Introduction
Long-standing and unique elements of the nation’s geological research community are the various state geological surveys. Less than 50 years after the United States gained its independence, the first state survey was established. By the time the Federal geological survey was established, more than 30 state geological surveys were already functioning. Most, along with the Federal survey, had the initial purpose of surveying mineral and land resources for a nation fueling its industries and developing and settling its lands. The state surveys vary in size, in specific function, and in name, but their historical commonality lies in the responsibility to delineate and map natural and geological resources of the state to ensure prudent resource development. In this environment the state surveys generally stand closer to the public policy process than do many of their sister groups in Federal Government or the Academy. In fact, in early years and in some cases even today politics sometimes outweigh science. But this existence at the boundary of science and policy is why the reach and impact of state geological surveys, now and historically, generally exceed the size and fiscal investments of state surveys. This is, and certainly has been, the case in Texas.

The 19th Century in Texas
What we know as the Bureau of Economic Geology dates back to 1909, but there was more than 50 years of on-again, off-again predecessors. The first two surveys, one lasting 6 years, before and after the Civil War, and another later for only 2 years, were largely disasters and produced little of consequence. Texas had large holdings of State Lands, and there was a strong urge to see them developed but little sense on how to go about it. But the mechanism seemed to require a geological survey, a recommendation made by the Governor in 1853. The survey bill passed the Senate but was tabled in the House. Finally the combination of a substantial drought (the drought of record in Texas would come 100 years later) and some lobbying by the railroads (who basically wanted free resource assessment of the State Lands being conveyed to them) led the Legislature to pass a survey bill that the Governor signed in February 1858. The state geologist’s salary was set at $3,000 with an allocation of $20,000 for expenses. Applications for the first position were “as numerous as mosquitoes in the Colorado bottom.” The first state geologist, Benjamin Shumard—imported from Missouri, where he was assistant state geologist, but tainted from the start because he was a Yankee—felt there should be some geological framework developed before the mineral potential of the state could be assessed. So he set out to actually do some geology. But with that kind of thinking, he lasted but 2 years and was replaced by Gov. Houston, father of Texas, perhaps, but a political spoils fellow of the first rank, with a Houston newspaper fellow—Francis Moore; he was put into office while the first state geologist was in the field. Shumard returned to Austin to find Moore sitting in his chair. In a few months Moore, whose geological credentials were a stint with the New York Geological Survey, was gone as the Legislature suspended the survey during the Civil War. A physician hired as the survey botanist, Samuel B. Buckley, made off with all the maps and records of the first survey.

After the war Buckley was to show up in Texas and proceeded to publish the results of the first survey under his own name, introducing a lot of hyperbole and exaggeration of resource potential in the process—but enough to get himself appointed state geologist. He lasted barely a year.

In 1870 the Legislature again established a survey, called the Texas Geological Survey; the state geologist’s salary was set at $3,000, assistants’ at $1,800, with total expenditures not to exceed $20,000. But the Governor waited 3 years to appoint someone, and then, under pressure from the Legislature, named a civil engineer who was an acting Republican mayor of Austin (first and last) by the name of John Glenn; his only lasting redemption (other than a famous successor’s namesake) was that he had the son of the famed James Hall as his assistant. Glenn lasted 1 year, done in by our conniving old friend Sam Buckley. But in a year’s time Buckley was gone and the survey terminated. Incidentally, Buckley was only one of two people to serve twice as state geologist of Texas.

The early years were not good ones. A bit from Shumard, but that is all. The others were hacks. But by the end of the 19th century even Texas was becoming more sophisticated. Some professional and scientific organizations were at hand. Major Wesley Powell of the U.S. Geological Survey was showing what a national survey could do in public land evaluation and pushed hard for creation of strong state surveys. In 1888 the Texas Geological and Mineral Survey, the third survey, was established. After a lot of jockeying, Edwin Dumble, a 36-year-old geologist, was named state geologist. He put together a memorable team—R. A. F. Penrose, a 35-year-old Ph.D. from Harvard, to cover East Texas. (Penrose is the same of GSA endowment and medal; after leaving the Texas survey he discovered gold in Arizona and took a professorship at Chicago). Wilhelm von Streeruwitz, an Austrian count, was assigned the Trans-Pecos area; W. F. Cummins, a Methodist minister who collected vertebrate fossils and was an active member of the KKK, appropriately got North Texas. And a three-person party was sent to South Texas. The Legislature funded Dumble for 6 years, then cut him off. Dumble became a consulting geologist for Southern Pacific but was allowed to retain state fees for water supply work and over the next 4 years ran the survey out of his Houston garage, preparing and printing maps and writing and publishing reports. Without this effort by Dumble much of the survey’s work would have been lost. The Dumble survey spent only $176,500 over 10 years (about $3 million in today’s dollars) but managed to produce an astonishing amount of outstanding work and basically laid the foundation of geological research in Texas. Read those reports—they are now online—you will be impressed.

The 20th Century in Texas
At the turn of the last century, discovery of significant mineral deposits in Trans-Pecos Texas—particularly the Terlingua district—again built concern in the Legislature that the state was selling mineral-rich lands for the price of grazing lands. Concerned professionals, in both the state and nation, were sour on the ups and downs of legislative funding of geological surveys and the lack of good geologic frameworks. It so happens that significant parts of the minerals of Trans-Pecos were on State and University Lands. At about this time oil was discovered near reserved school lands. In short order the Legislature passed a law giving authority to the UT Board of Regents to set up the Texas Mineral Survey, operating directly under the Board. The Legislature appropriated the grand sum of $10,000 per year, provided the work was finished in 2 years. In 1901, William B. Phillips, a UT instructor, was promoted to the rank of professor of field and economic geology and made director of the Survey with an annual salary of $2,500. The survey operated for 4 years, completed some very good work, but got bested politically by a jealous Land Office and state prospecting law that basically allowed prospectors to do pretty much what they wanted to do and to patent very little.

So the beginning of the 20th century seemed much like the ending of the previous one. Good science was coming forth, but the politics were still frontier. Both Dumble and Phillips were astute politicians, as survey directors have had to be, but, alas, not astute enough.

Despite the relatively short life of the Texas Mineral Survey, the University did appreciate the significance of having a component of the University directly involved in the economic development of the state. The University also rightfully judged that such investment on their part would increase overall public support. Fortunately, the University still holds that view. Thus, at the request of the University president, the Board of Regents established the Bureau of Economic Geology in 1909. About one third of the state geological surveys of the United States have direct or close administrative structures to a major state university, but Texas was among the first, if not the first.

And so the geological survey of Texas was out of the direct political winds, but as we will see, never entirely on the lee side. But some wind is good, especially if it is at your back. By the turn of the last century, more favorable geologic winds were blowing in Texas. Oil was on the scene, big time. And there were geological opportunities to be seized.

Peter Flawn once remarked that the “Bureau has survived over the years because its leadership was able to anticipate change, adapt to it, and provide new directions where they were called for.” The petroleum industry in Texas dates back to the Spanish days, but it was only when Spindletop, a salt-dome structure near Beaumont, was discovered in 1901 that the Texas industry become important. The early days of oil activity in Texas were chaotic, to say the least. Field regulation was not to come until the early thirties. Wells were drilled on town lots, and prices gyrated widely. Unscientific wildcatting, rank promotion, and hustling abounded. But soon geologists were to emerge in the business, and demand for scientific facts and data and synthesis of those data developed. A symbiosis between the early oil field geologists and university geologists at the Bureau was logical.

The early Bureau under Battle Phillips was little involved in the hectic oil patch as Trans-Pecos minerals and East Texas lignite were the hot areas. But in 1911 Phillips was to recruit a petrologist and sedimentologist by the name of Johan August Udden. Udden held the very comfortable and prestigious position of Oscar II Professor at Augustana College. But at age 52, and suffering from diabetes, he was ready to come to the wilds of Texas. Udden might have come earlier, but he required a microscope that cost around $50, a substantial start-up item in those days. He was not new to Texas, for he earlier had studied the Terlingua deposits and the Permian of West Texas while at Augustana.

Udden became the second director of the Bureau in 1915 when Phillips left to assume the presidency of the Colorado School of Mines. Udden was foremost a scientist interested in pure geology, but keenly aware of the importance of geological understanding in an applied area like petroleum exploration. Udden was to note his thoughts on the important role of the Bureau in a 1918 letter to the University president: “I find that in nearly every case, these private geological organizations are concerned with private local problems, and cannot give their attention to the general geologic questions which have the most important bearing on local problems: and so all looked to the Bureau for information on such general geologic problems.” This not only summed up Udden’s perspective but is generally descriptive of the Bureau and the industry’s historical relationship. In many ways it continues today.

Udden recognized not only the need for basic information in drilling but also the great potential of drilling in understanding the rock record. He initially focused on well cuttings—the only basis then for getting science from a hole since a decent core barrel had yet to be developed and the electric log that was to become the Gulf Coast staple was a decade and a half away. Most cuttings were not collected by geologists, so in addition to the problems attendant to working good cuttings a keen eye was needed to sort out meaning. One of Udden’s earliest descriptions of wells from cuttings was in a 1912 report on the oil and gas fields of Wichita and Clay Counties, Texas. In a 1914 paper on the deep boring at Spur, Dickens County, Udden included a section on fossils from cuttings, and in a 1916 paper with Hal Bybee on the Thrall Oil Field he prepared a table showing the relative abundance and frequency of forams in the Taylor Marl, the same kind of abundance and dilution plots still important in biostratigraphic analysis. The new field of applied micropaleontology massively advanced Gulf Basin exploration in the early days of the industry, and persisted as a major component of industry activity until the middle of the century.

Udden established a subsurface laboratory, as well as a sample library, in the Bureau. Cuttings came in from all parts of the state, and from this lab came the first applied subsurface sedimentologists and micropaleontologists—Bostick, Waite, Richards, Ellisor, Kniker, Beede, among others, most of whom went on to head up labs in the oil companies. In fact, by the early twenties the major oil companies began to hire their own micropaleontologists and well-cutting geologists. But the interchange of data and information between the Bureau and the industry was a template that has persisted to this day.

Udden is also generally credited with recognizing the potential value of seismography as exploration tools in oil and gas exploration. Ed Owen, in his Trek of the Oil Finders, refers to his 1920 paper on the subject as “one of the real milestones of geological science.” The impact of seismic technology in exploration through the years is quite obvious.

Udden focused the Bureau on regional studies, aided by data coming from drilling, but also vastly useful as geological frameworks for the working oil geologists. He put together the first large-scale geologic map of the state in 1916, a map that sold 50,000 copies as the oil boom developed. Regional work by the Bureau led Udden to predict the potential for oil in the Permian Basin, especially Trans-Pecos Texas, which led directly to the drilling the Santa Rita No. 1 in May 1923, the discovery well for the Big Lake oil field on University of Texas Lands. The Bureau has been there with University Lands since day 1, and a good part of the Permanent University Fund was due to Udden’s geologic insights.

Udden recruited some prominent paleontologists and stratigraphers of the time—E. H. Sellards, a noted paleobotanist and stratigrapher, who left the position of state geologist of Florida to join the Bureau; J. W. Beede, a professor and paleontologist from the University of Indiana; Walter Scott Adkins, a foremost Cretaceous paleontologist; and Charles Laurence Baker, stratigrapher and structural geologist. But Udden was the leader and the fiber, not only in directing the Bureau but in his personal research and ideals. He and his team had a most productive run for about 6 years; then the crunch came. The Governor said the Bureau was not teaching and thus was not an essential part of the University and sought to eliminate the budget; eventually the Bureau survived, but its budget was cut 35 percent to just under $30,000 (about $300,000 in today’s dollars). By 1925 Udden’s health was failing, and Sellards, as associate director, basically took over as the day-to-day director. Udden remained in office until his death in January 1932. It was Udden who established the reputation of the Bureau as a prominent research organization, one then as now generally regarded as the best in the nation among the state surveys.

Udden had little regard for his associates in the Department of Geology; when once there was the proposition that the Bureau and the Department be housed in the same building, Udden said he would agree to such only if a solid wall of concrete, 18 inches thick, separated the two units.

E. H. Sellards was a good scientist; he gave up a good position in Florida to come to Texas. He proved to be a good politician, as well. He held degrees from Kansas and Yale. When I was interviewing at the Bureau in 1960, John Lonsdale introduced me to Sellards by simply saying, “Sellards 1899, meet Fisher 1960,” referring to our graduation dates at Kansas. At that time Sellards was 85 and officed in J Hall, just a floor below me on the Little Campus (J Hall now lies somewhere beneath the north end of the Erwin Center). Sellards died in February of 1961, but meeting him and knowing him a bit, in a way, extended my reach in the Bureau to 1918.

In 1925 when Sellards took the effective directorship of the Bureau, the Legislature slashed the Bureau budget another 25 percent, but with a lot of hustle with friends and associates in the oil industry, Sellards managed to get the budget up to $41,000 by 1929, nearly what it was when the Governor took out his ax in 1921. But the Great Depression was just around the corner.

Still, Sellards was able to recruit some very good geologists—Adkins returned, Fred Plummer was hired from the oil industry, Alexander Deussen also came from industry, and H. B. Stenzel and Virgil Barnes, among others, joined the staff.

The Middle Years of the 20th Century
By the late twenties and early thirties most of the historical structure of the petroleum industry, the Bureau, and the professional scientific societies was in place, and a new relationship evolved. Udden, Sellards, Stenzel, and Fred Plummer were leaders in AAPG and were important figures in the creation of SEPM.

Sellards was to assume the additional duties of director of the Texas Memorial Museum, an appointment that he held jointly with the Bureau until his retirement in 1945. John T. Lonsdale, who was with the Bureau from 1925 to 1928 before he left to head up the Departments of Geology at Texas A&M and later Iowa State, returned as Bureau director and professor. He hired me at the Bureau just a couple months before his death of a sudden heart attack in the fall of 1960; he was succeeded by Peter T. Flawn, a Yale man who had been with the Bureau since 1949. Flawn was to direct the Bureau until 1970, when he went to the position of University Vice President for Academic Affairs. He was later the president of UT San Antonio and twice served as President of UT Austin.

During the early 1930s through much of the 1960s, the Bureau maintained good relations with the petroleum industry but was not extensively involved in petroleum geology, except for regional stratigraphic and structural studies, paleontological investigations, and occasional reports on different mineral commodities. Typical of the era was the publication of The Geology of Texas, the first volume coming out in 1932. Regional studies such as those on the Ellenburger by Pres Cloud and Virgil Barnes, Pre-Simpson stratigraphy by Barnes and others, and the Ouachita System by Peter Flawn characterized the kind of synthesis work the Bureau did that advanced the understanding of Texas geology but also established important frameworks for the mineral and petroleum industries. A lot of the Bureau work during this period focused on the broad range of mineral resources of the state, and a substantial amount of effort was involved in resource management through the Great Depression and the World War II years.

The Flawn Bureau, which encompassed my first decade in research, was typical in many ways of the middle years. The size of the staff was small; facilities were marginal, at best; but a handful of good, even exceptional, scientists were always around, and a few were capable of fairly prodigious work. Salaries were modest; I started as an entry-level fellow in 1960 at $7,040 per year (about $43,000 in today’s dollars); John Lonsdale, the director and highest paid member of the staff, made $11,000 at the time of his death in 1960. The Bureau budget was less than $1 million in today’s dollars.

It was generally expected in the 1960s that a part of one’s research would be dedicated to mineral resource studies—always bread and butter stuff of the Bureau—and the rest could be on just about whatever you wanted. I was assigned to the coastal plain because Lonsdale said he needed a Tertiary stratigrapher. (He did not seem to mind that my dissertation was on the Paleozoics of the Grand Canyon). But first Lonsdale had a study he had long wanted done on the high-calcium and high-magnesium rocks of the Cretaceous. He had had a couple of people on this before, but they left or got into other areas. By the time I finished this work with Pete Rodda and Bill Payne, Flawn had negotiated a $40,000 contract with the Department of Commerce to do a mineral survey of East Texas. That contract alone was equal to about 25 percent of the total Bureau budget, and I was asked to direct it. But along these, I managed to complete a fair amount of basic stratigraphic and paleontological studies. By the late 1960s we were involved in regional subsurface studies in the Gulf Coast and North Texas. Out of these came the concept of depositional systems and a lot of fundamental work on delta systems, which brought international acclaim to the Bureau. Before the end of the 1960s, focused by Flawn’s interest in the developing field of environment geology (he wrote a book on the subject), we launched the monumental Environmental Geologic Atlas of the Texas Coastal Zone, headed up by me, Frank Brown, Chip Groat, and Joe McGowen. Earlier in his directorship Flawn began the massive Geologic Atlas of Texas to complete modern geologic maps of the state; veteran Virgil Barnes headed that project.

The Years of Growth—1970 to the 21st Century
In the summer of 1970 a professor from the music department, Bryce Jordan, was named acting president of the University. His choice for the prime job of Vice President for Academic Affairs and Research was Peter Flawn, who assumed the job also on an acting basis. For 2 years I had served as Flawn’s associate director, and he named me acting director of the Bureau; by the end of the year both of us had the “acting” modifier removed.

The Bureau I inherited was modest in size; Flawn had grown it a bit and got us out of the general university organized research budget and into a special line. This meant greater opportunity, or at least not competing with dozens of other units, but it also gave us direct legislative scrutiny. The appropriation that year was $384,000 (about $1.7 million in today’s dollars); outside funding amounted to $12,500, the usual level of support provided by the Texas Water Development Board for the Geologic Atlas Project. That supported 13 research staff, 20 part-time student research assistants, and 20 FTE administrative, cartographic, and other support staff. We were housed in handsome quarters—the top floor of the new geology building on main campus where we moved in 1967—a far cry from the rustic, and fairly decrepit, facilities on the Little Campus.

The leadership of the Bureau—Frank Brown and Chip Groat, as associate directors, and I—felt that we had some real opportunities for growth in the Bureau, most especially in the environmental area. The environment was fast becoming a significant part of the U.S. conscience, and we had established the Bureau, primarily through the pace-setting work of the Coastal Zone atlas, as a leader. Immediately we were able to secure major funding from the Texas Water Development Board for environmental work in South Texas. A fellow I had come to know well when he was a House member of the environmental and natural resources committee and I was testifying roundly to the committee—Billy Clayton—had become Speaker. In our first year we managed a near 40 percent increase in appropriations, thanks to his support. I never managed it again, and in fact, averaged only about a 6 percent annual growth in appropriations over the next 24 years. It was clear, if we were to grow we would have to do it outside and go the real soft money route.

We did. And over the next 20 years the real dollar budget of the Bureau was to increase an order of magnitude; senior research staff would increase sevenfold and overall staff would increase fivefold.

The first efforts were indeed in the environmental area. But after the OPEC embargo in the fall of 1973, the world of energy changed. The common assumption was that oil and gas were near rapid depletion, both in the United States and globally, and that alternatives had to play a major role. The two areas we hit upon were geothermal—geopressured geothermal—and the renewed interest in nuclear and sufficiency of the uranium base.

I had had a couple of overtures to come to Washington for a stint. Thanks to the good work of Hollis Dole when he was an assistant secretary in Interior (Dole was a Nixon Navy buddy who had been state geologist of Oregon) and the Liaison Committee of the State Geologists on which I served, the State Geologists had a good reputation in Washington of knowing something about energy and natural resources. I recall in the summer of 1973 being in Houston to testify to Billy Clayton’s House committee when I received a call from the White House. An administration head hunter was at Houston Intercontinental and asked me to give him a ride to Austin. It turned out to be an interview for the position of Assistant Secretary of the Interior. But Steve Wakefield, an attorney in John Connally’s law firm, got the edge. But by March of 1974 I did find myself on leave from the Bureau as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy in the Interior Department. Chip Groat, later to be state geologist of Louisiana and the 13th director of the USGS, served as acting director in my absence. President Ford later appointed me as Assistant Secretary for Energy and Minerals in Interior, 3 years after my ride up from Houston. My 2 years in Washington was to assure that I would never be the same; nor, as it worked out, would the Bureau.

By the time I returned to the Bureau in January 1977, our budget had doubled to a little over $4 million in today’s dollars. Chip had continued the environmental push, had enlarged the geothermal effort, and, as fate would have it, started the first funding on high-level waste research in the Panhandle through ERDA.

In 1977 we had serious discussions with DOE about the role of the Bureau in the issue of high-level waste isolation, as two areas—East Texas and the Panhandle—were under consideration as potential storage sites. This was an opportunity to grow big time, but with a lot of risk politically. But if geology was an important question in waste isolation and if Texas was one of the likely candidate host states, did not the Bureau, as the state geological survey, have a broader responsibility? We decided we did, and over the next decade high-level waste studies would make up 35 to 40 percent of our entire research activity.

Geothermal activity continued, and we also undertook a major effort in the Natural Uranium Resource Evaluation effort, which was coordinated for DOE by Bendix. In 1978, we did our first modest contract with GRI, not on natural gas, but on geopressured geothermal resources. We also did major work on Texas lignite resources—supported by the state through the Texas Energy and Natural Resources Advisory Council (TENRAC) and by the USGS.

The decade of the 1980s was to see a major expansion, first in natural gas with support from GRI and DOE. Mobile oil we started on our own with the critical compilation of the Atlas of Major Texas Oil Reservoirs. GRI gas research was mostly low-permeability reservoirs and coalbed methane, but by the middle 1980s we had convinced both DOE and GRI of the promise of reserve growth of conventional gas reservoirs and incorporated such into a national assessment the Bureau did for DOE. These estimates were considered bullish at the time but in short order were exceeded by nearly all resource estimators. The assessment paved the way for the largest single research project in Bureau history—secondary gas recovery—a multiyear program sponsored by DOE, GRI, and the Sate of Texas for $23 million (about $37 million in today’s dollars). The largest overall research effort was high-level waste—$30 million, or $57 million in today’s dollars—but it ran over 17 years.

In the 1980s the Bureau was substantially involved in the state’s effort to secure and develop a low-level waste facility, doing most of the geological and hydrological work for the effort. After 18 years the Legislature terminated the program, one of my big regrets because not only had the Bureau been so substantially involved on behalf of the state, but I had also served on the Authority’s board all along.

The late 1980s and early 1990s were the busiest years in Bureau history as many of our efforts in energy and environmental issues converged. The Bureau budget peaked in 1992 at $20 million (in today’s dollars). Subsequently the Bureau has functioned with an average annual budget on the order of $14 million, about the long-term level prior to the anomalously high years of project convergence. Energy and environment, along with basic research and mapping, remain the mainstays of the Bureau—an appropriate orientation for any good state geological survey. Funding sources come and go. GRI became a major and good sponsor. I served for many years on their Advisory Council, but by the middle 1990s, with natural gas pipeline deregulation, GRI was essentially over. A good research partner was gone.

For much of the past 30 years the Bureau has gained 90 percent or so of its budget from external sources. Even annual appropriations and special lines should be considered as something other than hard funding. This resort to external funding allowed for substantial growth—one can imagine if we had not chosen to grow and had stood by while all the activity in energy, environmental resources, waste isolation, and the like was going on about us how marginalized or even nonexistent we might have become—and it gave us great flexibility within the University. But it has not been without its ups and down. Try as one might to keep external sources balanced and not to excessively leverage the organization, some volatility is inherent in the process. And the burden of raising large amounts of outside funding can wear over time. I experienced two situations where the Bureau was eliminated from appropriations—in neither case related to anything material to the Bureau but mostly as a budgetary hostage. With friends in the Legislature those budgets were preserved. But the darkest days in my memory were in December 1987. We were doing about $3.9 million ($6.3 million in today’s dollars) with DOE and the Governor’s Office on high-level waste in the Texas Panhandle, 35 percent of the total Bureau budget, when Congress summarily terminated the DOE program and concentrated the effort in Yucca Mountain, Nevada. They further mandated a shutdown of the program in 90 days with no funding thereafter. With a lot of hectic work we managed to stretch out a little of the funding, but the next year it was an order of magnitude less. Fortunately, we had a lot of prospects in the pipeline and finished the year with a budget decline of only 10 percent and followed the next year with a 41 percent increase. Survival is possible, and such events are even character building.

Dependence on large amounts of externally raised money, while tough at times, gives a real sense of pride in the ability of individuals and organizations to do good science without the comfort of hard money. One is always mindful of the necessity of the competitive edge. It is also salutary in that each person in an organization is to some degree dependent on associates. Mutual respect and social graces stay reasonably in tact.

With the substantial growth of the Bureau during the past 30 years, space was a problem. Ten years after occupying the fifth floor of the Geology Building we were also operating in two off-campus sites—an old furniture store on Lavaca, near the Capitol, and what was part of an apartment complex on 24th Street. But by 1984 we were to occupy spacious and solid facilities at Balcones Research Center—now the Pickle Research Campus—where the Bureau continues today with as good research facilities as any organization in the nation and vastly superior to most.

Conclusions
The early struggles of the Texas geological surveys were attempting to gain a scientific footing. The third survey, the Dumble survey, finally achieved that footing but did not entirely erase the political volatility of earlier years. The placement of the Bureau in the University, while never completely isolating it from political pressures—any organization involved substantially in natural resources will also be near the boundary of science and policy—did underscore the necessity for a scientific base. Without question in my mind that footing and indeed the prominence of the Bureau, statewide and nationally, as a geologic research organization was firmly planted by Johan Udden. It was to be maintained ever since. The decision to grow the Bureau starting in the 1970s to catch the massive expansion of resource and environmental concerns had to be such that the historical research standing of the Bureau not be compromised. I think the record of work and the people doing it were, and are, ample testimony that growth in size and quality need not be inconsistent. Growth had the additional benefit of transforming the Bureau into a national and even international force, both in science and in resource policy. It is indeed a testimony to the Bureau’s record that one can go almost anywhere in the United States and even abroad and simply refer to “The Bureau.” Sometimes an adjectival “Texas” is necessary, but not often.

Some Major Accomplishments
The Bureau has done and continues to do what any state geological survey worth its name does. This means superb work in the areas of basic mapping, critical compilation and analysis of data, regional framework studies, and public service. That the Bureau has always done these things in such an exemplary manner speaks to its standing. But the Bureau, unlike many of its sisters, has done more. Few organizations, public or private, have contributed more to the professional societies and to the general health of the profession. Few surveys have the track record the Bureau has in areas of public resource policy. Few have the international breadth and involvement. Few can count a significant cadre of world-class scientists. And few have made as many basic contributions to science. Here I think of Udden and his associates basically defining the scientific way of oil and gas exploration, the massive vertebrate fossil collections made by Sellards during the Great Depression, the seminal work of Barnes and Cloud that led to a whole new field of paleoecology, the concepts of Stenzel in the Coastal Plain that are now thoroughly embedded in modern stratigraphy and sedimentology, the early formulation of environmental geology under Flawn, the development and application of the concept of depositional systems—now a household term substantially discussed in or present in the title of 650 books and countless papers, the concept of unrecovered mobile oil and gas and the role it has played in understanding the importance of reservoir characterization and in-field reserve growth—an area before considered rather incidental to the resource base but now the major part of it, Kerans and associates in the development of the modern approach to carbonate stratigraphy, great advances in salt tectonics and geodynamics by Jackson and associates, and the list could go on. Indeed, it will go on.

The last of the historical accomplishment and the template of the future was the creation of the Jackson School of Geosciences and the Bureau as a major component. The massive research endowment of the School is not just rare, it is unique. And as the last part of the 20th century showed that an organization could grow massively and even enhance its scientific quality, the Jackson School and endowment challenge the Bureau and those who are and will be a part of it to even broader horizons. Some 146 years of history is behind us—that and much more lie ahead.

Principal References

Ferguson, W. K. 1969, Geology and politics in frontier Texas, 1845–1909: Univ. Texas Press, Austin and London, 233 p.

Ferguson, W. K., 1981, History of the Bureau of Economic Geology, 1909–1960: Bur. Economic Geol., Univ. Texas at Austin, 329 p.

Schoch, E. P., 1936, A history of the Division of Natural Resources: Univ. Texas. Bull. 3501, p. 11–19.

Annual Reports of the Bureau of Economic Geology, 1960–2003.

State Geologists of Texas
(Note that under the Bureau of Economic Geology, the heads are directors, and not officially state geologists, though widely recognized as such.)
Geological and Agricultural Survey of Texas 1858–61, 1966–67
    Benjamin Shumard 1858–60, B.S. Miami (Ohio), M.D. Jefferson Medical College
    Francis Moore 1860–61, no degree; studied geology at New York Geological Survey
    Samuel Buckley 1866–67, B.S. botany, studied medicine
Texas Geological Survey 1873–75
    John Glenn 1873–74
    Samuel Buckley 1874–75
Geological and Mineral Survey 1888–94
    Edwin T. Dumble 1988–94, B.S. mining engineering; DSc, Washington and Lee
University of Texas Mineral Survey
    William B. Phillips, 1901–05, Ph.D. mining engineering, North Carolina
Bureau of Economic Geology
    William B. Phillips, 1909–15
    Johan A. Udden, 1915–32, Ph.D. Augustana, DSc Bethany College and TCU
    Elias H. Sellards, 1932–45, M.S. Kansas, Ph.D. Yale
    John T. Lonsdale, 1945–60, M.S. Iowa, Ph.D. Virginia
    Peter T. Flawn, 1960–70, Ph.D. Yale, DSc Oberlin
    William L. Fisher, 1970–94, Ph.D. Kansas, DSc, SIU, D. Eng., CSM
    Noel Tyler, 1994–99, Ph.D. Colorado State
    William L. Fisher, 1999–2000
    Scott W. Tinker, 2000–, Ph.D. Colorado