gamble and rich men were looking for quicker gains. Inasmuch as
the world had lived for four years upon a steady diet of
excitement, it was indeed the psychological moment for a
spectacular boom.

The strike at Ranger lit the fuse, the explosion came with the
first gush of inflammable liquid from the Fowler farm at
Burkburnett. Then, indeed, a conflagration occurred, the
comprehensive story of which can never be written, owing to the
fact that no human mind could follow the swift events of the next
few tumultuous months, no brain could record it. Chaos came. Life
in the oil fields became a phantasmagoria of ceaseless action and
excitement--a fantastic stereopticon that changed hourly.

"Burk" was a sleepy little town, dozing amid parched wheat fields.
The paint was off it; nothing much more exciting than a crop
failure ever happened there. The main topic of conversation was
the weather and, as Mark Twain said, everybody talked about it,
but nothing was done. Within sixty days this soporific village
became a roaring bedlam; every town lot was leased, derricks rose
out of chicken runs, boilers panted in front yards, mobs of
strangers surged through the streets and the air grew shrill with
their bickerings. From a distance, the sky line of the town looked
like a thick nest of lattice battle masts, and at night it blazed
like Coney Island.

The black-lime territory farther south had proven too expensive
for individual operators and small companies to handle, but here
the oil was closer to the surface and the ground was easily
drilled, hence it quickly became known as a poor man's pool. Then,