Dad Joiner and the Daisy Bradford Number Three
Near Tyler, Texas
On the evening of October third, nineteen thirty, a creaking pine-board oil rig on a farm in Rusk County, about thirty miles southwest of Tyler, produced one of the most consequential moments in American economic history. The Daisy Bradford Number Three came in, showering the surrounding pines with crude oil, and Columbus Marion Joiner, an itinerant wildcatter everyone called Dad, stood watching at the age of seventy. Joiner had leased land on the Bradford farm since the mid nineteen twenties, when landowner Daisy Miller Bradford leased him a portion of her nine hundred and seventy-five acres, though his first well was not drilled until nineteen twenty-eight.
Geologists told him there was nothing to find. He lacked proper equipment and reliable funding; his first two wells failed completely. He financed the third attempt by overselling interests to investors, a practice that would later haunt him in court.
But the third well found oil, and not merely a modest deposit. The East Texas Oil Field turned out to be the largest petroleum reservoir in the lower forty-eight United States. It covered roughly one hundred and forty thousand acres across five counties, and by the summer of nineteen thirty-one, about twelve hundred wells in Rusk County alone were producing nine hundred thousand barrels of oil every single day.
Towns like Kilgore grew from five hundred residents to twelve thousand in six years. The price of oil collapsed from the glut. Fortunes were made and destroyed almost simultaneously.
Joiner himself sold his rights to the wildcatter H. L. Hunt for one million three hundred and thirty-five thousand dollars, a sum Hunt more than recovered many times over.
Dad Joiner died in nineteen forty-seven in Dallas, largely broke again, having briefly cradled the largest oil discovery of his era and then let it slip away. His well changed East Texas forever, and it changed America with it.
