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Hear the story of a con man and a group of hardscrabble East Texas farmers who uncovered the biggest oilfield in U.S. history — and how that discovery forced an obscure state agency to confront the destructive forces of unrestrained oil drilling.
The full transcript of this episode of The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout is available on the KUT & KUTX Studio website. The transcript is also available as subtitles or captions on some podcast apps.
Mose Buchele Let’s go back to how this all started. So this is the beginning of what might be a historic winter storm here in Austin, Valentine’s Day 2021. This is me recording the snow falling in my backyard. It’s a very unusual thing in central Texas. Just started down here. Big question for a lot of people right now is whether the electric grid is going to hold up. Because we know what happened. Freezing temperatures pushed energy demand to record levels. Our state’s power supply, isolated by design from neighboring electric grids, could not meet the challenge. Power plants broke down in the cold. The natural gas that fuels many of them stopped flowing at the very time it was needed most. Across Texas, people went without heat or electricity for days. Hundreds of people, some say many more, died in the cold.
Speaker 2 I don’t think she would have been in the situation she was had she not been cold and she was cold because we didn’t have power.
Mose Buchele In the years since the blackout, what it means to live in Texas has changed. Now, whenever a cold front comes through or a heat wave starts draining our energy supply, we can’t help but wonder is it happening again?
Speaker 3 We are keeping a. Close eye on our power grid this week, Ercot, the Electric Reliability Council of Texas, which manages the grid, did issue a weather watch. But as you can.
Mose Buchele See, there’s this big debate over how to fix things, how to build and manage a power grid that lets us stop worrying. State leaders say they’ve made good progress. But in the meantime, the challenges have become more complicated, not less. Over the last couple of years, the state’s grid has seen some near-misses.
Speaker 2 Today will be another close call.
Speaker 3 We are looking at Ercot, supply and demand.
Mose Buchele Some warnings about the future.
Speaker 3 The state’s power grid operator is predicting that statewide electricity demand will nearly double over the next six years.
Mose Buchele And some bright spots, it’s a.
Speaker 3 Big enough battery to power 130,000 homes for up to an hour
Mose Buchele Through all this, state leaders have returned over and over to one big fix for our statewide grid.
Speaker 3 Something we got 200 years worth of natural gas and we need to be using it.
Mose Buchele They want to build more natural gas power plants. And in a way, it makes sense. Gas plants use an abundant Texas fuel supply. They’re not weather dependent like wind and solar power. They can be turned off and on when needed. At least in theory, it’s what they call dispatchable.
Speaker 3 We need that dispatchable generation. Dispatchable, dispatchable, dispatchable generation. You said it better than I can. Dispatchable full stop.
Mose Buchele But there’s also this disconnect between the plan and what happened during the blackout. After all, it was problems at natural gas, power plants and pipelines that were largely responsible for the power failure.
Speaker 4 We just couldn’t get the gas.
Mose Buchele It was the high cost of gas that deepened the financial crisis created by the blackout that we’re all still paying for a.
Speaker 3 Hundred times more than what they normally go for the winter.
Mose Buchele And it was the gas industry that seemed to most successfully dodge accountability in the aftermath.
Speaker 5 These operators were not the problem. The oil and gas industry was the solution.
Mose Buchele It sometimes feels like a sane person would look at the last several years of energy, anxiety, hurricanes and heat waves and say, we need to try something new. But in Texas, we looked and said we need to do what we’ve been doing, but more.
Speaker 3 The bottom line is we have to start building plants.
Mose Buchele They want to build more.
Speaker 3 There’ll be a second wave and a third wave.
Mose Buchele and more.
Speaker 3 It’s never going to stop. It’s never going to stop.
Mose Buchele We think it’s time to take a closer look. In this new season of the Disconnect, we’ll look at natural gas production, transportation and delivery. It’s the system that at least in part, caused the big blackout.
Speaker 2 Natural gas failed in a big way.
Mose Buchele It’s also the system that we’re doubling down on to keep the lights on. We only have to put $10 billion to work.
Mose Buchele Can we get it done?
Mose Buchele What does that mean for climate change? Climate change is the biggest hoax that we’ve ever seen in America’s lot. How much is politics? How much is protectionism and how much could be good policy?
Mose Buchele You’re never going to get credit for a crisis you prevent.
Mose Buchele We’re going to tackle these questions like we did in earlier seasons, starting with the deep history we’ll tell the story of fossil fuels in Texas to see what it can tell us about where we are today.
Speaker 5 These private companies are set up to have monopoly control over the Texas power supply.
Mose Buchele And even when this history seems far removed from today, I promise you it’s not. And at the very least, it makes for a wild ride.
Speaker 6 Somebody hit somebody and they hit the ground.
Speaker 5 These are not people that you’re used to seeing. Be very Afraid
Page Foshee And I shouldn’t laugh, but he was a scammer, and I don’t have much sympathy for that.
Mose Buchele It’s a story that starts not with natural gas, but with that most Texas of Energy sources. Oil. I’m Mose Buchele. Welcome back to the disconnect. Power, politics and the Texas blackout. So like I said, these first few episodes especially are going to be history episodes. And joining me to help tell these stories is a voice that you know and love, not just from earlier seasons of this podcast. No, no, no. I’m talking about from her own excellent reporting. I’m talking about from the podcast Growth Machine. I am talking about Audrey McGlinchey. Audrey, welcome back.
Audrey McGlinchy Hey, Mose. Very excited to be here.
Mose Buchele I can’t believe we’re getting the band back together. Yup.
Audrey McGlinchy Yup. You.
Mose Buchele So, like I said, we’re going to start off talking about the early days of oil and gas and regulation in Texas. And there’s some fun stuff.
Audrey McGlinchy These stories are wild, Rose, And I’m so excited to tell them.
Mose Buchele Yeah, we’re talking bar fights.
Audrey McGlinchy Gun.
Mose Buchele Fight.
Audrey McGlinchy Texas Ranger guy named Lone Wolf Gonzalez.
Mose Buchele Yes. And it starts maybe appropriately with a great oil field con out of east Texas.
Audrey McGlinchy It would change everything.
Mose Buchele So to learn about this, we’re also going to hear from a guy who knows a ton about all this stuff.
Page Foshee My name is Paige Fossey. 40 years of my life are devoted to being an oil and gas land man.
Audrey McGlinchy A land man. As someone who works for an oil company and they go to land owners and try to get them to lease their land so that they can drill for oil.
Mose Buchele But Paige is also a historian and a writer. And his family is in fact, his family on his dad’s side is from the very part of East Texas that we’re going to be talking about.
Page Foshee My father took me to see his side of my family when I was 11, in 1965, and I spent two weeks with my grandmother. I’d never seen pine trees before, nor oil derricks 80 and 100ft tall. And I thought about the oil business and compared it in my mind to gold strikes and rushes. I found it and still do. I find it romantic.
Mose Buchele And it is. It’s a history full of gamblers, underdogs and con men like the one we’re going to be talking about, in particular.
Page Foshee Columbus Marian Joiner.
Mose Buchele But for reasons you’ll soon understand, he came to be known as Daddy or Dad.
Page Foshee Joiner and Dad had been working the East Texas field for 20 years.
Audrey McGlinchy Joiner’s official job was a lot like pages. He would go out, convince land owners to lease their properties so they could drill oil, and in exchange, everyone would usually get a cut of future profits.
Mose Buchele Right. And this is where the con comes in. See, after he got the lease, Joiner would get a bunch of investors together to raise money to drill. And this is pretty normal way of financing an independent oil project. The thing is, in the case of Dad Joiner, he appeared to have no intention of actually finding oil.
Page Foshee Absolutely. If he found oil, you blew it.
Audrey McGlinchy See, as long as he did not find oil, he never had to pay anyone back. You just keep gathering up new investors, new investors and taking all their money.
Page Foshee He would drill and drill and drill and he would sell parts of oil well projects. Hey, I’ll sell you 25% of my well for, you know, $5,000.
Mose Buchele Yeah, he he you could sell the same project to different people multiple times over.
Page Foshee He really made a ton of cash by overselling every well he drilled. That’s where his income came from.
Audrey McGlinchy As long as he failed, he never had to pay anyone because they had invested in the hope of future profits that would come when Dad Joiner struck oil, which he was never going to do.
Mose Buchele Like these days you might get I’ll pay you in stock options on the startup or whatever, you know, But it’s like it’s almost the same thing, right?
Page Foshee Certainly. It’s it’s not a new story. It’s probably one of the oldest.
Mose Buchele And when it came to targets like marks for this particular con, Joiner allegedly specialized in doctors and widows.
Page Foshee Yeah, he was especially kind to widows and maiden women. The older and with more property, the better.
Audrey McGlinchy He bragged about knowing a special place on a widow’s neck. If he touched it, she would write him a check.
Page Foshee He was a master of amore.
Mose Buchele So in 1927, Joiner was drilling for oil on the property of a widowed woman in Rusk County in East Texas. Her name was Daisy Bradford.
Audrey McGlinchy Joiner had gotten the lease from Bradford, and he’d pulled together a lot of investors to fund this drilling.
Mose Buchele So it’s 1927 and he drills his first well. It’s called the Daisy Bradford number one. Well, at the time, I don’t think was called the number one, but they call it the Daisy Bradford number one, because he drilled it and there was no oil. Right. There’s what they call a dry hole. But for Dad Joiner, that was no problem, right? It was an opportunity to go out and get more investors.
Audrey McGlinchy So a couple of years go by. It’s 1929. Joiner drills another well, the Daisy Bradford number two. And what do you know? Also dry.
Page Foshee I think the trouble with the Daisy Bradford number one and two wells was they didn’t drill deep enough.
Audrey McGlinchy So Joiner got more money together, wrote more IOUs and started drilling on a third well. And this third oil well, it started to show promise. Signs of oil and gas coming up with the mud and water below.
Mose Buchele At this point, the local people around Joiner couldn’t help but notice that he seemed uneasy with this. He actually brought in one of his longtime partners to take over operations, the guy named Doc Lloyd.
Page Foshee Practice as a doctor, you know, without the formality of license.
Audrey McGlinchy And again, it seemed to Daisy Bradford and others that Joiner and Lloyd were maybe trying to screw this up.
Page Foshee They were looking for dry holes.
Mose Buchele So at this point, Bradford and the other workers on the site wrestled control of the operation from Joiner. Basically, Daisy Bradford used her position as landowner to have him sidelined. And that’s probably why the Daisy Bradford number three struck oil in October 1930.
Page Foshee It came in big.
Mose Buchele So there’s a book about all this called The Last Boom, which I highly recommend if you can get your hands on it. And in it there is a description of the moment that Dad Joiner realized that Daisy Bradford three was a winner. And it says he did not dance a jig. No, no, no. He did not shout for joy. They say he just kind of briefly closed his eyes and leaned against a nearby tree, his expression, a kind of blank.
Page Foshee He could not have been happy over all that. Well, just like all the rest of them.
Audrey McGlinchy Joiner knew he was in trouble when he could not have known. Was that the Daisy Bradford Number three? That third oil well, had uncovered the biggest oil fields in U.S. history.
Mose Buchele So this is how he got his nickname, right? Columbus Marion Joiner was renamed the father of the field, hailed by East Texas as Dad or Daddy Joiner in the newspapers.
Audrey McGlinchy Which means his investors came knocking.
Page Foshee It’s just terrifically fortuitous for everybody except Dad. Joiner, who died, broke in the late 40s, and I shouldn’t laugh, but he was a scammer and I don’t have much sympathy for that.
Mose Buchele It’s hard to overstate what Dad Joiner discovered when this oil well came in. It was an ocean of oil that all of these people had been sitting on top of unknowingly. You know, ever since they had settled the land and started farming there. The sheer magnitude of the amount of oil that was found in East Texas would end up literally, like we said, changing world history.
Audrey McGlinchy And a lot of that change has to do with how the state of Texas reacted to this discovery.
Mose Buchele So here’s where we’re going to talk about the state agency that regulated oil. And it still does. And it’s called the Railroad Commission of Texas.
Audrey McGlinchy And you would not be wrong to hear that and think, what the hell do railroads have to do with any of this?
Mose Buchele Well, to answer that, we’re going to hear from two guys first.
David Prindle I’m Professor David Prindle of the University of Texas, Austin. Government department.
Audrey McGlinchy Prindle is retired now, but he literally wrote a book about the railroad commission.
Mose Buchele And then we have somebody who lived it.
Kent Hance My name is Kent Hance and I have a varied background.
Mose Buchele Well, he’s he’s a long time Texas politician. He started as a state senator back in the 1970s.
Kent Hance And then ran for Congress and had a opposition by the name of George W Bush.
Audrey McGlinchy He’s actually the only guy that ever beat W Bush in an election.
Kent Hance You know, I don’t know whatever happened to him.
Mose Buchele Later in his career. Hance ended up serving as a Texas railroad commissioner from 1987 to 91.
Audrey McGlinchy So the first thing we have to talk about is what is the deal with this name, The Railroad Commission.
David Prindle Railroads dominated the late 19th century economy very much as the automobile dominated it through much of the 20th century and the computers dominate it now.
Mose Buchele So take Texas late 1800s. Texas was an agricultural state. Farmers and ranchers grew crops. They raised livestock. And those things were not worth much. If you couldn’t sell them.
Kent Hance If your town didn’t get on the railroad line, your town died.
Audrey McGlinchy For a while, the state did anything to attract railroad companies to come to Texas. They gave away land offered tax breaks, you name it.
Mose Buchele And on the one hand, this is great for rural Texans. Suddenly, farmers and ranchers could get their goods quickly to places all around the country.
Audrey McGlinchy But it also gave these railroads almost absolute power.
Kent Hance It was a different world.
Mose Buchele If there was this one rail line connecting your town. Well, it had like monopoly power. You paid what that line wanted for shipping. There was price fixing. There’s collusion between railroad companies, corruption. And it all led to a lot of pissed off farmers for a lot of people in rural Texas. These were just Yankee monopolies coming in to steal their wealth.
Audrey McGlinchy Now, remember, Texas was a rural state. The farmers had political clout. And so in 1891, Governor Jim Hogg established the Railroad Commission. At first, it was made up of three commissioners who were appointed.
Mose Buchele But these farmers, they wanted the commission to be elected statewide.
Audrey McGlinchy This will come up again later.
Mose Buchele They thought if they were elected statewide, they could control the commission better that way.
Audrey McGlinchy So that’s what they got.
Mose Buchele But by the time the River Commission really got around to regulating railroads, there was a problem. The federal government had already basically taken that authority. It was the federal government that was going to regulate railroads that crossed state lines, which was most of them.
Audrey McGlinchy And that left the Railroad commission without much to do.
Mose Buchele Which brings us back to oil.
Kent Hance It was like a gold rush. It was black gold.
Audrey McGlinchy Kent Hance says all these discoveries in the early 1900s showed that there was a lot of oil in Texas. And it was really easy to get at.
Kent Hance Remember this, the old story, the Beverly Hillbillies TV program. They’d shoot into the ground and all came up. You know, it just showed that there was too much pressure. It’s all a bubble up. Instead of pumping, it flowed.
Mose Buchele So getting oil from the ground was relatively simple. Getting it to somewhere you could sell. It was not. You could put it in a truck. You could put it maybe on a train. But the most effective way to move oil around. Is to build pipelines.
Audrey McGlinchy But pipelines are a big hassle. They need a lot of upfront investment. They need rights to private property and they bring the threat of monopoly.
David Prindle One way of thinking about the history of the industry is to assume that power accrues to transportation.
Mose Buchele Or like Ken Hantz said.
Kent Hance If your town didn’t get on the railroad line, your town died.
Mose Buchele What they’re saying is no matter what you’re making, whether it’s oil or whether you’re growing crops, you have to have a way to move it. And the people who do the moving are usually the ones with the power. Imagine you have an oil well, but you’re kind of like a small timer, like Daisy Bradford on her farm. And only one pipeline is connected to your oil field. You’re totally at the mercy of that pipeline company. Back in these early days of drilling. That company had a name.
Audrey McGlinchy It was John D Rockefeller’s Standard Oil, a huge company that had a hand in every pot pipelines, railroads. It was so powerful that people called it the octopus.
David Prindle It had been Standard Oil’s monopoly of pipelines that allowed it to become a monopoly in everything. It wasn’t that John D Rockefeller owned every oil well in Ohio and Indiana and Pennsylvania. It was that he owned the pipelines. So if you produced oil, you had to have your oil transported on his terms. And his terms were he bought you out.
Audrey McGlinchy And if you didn’t buy you out, you were stuck trucking your own oil to market.
David Prindle Which meant it was expensive, which means he could undersell you. That was the basis for his monopoly.
Mose Buchele As soon as Texas became a big oil producing state. Standard Oil, the octopus under a subsidiary called Humble Oil, showed up. And smaller Texas oil drillers, not surprisingly, did not like that.
Audrey McGlinchy Now, these smaller drillers.
Mose Buchele A lot of times they’re called independents.
Audrey McGlinchy They use their political clout to get Standard Oil banned from Texas.
David Prindle It was good for the independence in the sense that that they were not dominated by this huge monopoly.
Mose Buchele But it was bad for them because they wanted pipelines to move oil. It’s the same fight over and over. The trains are useful to move your product, but you’re worried about the power of the trains. Same goes with the pipelines.
David Prindle So in 1917, the Standard Oil Trust and the Texas independents made a behind the scenes deal which resulted in a a law that essentially repealed the ban on Standard Oil. But the Railroad commission would regulate pipelines.
Mose Buchele Why not? Railroads carried people in goods. Pipelines carried oil. Why not regulate them the same way? Why not give the Railroad Commission power over the pipeline companies?
David Prindle In other words, it made Standard Oil be fair in regard to the little guys because everybody knew what Standard Oil had done to the little guys up in Ohio and Pennsylvania. And it essentially made them extinct.
Audrey McGlinchy And that’s how the Railroad Commission became the go to authority when Dad Joiner struck oil in East Texas in 1930.
Mose Buchele More coming up after the break. So when we left off, we were talking about this massive oil rush that was happening in Texas in the early 1900s.
Audrey McGlinchy And the state agency, the railroad Commission, which was put in charge of overseeing it.
Mose Buchele There were all sorts of conflicts and tensions already bubbling up. Yankee money, angry farmers, big oil. And it all came to a head when the Daisy Bradford number three oil well erupted in a gusher of oil in 1930.
Helen Griffin Really? We had what they called oil fever here.
Mose Buchele At Stephen F. Austin University. There is an excellent archive of oral history interviews that focus on life in East Texas. The one you’re hearing now is from a woman named Helen Griffin. In the 1930s, she was a little kid living in Kilgore, Texas, one of the closest small towns to the Bradford well.
Helen Griffin Oil went out the top and men got oil in their hats. And that’s where oil fever began.
Audrey McGlinchy Helen talks about how this poor rural community was transformed overnight. Farmers who have been scraping by, if they were lucky, were now sitting on fortunes of crude oil.
Mose Buchele Thousands of newcomers called boomers by the locals rushed to East Texas to get in on the action.
Helen Griffin Those people had come here from Arkansas, Louisiana uh all points to get work because they didn’t have work.
Page Foshee The Great Depression had started not quite a year before that discovery.
Mose Buchele Here’s Page Foschee again.
Page Foshee So you had desperate farm families with a mortgage they couldn’t even imagine paying off ever. Suddenly hear about manna from heaven on the Bradford farm.
Speaker 4 I’m going out on that oil field Tell me it’s a payday over there.
Audrey McGlinchy Kilgore, where Helen and her family were living, went from an unincorporated town of about 500 people to a city of 10,000 in a matter of months. And along with that came the typical problems of a boomtown.
Mose Buchele We’re talking drinking. We’re talking gambling. We’re talking prostitution. What a lot of those town folks thought of as very unsavory behavior.
Helen Griffin I mean, it was a holy mess.
Mose Buchele One thing that comes up more than once in these oral histories is how women could not leave clothes out to dry during these early days of the boom.
Gladys Foshee Well, let’s go. Let’s go.
Mose Buchele We know that voice is not Helen Griffin. It belonged to a woman named Gladys Fossey.
Page Foshee Goddamn. She’s my great aunt.
Mose Buchele And I’ll see the tapes A little muddy, but she says her son was born in May and she’d hang his diapers out in the clothesline, and she lost two clotheslines.
Gladys Foshee cause people needed those things
Audrey McGlinchy So by March 1931, the Texas Rangers come to try to establish order.
Mose Buchele And there’s one ranger in particular that people still talk about a lot, maybe because he had like the coolest name ever.
Gladys Foshee Now, you all know a little something about Lone Wolf Gonzalez.
Mose Buchele That’s right. Lone Wolf Gonzalez.
Audrey McGlinchy Helen remembers how Lone Wolf rounded up hundreds of suspected criminals and paraded them in chains through the streets. Problem was, at the end of that parade, there was no jail to take them to.
Gladys Foshee They had to put a line in one of the Baptist churches and hook the prisoners to the land like a trot line. And they call them trot line churches because they had the prisoners in the church.
Mose Buchele Yeah. If you don’t know, trot lines are a kind of fishing line where you put a lot of hooks and bait on one line. So these guys were all connected to each other on this one line lines kind of like basically a chain gang, right? So it just goes to show for Lone Wolf and his Rangers due process did not really seem to be part of the equation.
Audrey McGlinchy But Allen says his approach did cut back on some of the most visible crime.
Gladys Foshee I’m telling you that they respected the lone Wolf Gonzalez. Nobody got in his way.
Audrey McGlinchy But there was at least one crime in the oil fields of East Texas that Lone Wolf wasn’t able or willing to get a handle on. And it had to do with something they called hot oil.
Mose Buchele Yeah, another cool name.
Audrey McGlinchy How do we all was illegal contraband oil. To understand how this came about, you have to remember that this oil boom means people started drilling everywhere front yards, backyards, cattle pastures.
Mose Buchele Church members tore down their sanctuaries to put in an oil well. Oil Men tore out the floor of the Kilgore National Bank to put an oil well.
Page Foshee People said you could walk from well to well and you could walk down a row of ten wells without hitting the ground. You’re always on the rig floor.
Mose Buchele And the thing is, this huge boom of oil drilling was possible because the discovery of the East Texas field had caught the big oil companies by surprise. That’s the reason Dad Joiner chose to drill there. He didn’t think there was oil there.
Page Foshee Instead of having a cabal of big oil companies develop an East Texas field, you had farmers doing it. You had anybody who wanted work and needed money.
Audrey McGlinchy It was loud, it was chaotic.
Mose Buchele And it was suicidal for the oil industry. There are two reasons for this. One is geological. If you remember, Ken Hance talked about the pressure that existed underground to push oil upwards. The thing is, when everybody starts getting oil from the same oil field all at once, it lets all that pressure out. It makes it so there’s no force left underground to push the oil up.
Page Foshee The oil stays there. You can’t get it and it’s wasted. It’s gone. You’ll never get it.
Audrey McGlinchy The other reason all this drilling was a problem was financial. The boom in East Texas was flooding the market with oil. People hardly had anywhere to even keep it. They were sometimes letting it flow into creeks and ditches, keeping it where they could and selling it for pennies.
Mose Buchele One Texas oil man said, I could sell a barrel of oil at $0.10 and a bowl chili cost me 15.
Audrey McGlinchy But they still kept drilling because for a small town farmer, they’d rather make pennies than nothing at all.
Mose Buchele But for a big oil company, this overproduction was a huge problem.
Audrey McGlinchy They needed a stable and higher price of oil to cover their larger investments in the business. And they were in this business for the long run. Not to make a quick buck.
Mose Buchele Yeah, the big oil companies basically thought these small timers were ransacking, just doing a smash and grab on the oil in East Texas. So they went to state lawmakers and started getting rules passed to set limits on how much oil someone could pump.
Audrey McGlinchy The idea was that lowering production would stabilize prices.
Mose Buchele These production limits were called proration. Kind of a weird term that we’re going to be using in the future. And of course, proration was enforced by the Railroad Commission.
Audrey McGlinchy And the small time operators hated these rules.
Page Foshee The farmers who were desperate said no. Our notion is that the big companies just won’t put us out of business. They can afford to, you know, put their wells at rest for 30 days and we can’t.
Mose Buchele Under the system, crude produced beyond the limit was declared contraband.
Audrey McGlinchy This was hot oil. And almost everybody in East Texas was doing it.
Gladys Foshee We still had to run some of the so-called hot oil to protect ourselves.
Page Foshee She was something else.
Mose Buchele Here’s Paige’s great aunt, Gladys Foshee again.
Audrey McGlinchy Gladys perfectly describes why this overproduction could not stop.
Gladys Foshee Because it’s not like attractive timber or something you can save if you don’t get your oil when it’s going out. The other fellow got it? That’s right. So we were guilty, like a lot of everybody else. It was a matter of self-preservation.
Mose Buchele Small independent operators kept drilling. The big oil companies kept howling for limits, and the price of oil kept plummeting.
Page Foshee Now it’s just unsustainable. It wasn’t just Texas. It was hurting. It was every oil producing region.
Audrey McGlinchy Something had to give, and it did. In August of 1931.
Mose Buchele That’s when Governor Ross Sterling announced the East Texas oil field to be in a state of insurrection and declared martial law.
Page Foshee Sterling sent two Ranger captains and about 1100 National Guard to East Texas to turn off the pumps, turn off the oil rigs, shut everything down.
Mose Buchele Next time, the East Texas oil war, how the fight between a bunch of oil drilling farmers and the heavy hand of the Texas government came to change the world of energy forever. This episode was reported by me and produced by Audrey McGlinchey, Matt Largey and myself. We had technical help from Rene Chavez and Jake Pearlman. Special thanks to the Digital Archives of the East Texas Research Center at Steven Boston University for archival tapes. We are supported by you, our listeners. If you want to give us a few bucks to help us keep doing this work, go to supportthispodcast.org. The Disconnect is a production of KUT and KUTX Studios in Austin. I’m Mose Buchele. Thanks for listening.
This transcript was transcribed by AI, and lightly edited by a human. Accuracy may vary. This text may be revised in the future.
