The age-herald., 1902-02-23
From the New York Sun.

From the New York Sun.
 few years ago a Texan with few odd dollars to invest and nothing particular to invest in, purchased a small tract of land in the Lone Star State a few miles from Beaumont He might have put the money into the good timber land or rice growing country, which abounds there, but, of course, he couldn't get that land at S1.75 an acre, which was the price he paid for the barren prairie property he did acquire.
 This man never could explain to himself or to any one else why he bought this land, and his friends came to look upon him as harmless egotist, who wanted to own a bit of land for the mere sake of owning it. It was hard to find any other reason, for the tract he bought wasn't even halfway decent grazing ground, al- though some folks used it for that pur- pose.
 The friends of the man who had thus become a property owner guyed him unmercifully about his estate. Every time they met him they had some sar- castle thing to say about his magnificent holdings out on the prarfe and finally it occurred to him that maybe he was a kind of chump. and he resolved to get rid of that real estate as soon as he could.
 A New England Yankee with cattle raising motives and a few thousand dol lars. came along and offered him $6 an acre for the land. The Texan hated to rob him, but had the old-fashioned notion that everything is fair in a land deal, and besides it was such a chance to hurl back at his friends some of the things they had projected in his direction, that he closed with the Yankee at a profit of $4.25 an acre.
 He told the story to his friends between drinks and they congratulated him on his shrewdness, although 1t was just as hard for them to understand how anybody could take over that scrubby prairie ground at $6 an acre, as 1t had been to comprehend their friends s original pur- chase at s175 an acre.
 A few months later the New England Yankee sold one acre of that land back to the Texan for s55,000 and few days after that the Texan passed that one lit tie acre along to man from New York for s95,000. The price of that same acre climbed considerably higher before it set tied down and several men made fortunes out of 1t.
 And 1t wasn't the only acre that u1u acrobatic stunts either, because shortly after that Texan got rid of his burden at s6 an acre, the oil boom came to Beau mont and there was a rush of men and capital into Southeastern Texas, which sent prices soaring skyward and in few weeks made hundreds of poor men rich and not a few rich men poor.
 The new oil country has crowded heap of history into few brief months, some of it creditable, but great deal of 1t any thing but creditable 1t has finally set tied down to business with about the us- ual percentage of legitimate enterprises to be found in a new country which owes all of It's prosperity to a boom over the discovery of some of the earth's hidden riches in its land. and the sudden intro duction of foreign capital and hustling business men into it's affairs.
 There are individuals and corporations at work in the new Texas oil fields today trying to get the precious petroleum from the ground with the serious object of marketing it in a legitimate way. but there are also many. many others to