Spindletop Quotes

That's the only thing I want. That's the only thing I can think about wanting. But guess what? I'm going to rise above that. I'm not going to ruin your life. For once, I'm going to put someone else first." He grabbed another fistful of hair. "I can't believe your life. You've spent ten years taking care of your dad—and you gave up everything to do it. All this time, you've kept a lid on that Spindletop of talent you've got. It's so wrong that it happened.

Spindletop Fishtails flap and screw through earth’s cradled womb through heaving sands and ocean floors for fortunes crude and wildcat dreams for days of easy living. Earth retaliates with rotten eggs and busted drills but her resistance spent the caprock crumbles and exhales and like a newborn slapped she screams the scream which marks the birth of a spanking new-sprung era. Jubilant the fathers dance Stetson’s tossed high into the air their faces flecked with bootblack gold their hair slicked back with glistenin’ oil. Their upstart child’s a heifer to milk until it moos then trade unto the butcher’s block for meat when it goes dry. Enriched in the meantime between breakdowns rain and air turns to poison rivers flood the poor starve. We’re all wildcatters with the gleam of gold in our eyes and the spray of crude on our faces.

Spindletop not only created the modern American oil industry, it changed the way the world used oil. Its dirty little secret was that the oil found around Beaumont was of such poor quality it could not be refined into kerosene. But it made fine fuel oil—and that’s what changed everything. So much black crude flowed from Beaumont that oil prices dropped to three cents a barrel—a cup of water cost five cents—making it economical for railroads and steamship companies to convert from coal to oil.

The pivot on which everything turned, at least initially, was James Guffey, who struck “the deal of the century” when he sold much of Spindletop’s oil to a company he had never heard of—and whose executives needed a map to locate Beaumont—Royal Dutch Shell, Europe’s largest oil producer; the deal made Shell an international colossus. Guffey was backed by and later sold out to the Mellon family of Pittsburgh, who roared into the Gulf Coast fields with a new company it named, appropriately, Gulf Oil, which became one of America’s greatest oil companies. The Pew family of Philadelphia, founders of Sun Oil, swept into Spindletop in a blizzard of activity, laying pipelines, buying storage facilities and so much oil it had to build a new refinery at Marcus Hook, Pennsylvania. Another of the companies weaned at Spindletop was the Texas Company, later known as Texaco.