The age-herald., 1902-02-23
WHEN FORTUNES WE'RE QUICKLY
 MADE OR LOST IN BEAUMONT

quire about title or to attend to any of the details of transfer usually observed in real estate transactions. Hundreds of men made fortunes on a capital of few hundred dollars without ever having seen an oil we'll or caring about one.
 The men who got on the scene early with few hundred dollars in their pock- cts, bought the best land with it that the natives had to offer, and of course got 1t at a small rate. The natives couldn't know that for months, every train that came into Beaumont was going to be loaded to the platforms with men who were willing to pay almost anything for land, and so they snatched at the first offers that they got. And $100 an acre was big money to the native, who had never in his widest moments figured his property as worth more than s20 per acre.
 Gambling In Land.
 But the early arrivals benefited by the Influx of late corners. They sold their land to them and in many cases bought 1t back again day or so later at sev- eral thousand dollars more an acre, with out knowing that 1t was the same land they had sold once before, themselves
 To turn around and sell it again at an- other profit was an easy matter though, so they didn't care, and so the land spec ulation, which was a gamble pure and simple, and was promoted and kept up by men who didn't care a rap about the oil or the oil fields, save as a profitable source of excitement, went on until of course the inevitable end of 1t all came. and the bottom dropped out of every thing.
 Then, of course, thousands of dollars hx ha xrho Iao at to buy and couldn't find anyone to take their land ofs their hands On the whole, though, Beaumont came out of the land game better than one would expect con- sidering the heights to which the gamble went.
 New York men who went to Beaumont in the midst of all this excitement over land and oil say that they never saw anything like the scenes which were to be witnessed there. One man who went to Beaumont in connection with f1nan- cial institution and had no part in the excitement save as a spectator told a Sun reporter the other day that nothing was more interesting than the spectacle of the Texas farmers who had for years owned all the land about Beaumont, and who had let 1t go to the first spectators that came along.
 Farmers Lost Thelr chance. This side of the picture has considerable pathos to 1t. These farmers had toiled for years, elSing out a miserable existence at rico raising and cattle raising. They owned great tracts of land worth only a few dollars an acre, unless 1t happened to have timber on 1t.
 It was drug on their hands and when the first Of the boomers came along and finding Spindle Top and all the immedi- ately adjoining property already in the hands of the capitalists who promoted the early drilling for oil in the region. offered what seemed fabulous prices for their land, they naturally sold it. Then for weeks and weeks they sat by and watched the value of their property go up until in some cases 1t brought as much as $100,- 900 an acre.
 They were broken hearted lot of men and some of them will never get over the blow of having lost the only chance they ever had or are ever likely to have of making a fortune.
 A great many conservative observers os those weeks of excitement in and around Beaumont say that more money was