Welcome to the Engines of Texan.

Episode 7, Spindletop. I'm Brandon C.

The morning of January 10, 1901, found brothers Al and Kurt Hamill on a drilling rig overlooking

the Nitches River.

In earlier times, back when this spot had been part of an impresario grant to a friend

of the podcast and first Texas vice president, Lorenzo de Zavala, it had been known as

Seimas de Boneteros, a reference to the peculiar conical tops of the cypress trees at this particular

spot that reminded observers of a tree known in English as a spindle, hence its later name in

English spindle top.

These trees sat near the top of a hill known as Sour Spring Mound, which actually audibly hissed

with sulfurous seeps.

Locals would sometimes drive hollow tubes into the ground and light the gas which came out as a sort of party trick.

Then they'd scoop up some of the dirt, mix it with the bubbling spring water which gave the hill its name,

and drink this slightly carbonated, or in this case, methanated lemonade.

The Hamel brothers, however, weren't drilling for lemonade. For four months now,

they, along with their older brother, Jim, who was in town that morning getting supplies,

they had been putting down an oil well. A local developer named Patillo Higgins had convinced

himself that Sour Spring Mound was an anticline,

the geologic structure that oil prospectors back east had started drilling with much success.

Think of an anticline as like a pimple on the surface of the earth,

just full of oil and just waiting to be popped.

The problem for Higgins, however, was that everybody,

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