Page:The Mexican Problem (1917).djvu/96

50 Lagoon, still rises a cloud of steam from the ruins of the famous oil well Dos Bocas.

Here, in 1909, came in unexpectedly the world's greatest gusher. Through an eight-inch pipe line shot a column into the air fifteen hundred feet high by actual theodolite measurement; then the earth heaved and belched three hundred million barrels of liquid per day. How much of it was oil nobody could say. The torrential flood reached the boiler fires and soon in place of that eight-inch pipe was a heaving, seething mass, one hundred acres in extent. Soldiers as well as civilians fought the flow and flames to restrict the area of damage, but for many nights Dos Bocas lit up sea and shore for one hundred and fifty miles around.

Was this an advanced flash picture of the Mexico to follow? At Dos Bocas they worked even to save the fish of the river and the lagoon; but Mexico, abandoned by its friends and with notice to everybody else to keep out, was to become a politically heaving mass, with Mexicans, Americans, and Chinese massacred in the Mexican war flames.

China got promises. Americans, Germans,