Giant Under the Hill: A History of the Spindletop Oil Discovery at Beaumont, Texas, in 1901

Giant Under the Hill: A History of the Spindletop Oil Discovery at Beaumont, Texas, in 1901. By Judith Walker Linsley, Ellen Walker Rienstra, and Jo Ann Stiles. (Austin: Texas State Historical Association, c. 2002. Pp. xii, 304. $29.95, ISBN 0-87611-182-7.)

Giant Under the Hill, the first collaboration between the three authors, is a well-written and thoroughly researched account of the spectacular earlytwentieth-century oil boom in southeast Texas. Virtually every discovery of oil has generated its share of heroic tales of scrappy entrepreneurs, hardy workers, and daring capitalists, but perhaps none more than the Spindletop gusher near Beaumont, Texas, in 1901. Authors judith Walker Linsley, Ellen Walker Rienstra, and Jo Ann Stiles have done a solid job of sorting...