Read the beginning of the Introduction from Finding Oil: The Nature of Petroleum Geology, 1859-1920 by Brian Frehner:

"Shortly after walking over the dry west Texas plains, Jett Rink knelt on the ground while squeezing handfuls of oil-soaked dirt through his fingers and gazed in amazement at the black crude slowly bubbling to the surface. Later, Rink stood atop a cable tool drilling rig when a loud noise caught his attention. The black crude that had merely bubbled to the surface began to emit an awesome roar as it erupted from the hole Rink punctured in the earth. He stepped back to behold the spectacle he had created, as oil spewed from the earth and rained down on him. He held both hands in the air as if to thank Mother Earth for her beneficence, and jumped up and down to celebrate his good fortune.

The image of a gusher is a powerful symbol in the history of the American Southwest. Dramatized by James Dean in the movie version of Edna Ferber’s novel Giant, this scene played out repeatedly throughout the early twentieth century in the history of oil-rich states such as Kansas, Oklahoma, Texas, and California. Captivating and dramatic, a gusher represented a visual image of nature’s bounty spewing forth uncontrolled and seemingly uncontrollable. The image was powerful but far from simplistic: it held different meanings for the prospectors who found gushers as the oil industry grew and matured. For example, an oil prospector like Jett Rink might see a gusher as a symbol of great wealth, a fortune in the making, while to another prospector the gusher symbolized profligate waste and technological incompetence. Oil prospectors expressed these different views about oil over time. However they conceived of gushers, all prospectors strove to translate the geological forces governing oil into other forms of power  economic, intellectual, and cultural  within this emerging industry. This book recognizes the diversity of their views but shows that important similarities existed in the kinds of knowledge cultivated by the most successful prospectors."