Spindletop

Illustration: Oil gushes from a well at Spindletop, near Beaumont, Texas.

 For nine years, prospectors had probed the earth at Spindletop Mound, near Beaumont, Texas, in search of oil. Many experts scoffer at the idea that there was oil to be found in texas. But on January 10,1901, the patience of the prospectors paid off. As a drill probed more than 1,000 feet below the surface, the ground began to shake. Then, with a roar, a fountain of "black gold" shot out of the earth and rained down on the startled drillers. no one had ever seen oil gush from the ground like that.

Demand for oil to light kerosene lamps and power internal- combustion engines had been growing rapidly at the start of the 1900's. people realized there were fortunes to be made by those who could supply iy. So word of the strike at Spindletop spread quickly, and America's first major oil rush was on. Within a year, more than 100 small companies and "wildcatters"= independant oil drillers- were on the scene. An acre of land once worth $10 now sold for $900,000! The boom ended within a few years, when the Spindletop oil field dried up. But wildcatters set out across the state in search of new fields. And in 1928, Texas led the nation in oil products.

DID YOU KNOW....An oil company executive, who had refused to invest in Spindletop because he did not believe there was oil in Texas, had offered "to drink every gallon of oil found west of the Mississippi."

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