Ross Sterling, Texan: A Memoir by the Founder of Humble Oil and Refining Company (review)

360Southwestern Historical QuarterlyJanuary Stories of Scottsboro (Vintage Books, 1995) and Faulkner's As I Lay Dying (Knopf, 1930) change perspective from chapter to chapter, River Walk changes from page to page, as Fisher brings to focus his principal stories of die natural, the political, and the technologicaljust as diese elements blend and then bend the course ofthe river's story. The organizational plan matches the topic perfecdy because, as Fisher makes clear, the river has beguiled and killed, yielded and frustrated, flooded and withered, benefited and annoyed according to no neat calendar or schedule. Fisher recounts the river's natural historywidi descriptions ofthe EdwardsAquifer , the springs, the river's course, and fatal floods, and shows that die fundamental feature of die River Walk and the town beside it is, after all, a gift ofnature ruled by inconsistent and unpredictable forces. The city's need for water, love for the river, and necessity to control river levels lead to the social history ofpolitical batdes that have raged over private investment and public works. Fisher's keen eye for research brings to die surface elements from newspaper editorials, conservation movements, city bond proposals, and the combat of councilmen, mayors, and architects. Then Fisher saves the significant yet dusty stories ofdefeated propositions that never came to fruition—plans to chop down every tree lining the banks, or to fill and pave over the key River Bend and let the river become no more than a drainage ditch. Such accounts lend a context for understanding the way the River Walk came into existence, not at once, but evolving dirough decades ofeffort by people with pride, power, bias, money, voice, and vision. Fisher channels his greatest entiiusiasm into his descriptions of the remarkable technology ofthe public and private projects behind die RiverWalk story, projects that havesought to divert, harness, and beautify die stream since die colonial period. While in die eighteendi century, presasand the system ofseven acequiossel die stage for the river's central role in the development of the setdement, nineteendi-century construction of ice factories, mills, wells, and iron bridges formed die framework diat allowed die town to become the state's most populous city in 1900. In the twentieth century, new dams, course redirections, river extensions, floodgates, and the astoundingSanAntonio River Tunnel all set die context for die book's central organizing concept, die River Walk. Fisher's work emphasizes that the history ofthe San Antonio River encompasses much more than die story of the River Walk and its allure for tourists. The story of a city, its love for nature's beauty, and its attempts to cope with random raging fury make River Walk ¦& story of nature's continuing impact on a city of one million and the way that impact developed. University oftL· Incarnate WordTim Draves Ross Sterling, Texan: A Memoir by tL· Founder of Humble Oil and Refining Company. Edited and revised by Don Carleton, foreword by Dolph Briscoe Jr. (Austin: University ofTexas Press for the Center for American History, 2007. Pp. 280. Illustrations, notes, index. ISBN 0292714424. $24.95, cloth.) Apublic school dropoutat diirteen, Ross Sterlingexercised aseeminglyinnate ability to take advantage ofthe business opportunities diatabounded in Texas's earlyoil days. 2??8Book Reviews361 An entrepreneurwho eased hisway from retailing into oil, Sterlingwas a co-founder of Humble in 191 1 . Sterlingbelieves diatHumble pioneeredsome industrypractices, such as unitization, although die example given—simplybuying up a field—makes treatinga field as a unitvery easy. Based on his reputation ofpaving roads withoutnoticeable graft as chairman ofdie highway commission—a refreshing change after die corruption of the Ferguson administration—Sterling was elected governor in 1 930 with the support ofbusiness and, as he puts it, "litde people from die litde towns" (p. 124). Faced with unprecedented unemployment and growing poverty spawned by the Great Depression, Sterling initially suggested the limited notions diat employed wives widi employed husbands should surrender theirjobs and that Texans should concentrate on buying Texas products. Sterling and the legislature barely nibbled at the edges ofdie Depression, managing to create a child welfare department and providing a minimum-wage scale for highway workers. They enacted three other last-gasp programs while running for reelection. Sterling was far more concerned with...