While great riches may have eluded the majority of East Texans, work on the oil rigs allowed many former cotton growers to have a regular income for the first time in their lives. The oil industry acknowledged its connection to Southern farm life. For example, the greenest hands on a drilling site were referred to as “boll weevils.” On the farm, the boll weevil was a voracious beetle that had destroyed cotton crops and served as a symbol for the many reasons behind cotton farming’s decline across the South. Thus the term “boll weevil” shows how people in the oil industry viewed southern cotton farms as their labor pool. As the oil historian Bobby Weaver notes in Oilfield Trash: Life and Labor in the Oil Patch, this language persists today, though “boll weevil” has since been shortened to “worm.”
The hard work and improvisational mindset of these farm boys proved valuable for the drilling companies. Workers needed the mental and physical strength to withstand long hours of heavy lifting. Faulty boilers or unknown problems deep underground required quick-thinking to prevent costly slowdowns. Yet improvisation on the oil patch would have different consequences than on the cotton patch. Newly minted roughnecks lost limbs and lives as they extemporized their way down to pay dirt—boiler accidents proved especially common in East Texas while sudden releases of gas from deep underground sometimes caused explosions that destroyed whole rigs and killed anyone working on them. These men contributed to our knowledge of oil drilling, with the field serving as their laboratory, a trial-and-error series that had high costs for some people and big profits for the industry as a whole.
Despite these deadly risks, “boll weevils” flooded into the labor supply of the East Texas Oil Field. During the Great Depression government programs such as the Agricultural Adjustment Act (AAA) encouraged farmers to plow up parts of their crop, and many tenants faced eviction as landowners reduced their crop acreage. Both the AAA and oil money provided many landowners with significant capital they could then invest in tractors. These machines, powered with cheap oil, replaced farm families and their mules. Larger corporate farms in places like the North Texas plains used tractors and wage laborers to outcompete the smaller farms of East Texas.