CHAPTER 1
EARLY OIL
Somewhere between present Sabine Pass and High Island, in July 1543, survivors of Hernando Desoto's ill-fated expedition to further explore the New World for Spain noted a thick, gooey substance floating in the brackish coastal water. Later referring to it as cope, the Spaniards-forced inland by a storm in the Gulf of Mexico-used the pitch-like material to caulk the bottom of their vessels before they resumed their journey. Merely one of history's myriad footnotes, it nevertheless represented the first known use of a petroleum product by non-natives in what would become the United States.
Two centuries later, as Texas began to be settled, new arrivals noted oil or gas seeps here and there, but since oil had no real economic value, no one cared.
NACOGDOCHES
The American oil industry got its start in Pennsylvania on August 27, 1859-19 months before the Civil War-when Edwin T. Drake successfully oversaw completion of the first-ever well sunk in search of petroleum for commercial purposes. While his name, usually prefaced by an honorific "Colonel," is generally the first to appear in any history of the oil industry, the jack-of-all-trades and former railroad conductor was not the man who came up with the idea of extracting oil from the earth and converting it into a highly sought product called kerosene.
Down in Texas, Lynis Taliaferro Barret must have been an inveterate newspaper reader. Four months after Drake hit oil, Barret executed an agreement giving him mineral rights to 279 acres near a natural seepage called Oil Springs, 13 miles southeast of Nacogdoches in the piney woods of East Texas. The spot was well-known, at least locally. Spanish explorers had noted the seepage in 1790 and used oil from it to lubricate their cart and wagon wheels.
As a merchant and half-owner of a general store in the nearby community of Melrose, Barret appreciated the sales potential of the relatively new-fangled, kerosene-fueled lamp. A sudden national demand for what was then known as "illuminating oil" had pushed the price of a barrel of oil to $20, a giddying amount of money in the mid-19th century.
Before Barret could organize a drilling operation, sectional differences brought on war between the North and eleven seceding Southern states which reorganized themselves as the Confederate States of America. Born in Virginia and loyal to that venerable commonwealth, Barret interrupted his career in commerce to serve as a captain in the Confederate army. His business partner enlisted in the CSA infantry.
While Barret had followed the progress of the nascent oil industry in Philadelphia, he likely never heard of Juan Lopez Saenz, a Tejano rancher in South Texas. Saenz had moved from Rio Grande City to Duval County in 1854. The rancho he established stimulated a settlement briefly known as Noleda before it acquired a longer-lasting name, Piedras Pintas. That's Spanish for painted rocks, which is what a nearby geologic feature looked like.
