by Bryan Mealer
By then, most of the action in Best was heading out of town—to Big Lake, ten miles east, which was bigger and better suited to absorb the surge of newcomers. Bud’s job eventually left, too, but instead of following the boom, he pulled up stakes and found another one.
His older sister Fannie and her husband, Abe Jones, were now living near a town called Big Spring, a hundred miles north, on a cotton farm that Abe and his brothers inherited from their father. Once they put down roots, the rest of the family followed: John Lewis and my grandfather Bob, plus his sisters Allie, Velva, and Ahta, all of whom were married now and raising their own children. Bud and Bertha arrived and rented a house close to town, where they welcomed another child, a boy they named John Odell.
Oil had been discovered on the big ranches around Big Spring, and lots of it. The boom it triggered was less frenzied and better managed than the others, yet promised the same opportunities: trucks needed driving, rigs needed building, pipeline still had to be sunk. Several refineries were in the works and tall buildings were being raised, including a fifteen-story hotel like one you’d find in Fort Worth or Chicago. The surrounding farmland was rich and loamy and seasoned for cotton, and yields had been high. Come picking season, if the boll weevil kept its distance, there’d be enough work for every man. Most of all, though, the citizens in Big Spring seemed possessed of a vision, and it was clear that people were moving there to stay.
3
Bones, con men, and oil … a town is born … fortunes rise and fall … the Mealers find their home …
The town of Big Spring sits in the eastern Permian Basin and straddles two of the state’s most distinct geographical regions. The craggy red hills of the Edwards Plateau, which slope southeast for three hundred miles into the Texas Hill Country, dominate the town itself, which sits at twenty-four hundred feet above sea level. Two of those hills—which residents call “mountains”—rise along its southern edge and afford sweeping views to the north. Just a short drive in that direction one encounters the “breaks,” where the land rises dramatically up a jagged shelf, called the Caprock Escarpment, and rolls like a carpet all the way to Colorado. This marks the beginning of the Llano Estacado, or Staked Plain, that Spanish explorer Francisco Vázquez de Coronado crossed in 1541 while searching for the Seven Cities of Cibola.
The town gets its name from a deep, clear pool that once sprang from the limestone. For centuries the spring was a prime watering stop along the Comanche War Trail when the tribe’s empire stretched from modern-day Kansas down past the Rio Grande. It sustained warriors on their yearly raids into Mexico for cattle, slaves, and horses, and again when they returned with buffalo, hundreds of thousands of which came to graze on the grama and bluestem before loping north in the spring. The remainder of the year, antelope were as thick as jackrabbits, gray wolves stalked the canyon bottoms, and nightfall brought a strange thunder as vast herds of mustangs crossed the plain.
The pool remained the quiet domain of the Comanche until 1848, when gold was discovered in California’s Sacramento Valley. The initial discovery back in January had come less than two weeks after the signing of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American War and gave the United States the California territory and much of the American West. In one stroke of the pen, the nation grew by 66 percent. Only three years prior, Texas had joined the Union as the twenty-eighth state. The new parts of the country were young and raw and wholly perilous, particularly the vast middle section of the Great Plains and Llano Estacado.
The sea of grass that blanketed the western frontier constituted a chasm in the American mind. By the 1840s, most maps of the United States identified the region as the Great American Desert, described by military expeditions, travelers, and journalists as a wasteland void of water, shade, and timber. It was prone to grass fires, tornadoes, rattlesnakes, and blizzards. And of course, there were the Comanche, whose murderous mounted assaults had not only turned back the Spanish from the Llano Estacado, but practically ground American westward expansion to a halt.
But California gold instilled enough courage for thousands to cross anyway in search of their fortune. Up north, they struck out along the established emigrant trails, mainly the Santa Fe and Oregon. But southern routes through the Comancheria proved more treacherous, and in 1849, the government began looking for ways to protect them.
The job of surveying one of these “California roads” through Texas was given to Captain Randolph Marcy, then stationed at Fort Smith, Arkansas. In April, he and his men led nearly five hundred emigrants up the Llano Estacado and over to Santa Fe and El Paso, where the travelers broke off to California.
On his trek back to Fort Smith, Marcy searched for a secondary route. He hired a Comanche guide who led them through the Guadalupe Mountains and across the Pecos River until they reached a branch of the Comanche War Trail that took them up the plains. On October 3, while still on the trail, they encountered “a spring … flowing from a deep chasm in the limestone into an immense reservoir some 50 feet in depth.”
The “big spring” was added to their maps, and later to Marcy’s hugely popular Prairie Traveler: A Hand-Book for Overland Expeditions, which was published in 1859. Ragged caravans of emigrants—mostly men—began pushing toward California as the danger of the Great Desert ceded to gold fever. Thus Big Spring had its origins in the first boom of the American West. But it would take another bonanza—a dark and shameful one—to place it permanently on the map.
The great bison slaughter that began in Kansas and the middle plains after the Civil War reached Big Spring in the mid-1870s. Hunting teams fanned out from Fort Griffin, just north of Eastland, where the U.S. Army was making a last stand against the Comanche. Around Big Spring, groups of hunters hid in trees near watering holes, then opened up with Sharps rifles like carnival shooters. A crew of four men could kill a hundred buffalo in one morning and several thousand in a three-month season, especially when using chains and a team of horses to skin out the carcasses. The hides fetched two dollars apiece from buyers in the East, who sent freight wagons into the putrid camps to haul the pelts to Fort Worth and Dodge City. The remains were left to rot in the tall grass and churn a septic breeze.
By 1875, the killing had spiraled into a full-scale massacre, so out of control that the Texas Legislature debated a bill to protect the remaining herds. But General Philip Sheridan, who’d just broken the last Comanche resistance at the Battle of Red River, rebuffed lawmakers. Still bristling from his victory in the Panhandle, he pressed for the expedited elimination of “the Indian’s commissary.”
“Send [the hunters] powder and lead, if you will,” he told the Legislature. “But for a lasting peace, let them kill, skin, and sell until the buffaloes are exterminated. Then your prairies will be covered with speckled cattle and the festive cowboy.”
By 1878, both the Comanche and their buffalo had mostly disappeared from the Llano Estacado. When the cattlemen did arrive, as Sheridan predicted, they found a prairie covered in bones. One of the first homesteaders in Big Spring, William Roberts, described so many skeletons on his land that a person could walk atop them without ever touching the ground. It wasn’t until an Englishman named Jimmy Killfall appeared at Roberts’s door asking to collect the bones that Roberts discovered that a railroad was on its way.
The financier and rail magnate Jay Gould had just taken the reins of the failing Texas and Pacific Railway Company, which Congress had chartered in 1871 to build a line from Texas to San Diego using Marcy’s California road as its guide. In January 1880, a construction crew of five thousand men and three thousand mules finally broke ground in Fort Worth and began hacking their way west.
Killfall, the man who appeared at Robert’s door, was soon joined by a wave of fellow scavengers, couriers of a new industry that rode on the back of the hide trade. Companies in St. Louis, Detroit, Philadelphia, and New York were paying as much as fifteen dollars a ton for the bleached buffalo bones. Sugar companies used the calcium p
hosphate in the bones to neutralize acid in cane juice. Fertilizer plants ground them into meal. Bones undamaged by the sun went to make buttons.
The pickers traveled on buffalo roads from Fort Dodge through Kansas, where they’d scoured the prairies before moving south. Many were the same hunters who’d helped lay waste to the herds, while others were homesteaders who’d come west seeking fortune, only to be thwarted by drought, grasshoppers, and debt. Together with other families, they traveled in convoys of oxen-pulled wagons loaded down with bones. They combed creek bottoms and ravines, sent kids rooting under bushes and trees, and set fire to the prairies so they would reveal their prize.
The more industrious scavengers operated large, long-haul freight wagons that traveled in columns across the range, their sides “picketed,” as one historian noted, in a macabre array of pelvic and thigh bones. The freight was driven and stacked along the planned T&P route—in what would become the towns of Big Spring, Abilene, and Sweetwater—where they were loaded onto “bone trains” and carried to market. From West Texas up into the plains, ghastly white mountains swelled along the horizon.
On average, the bone mounds were the shape of hayricks and stretched as long as a city block, as high as the haulers could pitch them. Others covered a half mile, grand installations of death for men and boys to clamber atop and pose for passing photographers.
At Big Spring, the scavengers made their camps near the water’s edge, next to crews of Chinese and Irish laborers who’d come to build the railroad. The daily rumble of their dynamite as they blasted the roadbed came as a welcome distraction to the monotony of bone picking. Eager cowhands hoping to prove themselves on the ever-expanding ranches also made their camps alongside the spring. In the evenings, they gathered to drink red whiskey in a single-tent saloon owned by an Indian scout, and at closing time raced their horses through the tent rows, firing pistols into the lantern lights. Whenever red whiskey ran dry, the bartender tricked the Irish paddies by mixing moonshine with chewing tobacco. When the Texas and Pacific Railway arrived in March 1881, the town of Big Spring was born and these were its first citizens.
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The semiarid climate meant that cattle needed big spaces to feed—a whole section, 640 acres, just to keep six animals alive—and the hills and pasture around Big Spring provided plenty of room. The first cattlemen claimed vast holdings for their herds, since much of the land was public domain. Within a decade, the bone heaps gave way to a dominion of sweeping ranches.
Biggest of all was Colonel C. C. Slaughter’s Long S Ranch, with over a million acres of open range, so vast it was said to take seven days to cross it by horseback. Other ranches included the McDowell, the Roberts, the Otis Chalk, and Settles, to name a few. These men had emigrated from Ohio, Tennessee, Kentucky, and East Texas, moving west once the Comanche were pushed from the plains; Slaughter himself had hunted Indians with the Texas Rangers. Once their herds grazed along the Caprock, they weathered wolves and coyotes, stampedes and vacillating markets, and heaped a thousand curses upon the prairie dog, whose grass-covered holes could snap a horse’s leg and pitch a rider to his death. But their greatest enemy of all was the weather.
The Caprock lay at the convergence of three principal winds: those blowing cold off the Rockies and the northern plains, and those pushing up warm and damp from the Gulf of Mexico. Nowhere else would it rain and hail one minute, then blow dirt the next, and nowhere else would a blizzard mix with sand so thick it would blind ten thousand cattle, sending cowhands wandering lost with chilblains.
And nowhere else, it seemed, could the land dry up so quickly. Dry years were more common than wet ones, and every generation had its defining drought. The drought of 1886–87 nearly bankrupted Slaughter, and families with smaller holdings had to scavenge buffalo bones to stay afloat. The drought of 1916–18 that cost John Lewis his farm nearly devastated the McDowell ranch. In a panic, Lorin McDowell sent Lorin Jr. with most of their herd into Nebraska and South Dakota to save it, a journey his son would later say “made a furrow in my brain.” The following winter, in 1918, a freak blizzard killed two thousand of their steers.
Yet the cattlemen stayed, as did the farmers who came later, burrowing their crude dugouts into the hills with only bran sacks for a door. They stayed even as their fields died and their cattle starved and the wind pushed their wives to the margins of madness. And why? Because when the land was green and healthy, they said, it was like staring into heaven. “This country can promise less and deliver more than anywhere on earth,” said one rancher. That statement proved particularly true once oil was discovered, for when the land surrendered its oil, it offered a lasting insurance against the fickle skies.
As one popular Christmas card later declared: “No steer is so fat as one which scratches his ribs against the legs of an oil derrick.”
* * *
Big Spring’s first oil boom arrived with a whimper, and a fraud. It was 1919. Ranger was ripping 174 miles to the east, while to the north, Burkburnett was starting to stir. The whole state was like a frenetic landscape of kicked-over ant beds. People still reeled from the drought that had left hundreds of families like mine homeless. And as oil fever spread across Texas, jumping fence lines and county roads, they grew desperate for the salvation oil could provide from the dry, evil weather. This made them vulnerable to a slickster like Alphabet Cox.
S. E. J. (short for Seymour Ernest Jacobson) Cox was, in the words of the Federal Trade Commission, “the most seductive and unreliable promoter in America.” Before arriving in Texas, he’d created dozens of companies from Michigan to New York City, peddling everything from “miracle” carburetors to wallpaper and virility pills. But an oil boom presented untold opportunity. In 1917, Cox had moved to Houston and began selling interests in three separate ventures, passing himself off as a savvy dealmaker. He was dark-eyed and charismatic, his wife Nelda was cosmopolitan and gorgeous, and both were accomplished aviators who piloted their own planes, the Texas Wildcat and the Texas Kitten. The duo routinely competed in cup races.
After starting the General Oil Company in early 1919, Cox drilled several successful wells in Burkburnett, which gave him an air of legitimacy when he rolled into Big Spring that summer looking for a new play.
His arrival came shortly after a group of businessmen had pooled money to drill several test wells, without any luck. So when Cox marched into the local chamber of commerce and demanded to lease two hundred thousand acres, people paid attention. Even more so when Cox told them that his “geologist,” an Indian named Geronimo, had already scouted their pastures and discovered a sea of oil.
One of the sites was on Lorin McDowell’s place. Since the rancher’s herd was still recovering from the drought, he was placing his last hopes in Cox. As crews got busy spudding in during the summer of 1920, the Big Spring Herald reported that even fortune tellers had become interested in the oil field. The excitement swelled. “According to their dope an oil well is to be brought in between June 20 and 27,” the paper said.
The crystal gazers were correct. Sometime before dawn on June 20, Cox’s first well—the No. 1 McDowell—struck pay. “We got her!” the driller screamed into the night. “Honest to God, we got her!”
Oil was seeping into the pit, all right, and by that afternoon over five hundred people had arrived at the ranch to get a closer look. It was no gusher—barely forty barrels a day—but enough to stoke a frenzy, and enough for Cox to stretch the discovery into the realms of fantasy.
“There is no doubt that the McDowell well will be a gusher with a daily capacity of from 2,000 to 5,000 barrels, and possibly more,” Cox wrote to potential investors, dictating the letter from the derrick floor. “Here is evidence to prove that we have at Big Spring not only the largest oil field in Texas but one of the largest and best oil fields in the world.”
Days later, residents packed the Elks Hall as Cox spread his arms and, with eyes closed, described a vision of oil derricks that stretched seventy miles long.
People lined up with cash. According to the Herald, “The only man in Big Spring who does not own some General Oil stock or a parcel of soaring leases, lies under the sod and daisies.”
Residents were eager to celebrate their maiden well. Together with Cox, they began raising thousands of dollars for a huge party that would toast the coming boom and their salvation from the weather. Cox employed a line of trains, “Investor Specials,” to bring in ten thousand guests, according to pamphlets, who traveled from as far as Hawaii, New Zealand, and “the chilly borders of the Arctic circle.” Residents offered spare beds, even loaned the visitors their vehicles. To feed everyone, ranchers donated 150 beeves and 60 sheep that were stored in refrigerated cars. The festivities kicked off with calf roping and bronc busting, followed by an airplane race. At one point, a local cowpuncher named Shorty Wells appeared riding Cox’s single-engine plane. The Herald described him as “perched on a saddle in front of the tail and blazing away with his six shooter.”
The following day, Cox led a motorcade to the well site, where crews swabbed the hole with suction to pull the oil into the pit while other accounts have them shooting the hole with nitroglycerine. “Behold,” Cox said with a wave of his hand. “This black gold is a messenger of a new day in Big Spring and West Texas.”
But despite the presentation, the well turned out to be a low-performing dud, made worse after crews, in their haste, collapsed the casing and filled the hole with saltwater. The rest of General Oil’s wells turned up dry, and soon Big Spring got smart to Alphabet Cox. After his company went bust, Cox was indicted for mail fraud. He managed to escape the first set of charges, but not a second. A promotion scheme with Dr. Frederick A. Cook, who dubiously claimed to have been the first explorer to reach the North Pole, finally landed Cox in federal prison.
But rather than scare people away, the McDowell failure had the reverse effect. Now there was real proof that oil could be found in this part of the Permian Basin, it was just a matter of hitting the right seam. Exploration intensified, leading to the discovery of the Santa Rita well seventy-five miles away, and sparking the boom that would lure my uncle Bud to the town of Best. Meanwhile, drillers were punching holes all around Big Spring. Finally, in 1926, crews delivered Otis Chalk from the cattle trade by pulling two hundred barrels a day off his ranch south of town. But it wasn’t until the following year, when a gusher on Dora Roberts’s place came in at thirty-three hundred barrels a day, that Big Spring entered a new age.
