Historic Photos of Texas Oil

Like my former newspaper colleague Mike Cox, the author of this thoughtful new look at a fabled Texas story, I have connections to the oil patch. Mike introduces his in the book via a postcard from "the wild and woolly boom town of Ranger." His late maternal grandfather sent it to his grandmother in 1919 while covering the runaway oil boom for a Fort Worth newspaper. Seven years later, Mike’s paternal grandfather was a roughneck on a rig in Borger, another of the era’s many instant boom towns.

My maternal great grandfather, a Corsicana banker, was an original investor in Magnolia Petroleum, a Texas outfit which later became Mobil Oil. Great granddad went bust in the 1929 stock market crash and had to go to work for the company he once owned. His eldest son, my grandfather, was an engineer for the Magnolia, and then Mobil Oil, until he retired in 1960.

So I was especially taken by the book’s cover photo of eight "worn-out" Magnolia roughnecks taking a break on a rig in the East Texas field. Two of them, as Mike notes, seem to be courting death by fire with lit cigarettes. They are the beginning of a 199-page sentimental journey. You still see pump jacks all over the state, though many are idle when oil prices are low. But they only hint at the tall drilling rigs that preceded them. The book has the rigs. Forests of them. Skylines full. Blue-black gushers blowing. People happily swarming to the oil of prosperity.

There are muddy drillers and clean drill-bit salesmen, oil-soaked roughnecks and mule teams incongruously pulling wagonloads of the stuff that makes cars go. Big-hatted Texas Rangers tote rifles to cool boundary disputes and enforce state pumping rules, or break up criminal rings in the boom towns. It’s a stirring reminder of when Big Oil displaced the cowboy and the Alamo as primary Texas symbols, and literally propelled Allied victory in World War II. Today, the oil patch is little more than those occasionally-bobbing pump jacks, laden tankers leaving the port of Houston and reruns of Dallas. But the boom times live on, undying, in Historic Photos of Texas Oil. They used to say: If you haven’t got an oil well, get one. At least now you can get the book.