The Coolidge examiner., 1931-11-20

Surd things called witch sticks,
hoping thus to detect the precious
stuff beneath the earth's surface.
For years the meandering red
clay roads that were little more
than trails had seen only occasion
al buggieS, farm wagons, horsemen,
an Indian family creeping along in
a miserable cart or-rarely-an
automobile making perilous prog
reSS through the thick dust in the
dry season or the slippery dough
in the wet. Now those same roads
were choked, impossible. The frail
wooden one-way bridges over
creeks and draws sagged and splin-
tered with the stream of traffic, but
no one took the time to repair
them. A torrent of vehicles of
every description flowed without
ceasing, night and day. Frequent
ly the torrent choked itself with
its own volume, and then the thou
sands were piled there, locked,
cursing, writhing, battling, on their
way to the oil fields. From the
Crook Nose field to Wahoo was
scant four miles; it sometimes took
half day to cover it in a motor
car. Trucks. drays, wagons. rigs.
fiivvers, buckboards Every day
was like the day of the Opening
back in 80. Millionaire promoters
from the East, engineers, prospec-
tors, drillers, tool dressers, shoot
ers, bumpers, roustabouts, Indians.
Men in LondOn-tailored suits and
shirts from Charvet's. Only the
ruthless and desperate survived.
In the days of the covered wagon
scarcely twenty years earlier those
roads had been trails over the hot,
dry plains marked by the bleach
ing skull of a steer or the carcass
of horse, picked clean by the
desert scavengers and turned white
and desOlate to the blazing sky. A
wagon wheel. a rusted rim, a split
wagon tongue lay AT the side Of the
trail, mute evidence of a traveller
laboriOusly crawling his way across
the prairie. Now the bitches by
the side of these same roads were
strewn with the bodies of wrecked
and abandoned automobiles. their
skeletons stripped and rotting.
their lamps staring up at the sky
like Sightless eyes. testimony to the
passing of the modern ravisher of
that tortured region. Up and down
the dust-choked roads, tenders
ripped off like flies wings. wheels
trucks overturned.
loads sunk in the mud, plank
bridges splitting beneath the
strain. Devil take the hindmOst.
1t was like an army push. but with
out an army's morale or discipline.
Bear Greek boasted a killing a day
and not Jail nor courthouse for
miles around. Men and women,
to a common chain, were
like slave convicts down
the road to the nearest temple of
justice, a rough pine shack in
town that had sprung overnight on
the prairie. There were no rail
roads where there had been no
towns.
Boilers loaded on two wagons
were hauled by twenty-mule-team
outfits. Stuck in the mud as they
were, only mules could
have pulled the load out. Long
lines of them choked the already
road. Wagons were
heaped with the pipes through
which the oil must be led; with
lumber, hardware, rigs. tools, port
able houses-all the vast para
phernalia of sudden wealth and
growth in frontier community.
Tough careless young boys drove
the nitro-glycerin cars. deadly
job on those rough and crowded
roads. 1t was this precious and
dreadful stuff that shot the oil up
out of the earth. Hard lads in
corduroys took their chances and
pocketed their high pay. driving
the death-dealing wagons, singing
as they drove. a red shirt tail tied
to a pole Haunting its warning at
the back of the load. Often an
wagon would fail TO ap-
pear. The workers on the field
never took the trouble to trace it
or the time to wait for ii. They
knew that somewhere along the
road was great gaping hole, with
never a siZable fragment of wood
or steel or bone or flesh anywhere
for yards around to tell the tale
they already knew.
Acres that had been carefully
tended so that they might yield
their scanty crop of cabbages,
onions, potatoes were abandoned
to oil, the garden truck rotting in
the ground. Raw-boned farmers
and their scrawny wives and
spindling brats. grown spectacular
ly rich overnight. walked out of
their houses without taking the
trouble to move the furniture or
lock the door. 1t was not worth
while. They left the sleazy cur
tains on the windows, the pots on
the stove. The oil crew, clanking
in, did not bother to wreck the
house unless they found it neces-
sary. In the midst of an inferno
of oil rigs. drills, smoke, steam,
and seeping oil itself the passer-
by would often see weather-beat
en- farmhouse, its windows broken,
it's front askew, like a beldame
gone mad. gray hair streaming
about her crazed face as she stared
out on the pandemonium of oil
hell about her.
The farmers moved into Usage,