Word: beaumont
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...morning of Jan. 10, 1901, on a low hillock called Spindletop just outside Beaumont, Texas, gas rumbled out of its prehistoric tomb, shot up a black plume of petroleum and launched the oil age. The heavy oil spouted 200 feet into the air in the greatest gusher Americans had ever seen. Men saddled their horses and rode off, shouting: "Oil, oil on the hill." As one of the men passed 38-year-old Pattillo Higgins, he reined in, yelled: "People are saying you're the wisest man on earth. Hell, ain't you surprised?" "Not exactly." replied Higgins...
...Ignorant men in high places," snorted Higgins, as he kept on looking. In 1892. promising "millions," he persuaded three fellow Beaumonters to back him, but all he returned was three dry Spindletop holes. He became the town bore. Beaumont residents sneeringly called him "the millionaire." Desperate for a believer, Higgins advertised in a New York trade journal the glowing promise of oil, gas and sulphur in Spindletop, and flushed one reply. It was enough. Dalmatian-born Anthony Lucas, one time Austrian naval lieutenant who came to the U.S. to visit and stayed on to work as a mining engineer, agreed...
...blew in, he had been elbowed aside by Anthony Lucas. It was called the "Lucas well," not the Higgins well. Higgins had to sue to get his share from the Lucas well, finally settled for about $300,000. When he tried to form a new company in 1902, suspicious Beaumonters, wary of the sharpsters that had flocked in, were calling the whole operation "Swindletop." In the boisterous, bawdy oil boom, Beaumont refused to honor the man who had started it all, just as it had refused to believe him. Bitter, Higgins packed up and moved away...
Last week, at 92, Pattillo Higgins died and ended his restless search for oil. He left among his papers a document dated Dec. 3, 1901, signed by 32 citizens of Beaumont, Tex., and attested by the county clerk. It was a sort of apology, and it said in part: "Mr. Higgins deserves the whole honor of discovering and developing the Beaumont oil field. He located the exact spot where all the big gushers are now found...
Died. Pattillo Higgins, 92, Texas oilman who triggered the Spindletop strike near Beaumont which ushered in the oil age; in Houston (see BUSINESS...