The Kings of Big Spring Read online

  Best of all, the land was cheap. In 1913, records show that John Lewis purchased 171 acres south of Eastland from a local lawman named George Bedford. (Years later, Bedford served as chief of police in nearby Cisco, where on Christmas Eve 1927 he was killed while exchanging gunfire with a bank robber dressed as Santa Claus.)

  When I walked this land over a hundred years later, little seemed to have changed. A wide slice of green pasture sloped upward from the dirt road and solitary oaks bloomed like mushrooms on the expanse. And just south of the pasture, sitting on a hill overlooking the whole scene, sat the farmhouse, shaded by another large oak. The rest of the property was ringed with juniper and pecan and open for grazing cattle. The Leon River flowed a mile up the road, yet the ground held plenty of water.

  It was November when John Lewis and Julia arrived with their children, now totaling six. Another daughter, Velva, had been born in 1910. I assume John Lewis looked ahead to the spring, when he could plant peanuts, corn, and peas—cash crops of the day that were thriving in the sandy soil. And now with so much land of his own, I’m sure he wasted little time carving out his patch of paradise. A vegetable garden needed tilling for Julia to tend with the girls. And when Bud wasn’t in school, he could help raise the barn with proper corncrib, hayloft, and stable for a milk cow and team. There had to be a henhouse, of course, and a pigpen, and a smokehouse for when the shoats got big enough to butcher. And if they were lucky, the root cellar could go at the base of the windmill, where they could keep milk or watermelons cool.

  By now, John Lewis was forty-four and Julia thirty-nine. Goldie, their oldest daughter, was already seventeen. Shortly after they came to Eastland, she married a widower named Lem Wilson and took to raising his two girls. They lived together on a farm in tiny Desdemona, forty miles away, and the family no longer saw her much. With Goldie gone, Julia was left to care for five kids while trying to make a new home. She also had extra incentive for getting settled: she was pregnant again, and three months after arriving, she gave birth to their seventh child—a boy named Robert Odell, who would become my grandfather.

  The older girls coddled the baby and called him Little Bob, and their help came as a relief to their mother. For John Lewis, the new child spurred him into action, and for a while, the weather cooperated. The rains fell steadily throughout the spring of 1914 and the crops were strong in the three surrounding counties, with corn producing at twenty bushels an acre. In 1915, records show that John Lewis walked into the bank and paid off his farm.

  A farmer is never truly at ease, but I wonder if after twenty years of roaming, John Lewis finally allowed himself to imagine growing old on the land and seeing his two boys running their own plows over the fields. I like to picture him on the porch after a long day’s work, surrounded by children as he pulls off muddy boots, the fields changing colors under the setting sun. I want him to cherish these moments, to understand that a man grows richer with every child, and a houseful of children makes for a citadel against the darkness.

  I want to leave them all in happy twilight. But I can’t.

  2

  Oil, a brief history … double heartbreak … Bud on the edge of the dream …

  A drought arrived in Eastland in 1915. On the rainfall charts, it’s almost disguised behind scattered showers that fell from January through March. But the driest period occurred at the worst possible time, when fields were to be plowed and seeds planted.

  By June, the crops had failed and John Lewis was in trouble. Worse, he was in debt. Although he owned his farm outright, he’d assumed a pair of loans belonging to George Bedford when he bought the place, which were held by deed of trust. He was paying them off in twice-yearly installments of $9.62, and after paying off the farm, he’d managed to whittle down the balance to $48.10.

  But with his fields barren, he missed a payment in July, followed by another in January 1916. Knowing little else to do, John Lewis drove to Eastland to see his banker. Frank Day was the First National Bank clerk who’d loaned him the money for the farm. Day was twenty-seven years old, handsome, with the brawny physique and confidence of a football star—a man whose ambitions far outsized the small-town bank.

  Day listened to John Lewis explain how the drought had caused him to fall behind, how he needed to find a job in order to feed his family and make good with his debtor. He heard they needed laborers to work the fields down in Burnet County and wanted to go there and try his luck. But of course, he said, that would mean leaving his land and his outstanding loans. Could the banker help in any way? What did he advise?

  Day assured John Lewis that everything would be fine. Go to Burnet County, he said, do what’s best for your family. In fact, if the deed holder starts asking about his money and threatening trouble, I’ll settle the difference myself and keep the land from foreclosure. After all, no hardworking man should worry about losing his homestead over $48.10.

  So with that assurance, in the spring of 1916, John Lewis gathered Julia and their six children—including my grandfather, Bob, who was two years old—packed their wagon and set off to Burnet County, 150 miles south. But as he embarked on yet another slow retreat from his dead fields, others were headed in the opposite direction, seeing only money. Because what the land could no longer provide in food and living things, it would soon give in oil.

  * * *

  In the history of oil discovery, Texas arrived relatively late. Men had been drilling for oil across Pennsylvania and Appalachia since before the Civil War, mainly to produce kerosene. By the 1890s, this popular fuel made from petroleum had largely surpassed coal, and companies like Standard Oil were searching for bigger, more lucrative reserves.

  The Mid-Continent field in Kansas, discovered in 1892, pushed exploration westward into Wyoming and along the Pacific. By the turn of the century, California produced more oil than anywhere in the country—particularly the San Joaquin Valley and Los Angeles, where hundreds of companies sank pipe beneath the modern-day city. But the West Coast fields were too far away from where most Americans lived, and without adequate pipelines, much of that oil was exported to Asia on boats. By themselves, the bubbling wells of Pennsylvania and Kansas weren’t enough to drive an industry forward, much less ignite the imagination.

  Until then, few people in America had ever laid eyes on a bona fide gusher—there’d been a few in California, wells that had shot between one thousand and fifteen hundred barrels of oil a day and were given names like Wild Bill and Blue Goose, yet news of their discoveries hardly made it east. Then came Spindletop.

  On January 10, 1901, while John Lewis was still laboring on a tenant farm back in Hillsboro, the biggest gusher the country had ever seen erupted from a salt dome on the outskirts of Beaumont, Texas. The roar was so deafening that it terrified people in town, until they saw the green-black fountain rising hundreds of feet against the clear blue sky. Spindletop brought in seventy-five thousand barrels of oil per day and sparked a fever that spread throughout the state more fiercely and with greater speed than the boll weevil ever could. Within months, lines of wooden derricks sprouted along the Gulf of Mexico like a forest of naked timber. Tens of thousands rushed into Sour Lake, Humble, and Batson before the fever spread north to the Oklahoma line.

  Farmers sold or leased their fields to companies looking to drill, hoping to reap the royalties when the oil sold for top dollar on the market. Agriculture gave way to energy, the barren land be damned.

  * * *

  Three years after Spindletop, the Texas and Pacific Coal Company struck oil by accident—just twenty miles from where John Lewis would buy his farm—while drilling shallow holes for coal. Quietly, the company began exploring in earnest, encouraged by geology reports that suggested vast reserves of crude beneath the ground. After a string of dry holes, a decent producer finally came in near Strawn, north of Eastland, followed by an even bigger one in October 1916 near Breckenridge. That well kicked off at two hundred barrels a day, just enough to start a commotion. It was right around
the time that John Lewis and his family began their long journey home.

  By then, the drought had reached Burnet County, where they’d gone to find work. And with most of the state now suffering, I assume John Lewis—having saved some money—decided it was better to wait for the rain on his own front porch. That, or a neighbor must have noticed the alarming sight at their farm and sent word to hurry back.

  Although the Texas and Pacific Coal Company had practiced discretion while drilling around Eastland, there’s no indication their work was kept secret. And any number of people in town could have gained access to the geologist’s reports, understanding right away the potential bonanza that sat below the parched and useless fields—especially a loan officer at the local bank, someone like Frank Day.

  A week after assuring John Lewis that he’d look after his farm, Day purchased the outstanding note for $48.10 and sold the land from under him. The buyer was John Lewis’s neighbor—a man named C. M. Murphy—who John Lewis would later accuse in a lawsuit of conspiring with the banker. When the family arrived home that October, they discovered the gate was locked. Murphy had possession of their house and was farming their fields.

  A ferocious confrontation with Day certainly followed. But all the banker had to do was explain to the simple farmer the terms under deed of trust: the farmer was entirely at the mercy of the bank. Day merely had to produce the damning documents and ask, Didn’t you understand what you were signing? To which the farmer could only counter with flimsy, nonbinding emotion: But you gave me your word!

  To this day, the 171 acres in Eastland is the most property that anyone in my family has ever owned.

  Without a home, the family drifted. According to the lawsuit John Lewis later filed, he took his family south into Comanche County to look for a place to live, but then the record goes blank. There’s no trace of them going to Cleburne, where Julia’s family could have easily taken them in. The only other mention of the farm comes in April 1917, when Murphy leased it to a drilling company—just in time for one of the biggest oil booms in American history.

  * * *

  A week after Murphy leased the farm, the United States entered World War I. Already the British Royal Navy had made the revolutionary decision to switch from coal-driven vessels to faster ones powered by oil. The United States produced nearly 70 percent of the world’s crude, and in the first years of the war, about a quarter of it was going to fuel the British trucks, armored tanks, and airplanes being used to fight the Germans. In this new era of combustible-engine warfare, it was clear that victory would come to whatever side possessed the most fuel. For its part, Germany dispatched submarines into the Atlantic to sink American tankers, a move that had ultimately pushed the U.S. to enter the conflict. Aside from America, there were few places to get oil. German forces already controlled strategic fields in Romania, a major European supplier, while in Russia, the Bolshevik revolution was paralyzing the vast reserves in Baku.

  By July 1917, Germany’s assault on oil-carrying vessels had become so effective that America’s ambassador to England declared that “the Germans are succeeding” and that the Royal Navy was in danger of collapse for lack of fuel. That fall, Walter Long, the British Secretary of State for the Colonies, told the House of Commons that “oil is probably more important at this moment than anything else.”

  America’s entrance into the war only increased the Allied demand for fuel, while at home, the need was also dire. For one, the nation was running out of coal, due in part to the never-ending procession of coal-fired ships being dispatched to the conflict. A brutal winter in 1917–18 diminished reserves even more as homes and businesses devoured coal for heat. But nothing drove up the demand for oil—and its price—more than the Model T, the new gasoline-powered car that was rolling off Henry Ford’s assembly line to great demand. Between 1916 and 1918, the number of automobiles on American roads nearly doubled.

  While a global fuel shortage threatened to tip the war to the Germans and stall a bustling auto industry, it seems remarkable that the rescue would eventually come ten miles from John Lewis’s farm, in a region undergoing one of the bleakest economic periods in its history.

  Ranger was a small hamlet northeast of Eastland, with little more than a depot and a few shops, its name derived from the Texas Rangers who’d made camp there fifty years earlier to fight the Comanche. Beef and cotton had once moved its trains and built a community. But the boll weevil had since closed its cotton gin, and drought was starving the cattle and pushing ranchers from their homes.

  So desperate, the town’s businessmen turned to oil, hoping to profit off the global demand. After hearing of the T&P Coal Company’s success at Strawn and Breckenridge, they offered to lease the company twenty-five thousand acres if it would drill around Ranger. The first hole shot only natural gas, which was useless without pipelines to bring it anywhere. Then, on October 17, 1917, the T&P hit its pay.

  The well on J. H. McCleskey’s farm blew in at a thousand barrels of oil a day, so close to the farmer’s house that it coated his white leghorn chickens in black sludge. An even bigger discovery followed on New Year’s Eve, and the boom was officially on.

  Oilmen from Fort Worth were the first to arrive on the trains. Unlike the farmers undone by the land, the drillers in Witch-Elk boots seemed to harness the power of God, directing armies of men to tunnel into the earth. And with every gusher, from Spindletop to Sour Lake, Goose Creek to Batson, they’d learned a little more about how to tame it.

  The major oil companies—Humble, Magnolia, Texas Company—moved in like an occupying force and laid down the apparatus of extraction. Teams of oxen and dapple-gray Percherons appeared on the roads, their tassels swinging as they pulled steam-powered boilers, welded tanks, and premeasured lumber to build the derricks. Men with pulleys and gin poles raised them from the ground, then outfitted the joints of pipe according to how deep the oil was. The drillers spoke of doubles, thribbles, and fourbles, however many lengths it took to punch through the lime and sand and bring up a gusher. Against the driller’s technology, the land could no longer resist. Eventually it would break, shoot its mud, then give the men what they wanted.

  By spring, the population of Ranger had swelled sixfold and exhausted the town, spilling into Eastland and surrounding hamlets. With no empty hotel rooms, cheap row houses and boom shacks appeared overnight, their walls made from thin beaverboard and tarpaper. Men rented beds and slept in shifts, sharing the same dirty sheets, while others rented chairs in hotel lobbies. The conditions became so crowded and dangerous that in April a fire erupted in the tenements and burned down two city blocks. Then the water ran dry, since the oilmen took what they wanted to drill their wells. Sanitation and hygiene became luxuries. Men wanting a bath had to travel thirty miles by train, and those with automobiles drained their radiators each night for fear of thieves.

  By now the drought had spread across the entire state, turning the land pale and brown. In August 1918, D. J. Neill, the state representative to Gorman, just south of Eastland, told the Legislature that every crop in his district had failed. “Many thousands have turned their faces eastward, homeless, friendless, moneyless. Those who cannot move will die.”

  Not long after Neill’s address, a man traveling to Fort Worth reported seeing five hundred families camped along the roadside near Eastland. I can’t help but fear that John Lewis and his family were among those people, that whatever had happened between Julia and her parents after Goldie’s birth kept them from seeking help. The crowds were made up mostly of tenants and sharecroppers whose landowners had lost everything, for not every farm was lucky enough to sit over a fortune in oil.

  The state responded by passing the Drought Relief Law, which gave emergency loans to farmers in several counties. The commissioners in Comanche County called this “an inconvenience” and likened it to welfare, even as their neighbors starved in the weeds. John Lewis’s name does not appear on these lists.

  The drought was finally broken in
September, when storm clouds appeared and unleashed heavy rains. But the dry, parched ground couldn’t soak up the water quickly enough and the land flooded. Roads filled with mud, so deep in Ranger that a horse was said to have slipped and drowned. At the train depot, some enterprising boomers rigged boards into sleds and sold rides down Main Street. Heavy traffic caused sinkholes on the roads that stranded trucks and teams. Farmers living near these traps, broke and desperate, started charging fifteen dollars to pull people out. And just as the rains had brought the boll weevil in earlier years, now they spread typhoid and other diseases in the cramped and filthy boom shacks.

  The most deadly was Spanish flu. The great influenza pandemic first reached El Paso in September 1918, killing more than five hundred people within the first month. Elsewhere across the nation, as many as eight hundred people were dying each day in New York City, and in Philadelphia, news accounts described bodies stacked and rotting in the city morgue, so gruesome a scene that embalmers refused to enter. In Texas, the pandemic rode the railroads and summer winds, and by the end of September, it reached the oil patch. In less than a month, over twenty-five hundred cases were reported in Ranger.

  * * *

  It was around that time that Julia died.

  According to my grandfather Bob, her death occurred sometime that summer. Bob, who was four at the time, claimed his mother had fallen sick shortly after his birth, which suggests something degenerative such as tuberculosis, which was prevalent in the area. Influenza probably compounded the TB and accelerated her death. But whatever her sickness, she likely carried it with her on the road and was sick when Frank Day took their home and flung them into uncertainty.