Spindletop: The Morning of January Tenth, Nineteen Oh One

On a salt dome outside Beaumont, Texas, a drilling crew had been working for months on a hole that kept promising oil and delivering mud.

The site was called Spindletop Hill. Anthony F. Lucas, a Croatian-born mining engineer, had leased the land from an investor named Patillo Higgins, who had been convinced for years that the dome contained petroleum. Higgins had struggled to find backing; most geologists of the era did not believe oil pooled above salt formations. Lucas persuaded the Mellon banking family to finance a deeper drill. On the morning of January tenth, nineteen oh one, the drilling mud began to bubble. Then the drill pipe shot upward. Then a column of oil erupted from the ground, rising ten stories into the air.

The exact time of the eruption is not established with certainty in the sources available for this track. The record confirms it was morning. The crew stood clear. Then the largest oil gusher in recorded history flowed freely for nine days before anyone managed to cap it. At its peak, the Lucas Gusher produced one hundred thousand barrels of oil per day: more than the combined output of every other oil well in the United States at that time.

In nine days of uncapped flow, the world's understanding of what oil could be shifted permanently.

Within a year, Beaumont's population had grown from nine thousand to fifty thousand, an explosion of boomtown humanity that tore up the streets and filled every available building. Within a decade, the wealth and companies born from Spindletop's single field had chartered the Texas Company, which would become Texaco; the Gulf Oil Corporation; and the Humble Oil Company, which would eventually become ExxonMobil. The age of coal as the planet's dominant fuel was ending. The age of petroleum, with everything that entails, had arrived on a winter morning in a field outside a small Texas city that most Americans had never heard of.

The Spindletop-Gladys City Boomtown Museum in Beaumont preserves a reconstruction of the original derrick and the chaos of the field that followed. The geology that made Spindletop possible, salt domes pushing up through the coastal plain, is the same geology that gives the Gulf Coast its vulnerability to hurricanes. The wealth and the danger came from the same ground.