In the late 1800s, a Beaumont brick maker and Sunday school teacher named Pattillo Higgins led his class up a small hill called Sour Spring Mound, dropped a lit match, and watched the ground catch fire. He was convinced a salt dome beneath the hill had trapped oil and gas, though geologists insisted the Gulf Coast held none. In 1892 he formed the Gladys City Oil, Gas, and Manufacturing Company, only to see pressurized quicksand swallow his equipment at about 300 feet. Broke and mocked, he left his own venture in 1896 and recruited salt dome expert Captain Anthony F. Lucas.

This episode follows Lucas as he runs out of money, turns to Pittsburgh financiers John H. Galey, James M. Guffey, and Andrew Mellon, and accepts a one-eighth share while Higgins gets nothing. With the Hamill brothers drilling, the crew improvised its way through sand and gas until January 10, 1901, when the well blew. The boom that followed remade Beaumont, broke Standard Oil’s grip, and ended with Mellon owning the prize.

• To beat the quicksand and gas pressure, the crew devised an improvised check valve and pumped mud down the hole, the origin of drilling mud.
• Caroline Lucas urged the crew to keep drilling to the 1,200 feet their contract required rather than stop at a thin oil sand.
• The Lucas gusher shot oil 150 feet into the air at 100,000 barrels a day and took nine days to cap with a Christmas tree valve.
• Beaumont grew from 10,000 people to 50,000, and by the end of 1902 more than 500 oil companies and nearly 300 wells crowded the hill.
• A 20-year contract to sell Shell 25,000 barrels a day at 25 cents each sank the company once output fell, and Mellon reorganized it as Gulf Oil in 1907.