Oil began with Tampico, but the story of Tampico antedates oil. It goes back to the late 80’s, when one of the great railway builders of America’s youth left Kansas for Mexico. A. A. Robinson, who surveyed and built the Santa Fe Railroad from the Kansas prairies to the Pacific Ocean, who swung the track of the Denver and Rio Grande Railroad above the rapids of the Royal Gorge, was also one of the great builders of modern Mexico. Leaving the Santa Fe in 1889, he became president of the Mexican Central and built almost the whole of this first standard gauge line in the country, its branches and tributaries toward the rich granary of Mexico about Guadalajara in the west, to the mines of Pachuca in the mountains and to Tampico on the Gulf of Mexico. Tampico, a wretched, fever-ridden village beside a beautiful river, was no port in those days. The railroad which brought Mr. Robinson to Tampico brought also the engineers who built the great jetties which cleared the bar and opened Tampico to the world, carried the ores of Pachuca to their markets and began the conscious development of what is now the busiest seaport of Mexico. The railroad company built and paid for the jetties, and under Mr. Robinson a short-line to Mexico City was surveyed and construction was begun, to be halted, in 1908, by the government merger of the lines. All this seems to lead far away from oil, but it was in 1900, two years before the jetties were completed, that Mr. Robinson invited Edward L. Doheny and his partner, the late Charles A. Canfield, to Tampico to develop oil wells. Doheny, who had made himself famous and unpopular by discovering petroleum in the middle of Los Angeles, came to examine the seepages of which Robinson had told him in the hope that he might find an oil to help the Mexican Central solve its fuel problems, for the coal of Mexico is scarce and poor, and all the fuel for the railways had to be imported. Mr. Robinson agreed to buy the oil for fuel if Mr. Doheny developed it, and it was this encouragement, this faith of two great believers in Mexico, which brought about the discovery and the later development of Mexican oil. The board of directors for the Mexican Central later repudiated the Robinson contract, but the development of the Mexican oil fields had been begun, and it has never stopped from that day to this.