I'm reading the first installment of Robert Caro's biography of LBJ (which, by the way, is brilliant: Caro may be the best biographer alive today). In it, he writes at length about Herman Brown, the self-made Texan, who by virtue of his hard work, cronyism, and corrupt connections, built the empire that became known as Brown & Root, Kellogg, Brown, & Root, KBR, and eventually evolved into a Haliburton subsidiary.

Brown was much like Daniel Day Lewis' character in TWBB: a restless misanthrope who lived in his car as he criss-crossed the state of Texas, hustling contracts and supervising road and building projects, dams, and oil rigs. Like Daniel Plainview you get the idea that Herman Brown didn't much care for people either.

I think that Lewis' character in There Will be Blood is very much intended to capture that kind of western states entreprenurial, extractive archetype, and I think the film succeeds on that level quite well.

http:// en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kellogg,_Brown_and_Root