pede, the diamond frenzies of South Africa and of
Australia, all were epic in their way, but none bred a wilder insanity
than did the discovery of oil in the Red River district.

For one thing, the time was ripe and conditions were propitious for the
staging of an unprecedented drama. The enormous wastage of a world's
war, resulting in a cry for more production, a new level of high prices
for crude, rumors of an alarming shortage of supply, the success of
independent producers, large and small--all these, and other reasons,
too, caused many people hitherto uninterested to turn their serious
attention to petroleum. The country was prosperous, banks were bulging
with money, pockets were stuffed with profits; poor men had the means
with which to gamble and rich men were looking for quicker gains.
Inasmuch as the world had lived for four years upon a steady diet of
excitement, it was indeed the psychological moment for a spectacular
boom.

The strike at Ranger lit the fuse, the explosion came with the first
gush of inflammable liquid from the Fowler farm at Burkburnett. Then,
indeed, a conflagration occurred, the comprehensive story of which can
never be written, owing to the fact that no human mind could follow the
swift events of the next few tumultuous months, no brain could record
it. Chaos came. Life in the oil fields became a phantasmagoria of
ceaseless action and excitement--a fantastic stereopticon that changed
hourly.

"Burk" was a sleepy little town, dozing amid parched wheat fields. The
paint was off it; nothing much more exciting than a crop failure ever
happened there. The main topic of conversation was the weather and, as
Mark Twain said, everybody talked about it, but nothing was done.
Within sixty days this soporific village became a roaring bedlam; every
town lot was leased, derricks rose out of chicken runs, boilers panted
in front yards, mobs of strangers surged through the streets and the
air grew shrill with their bickerings. From a distance, the sky line of
the town looked like a thick nest of lattice battle masts, and at night
it blazed like Coney Island.

The black-lime territory farther south had proven too expensive for
individual operators and small companies to handle, but here the oil
was closer to the surface and the ground was easily drilled, hence it
quickly became known as a poor man's pool. Then, too, experienced oil
men and the large companies who had seen town-site booms in other
sta