Now that the Texas Railroad Commission has decided to Not restrict production any further than it already does my planned look at the events of the early '30's and the crash in prices (although not into negative territory) will be less urgent as a guidepost and more focused on storytelling.
From Delancey Place:
Today's selection -- from Big Wonderful Thing: A History of Texas by Stephen Harrigan. The history of Texas oil:
"Oil was never 'discovered' in Texas; it was just always there. It was the 'scum' that surviving members of the De Soto and Moscoso expeditions had found seeping up out of the Texas surf in 1543 and then used to seal the gaps in their leaky handmade rafts while they were tortured by clouds of mosquitoes. A three-or four-acre pond in the forests between the Brazos and Sabine Rivers was apparently regarded by local Indians -- the Bidais and Deadose -- as a useful resource, since blobs of lubricant in the form of petroleum percolated up from its sulfurous shallows. When the Anglos came, they called the place Sour Lake. In the little community of Sour Lake today, on the side of an out-of-business Mexican restaurant that faces Highway 105, a fading mural depicts a group of Indians wading through the water and staring down at floating, fetid-looking brown lumps. 'All over the lake's surface,' an early visitor noted, 'there is an escaping gas that ignites as quickly as gunpowder the moment that a match is applied to it.'....MORE
"Yet the place was, improbably, a mecca. On the mural, next to the scene of the Indians staring down at the petroleum seeping up out of Sour Lake, is a full-length portrait of Sam Houston standing in front of a long-vanished resort hotel with an explanatory text below: 'Houston seeks mudbath.'
"Houston was indeed one of the guests who traveled to Sour Lake to take therapeutic baths and drink the supposedly medicinal waters. In fact, he sought relief there in the summer of 1863, just before he died. A few years earlier, Frederick Law Olmsted, in his narrative about his travels through Texas, left a vivid description of a sulfurous, gaseous resort. 'The approach to the rude bathing-houses,' he remembered, 'is over a boggy margin, sending up a strong bituminous odor, upon pools in which rises a dense brown, transparent liquid, described as having the properties of the Persian and Italian naphthas.'
"At the time, there was no compelling use for petroleum that extended much beyond its restorative powers. It was handy, however, for jobs that required some sort of lubricant or sealant, and the dried-up, oil-saturated mud on the banks of Sour Lake could even be sliced up and burned like candles. And there were enterprising do-it-yourself types like the farmer in Liberty County who sank a pipe three feet into his backyard and, with the aid of a funnel, diverted the natural gas that emanated from the ground into his house, where he used it for cooking and lighting.
"Oil production during the first part of the nineteenth century meant mostly capturing and diverting the gas that rose naturally from the ground or gathering the petroleum deposits that seeped up out of foul-smelling bogs like Sour Lake. That changed after 1859, when Edwin Drake, a former railroad conductor, drilled a well in Titusville, Pennsylvania, and struck oil sixty-nine feet below the ground. All at once there was an oil industry, though at that point petroleum was used mainly for illumination, not power. Whale oil in lamps was on the way out, replaced by the cleaner-burning kerosene that could be refined from crude oil....
Next week: Dad Joiner, Dr. Alonzo Durham's Great Medicine Show and the biggest field in the U.S.
