Boom, Bust, Repeat: The Rhythms of the Oil Town

Odessa was platted in eighteen eighty-one as a water stop on the Texas and Pacific Railway, a place where cattle could be loaded onto trains and shipped east. Russian workers laying the tracks named it after the steppes of their homeland, the dry grasslands of southern Russia that the West Texas plains resembled. For the next four decades, it was a small agricultural and ranching town with a population to match.

Then oil came.

The Penn Field opened in nineteen twenty-nine. The Cowden Field opened in nineteen thirty. In nineteen twenty-five, Odessa had seven hundred and fifty residents. By nineteen twenty-nine it had five thousand, and the number kept climbing. Money moved through the town in quantities that the cattle years had never produced. The roads turned to mud under truck traffic. Workers poured in from across the South and Midwest. The town boomed.

The history of Odessa since then follows a rhythm so regular that the locals have a word for it. Boom and bust. Boom in the nineteen thirties and forties, driven by war mobilization and rising demand. Bust in the sixties, when prices fell. Boom again in the nineteen seventies, when the Arab oil embargo drove crude prices to historic highs. Bust in the nineteen eighties, when prices collapsed and the unemployment rate in Ector County reached devastating levels. Boom again in the two thousand tens with the shale revolution and hydraulic fracturing. Bust when prices fell in two thousand fourteen. Boom again through two thousand eighteen and nineteen.

Each boom brings construction, wealth, crowding, and optimism. Each bust empties storefronts, freezes construction, and leaves behind a population that had borrowed against a future that arrived ahead of schedule and then stopped. The Permian Basin is not a stable place. It is a place that has learned to live with extremes, because it has had no choice.