At Ebano, a way-station on the Mexican Central a few miles inland from Tampico this pioneer of the Mexican oil fields found his oil and developed it, and his success brought hundreds of other prospectors to Ebano in 1900-1902. But Ebano oil is heavy with asphalt, and it was dangerous to handle in the crude burners of the time because its fumes ignite at low temperatures. Thus, although it is rich in lubricating oils, it was not the petroleum which the world wanted in that day. With his contract with the Mexican Central abrogated, virtually without a market excepting for asphalt paving in Mexican cities, Doheny turned southward in search of lighter oils. His trips into the swamps and forests of the _huasteca_ or coastal plain led him to the great seepages at Cerro Azul, sixty miles below Ebano. It also took him to Juan Casiano where he located his first wells and in 1908 opened the first of the great producing pools of the Tuxpam district. Drilling and exploration went hand in hand and not only Doheny but the British interests of Sir Weetman Pearson (now Lord Cowdray) and other American companies began to make this field famous. Since that time the story of the Tampico oil fields has been the story of the Americans and other foreigners who followed them. No Mexican name and no Mexican interest are connected with the vast development which has come. Yet so vast is the busy zone of production, so tremendous and so varied the forces and elements working there, that one feels something false in this appearance of preponderance of individuals and of foreigners in the epochal industry of Mexico. When, however, one glimpses the long diplomatic struggle, the legal tangle, the endless problems which make the Mexican oil question so complicated, one finds that in every phase there are always only these foreigners on the one side and the predatory, scheming Mexican revolutionary leaders on the other. Never is there a Mexican on the production side, never a foreigner on the side of the elements which retard production. It was Mr. Robinson who opened up Mexican oil, and it was Doheny and other early foreigners who first dared drill, and the foreigners alone who in the years past have dared to put millions into pipe lines, storage tanks and wonderful fleets of oil-carrying ships. Only they dared or would dare to go into the sleepy villages of the Vera Cruz plains and pay fifty cents a day to peons who had lived for generations on less than a quarter as much. Only the foreigners dared give their labor a decent wage, dared teach their men to be worth more and more until to-day they pay the commonest peon the equivalent of two American dollars a day. Only these foreigners dared believe in Mexico, dared insist on the good faith of all her faithless governments, dared to go on with their work when all else in Mexico stagnates and cringes before the continuing revolutions.