The Kings of Big Spring

by Bryan Mealer

  I found no record of Julia’s death, which tells me they were estranged from her wealthy family, outside the realm of hospitals and coroners, just drifting among the castaways. “She died while they were traveling,” one of my uncles later told me, after I’d spent months searching courthouses and weed-strewn graveyards. “They just buried her somewhere on the road. That’s what they did back then.”

  I suspect John Lewis and the children were with her in the final moments, and others, too—a preacher to say a prayer, hopefully even a doctor. One of my aunts remembered hearing that they laid her body in a cheap box in whatever place they’d found as shelter. It sat on a table, its lid closed, and beneath the table lay my grandfather and his sister Velva, curled up on the floor and crying for their mother.

  I’m sure John Lewis arranged her burial—perhaps in a cemetery that I’ve visited, wondering who lay beneath the flat, unmarked stones. Or perhaps, as my uncle suggested, they simply dug a hole on the side of the road, since that’s what people did back then. Whatever the case, the trucks and mule teams plodded past under heavy loads of pipe and tools. Coming behind them with blaring horns were the shining new Fords of the drillers and the newly rich farmers, their dead fields painted black, their wheels bouncing onward into the dream.

  By now, I’m sure that John Lewis had heard about Frank Day—how he’d quit the bank and entered the oil game, and how he was on his way to making a fortune. Day’s charisma was such that no one bothered to question how he’d arrived, never bothered to look for his boot prints on the backs of working men.

  Boyce House, the editor of the Eastland newspaper and one of Day’s close friends, later told a story about an elderly farmer who entered Day’s bank one afternoon and, “out of friendship,” House wrote, “offered to give the banker his farm as he was no longer able to pay the taxes.” When the boom hit, Day leased the land for forty thousand dollars—a windfall that House chalked up to winner’s luck.

  * * *

  When the war ended in November, the Pullmans arrived full of soldiers looking for work, and the boom grew even bigger. Behind them came farmers who’d reversed their retreat to get some payback from the land. They rode into town dragging “half-dead milk cows,” House wrote, and found easy work as menial laborers on the rigs. Most of their families lived in tent cities by the derricks, in a slurry of mud and oil and sewage. The boomers quickly exhausted all resources. The price of food soared into the stratosphere. A man lucky enough to get a seat in a café could not dine in peace, for another man was soon hovering over him, hand on his chair, waiting for him to finish. And yet still more came—from Canada, Mexico, Russia, and Egypt—and in such great number that five trains a day were not enough. The Pullmans arrived at the depot with men clinging from the roofs and windows.

  Billy Sunday, the most popular evangelist in the country, heard about Ranger while preaching a monthlong revival in Fort Worth and came down to survey the action. At one of the rigs, Sunday dipped his hands into a puddle of oil and let it run down his arms. Other men smeared their hair and faces with it, removed their shirts, and bathed themselves in its stink. The drillers called this a “Roman orgy.” After Sunday took his own bath, he stood ankle-deep in the muck and preached to five thousand men on the pitfalls of demon rum.

  More celebrities arrived looking for a piece of the bonanza. One of them was Tex Rickard, the famous boxing promoter, who began leasing land from Ranger to San Angelo. He arrived in town with the heavyweight champion of the world, Jess Willard, who was looking for his own investments. The champ soon found a partner in Frank Day.

  Together, Day and Willard ate steaks in the McCleskey Hotel. They pushed through the crowded streets as the player piano chimed from behind the mud-splattered doors of the Blue Mouse Cabaret. Willard hailed from Kansas and was known as the Pottawatomie Giant. He was “much of a man,” according to House, six feet four and 240 pounds, while Day was “220 pounds of brawn and sinew.” The two men drove around Eastland County looking for land to lease and for oil to drill. One afternoon, a mule team wouldn’t get out of the road, so Day clipped it with his car. When the teamsters raised hell, Day and Willard jumped out with fists raised. “Good heavens, boys,” the men shouted. “It’s the world’s champion!”

  Day and the champ bounded toward Desdemona, where a new field was wide open. Desdemona, twenty miles from Eastland, was home to John Lewis and Julia’s oldest daughter, Goldie, who’d married the widower Lem Wilson and cared for his two children.

  Goldie had borne two kids of her own by the time the gas gusher blew on Joe Duke’s farm, just down the road. It mixed with some embers from the tool dresser’s forge, exploding into a column of fire that swirled like a vision of St. John. It took three days for the steam boilers to cap the runaway well, its bright corona visible for twenty-five miles. And when it began producing a thousand barrels a day, more boomers descended like a swarm.

  The boom landed right where the people lived, since most of the oil lay concentrated under the center of town. Drillers spudded in every five hundred feet on leases of one-hundredth of an acre, their derricks like a cluttered board game when viewed from the top of a flow tank. The oil was wrapped up in the rocks, so drillers dropped torpedoes of nitroglycerine down the wells and the ground vibrated until dark, when the glow of gas flares brought forth an odd chemical daylight. Gushers were left spewing to attract crowds and investors. So much oil poured from the ground that drillers dammed the creeks and gullies and filled them to the banks. One morning, a tidal wave of oil rushed three feet deep over the road to De Leon. Oil and mud stranded the mule teams and buried the Model Ts up to their doors. Gas wells blew untethered and sent men running through town shouting, “Shut everything down, nobody light a match!”

  Twenty thousand workers crowded in, many of them war vets straight from the trenches. A deputy sheriff pistol-whipped one and knocked his eye loose from its socket, so a mob destroyed the jail and the café where he was arrested. Then they sacked the nearby clothing store, whooping as they stomped bolts of silk into the mud. Twenty thousand men lived on the outskirts of town in a ring of tents, where disease festered and spread.

  This was Desdemona during its short-lived boom. And it’s where John Lewis was summoned in January 1919—less than a year after losing Julia—by a message that his daughter Goldie was gravely ill. It’s unclear where he and the children were living at the time, but it must have been far, because by the time they arrived and inquired of Goldie’s whereabouts, they were told she’d been dead for two weeks. She was twenty-four years old.

  The cause was pneumonia, most likely in conjunction with Spanish flu. Unlike John Lewis, Lem Wilson had managed to give his wife a decent burial in the Desdemona Cemetery, its air choked by a ring of belching rigs. Nearly one hundred years later, I visited her grave and wondered how John Lewis must have felt as he stood in the same spot, and if he regretted making the trip out west, leaving behind the peace of the Georgia hollow and all its familiar comforts.

  The old homestead must’ve weighed heavily on John Lewis’s mind, because four months after losing his daughter he received news that his little brother, Elijah, having contracted empyema during the war, had died in France. We don’t hear from him again until late December, when the hearing was scheduled in response to his lawsuit against Frank Day and C. M. Murphy. Probably knowing his chances were slim, John Lewis failed to appear in court and the case was dismissed. His farm went to Murphy, and Day got off clean. The judge ordered John Lewis to pay their legal fees.

  If there was any consolation, it came on July 4 of 1919—in Toledo, Ohio, of all places. There, an undersized contender named Jack Dempsey beat Jess Willard in one of the most lopsided victories in boxing title history. By the end of the third round, Dempsey had broken several of Willard’s ribs, shattered his cheekbone, and dispatched six of his teeth. Unable to continue, the Pottawatomie Giant threw in the towel. As he stumbled back to his dressing room, a reporter heard him mumbling, “I have a hundred
thousand dollars and a farm in Kansas. I have a hundred thousand dollars and a farm in Kansas.…”

  Frank Day watched it all from his ringside seat, dumbfounded. He had spent the entire week in Willard’s training suite, schmoozing with race-car drivers and other celebrities, and emerged so confident that he wagered ten thousand dollars on Willard’s chances. Dempsey ended not only Willard’s boxing career but also his relationship with Day. From what I could find, Willard never set foot in Eastland County again.

  It hardly mattered anyway. Within two years, the boom collapsed. All the gushers from Ranger to Desdemona gassed the pressure out of the ground and the oil became too expensive to reach. Frank Day was caught overspeculating and lost everything. The boomers and wool-suited moneymen simply stepped over him as they moved to another play, this one in Burkburnett, on the Oklahoma line, where the gushers were popping like champagne corks on the red Rolling Plains.

  * * *

  In March 1920, nearly two years after losing Julia, John Lewis responded to a U.S. census taker. He was living back in Eastland County as a tenant farmer. The previous year, his second-oldest daughter, Fannie, had married a gray-eyed pipeliner named Abe Jones, who swept her off her feet and into the North Texas boom. This left John Lewis to look after five children on his own—including my grandfather, Bob, who was now six years old.

  John Lewis often traveled to find work, and when this happened, he left the young children under the care of his two oldest, Allie and Bud, who were nineteen and fifteen years old. Despite their supervision, the children ran wild.

  One Christmas while their father was away, they sold his egg-laying hens to buy roman candles, then waged a war in the kitchen. They stuck cotton soaked in coal oil to the ends of cane poles, set them ablaze, and chased one another through the house. They cut holes in tow sacks and wore them as bathing suits. The nearest cattle tank was two miles away, where Allie and Bud taught the littlest ones—Ahta, Velva, and Bob—to swim in the deep red water.

  When money ran out, Bud shot jackrabbits and squirrels for their supper, but often they went hungry. They rarely attended school and couldn’t afford a doctor, not even when Bob nearly took off his own foot with a hatchet. They simply poulticed the wound with coal oil and bound it with shredded rags.

  There were times when John Lewis surprised the children with his tenderness. Although he was a hard man, and rightly so, each Christmas, he cleared the cane-bottom chairs and danced a jig, to the delight of his daughters. The girls loved their father fiercely and felt likewise about Bob. They doted on the boy constantly and regarded him with pity, feeling sorry that at such a young age he’d been deprived of his mother’s affection. They remembered with sorrow the way he and Velva had cried while curled up beneath her casket.

  But none were closer than Allie and Bud. Allie called Bud her dark-eyed boy, Bud called his older sister Skinny Legs, and he worried when she ran off and got married and came home for visits with the spark missing from her eye. Yet by that time Bud was no longer a boy. He was growing into a man, and a handsome one, too—tall and wiry, with thick brown hair that he kept trimmed and greased. On one side of his nose was a faint beauty mark.

  The most remarkable thing about Bud was that he seemed genuinely happy. Trauma and privation hadn’t soured him—unlike Bob, who even at a tender age was prone to rage and general meanness. In fact, Bud maintained a buoyant disposition that earned him many friends. And like his father at the same age, he was eager to travel the big country. As soon as he turned seventeen and working age, he sniffed the air for the nearest boom and raced headlong into its crazy arms.

  * * *

  Bud wound up in Reagan County, two hundred miles west, working as a mechanic in a derelict town on the wild edge of the pay zone. The town was called Best, “the town with the best name and the worst reputation,” and its motto was not untrue. After oil was found four miles from the tiny rail depot, the town had materialized in a matter of months, thrown up near the tracks like a Hollywood back lot. As in Ranger, housing came at a premium, but at seventeen years old, Bud lived happily in a tent, relishing the filth and danger.

  Best had all the action of Ranger but very little class, a last resort for prostitutes and bootleggers who’d burned through eight lives in other booms. The town floated on an ocean of Choc beer and moonshine whiskey. Blood covered the floors in the back rooms of saloons, where dogfights were wagered on by drunk, violent men—men whose wives appeared in the post office with black eyes and swollen lips.

  Best was surrounded by flat, lonesome country, so dry and sand-choked that farmers wouldn’t go near it. There was barely enough rain to sustain the native grasses that over millennia had toughed it out and adapted. It sat in the center of a vast region known as the Permian Basin, some 250 miles wide and 300 miles long, which stretched from the Edwards Plateau west up the Caprock Escarpment, where the Staked Plains yawned into New Mexico. To the south, it covered the Pecos River valley and up the bone-colored Guadalupe range.

  The region takes its name from its thick layers of rock, dating back to the Permian age, more than 250 million years ago. A pair of deep inland seas covered the land, fed periodically by a channel from the western ocean and fringed by great coral reefs. Over millions of years of subsidence and uplift, of land masses colliding and shifting apart, the seas became isolated. Their floors collected sediment, such as limestone, and as the sea finally evaporated and the reefs perished, massive deposits of marine life filled the basin and turned it rich with hydrocarbons.

  But up until the 1920s, the Permian Basin was considered an oilman’s graveyard. Not that there wasn’t oil to be found—it had long bubbled up in ranchers’ water wells, and just the previous year wildcatters had discovered a respectable field a hundred miles south of Best. But it was just that—respectable, yielding only twenty barrels a day.

  Elsewhere in the Permian Basin, the oil was elusive, a fortune just out of reach—yet it was close enough to keep the wildcatters crazy with fever, drilling test well after test well, only to come up brokenhearted. Rusted boilers and coils of cable littered the roadsides, a testament to the dry holes and saltwater at the end of every gamble.

  Reagan County was part of two million acres that the state legislature had endowed to the University of Texas. Cattlemen rented large swaths of the county for grazing, but aside from that, the land held zero commercial value. Then, in 1919, a group of wildcatters requested 430,000 acres to drill for oil. The university leased it to them for a dime an acre.

  El Paso businessman Frank Pickrell eventually came to lead the effort. Pickrell was working off an obscure survey that suggested a formation called the Marathon Fold ran beneath a narrow strip in the scrub. He knew little about the oil business, and his hunch was so farfetched that he spent two years trying to attract investors—who typically fronted a percentage of the drilling cost in exchange for royalties once the well came in. The drilling tools they found were secondhand, bought for ten cents on the dollar in Ranger, which by then was nothing but a salvage yard blooming rust.

  The well was spudded in August 1921 using a cable-tool rig that pounded deep into the earth like a pick and hammer. The drilling dragged on for twenty-one long months, the work often interrupted due to lack of funds to pay workers and buy supplies. During this time, the driller, Carl Cromwell, lived with his wife and daughter in a wooden shack near the well, their loneliness broken only by passing trains carrying sheep. Sometimes a rancher felt sorry for them and left a quarter of beef swinging from the derrick.

  While Cromwell pounded the hole, Pickrell hustled money to keep the operation going. In New York City, a group of nuns agreed to invest in the well, but did so with trepidation. Before Pickrell left, one of the sisters handed him an envelope full of rose petals and issued specific instructions. When he returned to the rig, he climbed to the top and sprinkled the petals onto the derrick floor, then declared, “I hereby christen thee Santa Rita,” who was the patron saint of impossible causes.

&
nbsp; On the morning of May 28, 1923, Cromwell was having his breakfast when he heard an unmistakable roar. The Santa Rita No. 1 had not only struck oil, but shot a head of crude that blew for a week, coating Cromwell’s shack in a gooey sludge. A few days later, over a thousand people crowded the well site and another boom was born—this one different from all the rest.

  The Reagan County field was only four miles long, but its reserves would prove vast and steady-flowing. Better, it triggered a surge of exploration that unlocked the rest of the Permian Basin. In a few short years, the providence of the Santa Rita not only made the University of Texas wealthy but introduced the Permian—the erstwhile wasteland—as the largest and most lucrative oil field in the United States, one that would power a growing nation and sustain our family for decades to come.

  * * *

  As an oil field mechanic in a boomtown, Bud most likely serviced trucks and heavy engines that powered the drilling rigs. Despite the bootleg dens and vice all around, he married Bertha McCormick and settled down.

  Bertha’s people were from northern Alabama, up in the Cumberland Plateau, where her father had worked as an itinerant coal miner. Out of James and Rilla McCormick’s six children, three of their four boys had died—all separately and all at the age of ten. Only two daughters had come to them, and to compound the family’s trauma, James violated them repeatedly.

  For whatever reason, the McCormicks were living on a farm in Snyder, 130 miles north of Best, when the oil boom hit. Bertha was fifteen years old when she met Bud, smitten by the dark-eyed boy whose past rolled off his back, whereas hers could not. In Bud, she found safety and comfort. They married that year, then welcomed two daughters into the maelstrom of the Reagan County boom—Frances Murl Dean, born in 1925, followed by Flossie Mae two years later.