About 60 years earlier, and seven miles to the southeast . . .

John Gaillard and a visitor from La Porte fish in Tabbs Bay, at the mouth of Goose Creek.

In Mississippi, where he lived when he was a boy, Gaillard (pronounced "Gillyard") learned that rising bubbles in the water were a sign of buffalo fish feeding below.

There are bubbles here, he complains to the visitor, but no fish.

The visitor, a Mr. Matthews, an oil scout, thinks he knows why. He lights a match, and throws it over the bubbles.

Tabbs Bay becomes the first offshore drilling site in Texas.

Progress comes slowly. The first well hits oil in 1907, but production is scanty. A number of strikes follow, but always the results are disappointing: some leases are abandoned, while wildcatters keep drilling in the area around Goose Creek.

Then three Augusts unmask the land and shores they live on. It is only a membrane, corking a potent stew of volatile gasses and fluids.

August 23, 1916: Just 500 feet west of his bubbly fishing site of more than a decade earlier, John Gaillard strikes black gold. Eight thousand barrels a day spurt to the surface from more than 2000 feet below the surface. Gaillard sells his lease quickly, and just in time -- production drops to 300 barrels a day less than two months later.

August 3, 1917: A blowout in Sweet #11 spurts Goose Creek crude 250 feet into the air, blanketing the surrounding area. Over three days, 25,000 to 35,000 barrels of oil shoot out -- enough to block roads, drench trees, and leave a two-inch deep black lake covering 10 acres. Then, just a few days later, the well sands up.

August 31, 1918: Natural gas erupts out of Sweet #16 on Tabbs Bay, wrecking the derrick, then igniting in a huge explosion. For 11 days the well gushes out of control, spewing 10,000 barrels of oil and depositing a gunky slick on Tabbs Bay. The slick makes its way down the San Jacinto River to Galveston Bay, trapping and killing a broad variety of marine life. The Simms-Sinclair Company manages to cap the well and pump 200,000 saleable barrels of oil from it before it fills with sand in December.

The Goose Creek oil field boom lasts from 1917 to 1919. Steel and wooden derricks sprout shoulder to shoulder across the water's edge. It is suck or be sucked dry: Wells pump at full capacity, 24 hours a day. Enterprising oilmen put rigs at the edges of their leases to grab reserves neighbors haven't yet taken.

Just a few years earlier, this land had been used to grow rice. Farmers drenched fields with diversions from Goose Creek and ground water, letting a six-inch liquid layer sit for three summer months. Thick layers of clay soil hold it there.

Water spurted from the punctured ground more easily than the oil. These were artesian wells; they did not need to be pumped.

But by the end of the teens, a lonesome coastline of clay-lined rice fields has become a smelly, mucky mud pit. A noxious sulphur odor hovers overhead. Pipes, shacks, guy wires, tanks, and derricks create a new landscape.

There are new inhabitants, too: fortune seekers, con men, roughnecks, and migrant workers from lands near and far -- drawn to oil like slivers of iron to a magnet. With few places to live, newcomers sleep in tents, under trees, or on the wooden boards laid on mud and called sidewalks.

Soon, the indiscriminate drilling contaminates even the ground water. Standing water and primitive sewer and waste systems allow diseases to fester. Typhoid fever spreads from contaminated drinking water; in winter, influenza becomes an epidemic.

A telling scene: Dr. R.E. Maresh stands on a wooden sidewalk laid across the mud, drying a smallpox vaccine in the sun.

Joseph Isaacs starts a business selling clear water for drinking to households for 35 cents a barrel.

In expensive eateries, a glass of water costs 10 cents.

Boating on Goose Creek, 1920s. Photo courtesy Sterling Municipal Library, Baytown.

Oil derricks, Goose Creek oil field, 1920s. Photo courtesy Sterling Municipal Library, Baytown.

Derricks along Goose Creek, 1920s. Photo courtesy Sterling Municipal Library, Baytown.

Oil derricks, Goose Creek oil field, 1920s. Photo courtesy Sterling Municipal Library, Baytown.

Drilling original artesian water wells. Photo courtesy Sterling Municipal Library, Baytown.

Derricks along Tabbs Bay at low tide, ca. 1916. Photo courtesy Sterling Municipal Library, Baytown.

Water well, ca. 1919. Wooden tanks were used for both oil and water. Photo courtesy Sterling Municipal Library, Baytown.

Dr. R. E. Maresh, the first doctor to stay for one year. Photo courtesy Sterling Municipal Library, Baytown.

Ed Eisemann and his water wagon, Goose Creek oil field, ca. 1916-19. Photo courtesy Sterling Municipal Library, Baytown.