TRACING THE PATH PODCAST

This episode, “East Texas Wildcatters,” chronicles the discovery and profound impact of oil, particularly focusing on the East Texas oil field. It traces the historical progression of oil’s recognition, from ancient Chinese uses to James Young’s kerosene and Edwin Drake’s first well, highlighting key figures like CM Joiner, whose persistent efforts, despite being labeled a “con man,” led to the massive East Texas oil strike.

The story emphasizes how this discovery, against the backdrop of the Great Depression, not only fueled an economic boom but also became critical to the Allied victory in World War II, supplying the vast majority of their petroleum needs via innovations like the “Big-Inch” pipelines. Ultimately, it illustrates the transformative power of oil on the economy, warfare, and even American culture, as seen in the legacies of figures like H.L. and Lamar Hunt.

It all Started With Oil

Some called him a con man. 

Some couldn’t believe how long he pursued his actual dream. But that divergence changed Texas. It changed America. It changed World War II, and it changed the world forever.

That’s the story of CM Joyner.

Our story begins in 350 BC. The Chinese had been using oil to help light fires, mainly for the purpose of boiling salt water, that way they could take the salt and put it on their food. Otherwise, it wouldn’t be until the 1850s, before the world truly understood the value of oil.

But there wasn’t anything about the 1840s and ’50s that made the world ready for the change. In 1848 there was a great famine in Ireland due to a potato blight, forcing thousands of Irish to emigrate. The Thai Ping Revolution had begun in China. Charles Darwin was collected his lessons and turned them into a book he called “The Origin of Species”. 

Between 1840 and 1860, 3,000 travelers traversed the 2,000 mile Oregon Trail with horses and covered wagons. Charles Dickens published  Tale of Two Cities and the California Gold Rush began. 

Which brings us to 1847 England, a young Scottish chemist named James Young, noticed an oily substance seeping into a derby-shire coal mine. He carried out some tests and oil refining and was able to create a fuel suitable for lamps.

Then in 1850, a Canadian geologist, Abraham Gessner, developed a process to retrieve a liquid from coal. He called it “Kerosene.” While he didn’t know it that day, he too changed the world.

Whale oil had been the primary oil used in lamps, but it was $1.50 / gallon. Gessner’s discovery of kerosene brought that price down to ten cents a gallon. He then created the kerosene gaslight company and began installing lights on the streets.

A couple years later, in 1859, George Bissell, an academic, was traveling through Western Pennsylvania when he noticed locals skimming a black liquid off the top of creeks. Bissell took some back to Dartmouth, where he tested it, and determined it was probably a good fuel. He contacted a friend, a jack of all trades and railroad conductor, about the idea of trying to drill into the earth to get the black gold, the oil, like they did for water. 

So Bissell and his friend Drake headed out to Titusville, Pennsylvania, where they drilled and hand-pumped the oil out of the ground and into basin upon basin of fresh oil. After their discovery, wells started going up everywhere in the West Pennsylvania area. By 1860, the wells produced several thousand barrels, and by 1862, over three million barrels.

The nation’s oil bonanza had begun.

The Texas Gold Rush

As word got out that there was a new gold rush, people from all walks of life began leaving their jobs to be part of this second black gold rush.

An immigrant from Croatia Anthony Francis Lucas had been working in the California and Colorado Gold Mining industry. Without much luck there, he found work at a salt mine in New Orleans. There he not only revived their damage salt mine, but drilled many other places and started developing a theory that sulfur, salt, natural gas and oil deposits were found near each other. 

Pattillo Higgins, a Texas developer, had a similar hunch and had made waves suggesting that a hill called Sour Spring Mound near Spindletop, Texas was a salt dome that hid oil underneath. When Anthony Lucas heard the rumor, he jumped at the chance, moving from New Orleans to Spindletop, Texas.

Anthony and Higgins hired a couple of experienced drillers and began work. It wasn’t long before they passed the salt and found an oily sand. And then on January 10th 1901, they broke through the sand and watched oil shoot out of the ground.

Spindletop set the nation on fire. It was like the California Gold Rush all over again. Soon there would be 138 wells in the area, and property that had been selling for $125 was now selling for $50,000.

In 1902 there were 500 corporations doing business in nearby Beaumont and many of the major oil companies were born at Spindletop.

• The Texas Oil Company formed and became Texaco. 
• The Gulf Oil Company started there.
• The Sun Oil Company eventually became Sunoco.
• And Humble Oil started there too. It became Exxon. 

All the ruckus about oil caught the ear of CM Joyner, a Tennessee legislator. Not wanting to miss out on the fun, Joyner left Tennessee to begin prospecting for oil in Oklahoma. He’d been doing it a few years without success when he heard about Spindletop in Texas.

Joyner’s problem wasn’t zeal or drive or energy, it was money. But he was a good salesman and was able to go from place to place, convincing the locals to invest in his idea so they could drill and get rich. So far that hadn’t happened, and many people considered him a con man for finding investors for dry wells.

A fellow oil prospector, Tom Slick, had been using the same plan and actually acquired the nickname Dry Hole Slick.

In 1912, Slick had acquired a lease in Cushing, Oklahoma from a farmer named Frank Wheeler. Unfortunately, he ran out of money after drilling 2,000 feet down. Instead of locals, slick went to Chicago and found some big investors who had already gotten rich in Pennsylvania. When he got back, he had money, and he started a second hole on Wheeler’s property.

This time, at 2,312 feet below earth, his dreams became a reality. Oil shot out of the hole. The Cushing oil field would produce 400 barrels a day and make Tom Slick a rich man. It would produce for 35 years and at its peak in 1917, it produced 330,000 barrels of oil.

For Frank Wheeler, the farmer, he got $125 a day royalty. For a while, he was making two hundred and fifty dollars a day from Tom Slick’s well alone. But Mr. Wheeler was smart and had other drillers on his property as well.

The Cushing find was hard for Sam Joyner as he had been trying just as hard as Slick. While in Oklahoma City in 1917, Joyner met up with three oilmen who were selling leases they had negotiated.

One of them was in Rusk County, Texas, and CM Joyner bought it, sight unseen. He went down to Rusk and didn’t see any oil activity. Some of the locals had told him that a geologist had already been through and decided there was no oil there.

So Joyner went back to Oklahoma.

Nine years later, however, in 1926, Joyner would wake up from a dream. A dream he felt would change his life forever. A dream that he would find big oil in Texas. The dream was so vivid in fact he was able to sketch the details on a sheet of paper.

The only area he had an economic interest in was Rusk County.

Knowing he’d need to convince locals of the idea that there might be oil, he contacted a self-proclaimed geologist friend named DA Lloyd. If they were going to make it a success, they’d need enough money for drillers, equipment, wood for platforms, their daily needs, fuel, lodging, and even a car.

Joydner traveled all over looking for the property in his dream, and felt he may have found it on the Daisy Bradford property. D.A. Lloyd agreed that it did look like oil would be present there. So Lloyd created a report for him, titled, “A Geological Topographical and Pretra-Leface Survey of Rusk County.” 

And on July 1, 1929, a couple months before the beginning of the Great Depression. Sam Joyner would write a letter to Daisy Bradford that would change the world.

“Do you believe in science, Mrs. Bradford? Do you believe there is hidden in the bowels of the earth, untold millions of oil, gas, and minerals? When you use your land to only grow cotton, you deprive yourself of the many luxuries you could have.

Imagine back to our fathers who rode ox carts and thought it was fine.

You and I ride in automobiles and airplanes, because someone had a vision of better things.”

Daisy Bradford said yes, which gave Joiner the right to get started.

Joyner needed money first and foremost, so he made the plea to everyone he could reach. Even to laborers, instead of cash he offered them a piece of profits should they strike oil. He traded labor, equipment, food, for a piece of the profit, and the profit on other leases.

With Lloyd’s geologic report, he raised enough money to drill not once, not twice, but three separate times on her property. The third, in the spot, where the equipment broke down and wouldn’t go any further. As he drilled and got lower and lower, he truly felt he had another duster on his hands, another dry well.

And then as the drill hit 3550 feet, the depth Lloyd’s geologic report had predicted. Thousands of onlookers witnessed a geyser of oil shooting way over the 90-foot oil derrick.

At 8 p.m. of October 3rd 1930, CM Joyner struck black gold. And as Lloyd’s report had predicted, this East Texas oil field would be the biggest in the world, stretching five miles wide and 40 miles long. With the Great Depression gripping the nation, this discovery near the town of Kilgore had the independence stampeding their way there.

And landowners struggling to make ends meet were very open to the idea of leasing a piece of property to a driller. Not only prospectors, but laborers as well. Thousands converged on Kilgore, sleeping in cars, tents, and even outside.

Buildings were torn down to make room for wells. And downtown Kilgore, 44 wells were placed on one city block, the world’s richest acre.

One of the reasons for the velocity of these boom towns was an 1889 Pennsylvania Supreme Court decision. Back then in Westmoreland, Pennsylvania, just north of where Bousal and Drake were first to drill for oil. A man named Dewitt owned some property.

Next door, the Westmoreland and Cambria Natural Gas Company had set up a well and were pumping oil. When Dewitt set up to drill on his own land, the oil was gone. It had flowed over to the neighboring well. So he took them to court. The case was appealed all the way to the Supreme Court, which ruled in favor of the West Moreland and Cambrian National Gas Company.

The ruling created the rule for capture. The Supreme Court declared whoever drills and captures the oil gets the oil. Not wanting their oil to be sucked up by some other well, the landowners in Kilgore were happy to lease spots as soon as possible.

The only person in Rusk County that was hurting was C.M. Joyner. All his wheel and endeeling left him in a heap of legal trouble. He’d promised trade and sold more than a hundred percent of the prophets, and more than anything he needed a savior.

Fortunately, there was just a man in the perfect situation at the right time.

H.L. Hunt

H. L. Hunt was born in 1899.

The youngest of eight children, he was homeschooled and thought of formal education, would actually hinder his ability to make money. At 23 he had moved to Arkansas to run a cotton plantation, but Mother Nature had other plants. A few years after buying it and turning it into a financially successful venture, the Bowl Weevil, an insect, single-handedly damaged the U.S. cotton street. H.L. Hunt, needed a new venture.

He’d heard rumors of the money in oil wells and heard about an opportunity in El Dorado, Arkansas. That location did well, and in 1925, he’d amassed 600,000 in profit from the well.

However, some of his Florida real estate ventures that he tried failed and now he too was seeking a new oil well. He was in Texas that day to see the oil sky rocket from CM joyners well and he’d heard rumors of CM’s financial troubles.

Later, seated together at the Adolphus Hotel in Dallas, H. L. Hunt, secured title to the largest known oil deposit in the world, the East Texas Oil Field. But it was not all roses for Hunt. The hordes and hordes of independence putting up wells pushed the price of oil down to 10 cents a barrel, cheaper than water.

The big gas and oil companies complained to the state of Texas as the lack of regulation was killing profits. They argued that most independents didn’t care about the future of the resource and just grabbed the easy stuff. They pumped more than the well could handle and didn’t shut them down properly.

The newly formed Texas oil commission replied by putting a cap on how much each well could produce per day. This really angered the independence who felt the state was pandering to the bigger companies. So they refused to comply which forged the governor to declare East Texas in a state of insurrection and actually sent in the National Guard.

But with the independence burying small pipelines and keeping watch, there wasn’t much the National Guard could do. On the other hand, Texas Ranger Manuel Gondeweis was sent to Kilgore to maintain the peace. 

There he cleaned up the town almost immediately, chaining up the lawbreaker to next to the church until a jail could be built. Gondeweis earned the nickname “The Lone Wolf” and was inducted into the Ranger Hall of Fame in 1982.

But even though the criminal element was tied up in chains, the oil industry was still out of hand.

The Big Inch Pipeline

By 1932, the industry was drowning because of itself.

In 1935, the nation’s top oil producers and associations and companies gathered to vote to support a bill that would give control of the oil industry to the secretary of the interior. The vote was unanimous.

Oil companies wanted regulation.

That same year, a law was passed prohibiting the transport of illegally produced oil and overnight the gluttony was over. There were no buyers for the illegal oil.

As World War II approached, the first war to rely on petroleum products for automobiles and planes and rubber and fuel and asphalt and bumps, the government knew they would need to employ the help of American companies.

In 1941 Roosevelt drafted a letter that became the Petroleum Administration for War, PAW, and appointed Harold Dickey’s, the Secretary of the Interior, to lead it. By the start of World War II, the U.S. was already producing 60% of the world’s crude oil, with Texas leading the production.

Hitler knew oil would play a huge part in the war and sent submarines to the Gulf of Mexico to sink any oil headed for Europe. They sank 47 oil tankers before a new plan was hatched to move the oil.

Harold Ickies had an idea.

He suggested that two pipelines be built that would connect the East Texas oil field to the ports in New York and New Jersey, far from German submarines. Each of them would be over 1,300 miles long, which would require eminent domain and other resources to acquire the land. He asked Bert Hall, head of Texago, to manage the project.

Believe it or not, but construction began on June 26, 1942, and 13 months later, on August 14, 1943, the first crude oil arrived, two pipes, one with crude and one with other refined products. It was the largest pipeline ever built and was called “Big-Inch and Little Big-Inch” and delivered over 500,000 barrels of oil per day toward the war effort.

It was concluded one year before the Normandy invasion, which actually made that invasion even possible. Hitler’s first action was going to war with the Soviet Union to gain access to their oil fields. Hitler already had access to Ploieşte in Romania, and even Ramos campaign in North Africa was designed to secure the oil at Baku.

And for the allies, the most pressing need was ensuring clear passage of American oil tankers across the Atlantic, which is why Alan Turing’s “Bletchley Park Code” breaking was so important.

During the war, the US produced six of the seven billion barrels of oil used by the Allies. The oil was used to make rubber for tires for jeeps, and for fuel for tanks, planes, and ships. It was for lubricants for guns and TNT for bombs.

The Allies never ran out of oil.

Churchill declared at the beginning of the war that whomever controlled the oil would win the war. At the end he declared that the war was won on a sea of East Texas oil.

The East Texas oil field alone contributed to three fifths of Texas production, three-eighths of the U.S. production, and 22 percent of the world. After the end of the war, there were extended arguments over how the pipelines should be used.

In 1947, the Texas East Transmission Corporation purchased the pipelines for $143 million. The largest post-war disposal of war surplus property. The corporation converted them to transport natural gas, transforming the energy market in the Northeast.

Today, the pipelines are owned by Spectra Energy Partners and Enterprise Products and remain in use.

Which brings us back to CM Joyner.

While Joyner did have legal troubles and ended up having to sell, the biggest oil discovery in his lifetime, he didn’t walk away empty-handed. Hunt paid him $30,000 in cash, plus a series of four notes payable over nine months, totaling $45,000, and then, through the profits of oil, Hunt gave him another $1.26 million.

He truly did strike it rich.