God Save Texas

by Lawrence Wright

  The defiant Texians—as they were then called—held off Santa Anna’s forces for thirteen days under the command of a prickly young Alabama lawyer, William Barret Travis. With him were Jim Bowie, a land speculator and renowned knife fighter, and David Crockett, a legendary frontiersman and former U.S. congressman who had once been mentioned as a possible presidential candidate. After being voted out of office, Crockett advised his Tennessee constituents, “You may all go to hell and I will go to Texas”—an example followed by many since.

  As boys, Steve and I had fallen under the spell of the Alamo legend, having been indoctrinated by the Disney television series Davy Crockett, which Steve compares to Star Wars and Harry Potter in terms of its cultural sway. Like every other boy we knew, we sang “Davy! Davy Crockett! King of the wild frontier!” We owned replicas of Davy’s coonskin cap, a fashion statement that is perhaps hard to account for but now seems ripe for revival among the tattooed ironists of the coffee shops. My family had just moved from Abilene to Dallas in 1960 when The Alamo, starring John Wayne as Crockett, came to the Capri Theatre. At the time, the movie was widely read as a rallying cry for the right-wing politics that Wayne trumpeted, with the Mexicans serving as stand-ins for the forces of international communism; in Texas, however, The Alamo was our creation myth. In some elemental and irresistible manner, the movie told us who we were.

  One of Steve’s fans is the British rock star Phil Collins, who has amassed the world’s largest private collection of Alamo relics, including a rifle owned by Crockett and a knife that belonged to Jim Bowie. As a child, Collins had also been fixated on Davy Crockett and the Alamo myth. His grandmother cut up a fur coat to make him a coonskin cap, which I suppose wasn’t as readily available in London as it was in Texas. Collins once told Steve that when he finally saw the Alamo in person—in 1973, when he was the lead singer for Genesis—it was like meeting the Beatles for the first time.

  Collins inadvertently triggered a bitter legal and political contest between the Daughters of the Republic of Texas, the jealous guardians of the Alamo for more than a century, and the newly elected Texas land commissioner, George P. Bush, son of the former Florida governor and presidential candidate Jeb Bush. In 2014, Collins offered his artifacts to the State of Texas under the condition that a suitable repository—i.e., a $100 million museum—be constructed to house the Phil Collins Alamo Collection.

  George P. muscled control from the Daughters, who had a history of financial trouble, pledging to repair the infrastructure of the building and make the plaza more sober-minded. Given his mother’s Hispanic roots, George P. is expected to bring more balance to the legend that the Alamo has enshrined. One hopes that he will address the original sin of the Texas Revolution. Stephen F. Austin founded the Texas colony as a cotton empire, manned by slave labor. Mexico outlawed slavery in 1829, but appeased the colonists by granting an exemption to Texas. The Constitution of the Republic of Texas not only legalized slavery, it prohibited the emancipation of any slave without the consent of Congress. In 1845, with the price of cotton on the floor, the bankrupt young republic faced a choice of being annexed by the United States as a slave state or accepting a bailout from Great Britain and remaining independent. The loan came with a catch: Texans would have to pay wages for all labor. Despite the chest-thumping Tea Party bluster about secession these days, Texas tossed away its independence when it appeared it would have to surrender on slavery.

  As you pass through the heavy wooden door into the hushed sanctuary of the Shrine of Texas Liberty, men are advised to remove their hats. “Be silent, friend,” a plaque commands. “Here heroes died to blaze a trail for other men.” Since I last visited, the exhibits have improved and the sacristy rooms, where the women and children took shelter during the massacre, have been opened. The relics inside glass cases include Davy Crockett’s beaded leather vest, Bowie’s silver spoon, and Travis’s razor. The garish paintings depicting the battle, which once adorned the walls, have been taken down, revealing the faded frescoes of the original structure.

  We passed through the gift shop, which as you would imagine is a kind of Lourdes of Texas kitsch. Coonskin caps are still available for $12.99, along with reproductions of Travis’s farewell letter pledging that he will “die like a soldier who never forgets what is due to his own honor & that of his country—Victory or Death.” All this meets with Steve’s approval, to a point. “You don’t want to take away everything,” he said. “You don’t want it to be in ‘excellent taste.’ ” Steve actually owns a tie he bought here some years ago depicting Travis drawing the legendary line in the sand with his sword. He is supposed to have said on the occasion, “Those prepared to give their lives in freedom’s cause, come over to me.” Travis fell early in the assault, which lasted only ninety minutes; his slave, Joe, was spared, as were the women and children.

  It was twilight when we finished our ride. On the way back to Austin we stopped to eat in Gruene, a little German town where, in 1979, my decision to return to Texas began to take shape. I was writing an article for Look magazine about the twelve men who walked on the moon. One of them, Charlie Duke, was living in New Braunfels. When I got to town, I checked in at the Prince Solms Inn, named after the military officer who established the German colonies in Texas. There was a rathskeller in the basement. I figured I would have a beer and a kraut and then retire with a book—Saturday night in New Braunfels—but destiny placed an insurmountable obstacle in my path in the person of Frank Bailey, Texas Monthly’s restaurant critic. Away we went on a gallivant around the Hill Country, eating at a roadhouse where Frank ordered a three-inch steak, rare, a bleeding brick of meat, and winding up at Gruene Hall, Texas’s oldest dance emporium. A band called Asleep at the Wheel was playing Texas swing. A young man named George Strait opened for them. Dancers were two-stepping; the boys had longnecks in the rear pockets of their jeans and the girls wore aerodynamic skirts. There was something suspiciously beguiling about the scene, verging on being staged for my benefit. Memories were stirred. The tunes, the accents, the food—they all felt familiar and yet curated so that they could be properly noticed and appreciated by the susceptible exile.

  At the time, my wife and I were living in Atlanta. That night, I called her and said, “Something’s going on in Texas.” I couldn’t put it all into words then. It was subtle.

  TWO

  A Tale of Three Wells

  One can’t be from Texas and fail to have encountered the liberal loathing for Texanness, even among people who have never visited the place. They detect an accent, a discordant political note, or a bit of a swagger, and outraged emotions begin to flow. Fear is a part of it, as every decade Texas gains congressional seats and electoral votes, while moving further rightward and dragging the country with it. Whereas, for conservatives, Texas is a Promised Land of entrepreneurship, liberals draw a picture of Daddy Warbucks capitalism—heartless, rapacious, and predatory. Even in Norway—that earnest, pacific, right-thinking country—there is the phrase “Det var helt texas!” which translates as “It was totally bonkers.” “It’s actually said with a touch of admiration,” a Norwegian friend assured me.

  Texas is invariably compared to California, its political antithesis. California is more regulated and highly taxed, whereas Texas is relatively unfettered, with one of the lowest tax burdens in the country. Every statewide officeholder in California is a Democrat; in Texas, there hasn’t been a Democrat elected to statewide office in more than twenty years. The gross domestic product of Texas is $1.6 trillion; as an independent country, its economy would settle in around tenth, eclipsing Canada and Australia. California, with 40 percent more people, has a GDP of $2.6 trillion, making its economy the fifth largest in the world, just ahead of the UK.

  Texas has been steadily closing the gap in both population and economic growth, however. Texas exports nearly outrank those of California and New York combined. Yes, a lot of that is from petroleum products, but Te
xas also tops California in exporting technology. Between 2000 and 2016, job growth in Dallas and Houston expanded 31 percent, which is three times the rate of Los Angeles. Austin employment expansion was over 50 percent during the same period.

  All that vigorous growth in Texas had a rope thrown around it when oil prices, which had climbed to $145 a barrel in 2008, slumped in 2014, ultimately falling below $30. In 2016, for the first time in twelve years, Texas job growth lagged behind that of the nation as a whole. Houston alone lost as many as 70,000 energy-related jobs. California’s gross domestic product outpaced that of Texas in the first two quarters of 2016. In the third quarter, however, when oil prices began to stabilize, Texas once again leaped ahead. Critics of the Texas economic model would say that’s proof that it’s not magic—it’s oil.

  * * *

  THE MANY LAYERS of subterranean Texas have names that resonate among oilmen and even form a part of the ordinary Texan’s consciousness. The Barnett Shale, the Wolfcamp, the Austin Chalk—each held a buried treasure waiting to be discovered. The grand story of Texas oil, however, is really about three wells.

  At the beginning of the twentieth century, near Beaumont, on the Gulf Coast close to the Louisiana line, there was a sulfurous hill called Sour Spring Mound. Gas seepage was so noticeable that schoolboys would sometimes set the hill on fire. Pattillo Higgins, a disreputable local businessman who had lost an arm in a gunfight with a deputy sheriff, became convinced that there was oil below the gassy hill. Wells weren’t drilled back then; they were essentially pounded into the earth using a heavy bit that was repeatedly lifted and dropped, chiseling its way through the strata. The quicksand under Sour Spring Mound defeated several attempts to make a proper hole. Higgins forecast oil at a thousand feet, a totally made-up figure.

  Higgins hired a mining engineer, Captain Anthony F. Lucas, a Croatian American who had studied mining engineering in Austria. Captain Lucas’s first well got to a depth of only 575 feet before the pipe collapsed. Lucas then decided to use a rotary bit, a novelty at the time, which he thought more suitable for penetrating soft layers. His drillers also discovered that by pumping mud down the hole, they could form a kind of cement to buttress the sides. These innovations created the modern drilling industry.

  Lucas and his team hoped to bring in a well that could produce 50 barrels a day. On January 10, 1901, at 1,020 feet, almost precisely the depth predicted by Higgins’s wild guess, the well suddenly vomited mud and then ejected six tons of drilling pipe clear over the top of the derrick. No one had ever seen anything like this. It was terrifying. In the unnerved silence that followed, the flabbergasted drilling team, drenched in mud, crept back to the site and began to clean up the debris. Then they heard a roar from deep in the earth, from another era, millions of years earlier. More mud flew up, followed by rocks and gas, and then oil, which shot 150 feet into the air—a black geyser that spewed from the arterial wound that the drillers had made in the greatest oil field ever seen at the time. For the next nine days, until the well was capped, the gusher blasted 100,000 barrels of oil into the air—more than all the wells in America combined. After the first year of production, the well, which Higgins named Spindletop, was producing 17 million barrels a year.

  In those days, Texas was almost entirely rural; there were no large cities and practically no industry; cotton and cattle were the bedrock of the economy. Spindletop changed that. Because of native Texas suspicion of outside corporate interests—especially John D. Rockefeller’s Standard Oil—two local companies were formed to develop the new field: Gulf Oil and Texaco (both now merged with Chevron). The boom made some prospectors millionaires, but the sudden surfeit of petroleum was not entirely a blessing for Texas. In the 1930s, prices crashed, to the point that, in some parts of the country, oil was cheaper than water. That would become a familiar pattern of the boom-or-bust Texas economy.

  In August 1927, Columbus Marion Joiner, a prospector and beloved con man widely known as Dad, began drilling in East Texas, near Henderson, on the Daisy Bradford lease, named after the widow who owned the land. Joiner had practically no money and even less luck. His first two wells went bust. To entice investors to back yet another well, he drew up fake geological reports indicating the presence of salt domes and oil-bearing anticlines. The phony report predicted that at 3,500 feet the well would tap into the greatest oil field in the world. Once again, a wild prediction would turn out to be absolutely true.

  Dad Joiner was targeting the Woodbine sand, which sits above a layer of Buda limestone, thick with fossils of the dinosaurs and crocodiles that had plied the shallow Cretaceous seas. Over millions of years, plankton, algae, and other organic materials buried in the sandy layer transformed into oil or gas. Joiner scraped by for three and a half years, paying his workers with scrip and selling $25 certificates to farmers to raise enough money to complete the rickety well. When Joiner reached 3,456 feet, a core sample showed oil-saturated sand. Thousands gathered to watch the roughnecks drilling and swabbing through the night. Imagine the scene: farmers in bib overalls, women in dresses sewn from patterns out of the Sears catalog, all of them dreaming of a life in which they would be strolling down a grand boulevard in fine clothes, pricing jewels and weighing investments—a dream that was about to come true for many of them. In the late afternoon on October 3, 1930, a gurgling was heard; then, two nights later, oil flew into the air in a great and continuous ejaculation. People danced in the black rain; children painted their faces with it.

  Overnight, new prospectors arrived, along with major producers. Within nine months of the Daisy Bradford No. 3 strike, a thousand wells were up and running in the East Texas field, accounting for half the total U.S. demand. Saloons and hotels sprang into existence to accommodate the roughnecks, along with the “man camps” that invariably blossom in the booms. Cities such as Tyler, Kilgore, and Longview suddenly found themselves in a forest of towering derricks, which rose out of backyards and loomed over downtown buildings. In one city block in Kilgore, there were forty-four wells. It was said you could walk from derrick to derrick without touching the ground. Texans pumped so much oil out of the Woodbine that prices fell from $1.10 a barrel to thirteen cents. The governor shut down the wells in an attempt to staunch the decline.

  Besieged by lawsuits because of his years of reckless promises, Joiner sold his interest in the lease to H. L. Hunt, who would eventually become the richest man in the world. Dad Joiner died broke in Dallas in 1947.

  By the mid-nineties, the oil business in the U.S. was lagging. The industry seemed to be on the verge of peak oil—the moment when at least half of all the recoverable petroleum in the world has been exploited. On the other side of that peak lay an unyielding slope of diminishing returns. The major oil companies began concentrating their exploration efforts outside the U.S., whose reserves were deemed to be more or less used up. The end of the fossil-fuel era was not exactly imminent, but it was no longer unimaginable.

  The situation was brutally clear to George Mitchell, one of Texas’s most famous wildcatters. His father, Savvas Paraskevopoulos, was a goat-herder from a little village in Greece, who opened up a shoeshine stand in Galveston and changed his name to Mike Mitchell. George worked his way through Texas A&M, studying geology and petroleum engineering, graduating at the top of his class. In 1952, he acted on a tip from a bookie and optioned a plot of land in Wise County, an area in North Texas that was known as the “wildcatter’s graveyard.” He soon had thirteen producing wells, the first of the ten thousand he went on to develop in his career.

  In 1954, Mitchell secured a lucrative contract to supply 10 percent of Chicago’s natural-gas needs—up to 200 million cubic feet per day. However, as the years passed, the wells operated by Mitchell Energy & Development were declining. He needed to discover new sources of petroleum, or else.

  Mitchell was under the sway of an influential report, published in 1972, by an international team of scientists, led by
Dennis L. Meadows at MIT, titled The Limits to Growth. The scientists examined a number of variables—population, food production, industrialization, pollution, and consumption of nonrenewable natural resources—all of which were increasing exponentially. “Under the assumption of no major change in the present system,” the authors emphatically warned in the section dealing with declining natural resources, “population and industrial growth will certainly stop within the next century, at the latest.” Even under a more optimistic scenario, in which the available natural resources doubled, pollution would overload the capacity of the environment to absorb it, leading to the same dire outcome: “The basic behavior mode of the world system is exponential growth of population and capital, followed by collapse.” The only way to halt the march to disaster is to achieve what the authors call “equilibrium.” That would mean sacrificing certain liberties, “such as producing unlimited numbers of children or consuming uncontrolled amounts of resources.”

  As the father of ten children, Mitchell certainly hadn’t done much to control population, but he was deeply engaged with the concept of responsible growth and environmental welfare. In 1974, he founded a planned community outside Houston, called The Woodlands, designed to be ecologically mindful. (It is now the home to more than 100,000 residents and a number of corporate campuses.) Mitchell began holding conferences there, inspired by the ideas in The Limits to Growth. He and his wife, Cynthia, formed a foundation that is largely dedicated to promoting ideals of sustainability.

  In 1980, Mitchell predicted that there were only about thirty-five years of conventional sources of petroleum remaining in the U.S. The obvious alternative was coal, which had dire implications for the environment. Natural gas, on the other hand, was far cleaner, almost an ideal fuel, in Mitchell’s opinion. But was there enough gas remaining to prevent the world from returning to a time when coal-burning fireplaces coated the cities in black ash and smog filled the air with dangerous pollutants?