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Aircraft Corp.'s plant in Fort Worth, newsprint in the piny-woods country at Lufkin, saddles and cowboy boots in scores of small shops, and women's sport clothes in Dallas' burgeoning garment business. The West Texas town of Monahans (pop. 7,000) is popularly believed to produce the nation's healthiest and most intelligent trained fleas.
Both cattle and cotton—once the main supports of Texas—are still big business; Texas plantations and ranches yield a third of U.S. cotton, 10% of U.S. beef. Texas has 25% of the nation's sheep, and raises $100 million worth of wheat.
The effects of this $5 billion combination of industrial and agrarian prosperity has inspired a giant construction industry: Texas cities have not only acquired new factories, but the high, clean shafts of new office buildings, bright-roofed acres of housing for the new industrial workers, and tree-shaded mansions for the new millionaires. Dallas has a Rolls-Royce agency; its fashionable Neiman-Marcus sells more mink than any store outside New York. There is fresh paint on farmhouses and new tractors grumble across the endless Texas land.
In many ways it is an astonishing phenomenon; few areas of the world have experienced so much change with such little pain. Oil (plus natural gas) has been the catalyst. The presence of potential bonanzas under the soil inspired the beginnings of Texas industry; modern oil production (roughly one-quarter of the world's production) built it. And the steady stream of oil wealth, along with the income-tax generosity of the U.S. Government,† sprayed money off in dozens of different directions.
Gusher. Both Texas industry and Wildcatter Glenn McCarthy were born at Spindletop—a gently sloping salt dome near Beaumont, from which gushed the first big flood of dark, heavy Texas oil. Like many another boom field which was to follow, the Spindletop discovery was the result of one man's faith, energy and stubbornness.
Three dry holes had been drilled in the dome before the arrival of an engineer, prospector and onetime Austrian naval officer named A. F. Lucas. Lucas drilled a fourth "duster at Spindletop." Undiscouraged, he set up new equipment and began again, determined to pierce 500 ft. of quicksand which lay beneath the surface soil.
It was a long, heartbreaking job. But on Jan. 10, 1901, when the bit had reached 1,020 ft., the well began to erupt. With a cannonlike report, mud, water and gas roared up, shooting pipe and rocks high in the air. Then came a greasy and terrifying geyser of oil — a 75,000-barrel-a-day flow, more than many a whole field produces. Within weeks, the town of Beaumont was a madhouse of tents, saloons, lean-tos and one-room shacks; land on the dome was selling for as much as $1,000,000 an acre, and derricks were rising, leg to leg, in a confused and feverish race for riches.
Jackpots. After Spindletop, in the superlatives of the oilfields, came a jillion jackpots—roaring booms at Electra, Ranger, Burkburnett, Desdemona and Mexia proved that oil was where you found it. The automobile age created a rising demand, and after the Lucas No. 1, Texas wildcatters never stopped their probing in the earth's baffling substrata. Glenn McCarthy, a man with a lust for money and fame, became one of them.