Giant Under the Hill: A History of the Spindletop Oil Discovery at Beaumont, Texas, in 1901 (review)

In August 1901, the New York Journal reported that "Texas had found her glory. It is Oil." By 1905, more than a quarter of the crude oil pumped in the United States came from Texas. Where there had been only speculation in oil prior to 1901, by 1917 the state had twenty-six refineries valued at over $48 million. What caused such a vast transformation? In Giant Under the Hill, Ellen Rienstra, Judith Linsley, and Jo Ann Stiles argue that Texas's glorious oil story emanates from one well: Spindletop.

So, Giant Under the Hill is guilty of oversimplification from the outset. Yet, historians such as Diana and David Oliens and Daniel Yergin have argued that through the sheer quantity of oil pumped from Spindletop the twentieth century became the era of the automobile and the internal-combustion engine. While the authors of Giant Under the Hill resist discussing these larger implications, by stressing the state and local context of Spindletop their book adds depth and regional context to this well-worn story of petroleum and industrial history.

Much of Giant Under the Hill reads as if it were written for a very general audience. This is most evident in the early chapters, which trace the familiar history of the petroleum industry. Still, the authors offer one of the best considerations of Texas oil during the late 1800s, and once they get to the story of Spindletop the narrative takes on dynamic energy. They have made liberal use of photographs and maps from the Tyrrell Historical Library in Beaumont, Texas. While the reproductions are sometimes poor, these images reveal a great deal about life on the oil frontier. They also suggest continuity with the patterns of land use during Pennsylvania's 1860s boom, which is also preserved in photographs. One photo, however, shows an astonishing contrast in scale: the oil lake at Spindletop, the tremendous pool that formed prior to the construction of storage tanks (p. 121).

The fortitude of Pattillo Higgins remains the centerpiece of the Spindletop story. His dogged pursuit led to a gusher that raged unchecked—spouting an estimated hundred thousand barrels of oil per day—before drillers invented a valve assembly to control the flow. This valve and much of the apparatus designed to manage the larger output of other Texas oil fields would shape the industry's next century. But Giant Under the Hill is more concerned with the actors involved in Beaumont's oil boom than the technologies developed there: "[T]he town of Beaumont—and the rest of the world—were as ill prepared for the gusher as if it had occurred without human assistance" (p. 2). One finds in this book personal observations by the participants that appear in no other accounts. Boom times overwhelmed local society and defined new community structures, just as they had in the Pennsylvania oil fields of the 1860s. With Spindletop, word spread quickly, and boomers began arriving in Beaumont from all over the country. Petroleum found markets all over the world.

Even though historians of technology will find little new material on the evolution of petroleum technology in these pages, Giant Under the Hill offers a useful case study of the cultural and social implications of a storied petroleum boom.