Bryan Burrough Read Online Free Page B

refinery, outside Beaumont. When Texas oil prices rose in 1906, Burt tried to drive them down by threatening to import cheaper oil from Oklahoma. The Texas attorney general, Robert Vance Davidson, responded by strafing Burt with a series of lawsuits and fines, eventually forcing Standard to dismantle its refinery and rebuild it in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. The message was clear: don’t mess with Texas.
    The upshot, by 1910 or so, was that control of Texas Oil remained split. Eastern interests—Shell, Sun, Gulf, and others—handled the purchasing, transporting, refining, and retailing of oil and its by-products, while Texans remained active in exploration and production. The official division lasted until 1917, when state legislators, realizing that out-of-state funding was crucial to the industry’s growth, finally passed a law allowing the large companies to integrate. The intervening years, however, saw the creation of a native Texas presence in the risky business of oil-finding that would endure for decades. Hundreds of small companies, many one-man operations, popped up to look for oil. During the 1910s at least, they did a dismal job of finding any. Year after year passed with no new Spindletop. Many companies disappeared. Scores of oilmen returned to their jobs as farmers, clerks, or lawyers. Thanks to their brass-knuckled political leaders, Texans had earned the right to look for their own oil.
    Now they just had to find some.

V.
    Spindletop may have changed the world, but it didn’t change Texas that much—not at first. What the Spindletop boom provided native Texans and new arrivals was not so much a vault of black treasure as a classroom where the oil business could be learned.
    A few caught on quickly. Among them was a young Iowa heir named Howard Hughes, who fled a lead mine in Southwest Missouri for Spindletop within weeks of that first gusher. Captivated by oil, Hughes and a partner, Walter Bedford Sharp, who had drilled one of Patillo Higgins’s early wells, began sinking wells in fields opening in northern Louisiana. Frustrated by their drillers’ inability to penetrate solid rock, Hughes and Sharp developed a drill that could. Patented in 1908, the Hughes rock bit became an industry standard, and by the time the Hughes family returned to Houston in 1909, Hughes Sr. was fast becoming a wealthy man. In time the company he founded, Hughes Tool, would make his son, the legendary Howard Hughes Jr., the wealthiest Texas oilman of all, though in name only. When he reached adulthood in the 1920s, Howard Hughes fled Texas for Hollywood and never returned.
    In those early years the best-known and most profitable of Texas-run oil companies was Humble Oil & Refining, formed in 1917 by the mass merger of an all-star team of Houston and Beaumont oilmen, many of whom began their careers at Spindletop. In later years its founders, men like Walter Fondren, Robert Lee Blaffer, and future Texas governor Ross Sterling, became what passed for “old money” in Houston. Savvy, aggressive finders and purchasers of oil reserves, the Humble men sold half the company to Standard Oil in 1919 for seventeen million dollars, the largest transaction in the Texas oil industry’s brief history. Humble, which later became better known as Exxon, would remain a power in the Texas oil fields for decades to come. Its counterpart in Dallas was the Magnolia Oil Company, formed from the remnants of the company Standard Oil left behind when it fled the state. Standard retained a sizable minority stake it slowly increased in Magnolia, whose claim to fame was the giant red-neon Pegasus it erected over its downtown headquarters, a Dallas landmark visible from fifty miles away.
    The oilmen who ran Humble and Magnolia and scores of smaller rivals survived the lean years of the 1910s by dividing the risk in a very risky business. In doing so, they also divided the upside; as wealthy as they were by local standards, no one in that first generation