Columbus Marion Joiner

Columbus Marion Joiner, known widely as Dad Joiner, was an American wildcat oilman whose discovery well opened the East Texas Oil Field, the largest oil field in the world at the time it was found. Working with little capital and after a long string of failed wells elsewhere, Joiner drilled his Daisy Bradford No. 3 well in Rusk County, Texas, which blew in when he was around seventy years old. The strike proved to be the edge of a vast oil-bearing formation running through several East Texas counties, touching off one of the biggest oil booms in American history and transforming the regional economy almost overnight. Joiner himself lacked the capital to develop the field he had found and sold most of his interests soon after the discovery, never gaining the fortune his well made possible for others. He is remembered in the history of the American oil industry as the archetype of the independent wildcatter whose stubborn persistence, more than any technical innovation, opened one of the twentieth century's great oil provinces.