The midland journal. (Rising Sun, Md.) 1885-1947, 1931-08-28
=: CWM ~ - - O Ut L

the shabby farmhouse, bony drudge,
unlovely as the house itself.
"Millions" they shouted at her.
millions and millions What are you
going to do?"
Fred Sloat's wife had looked down
at her hands, shriveled and gnarled
from alkali water and rough work.
She wiped them now on corner of
her, Bingham apron with gesture of
utter finality. Her meager shoulders
Strengthened. The querulous voice
took on note of defiance.
"From now on I'm goin' to have the
washin' done out"
In those first few frenzied weeks
there was no time for scientific meth
DDS. That came later. Now. in the
rush of it, they all but burrowed in
the red clay with their finger nails.
Men prowled the plains with divining
rods, with absurd things called witch
sticks, hoping thus to detect the pre-
cious stuff beneath the earth's surface.
For years the meandering red clay
roads that were little more than trails
had seen only occasional buggies, farm
wagons, horsemen, an Indian family
creeping along In a miserable cart or
-rarely-an automobile making peril
GUS progress through the thick dust In
the dry season or the slippery dough
in the wet. Now those same roads
were choked, impossible. The fraii
wooden one-way bridges over creeks
and draws sagged and splintered 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. Ere
quently the torrent choked itself with
it's own volume, and then the thou
sands were piled there, locked, ours
ing, writing, battling, on their way to
field to Wahoo was scant four miles;
it sometimes took half day to cover
it in motor car. Trucks, drays,
wagons, rigs, flivvers, buckboards.
Every day was like the day Of the
Opening back in 80. Millionaire pro-
moters from the East, engineers, pros
pectors, 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 bleaching skull of steer or the
carcass of horse, picked clean by
the desert scavengers and turned
white and desolate to the blazing sky.
A wagon wheel, rusted rim, split
wagon tongue lay at the side of the
trail, mute evidence of traveller la
boriously crawling his way across the
prairie. Now the bitches by the side
of these same roads were strewn with
automobiles, their skeletons stripped
and rotting, their lamps staring up at
the sky like sightless eyes, testimony
to the passing Of the modern rayisher
of that tortured region. Up and
down the dust-choked roads, tenders
ripped off like flies wings, wheels in
terlocking, trucks overturned, loads
sunk in the mud, plank bridges split
ting beneath the strain. Devil take
the hindmost. 1t was like an army
push, but without an army's morale or
discipline. Bear Creek boosted kill
ing day and not Jail nor court
house for miles around, Men and
women, manacled to a common chain,
were marched like slave convicts down
the road to the nearest temple Of JUS
tice, a rough pine shack in town
that had sprung overnight on the
prairie. There were no railroads
where there had been no towns.
Boilers loaded on two wagons were
hauled by twenty-mule-team outfits.
Stuck in the mud as they inevitably
were, only mules could have pulled the
load out. Long lines of them choked
the already impossible road Wagons
were heaped with the pipes through
which the oil must be led; with lum-
Der, hardware, rigs, tools, portable
houses-all the vast paraphernalia of
sudden wealth and growth in a
frontier community.
Tough careless young boys drove the
nitro-glycerin cars, a deadly job on