commerce in wildcat securities; shopgirls, matrons, housemaids
gambled in shares quite as wildly as did the unkempt disreputables
from the oil fields or the newcomers spilled out of every train.
People trafficked not in oil, but in stocks and in leases, the
values of which were entirely chimerical.

But this speculative frenzy was by no means local. Burkburnett
became a name to conjure with and there was no lack of conjurers.
These latter spread to the four points of the compass, and the
printing presses ran hot to meet their demands. A flood of money
flowed into their pockets. While this boom was at its height a new
pool, vaster and richer, was penetrated and the world heard of the
Northwest Extension of the Burkburnett field, a veritable lake--an
ocean--of oil. Then a wilder madness reigned. Daily came reports
of new wells in the Extension with a flush production running up
into the thousands of barrels. There appeared to be no limit to
the size of this deposit, and now the old-line operators who had
shunned the town-site boom bid feverishly against the promoters
and the tenderfeet for acreage. Farms and ranches previously all
but worthless were cut up into small tracts and drilling sites,
and these were sold for unheard-of prices. Up leaped another
forest of skeleton towers some ten miles long and half as wide.

But this was the open range with nothing except the sky for
shelter, so towns were knocked together--queer, greasy, ramshackle
settlements of flimsy shacks--and so quickly were they built that
they outran the law, which is ever deliberate. The camps of the
black-lime district, which had been considered hell holes, were in
reality models of order compared with these mushroom cities of raw
boards, tar paper, and tin. Gambling joints, dance halls, and dens