When people think of Texas, oil surely makes the shortlist of things that spring to mind.
For many people it’s hard to imagine a Texas without pump jacks and oil derricks. But the story of how the state became synonymous with fossil fuels is perhaps not what you would expect.
It has to do with a great oilfield con.
Oil fever
In the 1920s, oil was becoming a hot commodity in Texas. The success of the Spindletop oil well in Beaumont in 1901 had set off a series of oil booms that promised wealth to any landowner lucky enough to sit atop some crude.
“Oil fever," as it was called, provided a perfect environment for scammers and conmen. Enter Columbus Marion Joiner, later known as "Dad" Joiner, for reasons that will become clear.
Joiner’s official job was as a “promoter” of oil projects. He would convince landowners to lease their properties so he could drill for oil. Then he would gather investors to finance the project. In exchange, everyone involved would receive a cut of future profits.
The thing is, Joiner seemed to have no intention of actually finding oil, to find it would have ruined his con.
“Absolutely, if you found oil, you blew it!” says Page Foshee, a historian and writer, who also worked for decades as an oil and gas landman – a person who, like Joiner, secures the rights to drill for oil on people's properties.
Here's how the con worked.
As long as Joiner didn't find oil, he never had to pay anyone back. He could just keep gathering up new investors and taking their money. Their profits would materialize only if Joiner struck oil, which he never planned to do.
“He would drill and drill and drill, and he would sell parts of oil well projects,” Foshee says. “Hey, I'll sell you 25% of my well for, you know, $5,000."
That's about $90,000 in today's money.
Joiner would also sell the same oil project multiple times over, so a well might have several different investors believing they had exclusive rights to profit from it.
“He really made a ton of cash by overselling every well he drilled,” Foshee says. “That's where his income came from.”
When it came to targets for his scam, Joiner reportedly specialized in doctors and single women.
"He was a master of amore," Foshee says. "He was especially kind to widows and maiden women. The older and with more property, the better."
Daisy Bradford No. 3
In 1927, Joiner was drilling for oil on the property of Daisy Bradford, a widowed woman in East Texas. He had gotten the lease from Bradford and had gathered a lot of investors to fund this drilling.
Wouldn't you know it? He found no oil. The well was what they call in the business a “dry hole.”
For Joiner, that was no problem. His failure to find oil meant he did not need to pay anyone back. Instead, he went out and convinced more people to invest in a second well.
In 1929, Joiner drilled the "Daisy Bradford No. 2." That well was also dry.
"They were looking for dry holes,” Foshee said. “I think the trouble with the Daisy Bradford No. 1 and 2 wells was they didn't drill deep enough.”
So, Joiner got more money together and started drilling on a third well.
This third oil well started to show promise: There were signs of oil coming up with the mud and water below. The East Texas laborers who were working on the operation couldn't help but notice Joiner seemed uneasy with this.
He brought in his longtime partner Doc Lloyd to take over operations. Lloyd, as Foshee puts it, “practiced as a doctor, without the formality of a license.”
But the way Lloyd told his work crew to drill seemed destined to ruin the oil well. It seemed to Bradford and others that Joiner and Lloyd were trying to screw this up.
In the book The Last Boom, authors Michel Halbouty and Jame Clark describe how Bradford used her power as the property owner to wrestle control of the drilling operation from Joiner and Lloyd. That's probably why the Daisy Bradford No. 3 well struck oil in October 1930.
In their book, Halbouty and Clark describe the moment Joiner realized No. 3 was a winner. He did not dance a jig or shout for joy. Instead, he leaned against a tree with his eyes closed.
"Not yet,” Joiner said. “It’s not an oil well yet.”
“He could not have been happy,” Foshee said. “He'd oversold that well, just like all the rest of them.”
Father of the field
With a successful oil well on his hands, Joiner's investors would soon come knocking, and he would not have the money they expected.
He knew he was in trouble. What he could not have known was that that third well had uncovered the biggest oil field in U.S. history.
Joiner was dubbed the father of the field, hailed by East Texas as “Dad” or “Daddy” Joiner in the newspapers. It was an honor that did not help much with his creditors.
The oil discovery was “was just terrifically fortuitous for everybody, except for Joiner, who died broke in the late '40s," Foshee says.
One reason the ocean of oil uncovered by the Daisy Bradford No. 3 was so consequential is that no one had expected the oil reservoir to be there. Big oil companies had not bought up the oil rights in that part of East Texas like they would in areas they expected to be rich in crude.
“Instead of having a cabal of big oil companies develop the East Texas field, you had farmers doing it," Foshee says. "You had anybody who wanted work and needed money."
That set off a fight between the big companies and small-time drillers, leading to the creation of a new system of oil regulation in Texas.
Parts of that system remain in place today, not just in Texas, but in oil-producing countries around the world.
And it took a man actively trying to not find oil to bring it all about.
This story is included in Episode 1 of Season 3 of The Disconnect: Power, Politics and the Texas Blackout. Listen to the full episode in the player above. You can find The Disconnect wherever you get your podcasts.
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