The Man Nobody Believed: The Story of Spindletop

Pattillo Higgins was nobody's idea of a visionary. He left school after the fourth grade. He lost his left arm at seventeen. And then his life turned around - he came to faith, and the onetime troublemaker became a Sunday school teacher in Beaumont, Texas.

It was the Sunday school class that changed history. Higgins used to take his students on picnics to a low rise south of town called Big Hill - and on those picnics he noticed something everyone else ignored: gas seeping from the ground, springs that smelled of sulfur, little flares you could light with a match. He began teaching himself geology from books and government surveys, and he reached a conclusion almost no expert on earth agreed with: there was oil under that hill.

In 1892 he put everything behind the idea, forming the Gladys City Oil, Gas and Manufacturing Company - named after Gladys Bingham, his favorite student in that Sunday school class.

Then came the years that would have finished most people. A dry hole in 1893. Another in 1895. Another in 1896. The leading geologists of the day said the Texas coastal plain held no oil at all, and said so publicly. By 1896, Beaumont had made up its mind: Big Hill was worthless, and Pattillo Higgins was a fool.

Higgins did not stop. Out of money and out of partners, he placed an advertisement inviting someone - anyone - to come drill his hill. Exactly one man in America answered it: Captain Anthony Lucas, a Croatian-born engineer who was perhaps the only expert alive who took salt domes seriously.

Lucas got the same treatment Higgins had. His first attempt failed. His money ran out. The experts dismissed him too. He kept going - securing backing, bringing in a crew that invented new drilling techniques on the spot, and pushing the bit down through the very ground the professionals had written off.

On the morning of January 10, 1901, at 1,140 feet, the hill answered. Mud began to boil up the hole, then the drill pipe shot skyward, and then the Lucas Gusher roared in - a fountain of oil more than a hundred feet high, flowing an almost unbelievable 100,000 barrels a day. It ran wild for nine days before they could cap it. Nothing like it had ever been seen on earth.

Spindletop did not just make two stubborn men right. It started the American oil age. Companies born or built in the rush that followed - Gulf, Texaco, and others - became giants of the century. The fuel that would power the automobile, the airplane, and the American economy came up through a hill that every expert had dismissed - and that one Sunday school teacher never gave up on.

Higgins was even edged out of the drilling deal before the gusher came in - and persevered through that too, taking his stand, winning his settlement, and going on to a long career in oil. History gave him the name the town once denied him: the Prophet of Spindletop.

Nine years of dry holes, ridicule, and empty bank accounts. One answered advertisement. And then a morning that changed the world.