Download or read book The Great Texas Oil Heist written by Robert Cargill and published by Stephen F. Austin University Press. This book was released on 2021-04 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It was 1946. World War II was over. The thieves went to work. They drilled deviated wells from outside the East Texas Oil Field back into the oil that remained after 16 years of production. This was the oil field that supplied the oil needed for an Allied victory in 1945. The deviators continued their nefarious activity until an angry and aggressive attorney general led his posse of lawmen, including the Texas Rangers, into East Texas to stop the theft and administer Texas justice. I tell this story on the basis of 35 years of research and my father's well files. Yes, he drilled six of the nearly 400 deviated wells. I first learned of the so-called Slant-Hole scandal in late spring 1962. That's when colleagues in my research group at the University of California at Berkeley accosted me with the morning's San Francisco Chronicle. They knew my father was an East Texas oilman. One pointed to an article reporting that oilmen in East Texas had drilled "deviated" oil wells from beyond the known productive limits of the East Texas Oil Field to steal oil. "Has your dad been stealing oil?" "Of course, not!" I replied. I had known nothing of the illicit activity until that morning. Then a report in TIME further exposed the East Texas oil scandal that had erupted in my hometown of Longview. Here, then, for the first time, I reveal the story of how a few dozen oilmen stole up to 20 million barrels from the East Texas Oil Field. I am eager to share what I have learned and to tell the truth of the slant-hole scandal--the circumstances that made it inevitable, who did what to whom, and how the matter eventually reached its conclusion. Much of what I reveal in this book has been the tightly guarded secrets of the families of the participants so that grandchildren can be kept from knowledge of granddaddy's scandalous behavior. But most of what I reveal here lies barely hidden in the public record. The slant-hole story is a significant piece of Texas history, and it must be told before no one is left to tell it.
Download or read book Texas Oil and Gas written by Jeff A. Spencer and published by Arcadia Publishing. This book was released on 2013-09-16 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Texas Oil and Gas documents in postcards the rapid growth of the Texas petroleum industry from its beginnings near Corsicana in the 1890s through the next several decades of oil booms throughout the state. The young 20th century opened with the Lucas Gusher at Spindletop in 1901. Thousands rushed from the oilfields of Pennsylvania, Ohio, and West Virginia to find work and riches. Continued drilling success along the Texas Gulf Coast transformed Houston into a major city and the Beaumont area into a major petrochemical center. Through the 1910s and 1920s, oil booms occurred in North Texas, the Panhandle, Central Texas, and West Texas. The giant East Texas oilfield, the second largest North American oilfield to Alaskas North Slope, was discovered in 1930. Texas oil replaced coal as fuel for the nations railroads and provided fuel for our military in two world wars.
Download or read book Lone Wolf Gonzaullas Texas Ranger written by Brownson Malsch and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 1998 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Captain M. T. Lone Wolf Gonzaullas, 1st ed. includes bibliographical references index.
Download or read book Oil in Texas written by Diana Davids Hinton and published by University of Texas Press. This book was released on 2002-03-15 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The dramatic story of the oil boom that transformed the history of a state, drawn from archives and first-person accounts. As the twentieth century began, oil in Texas was easy to find, but the quantities were too small to attract industrial capital and production. Then, on January 10, 1901, the Spindletop gusher blew in. Over the next fifty years, oil transformed Texas, creating a booming economy that built cities, attracted out-of-state workers and companies, funded schools and universities, and generated wealth that raised the overall standard of living, even for blue-collar workers. No other twentieth-century development had a more profound effect upon the state. This book chronicles the explosive growth of the Texas oil industry from the first commercial production at Corsicana in the 1890s through the vital role of Texas oil in World War II. Using both archival records and oral histories, they follow the wildcatters and the gushers as the oil industry spread into almost every region of the state. The authors trace the development of many branches of the petroleum industry: pipelines, refining, petrochemicals, and natural gas. They also explore how overproduction and volatile prices led to increasing regulation and gave broad regulatory powers to the Texas Railroad Commission.
Download or read book Oilfield Trash written by Bobby D. Weaver and published by Texas A&M University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-24 with total page 244 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Oilfield Trash is written in a charming, flowing style that any reader will enjoy....In Weaver's capable hands, the gypsy lives of a generation of young men unfold on the rigorous stage of drilling fields...."---Paul Spellman, author of Spindletop Boom Days --
Download or read book Early Texas Oil written by Walter Rundell and published by . This book was released on 2000-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: At the beginning of this century oil transformed the Texas economy and wrought profound and lasting changes on life within the state. Here, in 328 contemporary photographs is an eyewitness record of the early days of the Texas oil industry. When Lyne Barret brought in the first well in 1866 near Nacogdoches, photography was in its adolescence, so the entire history of the Texas petroleum industry fortunately was documented by the camera. Although that well amounted to very little, thirty years later Corsicana proved the commercial success of Texas oil, and when Spindletop roared in on January 10, 1901, a new era began for Texas and the entire petroleum industry. Other fields opened--Saratoga, Sour Lake, Batson, Humble, Electra, Burkburnett, Goose Creek, Ranger, Desdemona, Breckenridge, Mexia, Big Lake, the Permian Basin, Borger, and the incomparable East Texas field--and camera men were there to capture the excitement of discovery and the changes brought by oil. Unforgettable photographs of oil-field folk--drillers, roustabouts, tool dressers, tycoons--of the bustling boom towns and the derrick-crowded fields, dramatically portray the people and how they lived and worked. Recorded too are primitive refineries, oil tankers under sail and steam, pipeline crews, and the "modern" transportation and retailing facilities of the 1930s. Walter Rundell's text provides the historical setting for the photographs, focusing always on the human element. This combination of pictures and text presents a vivid social history of early Texas oil and its tremendous impact on Texas and its people.
Download or read book Structure of Typical American Oil Fields written by Jesse V. Howell and published by . This book was released on 1948 with total page 556 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Texas Almanac 2000 2001 Millennium Edition written by and published by . This book was released on 1999 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Big Rich written by Bryan Burrough and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2010-03-30 with total page 482 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Full of schadenfreude and speculation—and solid, timely history too.” —Kirkus Reviews “This is a portrait of capitalism as white-knuckle risk taking, yielding fruitful discoveries for the fathers, but only sterile speculation for the sons—a story that resonates with today's economic upheaval.” —Publishers Weekly “What's not to enjoy about a book full of monstrous egos, unimaginable sums of money, and the punishment of greed and shortsightedness?” —The Economist Phenomenal reviews and sales greeted the hardcover publication of The Big Rich, New York Times bestselling author Bryan Burrough's spellbinding chronicle of Texas oil. Weaving together the multigenerational sagas of the industry's four wealthiest families, Burrough brings to life the men known in their day as the Big Four: Roy Cullen, H. L. Hunt, Clint Murchison, and Sid Richardson, all swaggering Texas oil tycoons who owned sprawling ranches and mingled with presidents and Hollywood stars. Seamlessly charting their collective rise and fall, The Big Rich is a hugely entertaining account that only a writer with Burrough's abilities-and Texas upbringing-could have written.
Download or read book Subterranean Estates written by Hannah Appel and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2015-06-24 with total page 433 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Oil is a fairy tale, and, like every fairy tale, is a bit of a lie."—Ryzard Kapuscinski, Shah of Shahs The scale and reach of the global oil and gas industry, valued at several trillions of dollars, is almost impossible to grasp. Despite its vast technical expertise and scientific sophistication, the industry betrays a startling degree of inexactitude and empirical disagreement about foundational questions of quantity, output, and price. As an industry typified by concentrated economic and political power, its operations are obscured by secrecy and security. Perhaps it is not surprising, then, that the social sciences typically approach oil as a metonym—of modernity, money, geopolitics, violence, corruption, curse, ur-commodity—rather than considering the daily life of the industry itself and of the hydrocarbons around which it is built. Subterranean Estates gathers an interdisciplinary group of scholars and experts to instead provide a critical topography of the hydrocarbon industry, understood not solely as an assemblage of corporate forms but rather as an expansive and porous network of laborers and technologies, representation and expertise, and the ways of life oil and gas produce at points of extraction, production, marketing, consumption, and combustion. By accounting for oil as empirical and experiential, the contributors begin to demystify a commodity too often given almost demiurgic power. Subterranean Estates shifts critical attention away from an exclusive focus on global oil firms toward often overlooked aspects of the industry, including insurance, finance, law, and the role of consultants and community organizations. Based on ethnographic research from around the world (Equatorial Guinea, Nigeria, Oman, the United States, Ecuador, Chad, the United Kingdom, Kazakhstan, Canada, Iran, and Russia), and featuring a photoessay on the lived experiences of those who inhabit a universe populated by oil rigs, pipelines, and gas flares, this innovative volume provides a new perspective on the material, symbolic, cultural, and social meanings of this multidimensional world.
Download or read book The Last Boom written by James Anthony Clark and published by . This book was released on 1972 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Includes material on H.L. Hunt, Lone Wolf Gonzaullas, and Kilgore, Texas.
Download or read book Texas Oil Gas Since 1543 written by C. A. Warner and published by Copano Bay Press. This book was released on 2007-05 with total page 512 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When it was first published in 1939, oil historian James A. Clark called this book, "the most valuable collection of historical, biographical, and statistical data on Texas oil ever assembled." This definitive history of the petroleum industry in Texas exhaustively addresses the geology, technology, and economic impact of the industry that made Texas synonymous with oil. (Technology & Industrial Arts)
Download or read book Pattillo Higgins and the Search for Texas Oil written by Robert W. McDaniel and published by . This book was released on 2000-06 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Texas and wildcatters--they go together. And Pattillo Higgins was the granddaddy of them all. Without him Spindletop, Texas' first gusher, would never have been drilled, and the history of the modern oil industry might have been far different. Here for the first time is his dramatic, almost mystifying story, based on his personal papers and told by his grandnephew. It was Pattillo Higgins who showed the more famous Captain Anthony Lucas where to drill at Spindletop. He organized the Gladys City Oil, Gas and Manufacturing Company in 1892, and he located oil fields all over Texas and Louisiana--as many as 100 independent fields, some still unexplored. Although often doubted, he has never yet been proven wrong on one. In his career he gained and lost several fortunes, opened the first brick plant in southeast Texas, and operated a logging enterprise on the Neches River. He was once acquitted in a murder trial, experienced a religious conversion, and married his adopted daughter. But throughout his life the search for oil was his chief preoccupation--one he never abandoned. This is the story of a determined, dedicated individual who took large risks in order to find black gold. It firmly gives Pattillo Higgins his rightful place as one of the three or four great names in the Texas oil industry.
Download or read book The Prize written by Daniel Yergin and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2012-09-11 with total page 1094 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Prize recounts the panoramic history of oil -- and the struggle for wealth power that has always surrounded oil. This struggle has shaken the world economy, dictated the outcome of wars, and transformed the destiny of men and nations. The Prize is as much a history of the twentieth century as of the oil industry itself. The canvas of this history is enormous -- from the drilling of the first well in Pennsylvania through two great world wars to the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and Operation Desert Storm. The cast extends from wildcatters and rogues to oil tycoons, and from Winston Churchill and Ibn Saud to George Bush and Saddam Hussein. The definitive work on the subject of oil and a major contribution to understanding our century, The Prize is a book of extraordinary breadth, riveting excitement -- and great importance.
Download or read book A Saga of Texas Land and Oil Law written by Edgar Freeman Smith and published by . This book was released on 2011-07-01 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the 1920s, the law of oil and gas in Texas was a frontier: raw and unsettled. As Assistant Attorney General in charge of the land desk, Edgar Smith found himself a fascinated observer and an active player in some the most important cases in the history of Texas land and oil law. This is Edgar Smith's legal autobiography. In it, he lays out the the facts of the cases he argued and why he won, while presenting the arguments of his opponents in a fair light.The cases he covers include Capitol Syndicate case, Red River Boundary case, Relinquishment Act, case of the "So-called Oil Leases" and more. Smith went on to work for Baker, Botts & Parker & Garwood (now Baker Botts) and includes a concise history of the firm, as well as an excellent character sketch of Judge Garwood.
Download or read book Anointed with Oil written by Darren Dochuk and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 492 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A groundbreaking new history of the United States, showing how Christian faith and the pursuit of petroleum fueled America's rise to global power and shaped today's political clashes Anointed with Oil places religion and oil at the center of American history. As prize-winning historian Darren Dochuk reveals, from the earliest discovery of oil in America during the Civil War, citizens saw oil as the nation's special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission in the world. Over the century that followed and down to the present day, the oil industry's leaders and its ordinary workers together fundamentally transformed American religion, business, and politics -- boosting America's ascent as the preeminent global power, giving shape to modern evangelical Christianity, fueling the rise of the Republican Right, and setting the terms for today's political and environmental debates. Ranging from the Civil War to the present, from West Texas to Saudi Arabia to the Alberta Tar Sands, and from oil-patch boomtowns to the White House, this is a sweeping, magisterial book that transforms how we understand our nation's history.
Download or read book East Texas Troubles written by Jody Edward Ginn and published by University of Oklahoma Press. This book was released on 2019-07-18 with total page 280 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When the gun smoke cleared, four men were found dead at the hardware store in a rural East Texas town. But this December 1934 shootout was no anomaly. San Augustine County had seen at least three others in the previous three years, and these murders in broad daylight were only the latest development in the decade-long rule of the criminal McClanahan-Burleson gang. Armed with handguns, Jim Crow regulations, and corrupt special Ranger commissions from infamous governors “Ma” and “Pa” Ferguson, the gang racketeered and bootlegged its way into power in San Augustine County, where it took up robbing and extorting local black sharecroppers as its main activity. After the hardware store shootings, white community leaders, formerly silenced by fear of the gang’s retribution, finally sought state intervention. In 1935, fresh-faced, newly elected governor James V. Allred made good on his promise to reform state law enforcement agencies by sending a team of qualified Texas Rangers to San Augustine County to investigate reports of organized crime. In East Texas Troubles, historian Jody Edward Ginn tells of their year-and-a-half-long cleanup of the county, the inaugural effort in Governor Allred’s transformation of the Texas Rangers into a professional law enforcement agency. Besides foreshadowing the wholesale reform of state law enforcement, the Allred Rangers’ investigative work in San Augustine marked a rare close collaboration between white law enforcement officers and black residents. Drawing on firsthand accounts and the sworn testimony of black and white residents in the resulting trials, Ginn examines the consequences of such cooperation in a region historically entrenched in racial segregation. In this story of a rural Texas community’s resurrection, Ginn reveals a multifaceted history of the reform of the Texas Rangers and of an unexpected alliance between the legendary frontier lawmen and black residents of the Jim Crow South.
