The Horrors of the Oil Rush

My book, The Times You Grew Up With, takes you back: https://paulmcallister.store In 1859, Edwin Drake struck oil along a quiet creek in northwestern Pennsylvania. Within months, the valley was unrecognizable. The American oil rush that followed — from Oil Creek through Spindletop, Texas and the Oklahoma fields — produced staggering fortunes and destroyed them just as fast. The rule of capture, a legal doctrine that treated underground oil like wild game, turned every landowner into a desperate competitor and every oil field into a race to the bottom. Nitroglycerin men hauled liquid explosives over dirt roads in the dark. Boom towns rose and collapsed in under two years. A river of fire swept through Oil City and Titusville in 1892. And in 1920s Osage County, the wealthiest people per capita on earth were systematically murdered for their oil money — crimes that remain unsolved to this day. Sources: Petroleum History Institute archives, petroleumhistory.org Crawford County Historical Society, “Fire Rode the Flood: Disaster in the Oil Region” National Weather Service, “125th Anniversary of the Oil Creek Flood of 1892” Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Osage Murders Case” historical records David Grann, Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI (2017) Earth Magazine, “Benchmarks: October 9, 1865 — First Successful U.S. Oil Pipeline”