Sunday, 12th January 1901
Two days ago, at half past ten on a Friday morning, the earth opened its mouth in southeast Texas and screamed.
It began with mud. Mud bubbling up from a hole in the ground near a low, scrubby hill four miles south of Beaumont — a town of ten thousand people that makes its living from lumber and doesn’t think much about what lies beneath its feet. Then the mud stopped. Then six tons of four-inch drilling pipe — iron, heavy, real — came shooting out of the hole like a javelin thrown by something underneath the world. The roughnecks ran. Sensible men. The pipe clattered to the ground. Silence. A minute. Two. Then a sound like a cannon fired underground, and a column of black crude oil — thick, reeking, magnificent, catastrophic — erupted a hundred and fifty feet into the sky and kept going.
It is still going. It has been going for two days. It will go for seven more before anyone figures out how to stop it. A hundred thousand barrels a day, pouring out of a hole that is a thousand feet deep and four inches wide. More oil in a single day than every other well in America produces combined. The countryside around the hill is black. The air is black. The men standing in the oil-soaked field are black with it, their teeth and the whites of their eyes the only things still recognisable as human.
They are smiling. Of course they are smiling.
I have seen fire and I have seen ice and I have seen the space between stars. But I have never seen anything as terrifying as a group of confident men standing over a resource they do not fully understand, grinning, saying, This changes everything.
They’re right. It does. They just don’t know how.
The substance gushing from that hole in the ground is about to become the blood of the twentieth century — and the twenty-first, and however many centuries it takes for the species to find something else or run out. It will fuel the cars that don’t exist yet and the planes that haven’t been imagined and the ships that will cross oceans carrying armies to wars that haven’t been provoked. It will be the reason men in silk suits draw lines on maps of deserts they have never visited, carving up lands whose people were not consulted. It will make fortunes so vast they will distort democracies. It will power an entire civilisation and then, slowly, imperceptibly at first and then with gathering, undeniable force, it will heat the atmosphere of the planet until the ice caps begin to sweat and the coastlines begin to move and the people living in the early twenty-first century will look at each other and say, with genuine bewilderment: How did this happen?
It happened here. It happened on a Friday morning, in a muddy field, near a town that makes lumber.
They’ll call it Spindletop.
I want to tell you about the man who predicted this, because he is exactly the kind of person I love to watch — the kind history almost forgets, the kind who is right about the thing that matters and wrong about almost everything else, the kind whose life reads like a novel written by someone who doesn’t believe in subtlety.
His name is Pattillo Higgins. He is thirty-seven years old. He has one arm. He lost the other when he was seventeen, after a gunfight with a sheriff’s deputy that left the deputy dead and Higgins’s left arm so infected it had to be taken off below the elbow. A jury called it self-defence. Higgins went to work as a logger on the Texas-Louisiana border, one-armed and apparently unbothered by it. Then, at twenty-two, he walked into a Baptist revival meeting and walked out a different man. Put down the violence, picked up the Bible, moved back to Beaumont, started a brick-making business, and began teaching Sunday school to young girls at his local church.
It was the Sunday school that did it. He used to take his class on outings to a low hill south of town — the locals called it Big Hill, or Sour Spring Mound, on account of the sulphurous smell that seeped from the ground. One afternoon, Higgins poked his cane into the earth and gas hissed out. He lit it for the children. They watched it burn, delighted. Higgins watched it burn too, but he was thinking something different. He was thinking: There is oil under this hill.
He was right. Every geologist he consulted told him he was wrong. The local newspaper mocked him. His business partners gave up on him. He spent nearly a decade trying to drill through quicksand and failure, running out of money and allies, until he found a Croatian-American mining engineer named Anthony Lucas who believed him. And then Andrew Mellon’s money arrived, with one condition: Get rid of Higgins.
They did. They cut him out. And two days ago, at the precise location Pattillo Higgins had predicted, at almost exactly the depth he had estimated, the earth proved him right in the most spectacular way imaginable. Fifty feet to the south and the drill would have missed. But it didn’t miss. Because a one-armed Sunday school teacher who lit gas seeps for children knew something the geologists didn’t.
He will sue. He will win, partially. He will make and lose several fortunes. He will discover more oil fields across Texas. He will be called the Prophet of Spindletop, which is accurate but insufficient — he is also its ghost, haunting the margins of a fortune that others will enjoy.
I know the feeling.
Meanwhile, the gusher roars. Beaumont is already filling up with speculators, drillers, con men, preachers, and prostitutes — often arriving on the same train. Within three months, the town’s population will triple. Within a year, more than five hundred oil companies will be operating in the area. Land that couldn’t be sold for a hundred and fifty dollars three years ago will change hands for twenty thousand, and then again for fifty thousand fifteen minutes later. They will call it a boom. They will not yet know what a bust looks like, but they will learn.
The companies that will grow from this mud — Gulf Oil, the Texas Company, Humble Oil — will become some of the largest corporations in human history. Humble Oil will become Exxon. The Texas Company will become Texaco. These names will outlast empires. They will be printed on gas stations and tankers and annual reports and congressional subpoenas and protest signs and climate accords that no one honours. All of it starts here, in the muck, under a Texas sky, while a column of oil the colour of midnight paints the clouds.
And on the Isle of Wight, the Queen is still dying. Slowly. Her doctors are still pretending she isn’t. She is eating almost nothing. She sleeps badly and wakes confused. The Empire she built — the largest empire in history, covering a quarter of the Earth’s land surface — runs on coal and cotton and gunpowder and the unshakeable belief that God is English. It does not yet run on oil. It will, soon enough. And by the time it does, the Empire will be losing its grip, and the country that runs on oil most successfully — the country where a one-armed man just proved the geologists wrong — will be the one that replaces it.
The century is twelve days old and it’s already learning its first lesson — that everything you think is permanent is just a long, convincing performance. The Queen. The Empire. The age of coal. The certainty that Texas is just lumber and cattle and dust.
Somewhere beneath the earth, the future has been waiting. It doesn’t wait anymore.
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