The spectacular Carney gas fire (put out only two weeks before the San Francisco earthquake) as omen of Texas industry and 'oil conquest of the world'

Archivist I follow had shared the above-appended image of the fire at Carney, Kansas. And I was lost in thought considering the spatial and temporal context of that fire.

The image/print comes from: Frederick Arthur Amrbose Talbot, The oil conquest of the world (Lippincott, 1914), page 201.

A natural gas well at Carney was struck by lightning in February 1906. Burning three million cubic feet per hour, the fire endured for at least 35 days.

At the time, the largest natural gas well in the US (where did it rank on Earth? pretty high, I've read) was located at Dexter, just a little west of Carney. These were notable as representative sites of the so-called "Mid-Continent Fields," the first major natural gas extraction hub in the interior of the US. This also made the fields a sort of model or harbinger of the fossil fuel industry which would later be a massive deal in funneling wealth to Texas (and Dallas finance capital).

So the lightning was, you could say, an omen? A warning?

In any case, just two weeks after the Carney fire was put out, the Great Earthquake occurred in San Francisco and leveled much of the US's premier western port, the "Paris on the Pacific."