The Hamill Brothers At Spindletop

The year I turned sixteen my mother moved us from Kentucky to Big Springs, Texas. It was 1988 and we’d made the journey in a late seventies model, faded yellow Datsun 210. The car wasn’t cool, and neither was the wind damage to my Aqua Net hairdo. I cranked up the volume on my Walkman, closed my eyes and tried to lose myself in Bad Medicine. 

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I was a rebellious teenager who wasn’t impressed by the dry, dusty landscape of the Permian Basin or the horrible smells coming from the oil refineries. But Texas has a way of soaking in deep to your soul. I quickly fell in love with the Lone Star State, its people, and history.  

With Breaking the Cowboy, the third and final book in my Coldiron Cowboys series scheduled for release in late summer, I started thinking about where I wanted to go with my next series, which secondary characters nailed their auditions and what stories I wanted to tell. I've been eager to write about Finn Durant ─ a roughneck, bad boy turned sheriff ─ since his appearance in the first Coldiron book. And I was curious about what I might find if Durant Drilling were a real company. I soon began to draw from those memories of the years I’d spent in West Texas, to the derricks and to the stories of the oil boomtowns.

This is where the romantic in me sighs heavily and sets back in her chair, ready to write.

HARPER, W. D. / LIBRARY OF CONGRESS

At the latter part of the nineteenth century, the only resource ranchers and farmers wanted to spew from the ground was water and the black sludge contaminating their wells was a pestilence they could do without. Little did they know that it was about to spew forth in an abundance and thrust them into the biggest consumer boom known to man.  

Lyne Taliaferro Barrett is credited for drilling the first oil well in 1866 near Nacogdoches. But the state of the economy after the Civil War made finding investors for his endeavor difficult and the market for oil was limited. Fast forward thirty years, toss in names such as John D. Rockefeller and Joseph Stephen Cullinan, stir in a few politicians and you have the construction of the first pipeline and refinery in the Lone Star States history.

At the same time, in the southeastern part of the state, a man without financial investors or political influence was becoming the laughing stock of Beaumont. Holding tight to his notion that there was an ocean of oil looming under the towns salt dome, Pattillo Higgins placed his faith in God and a spiritually like-minded man who, along with other investors, agreed to finance the drilling at Spindletop.  In 1892 Higgins partnered with George Washington Carroll, George Washington O’Brien, and J.F. Lanier to form the Gladys City Oil, Gas, and Manufacturing Company.

A year and three shallow attempts later, oil was nowhere to be found. Higgins and Lanier parted ways with the company and four years later, Anthony F. Lucas leased the land. John H. Galey and James M. Guffey put forth the finances for drilling and brought in Al and Curt Hamill, two expert oil drillers.

(Cue the dramatic music as the origins of Durant Drilling pop into my head like beautifully written sonnets. Okay, maybe that was a bit much.)

Photo by the Texas Energy Museum Newsmakers

In the fall of 1900, the Hamill brothers brought new technology to the game of drilling by using a steam engine to pump through the sand at Spindletop. But the sand was too fine for progress and the walls soon collapsed. But the brothers devised a solution. Using cattle stomp, water, and dirt, they made mud and inserted it into the well to encase the walls.

On January 10, 1901, they hit the motherload. The geyser at Spindletop spewed oil one-hundred and fifty feet into the air and began producing over eighty-thousand barrels a day. 

The Hamill brothers became legends in the oil industry. In the months that follow, the Gladys City Company produced six more successful wells and over forty-thousand people flocked to the town of Beaumont. 

Forget the series, I'm ready to write a historical romance. 

The stories of oil boomtowns are filled with rich history, colorful characters, treachery, murder, deceit, money and of course, love and the writer in me is always fascinated by the stories that might have been. I can’t wait to write about the rugged Durant roughnecks and the ladies who love them.