovered it? As with most things, Texas’s oil history is familiar to us in legend but more complicated in fact. The first people to know about and use Texas’s oil were the Native Americans. Long before Exxon was formed, people knew there was something valuable hidden beneath the Texas dirt. The question was how to get it?

‘An Odor of Sulfur‘

It
was Luis de Moscoso Alvarado who made the first report of oil, though he had no
idea what he had found. In the 16th century, this member of Hernando De Soto’s infamous
expedition to Texas recorded the finding of a strange black substance floating
on the water near Sabine Pass. Remarkably, the Spanish explorers immediately recognized
a use for the stuff, and they used the crude to caulk their ships.

When
Frederick Law Olmsted, a future designer of New York’s Central Park, made his famous
trek through Texas in 1854, he noticed a “a slight odor of sulphureted hydrogen”
as he passed through Sour Lake.

Texans
knew about oil before they knew what to do with it. After the Civil War, Lyne
T. Barret managed to drill one of Texas’s earliest oil wells in Nacogdoches
County, but he couldn’t figure out how to make the venture profitable. In 1886,
a rancher in Bexar County named George Dullnig discovered oil while trying to
dig for water, but he also couldn’t make his accidental discovery make economic
sense. The first viable oil well was discovered in 1894 near Corsicana and
constructed a year later, which led to the opening of the state’s first oil
refinery.

The
real boom, however, would take place a few years later at a site closer to
where Alvarado first spotted oil.

The
Gusher

There
was no problem finding oil in Texas. The real challenge was extracting it
profitably. The necessary technology wasn’t developed until the early 20th
century. In 1892, a number of prospectors drilled holes near Beaumont, hoping
to tap into what was surely a supersized well. It wasn’t until Anthony Lucas —
with the Gladys City Oil, Gas, and Manufacturing Company — began utilizing new
drilling bits that he finally hit it big.

On
Jan. 10, 1901, Lucas’s drill struck the oil at the Spindletop field, causing a
black eruption of oil to shoot 150 feet into the air. It took nine days to finally
cap the gusher. After that, the field began producing 100,000 barrels a day.

The strike
at Spindletop could be considered the birthday of the new Texas economy. In
1902, the oil field produced more than 17 million barrels in one year. But its
longest-lasting impact was the development of the Texas oil industry. Exploration
along the Gulf Coast produced numerous new wells. Companies such as the Texas
Oil Company (now Texaco) and J.M. Guffey Petroleum Company (now Gulf Oil
Corporation) formed to finance more drilling and to build refineries to process
the crude oil and pipelines to ship it. The era of Texas oil had begun, and the
image of the oil speculator, who stuck a drill in the ground and struck it
rich, captivated the American imagination.

Wildcatters

The
expansive growth of the oil industry through the first decades of the 20th
century didn’t just make many Texans rich; it helped forge a new mythic
identity for the state. The term wildcatters
came into use to describe the intrepid, hardworking, hard-playing oil explorers
who came from little and risked everything to accumulate fortunes.

Glenn
McCarthy was one such figure. The Beaumont native’s father worked in the
fields, and after injuring his ankle while playing football at Tulane
University, McCarthy returned home to start digging holes himself. In the
1930s, in the teeth of the Depression, McCarthy struck oil 38 times. He used
his new wealth and larger-than-life personality to live out a flashy public
life that inspired the character Jett Rink in the classic novel Giant.

Michael Late Benedum wasn’t born in Texas, and he didn’t discover his first well here. He began drilling in his native West Virginia before going on to discover wells with his partner, Joe Trees, in Arkansas, Louisiana, Illinois, and Colorado. It is said that Benedum drilled more successful wells in more places than anyone else. His biggest find was the massive Yates Oil Field, which opened up the Permian Basin — the field that still drives the Texas oil industry today — for oil drilling.

By
the late 1920s, there were productive wells all over Texas and only a few
corners of the state where oil hadn’t been found. Columbus Marion Joiner had
already made and lost a fortune speculating for oil in Oklahoma when he arrived
in Texas in 1926. He and his partner, A.D. Lloyd, began digging holes in an
overlooked part of East Texas when, in 1930, they discovered the East Texas Oil
Field, the largest petroleum deposit ever found at the time. Joiner, however,
soon found himself in financial trouble yet again despite the massive discovery,
and he sold his stake in the field to H.L. Hunt.

Texas
Crude

By
the end of the 1930s, Texas drove the United States oil economy. With the
discoveries came whole new industries to support the production of crude. Refineries
were constructed and pipelines laid to create and ship oil products to major
markets. Fortunes were made that transformed Texas’s cities and culture. The
University of Texas used oil discoveries on its land holdings to create an
endowment that has long supported the state universities. The discoveries of
the wildcatters and their high-risk, high-reward speculation left an indelible
mark on Texas and on the world.

For more Texas history, find out the stories behind the Texas Rangers, our last dance halls, the Texas frontier, or Frito pie.