Pratt poses the essential question, essential not just to explain 20th-century Houston, Pratt’s purpose, but also to imagine a postfrontier Houston, or “Galveston,” my purpose: What would have happened “had oil not been discovered near Houston”? Because Pratt’s concern is patterns of 20th-century energy and economic development, he answers that coal dependency would have prevented rapid economic development. But a major concern of my study is the transcendence of fossil-fuel dependency. More than mere conjecture, posing the what-if question allows us to use history to imagine the 21st-century transition after fossil-fuel dependency. If oil had not been found at Spindletop 80 miles east of Houston right after the Great Storm in 1900, that might have been the end of the story. Or, as Fortune magazine put it in 1939, “Without oil Houston would have been just another cotton town.”
“Galveston,” centered on a barrier island, would be yet one more Gulf Coast town struggling to develop and maintain its population. And if for some reason the land subsided, the groundwater got polluted, and torrential rainfall inundated the area repeatedly, then settlers would have moved farther inland.
What is more, to extend this imaginative rewrite of history, Second Peoples, situated inland, would have ventured seasonably into the bay all the way to Galveston Island to fish and hunt and collect vegetation. In short, they would have adapted to “Galveston” much as the First Peoples did. In fact, if the history of fire adaptation in North America is any guide, Second Peoples, upon settling, would have learned such a resource mode from the First Peoples.
“The evidence suggests that early European colonists were generally ignorant (or in denial) of wildland fire and of methods to control it,” writes the preeminent fire and forestry historian Stephen J. Pyne. “It was from the Indian — into whose fire environment they moved — that the European immigrants learned basic survival skills.” Likewise, the evidence from Galveston suggests that 19th-century colonizers were ignorant of extreme weather on a coastal barrier island. What’s more, even after the worst natural disaster in U.S. history, they retained that ignorance (or denial) right into the 20th century, buoyed by boosterist calls for greatness and the belief that they could control it all. Only now are some people, although still a small minority it seems, entertaining the idea that all cannot be controlled. What is more, they are learning from history and the adaptiveness of early peoples.