Oil and Gas Lawyer Blog

In 1860, at the age of 60, Joseph Glidden invented barbed wire. He patented it the next year and sold the patent in 1876 to a company named Washburn and Moen, retaining a royalty that made him one of the richest men in the US.

John Warne Gates was born in Chicago in 1855. After several failed business, Gates became a salesman for Washburn and Moen. They gave him Texas as his sales territory. To show the benefits of barbed wire Gates set up a demonstration at the San Antonio Military Plaza. He built a barbed-wire pen and placed 100 head of cattle in the pen, who were run full speed into the fencing; the fence held. He sold lots of barbed wire for Washburn and Moen, then started his own successful wire business, which he later sold to JP Morgan’s US Steel. So he got in the steel business, forming Republic Steel, and invented a new process to purify iron called the open-hearth process.

In 1900, Patillo Higgins was drilling a well at a place called Spindletop, near Beaumont. He ran out of money, and Gates eventually invested $590,000 into the project. On January 10, 1901 the well blew in and spewed 100,000 barrels of oil a day for nine days. The company Gates invested in, the Texas Company, which later became Texaco. Gates became its president.

I ran across an article recently in the Journal of the Texas Supreme Court Historical Society about James V Allred, who succeeded the infamous Miriam “Ma” Ferguson as Governor of Texas in 1935. The Article, “Texas Troubles: Governor Allred and His Rangers Defy Jim Crow,” by Jody Edward Ginn, Ph.D. (Executive Director of the Texas Rangers Heritage Center in Fredericksburg), is excerpted from his book East Texas Troubles: The Allred Rangers’ Cleanup of San Augustine. In it he chronicles Allred’s depoliticizing and professionalizing of the Texas Rangers (he fired all but three of Ma Ferguson’s five thousand Rangers) and his clean-up of San Augustine, at that time run by a criminal gang “who built their power exploiting Jim Crow limitations on African American Texans’ access to the courts,” with the help of his new Rangers. In three trials in 1935 and 1936, three all-white juries convicted members of the gang of felony crimes against African American victims, based exclusively on the testimony of black victims and witnesses and the Rangers’ investigations.

Reading about Jimmy Allred sparked a memory about a case our firm handled years ago, which I will relate momentarily. First, a little more about Allred.

James V (no period, that’s his name) Allred was born in Bowie, Texas in 1899, went to Rice, served in the Navy, and graduated from Cumberland University law school in Lebanon, Tennessee, in 1921. He served as Texas’ Attorney General 1931-34 and Governor 1934-39. He was a progressive Democrat in the model of Franklin Roosevelt. After his stint as Governor Allred served on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of Texas, taking the bench at the age of forty. He resigned his judgeship in 1942 to pursue an unsuccessful run for the U.S. Senate, losing to Pappy Lee O’Daniel. Roosevelt nominated him for the Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals in 1942, but he was not confirmed. He was later again appointed as Judge for the Southern District in 1949, where he served until his death in 1959.