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.

A wildcatter named Patillo Higgins leased a thousand acres along an inconspicuous hill called Spindletop, near Beaumont, but ran out of money before he completed drilling. Looking for investors, Higgins first contacted John D. Rockefeller at Standard Oil, but Rockefeller wasn’t interested. Finally, he found a backer named Joseph Cullinan, a Pennsylvanian who had set up a refinery in North Texas, at Corsicana, and who had experience in raising seed money for drilling operations. Cullinan had heard of the Moodys of Galveston and decided to visit the Island and offer them a chance to invest. The story of that meeting is one of the Island’s enduring legends. During the negotiations, the story goes, Cullinan happened to mention that he had recently paid $10,000 for a painting by a well-known New England artist. The look that passed between Colonel Moody and his son would have fried a ship’s anchor—ten grand for a single picture! The Moodys decided that anyone that gullible wasn’t worth additional conversation, and they dismissed Cullinan as quickly as possible. Cullinan and Higgins eventually hooked up with a gambler and speculator named John W. “Bet-a-Million” Gates, who had hung around Texas in the late 1890s trying to peddle barbed wire, and in his dealings had acquired ownership of the Kansas City & Southern Railroad. Gates’ railroad connections were an invaluable asset for a field as isolated as Spindletop, and he agreed to take 46 percent of the action. On January 10, 1901, Spindletop blew in with such force that it shattered the derrick and spit drills and equipment hundreds of feet in the air. The raging spout of oil measured a steady 160 feet—it was nine days (and a loss of half a million barrels) before they got it capped and controlled. So prodigious was the strike that at the time it was estimated that Spindletop could supply one-sixth of the world’s oil. The company in which the Moodys declined to invest became known as Texaco.