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Audio Archive: Spanish Flu in the Texas Oil Fields

This article was originally posted in the Briscoe Center for American History’s Newsletter.

In 1918, Spanish influenza ravaged a war-weary world, killing as many as 40 million people across the globe and over half a million in America. In the oil fields of Texas, the flu was particularly vindictive due to poor working conditions and a lack of health care. The Oral History of the Texas Oil Industry Records include interviews with roughnecks, rig managers, mule skinners, and Red Cross workers who witnessed the flu firsthand. Below are four excerpts from the collection.

Black and white image of the main street of Desdemona, Texas crowned with cars and horse-drawn wagons

Walter Cline, Red Cross worker in Burkburnett, Texas

“And we had what you and I now know to be the worst flu epidemic we’ve ever had in the United States. I was serving as field director for the Red Cross at the time in charge of Red Cross field operations at Call Field near Wichita Falls. . . . We got the government to assign some doctors and nurses to try and relieve the situation. . . . We asked the people of Wichita Falls to contribute in order that we might find shelter and food and warm clothing and medicine for the people, many of whom were suffering from flu and exposed in covered wagons and under these tarpaulins. . . . In one place, you’d find a mother dead, with a little six or eight months old baby crawling around over her breast, trying to open her dress. And you gather her up and look around and her husband is sick over there and a little boy. I think on our first trip west of Burkburnett, we gathered up some six or eight dead men, women, and children, and they continued to die until we found temporary shelter for them.

The people in Wichita Falls were most generous and helpful. They shipped lumber and bedding and food and clothing by carloads. As I recall it, the railroad hauled it to Burkburnett free of any freight charge, and the teamsters, the oil field haulers, hauled it out to where it was needed without any charge. And it was possibly one of the saddest sights I’ve ever had to experience . . . it was rather saddening to see thousands of people, and there were thousands of them, suffering and dying and little we could do about it. We finally stopped it . . . we had a reputation for taking care of the folks that couldn’t take care of themselves. They parked along the riverfronts and pitched camp and we tried to feed and shelter them and give them medicine and take care of them through the winter. And it was rather a severe winter.”

Burkburnett lies close to Wichita Falls in northeast Texas. In 1912 oil was discovered west of Burkburnett, but a much larger find was made in 1918, drawing approximately 20,000 people to the area. “Of course, there was a tremendous influx of people,” recalled Cline. “Crop conditions had been very poor over most of southern Oklahoma and western Texas, and there were thousands of families who were suffering for enough food and clothing and shelter to carry them through the winter months.” Many of these families found work in Burkburnett. But they also found the flu. By the end of 1918, the oil field was producing 7,500 barrels per day, and twenty trains ran daily between Burkburnett and Wichita Falls. These figures suggest managers prioritized profit over public health. Due to the transient nature of the working population, it is not clear how many people died. The oil boom died out by 1930.

Black and white image of a wagon loaded with oil equipment and a car stuck in a muddy road in a small Texas town

G. Lawson, oil rig worker in Ranger, Texas.

“I was in Ranger when they had this flu epidemic, and that was about the most pitiful thing that I have ever seen. I have seen parents carrying children down the street on their shoulders unable to raise their heads, taking them to the doctor’s office. Seen caskets just piled up—bodies in them I suppose—ready to be shipped out. That was one of the hardest things to see.”

Born in West Virginia, Lawson worked in oil fields across the United States and Mexico wherever he could find work. In 1917, he came to Ranger, Texas. Ranger, between Fort Worth and Abilene, was an agricultural town. Hard hit by drought, locals initiated a successful search for oil. By mid-1917, McClesky No. 1 reached a daily production of 1,700 barrels. The discovery kicked off an oil boom that radically transformed both Ranger and the surrounding Eastland County. Unsanitary conditions caused by makeshift housing and torrential rain led to outbreaks of typhoid. In 1918, when Spanish flu began to spread, the town was ill-prepared. However, work in the oil fields never abated, no doubt one of the reasons the flu hit so hard. By 1919 there were 22 oil wells in the area. By 1921, most of the wells were spent.

Black and white image of five men standing underneath an oil rig

Fred Jennings, rig manager in Goose Creek, Texas

“The people died [in Goose Creek, Texas, east of Houston] and they just died so fast here till they didn’t have no undertakers. You’d just have to put them in pickup trucks and haul them to Houston. Just put them in a pine box and bury them any way you could. That went on—well, that was 1918. That was through the winter months of 1918, when the flu epidemic was so bad . . . and men—I saw one man working and walk home and was dead in thirty minutes after he came home with that flu.”

Born Gonzales County, Fred Jennings settled in Goose Creek in 1916, eventually working his way up from roughneck to rig superintendent. In 1917 Ross S. Sterling, president of Humble Oil and future governor of Texas, pioneered a railroad connection to the Southern Pacific line at Dayton, leading to a boom—“30,000 people into the area overnight,” according to Jennings. In his interview, Jennings discusses the conditions in the town before and after the flu epidemic. Topics covered include strike action, the declaration of martial law, fist fights, gunfights, the poor treatment of women, and the arrival of the Ku Klux Klan.

Black and white image of a mule train moving through a small town in the South Texas Oil Fields

Plummer Barfield, mule train operator in Jefferson County, Texas

“Even as late as ’19 and ’20, well, we were pretty short-handed during the flu epidemic around the cemetery because—especially in the fall and the early spring of ’19 and the early spring of ’20, when the epidemic was at its worst, why, people was just afraid to get out. And I’ve had— conducted several funerals that there wouldn’t be nobody there but maybe a brother, or maybe a son or the father of one, or a gravedigger and myself in any number of cases. And the preachers, at one time here, all of our local preachers were sick, and everybody worked to death in this neck of the woods, and you just couldn’t get nobody. Lots of times we wouldn’t have enough for pallbearers. . . . But those things couldn’t be helped and they understood, . . . people that had been sick didn’t have any business out. . . . And most of them was afraid they were gonna be sick and they wouldn’t get out unless they had to. So it was pretty severe in this neck of the woods for about six months.”

Plummer Barfield grew up in Jefferson County. He worked in livery stables for much of his life and ran mule trains that carried supplies to a variety of oil fields between Beaumont and Houston during the 1910s and 1920s.

About the Oral History of the Texas Oil Industry Records

Created in the 1950s, the Oil Industry Records project was commissioned by Estelle Sharp. Her husband, Walter Sharp, was one of the early Spindletop drillers. Mrs. Sharp saw the need to gather the recollections of those who worked during the early Texas oil boom. The collection includes 218 taped interviews that have since been transcribed. The Briscoe Center is in the process of digitizing the entire collection and making it available online.

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The views and opinions expressed in this article or video are those of the individual author(s) or presenter(s) and do not necessarily reflect the policy or views of the editors at Not Even Past, the UT Department of History, the University of Texas at Austin, or the UT System Board of Regents. Not Even Past is an online public history magazine rather than a peer-reviewed academic journal. While we make efforts to ensure that factual information in articles was obtained from reliable sources, Not Even Past is not responsible for any errors or omissions.

Oil and Money: Texas Politics, 1929-1932

by Rachel Ozanne

The late Professor Norman D. Brown was a fixture of the UT Austin History Department for nearly four decades, and his classes on Texas history were popular favorites among undergraduates and graduate students. In 1984, Texas A&M University Press published Brown’s Hood, Bonnet, and Little Brown Jug: Texas Politics, 1921-1928, which is still considered the main source for the state-level political history of that era. In the ensuing decades, Brown worked steadily on a sequel, which he never published before his retirement from UT Austin in 2015.

That sequel, Biscuits, the Dole, and Nodding Donkeys: Texas Politics, 1929-1932, unveils little known stories of the high drama of the Texas political scene at the beginning of the Great Depression. Yet these stories might never have seen the light of day if it weren’t for the efforts of some of Brown’s devoted former students and colleagues.

Norman D. Brown with Rachel Ozanne, ed., Biscuits, The Dole, and Nodding Donkeys: Texas Politics, 1929-1932

Brown donated his personal papers and research files to the Briscoe Center for American History when he retired. Unknown to many, this donation included his unfinished book manuscript. A former Master’s student of Brown, Josiah Daniel, learned of the manuscript’s existence, and, with the support of the Briscoe Center, contracted with the UT History Department to find an editor for the manuscript. In 2017, I was hired to update the scholarly references in the manuscript’s footnotes and to write an introduction for the manuscript, summing up its main ideas and themes. I was quickly delighted with the rich details of the highs and lows of Texas gubernatorial, legislative, and party politics that Brown portrayed. The manuscript came to me without a title, but I settled on Biscuits, the Dole, and Nodding Donkeys as key images that encapsulated the major ideas and issues of this critical era in Texas history.

“Biscuits” refers to the on-going role that personality and populism played in Texas politics. Throughout most of the twentieth century, the Democratic Party dominated the state of Texas. The Republican Party was too closely associated with Abraham Lincoln and the defeat in the Civil War to appeal to most white Texans, and most black Texans were prevented from voting due to Jim Crow laws that in effect disfranchised them. In the 1920s and 30s the Texas Democratic Party was divided between two factions that fought for control of the party: business progressives, who sought to reform certain aspects of government to provide improved social services, and populists, who sought to prevent the expansion of the size and scope of government and claimed to appeal to the people, mostly poor, rural white Texans.

Ma Ferguson, 1933 (Paralta Studios, Austin. Briscoe Center for American History)

In Brown’s narrative, Jim “Pa” and Miriam “Ma” Ferguson best represented the populist wing of the Democratic Party. Pa Ferguson was governor in the 1910s, but was barred from holding public office after being convicted of misappropriation of public funds and other charges in his 1917 impeachment trial. Ma Ferguson ran for reelection to the governorship in 1932, promising “two governors for the price of one.” In explaining his political philosophy, Pa asserted that you’ve got to keep the people happy, or “give them a biscuit.” As long as you kept giving them people biscuits, they would be “for you,” but as soon as the biscuits ran out, “they [would] not be for you any longer.” The Fergusons’ populist appeal was successful in 1932, but they soon found themselves falling from public favor, as new rumors of abuses of public funds and power surfaced again.

Texans also argued among themselves about “the dole” and the extent to which they were comfortable with government intervention. The Great Depression presented Texans with a social crisis of poverty and unemployment the likes of which they had never seen, making them more receptive to the possibility of federal and state programs than ever before. Brown notes that every successful gubernatorial candidate in Texas in the 1930s ran for office promising to provide a pension program for elderly Texans, but efforts to implement these plans were always prevented by the state legislature.

East Texas Oil Fields, Derricks and Buildings (Briscoe Center for American History)

Texans also flirted with stricter regulations on production for the oil industry—the “nodding donkeys” of the era—particularly regulations that would limit the number of barrels produced per day. Brown documents what happened when a massive oil field was discovered in east Texas near Kilgore in late 1930. Wildcat, individual producers rushed to the area to drill wells to capture as much oil as possible, hoping to make a quick profit, before large producers came in to dominate the area. Their efforts led to massive decreases in prices and to environmental waste, as much of the oil evaporated or flooded nearby fields, when it could not be contained. These smalltime producers opposed efforts by Governor Ross Sterling to regulate production, arguing that limiting production in order to stabilize and increase prices violated the law (it did). Governor Sterling eventually declared martial law in east Texas to try to enforce production quotas, but one-by-one oil companies filed court injunctions that made the attempt to enforce production quotas impossible. In the long-term the legislature did pass new laws allowing for better restriction of the oil industry, but too late to affect the situation in Kilgore.

Vice President John N. Garner –“Cactus Jack– and President Franklin D. Roosevelt, c. 1930-35 (Briscoe Center for American History)

Brown’s book concludes with a dramatic recounting of the Democratic Party’s Primary Convention in Chicago in 1932, as Texans considered whether to throw their support behind native son John Nance “Cactus Jack” Garner or New Yorker Franklin D. Roosevelt—revealing the critical role that Texans ultimately played in securing the nomination for Roosevelt.

These stories and others make Brown’s work highly recommended for lovers of Texas history or political history in general.

Norman D. Brown with Rachel Ozanne, ed., Biscuits, The Dole, and Nodding Donkeys: Texas Politics, 1929-1932

Want to know more? You can listen to Rachel Ozanne talk about Brown’s book on the Texas Standard’s website.

George Norris Green’s The Establishment in Texas Politics: the Primitive Years, 1938-1957 picks up the story of Texas political history about where Brown’s Biscuits leaves off.

Walter L. Buenger’s The Path to a Modern South emphasizes the economic developments of Texas history as well as Texans’ shifting understandings of their state identity in the years leading up to and through the era of Brown’s work.

Darlene Hine Clark’s Black Victory: The Rise and Fall of the White Primary in Texas highlights the political history of African Americans in Texas in the first part of the twentieth century.

Neil Foley’s The White Scourge provides important insight into the racial history of Texas during the era of Jim Crow, by examining not just the issue of white and black racial conflict, but the complexities of racial tension in a state with a substantial Mexican American population in the early twentieth century as well.

Student Showcase – Oil and Gas Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico

Maham Sewani and Sania Shahid
Sartartia Middle School
Junior Division
Group Website

Read Maham and Sania’s Process Paper

In 2010 the Deepwater Horizon, an off-shore oil rig operated by British Petroleum, exploded in the Gulf of Mexico. Over the succeeding weeks an estimated 4.9 million barrels of oil spilled into the Gulf, the largest marine oil spill in American history. This event brought the dangers of off-shore drilling to the forefront of America’s public consciousness, leading many to ask why we even allow such dangerous methods of oil extraction.

Maham Sewani and Sania Shahid, students at Sartartia Middle School, explored the history of this controversial technology with a Texas History Day website, “Oil and Gas Drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.” Looking back on the origins of off-shore drilling, Maham and Sania argue this technology has created both economic benefits and ecological perils. Here are two excerpts from their site:

A controlled fire in the Gulf of Mexico following the Deepwater Horizon oil spill, May 6, 2010. The U.S. Coast Guard conducted the burn to help prevent the spread of oil. (U.S. Military)

Rights and responsibilities of stakeholders within the oil and gas industry in the Gulf of Mexico have greatly evolved. Since the mid-1900s, several incidents have resulted in loss of lives, destruction of property, and environmental damage. This has led to the reorganization of governmental agencies, more stringent regulatory framework, and corporate pursuit of technological advances, resulting in improved capability to extract oil and gas in deeper and harsher environments in a responsible manner.

Oil drilling platform off the coast of California, near Santa Barbara (U.S. Department of Energy)

Accidents, changes in supply and demand, technological advancements, jurisdiction conflicts, and competing priorities between energy independence and environmental protection have led to an evolution in rights and responsibilities of oil and gas industry stakeholders in the Gulf of Mexico. These stakeholders include corporations, the federal government, and governments of states bordering the Gulf of Mexico. The evolution over the past 60 years has resulted in significant reorganization of governmental agencies, changes in rights to value derived from mineral resources between stakeholders, and passage of more stringent laws/regulations causing companies to be environmentally safe, while simultaneously pursuing technological breakthroughs for more efficient and effective extraction of oil and gas.

Recent Texas History Day projects:

A documentary on the draft’s controversial history in America

And a story of WWII internment you probably haven’t heard

The War, The Weapon and the Crisis: The Arab Oil Embargo of 1973

By Johana Mata

Read Johana’s Paper Here

In October of 1973, members of the Organization of Arab Petroleum Exporting Countries—or OPEC—placed an oil embargo against the United States and many of its NATO allies. This dramatic move was retaliation against the West for their military support of Israel in the ongoing Yom Kippur War. The embargo caused the price of crude oil to promptly skyrocket in the United States, creating an economic and political crisis.

For Texas History Day, Johana Mata delved into the history behind OPEC’s provocative act. She argues that the embargo represented a serious turning point for the global economy:

Israeli tanks cross the Suez Canal’s western border into Egypt, 1973 (Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

“The embargo and its consequences sent shock radiating through the social fabric of the industrial nations. The fear and uncertainty caused by the oil cutbacks had both oil companies and consumers frantically seeking additional supplies not only for current use but as a safeguard for future shortages. Buyers were scrambling desperately to obtain any oil they could find. ‘We weren’t bidding just for oil, we were bidding for our life,’ said an independent refiner who did not have a secure supply. The effects of the embargo on the psyches of the Western Europeans and the Japanese were dramatic. The disruption instantaneously transported them back to the bitter postwar years of deprivation and shortages. In West Germany, for example, the Ministry of Economics took on the task of allocating supply to desperately worried industries. In japan, the embargo came as an even more devastating shock. The confidence built by strong economic growth was suddenly shattered and ignited a series of commodity panics.”

An American gas station experiencing the embargo’s impact (Image courtesy of Vintage Everyday)

“In the United States, the shortfall of oil struck at fundamental beliefs in the endless abundance of resources, convictions rooted so deeply in the American character and experience that a large part of the public did not even know until October of 1973 that the United States imported any oil at all. In a matter of months, however, the public found out just how dependent the country was on Middle Eastern oil. Gasoline prices quadrupled, rising from just 25 cents per gallon to over a dollar in months. Gas lines became common sights as drivers became desperate to fill their tanks before the gas ran out. There was an instant drop in the number of homes built with gas heat and Congress issued a 55 mph speed limit on highways. Daylight savings time was compulsory year-round in an effort to reduce electrical use and one of the biggest long-term effects was the massive change in cars due to the oil embargo. The production of gas guzzling cars was halted and the sale of Japanese cars increased because they met efficiency standards that American cars did not. Americans lost the confidence they had held for the future.”

Johana Mata
Senior Division
Research Paper

Oil and Weapons in Gaddafi’s Libya

by Chris Dietrich

In a recent Wikileaks revelation, a secret U.S. cable revealed that Senators John McCain and Joe Lieberman promised to provide Muammar Gaddafi with military hardware in 2009. McCain and Lieberman were among the last high-level teams to have made such a promise, but they certainly weren’t the first. From the very beginning of the Gaddafi regime’s existence in 1969, western leaders have rationalized arms sales to oil-rich Libya. Often, these justifications were cast in stark Cold War terms, however, archival evidence from the United States and the United Kingdom points towards a different, more pragmatic explanation. Libyan arms sales represented an opportunity to reinvest petrodollars in western businesses.

This process began in the early 1960s, when Libyan oil emerged as a “safe alternative” to oil from the Persian Gulf. Then ruled by a pro-American monarch, King Sayyid Muhammed Idris, Libya was first suggested as a reliable alternative in a May 1959 meeting of the National Security Council. The Persian Gulf, the NSC concluded, “was in a position to exert too much economic and political leverage against Western Europe.” Libya’s newly-discovered reserves, on the other hand, were safely within the western bloc and ready for development. “The nub of the matter,” Vice President Richard Nixon said in that meeting, “was what to do about Libya.” Encouraged by a Libyan petroleum law written by a Palestinian nationalist lawyer imposing limits on concession sizes, smaller companies jumped at the chance to enter Libya and production increased in the following decade. At the same time, the State Department argued for the cultivation of closer political relations with all Arab oil producers, to help overcome the “ideological ferment” of their pan-Arabism and make them more “interdependent with the West.”

This policy was unsuccessful in Libya and on September 1, 1969 nationalist army officers deposed Idris. In an early report, the State Department described the new leader, 27-year-old Muammar Gaddafi, as “a man raised in the desert” with “the virtues and vices of a fundamentalist prophet” and “a strong sense of mission.” No one predicted that Gaddafi’s sense of mission would convert Libya into a pariah state by the end of the next decade, when it embarked on its continuous and spiteful interference in global affairs, culminating in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am flight 103. However, it was readily apparent by early 1970 that Gaddafi’s Libyan Revolutionary Command Council (RCC) would actively employ its control over the country’s vast oil wealth to increase its arms sales.

American arms-sale policy towards the new regime was initially cautious. The State Department reported that Libya showed no signs of “moderation in Middle Eastern affairs.” Gaddafi not only espoused armed conflict as the only means of settling Arab-Israeli problems, he also had just nationalized the holdings of British Petroleum. The State Department imposed a ban on all transfers, specifically cancelling permission for a Spanish company to sell Libya F-5 fighter planes.

The United States’ initial restraint soon wore away and the reality of arms profits superseded public concerns that the further militarization of the Arab world would retrench the Arab-Israeli conflict and give rise to what western officials had begun to describe as “international terrorism.” In his first report on the state of American foreign policy, President Nixon used aggressive Cold War rhetoric to present this broader policy to Congress. “We repeatedly made clear to the Soviet leaders our decision to limit the arms race in the Middle East on a reciprocal basis,” he began. He continued: the Soviet Union had responded by stepping up the shipment of air defense missiles, aircraft, and combat crews to Egypt. The United States had no choice, Nixon concluded, but to “help maintain the military balance.”

Military sales became immensely more profitable with oil price increases in the 1970s. After negotiations between the members of OPEC and the multinational oil companies, triggered by Gaddafi’s demands, ended in favorable conditions for OPEC, it became clear that oil producing countries would have far more funding for arms purchases, the CIA reported as early as March 1971. After the 1973-1974 oil price shocks, these funds increased astronomically.

Although official Libyan policy was to remain neutral in the Cold War, Soviet ships began to unload tanks and artillery there in 1970 hoping to establish Libya as what one U.S. official described as “an arms depot and a training sanctuary for all the Arab confrontation states.” In this Cold War context, the Nixon administration supported western arms sales to Libya, including an unprecedented $400 million French sale in 1970. U.S. policymakers believed such sales would keep the lines open to clients within Soviet clutches. The State Department believed that if the French did not fill the vacuum left by the cancellation of U.S. and U.K. sales, “the Soviets would.”

In this context, the State Department reconsidered its policy towards arms deals between American companies and the Libyan RCC in 1972. After receiving a letter from the president of Lockheed discussing his concern that his Marietta, Georgia plant was threatened with closure, the department gave the green light for the company to sell planes to Libya through Italy, reversing the Spanish F-5 decision.

As the French example demonstrated, the influx of petrodollars into the Libyan economy changed the scale of potential profits. The benefits of a new relationship with the Libyan government were clear to the British as well. The British also sought to lessen Soviet influence in Libya, but concerns about the domestic economy played the major role in the British decision sell more arms. In 1977, after the Defense and Overseas Policy committee decided to relax military sales restrictions, writing that restrictions had caused the British to “lag well behind the Germans, French and Italians.”

The British Army fought the decision. Libyan support for the IRA, one official wrote, “completely overshadowed” all other considerations. Given that “soldiers are being killed and wounded daily by the IRA,” he continued, “it would be indefensible…to supply equipment to the Libyans or worse to be seen to train them.” The Cabinet disregarded the army’s complaints. The Defense Secretary, Fred Mulley, told the Foreign Secretary, David Owen, that arms would provide the “key factor” in helping other British firms secure military and civil contracts in the growing petro-economy. The Secretary of State for Industry also approved increased sales, noting that they were “most welcome to British Aerospace” and “a much needed fillip to British Shipbuilders.”

In remarkably pragmatic considerations, the immediate prospects for lucrative business, not to mention long-term sales potential, made the risks acceptable to French, British, U.S. and other western policymakers. While we should be careful not paint the current NATO support for Libya as a mono-causal “War for Oil”, it is clear the oil money has long played an important part in Libya’s relations with the west. It remains to be seen what role it will play in the future.

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