Cattle drives over? What did Texans turn to? In 1901, a 100 foot oil geyser started to gush out of Spindletop, a small hill full of oil. This impacted Texas and Texans greatly. Many started to start to turn to oil as their business, so they started to make a lot of money. This sprung up better jobs, education, and communities, but it increased divorce rates. First, oil created a great social change because it opened up better jobs for African americans and Mexican americans who couldn’t work as wildcatters, roustabouts, or rig builders. People who worked on oil rigs generally made a lot of money. The people who made a lot of money hired people to work around their house. The people who worked around houses were the many African and Mexican Americans who couldn’t work on the oil rig. Willsie McKinney, an African American, made one dollar per hour (one dollar then was worth 10 dollars now) by just doing domestic work for someone who worked on an oil rig. Since there were many people who worked on an oil rig, it caused many jobs to spring up for the many …show more content…
When the oil business boomed in the late-1920’s to the early 1930’s, the divorce rates in the Winkler, Ector, and Midland counties sharply rose. For example, Ector’s divorce rate was about 4.6 per 1,000 people in 1926. In 1930, the oil business started rapidly grow. As a result, Ector’s divorce rate grew to 37.4 per 1,000 people. Oil impacted people’s marriage because men went to go work on oil rigs when oil sprung about. More specifically, when the oil business started to boom, men went off to work on the oil rigs, so they would leave their wives at home. Because of this, the wives who were left at home probably got lonely, so they divorced their husbands. Keep in mind, this was going on in with many counties other than Winkler, Ector, and Midland, so thousands of people got divorced in Texas during the oil