For years Oklahoma had longed for statehood as a bride awaits the dawn of her wedding day. At last, “Behold the bridegroom!” said a paternal government, handing her over to the Union. “Here is a star for your forehead. Meet the family.”
Then, at the very altar, the final words spoken, the pact sealed, the bride had turned to encounter a stranger—an unexpected guest, dazzling, breath-taking, embodying all her wildest girlish dreams.
“Bridegroom—hell!” yelled Oklahoma, hurling herself into the stranger’s arms. “What’s family to me! Go away! Don’t bother me. I’m busy.”
The name of the gorgeous stranger was Oil.
Oil. Nothing else mattered. Oklahoma, the dry, the wind-swept, the burning, was a sea of hidden oil. The red prairies, pricked, ran black and slimy with it. The work of years was undone in a day. The sunbonnets shrank back, aghast. Compared to that which now took place the early days following the Run in ’89 were idyllic. They swarmed on Oklahoma from every state in the Union. The plains became black with little eager delving figures. The sanguine roads were choked with every sort of vehicle. Once more tent and shanty towns sprang up where the day before had been only open prairie staring up at a blazing sky. Again the gambling tent, the six-shooter, the roaring saloon, the dance hall, the harlot. Men fought, stole, killed, died for a piece of ground beneath whose arid surface lay who knew what wealth of fluid richness. Every barren sun-baked farm was a potential fortune; every ditch and draw and dried-up creek bed might conceal liquid treasure. The Wildcat Field—Panhandle—Cimarron—Crook Nose—Cartwright—Wahoo—Bear Creek—these became magic names; these were the Seven Cities of Cibola, rich beyond Coronado’s wildest dream. Millions of barrels of oil burst through the sand and shale and clay and drenched the parched earth. Drill, pump, blast. Nitroglycerin. Here she comes. A roar. Oklahoma went stark raving mad.
Sabra Cravat went oil mad with the rest of them. Just outside the town of Osage, for miles around, they were drilling. There was that piece of farm land she had bought years ago, when Yancey first showed signs of restlessness. She had thought herself shrewd to have picked up this fertile little oasis in the midst of the bare unlovely plain. She was proud of her bit of farm land with its plump yield of alfalfa, corn, potatoes, and garden truck. She knew now why it had been so prolific. By a whim of nature rich black oil lay under all that surrounding land, rendering it barren through its hidden riches. No taint of corroding oil ran beneath that tract of Cravat farm land, and because of this it lay there now, so green, so lush, with its beans, its squash, its ridiculous onions, taunting her, deriding her, like a mirage in the desert. Queerly enough, she had no better luck with her share in an oil lease for which she had paid a substantial sum—much more than she could afford to lose. Machinery, crew, days of drilling, weeks of drilling, sand, shale, salt. The well had come up dry—a duster.
That which happened to Sabra happened to thousands. The stuff was elusive, tantalizing. Here might be a gusher vomiting millions. Fifty feet away not so much as a spot of grease could be forced to the surface. Fortune seemed to take a delight in choosing strange victims for her pranks. Erv Wissler, the gawk who delivered the milk to Sabra’s door each morning, found himself owner of a gusher whose outpourings yielded him seven thousand dollars a day. He could not grasp it. Seven dollars a day his mind might have encompassed. Seven thousand had no meaning.
“Why, Erv!” Sabra exclaimed, when he arrived at her kitchen door as usual, smelling of the barnyard. “Seven thousand dollars a day! What in the world are you going to do with it!”
Erv’s putty features and all his loose-hung frame seemed to stiffen with the effort of his new and momentous resolve. “Well, I tell you, Mis’ Cravat, I made up my mind I ain’t going to make no more Sunday delivery myself. I’m a-going to hire Pete Lynch’s boy to take the milk route Sundays.”
Everyone in Osage knew the story of Ferd Sloat’s wife when the news was brought to her that weeks of drilling on the sterile little Sloat farm had brought up a gusher. They had come running to her across the trampled fields with the news. She had stood there on the back porch of the shabby farmhouse, a bony drudge, as weather-beaten and unlovely as the house itself.
“Millions!” they shouted at her. “Millions and millions! What are you going to do?”
Ferd Sloat’s wife had looked down at her hands, shriveled and gnarled from alkali water and rough work. She wiped them now on a corner of her gingham apron with a gesture of utter finality. Her meager shoulders straightened. The querulous voice took on a 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 methods. 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 precious 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 perilous progress through the thick dust in the dry season or the slippery dough in the wet. Now those same roads were choked, impassable. The frail 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. Frequently the torrent choked itself with its own volume, and then the thousands were piled there, locked, cursing, writhing, battling, on their way to the oil fields. From the Crook Nose field to Wahoo was a scant four miles; it sometimes took half a day to cover it in a motor car. Trucks, drays, wagons, rigs, Fords, buckboards. Every day was like the day of the Opening back in ’89. Millionaire promoters from the East, engineers, prospectors, drillers, tool dressers, shooters, pumpers, roustabouts, Indians. Men in oil-soaked overalls that hadn’t been changed for days. 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 a steer or the carcass of a horse, picked clean by the desert scavengers and turned white and desolate to the blazing sky. A wagon wheel, a rusted rim, a split wagon tongue lay at the side of the trail, mute evidence of a traveler laboriously crawling his way across the prairie. Now the ditches by the side of these same roads were strewn with the bodies of wrecked and abandoned automobiles, their skeletons stripped and rotting, their lamps staring up at the sky like sightless eyes, testimony to the passing of the modern ravisher of that tortured region. Up and down the dust-choked roads, fenders ripped off like flies’ wings, wheels interlocking, trucks overturned, loads sunk in the mud, plank bridges splitting beneath the strain. Devil take the hindmost. It was like an army push, but without an army’s morale or discipline. Bear Creek boasted a killing a day and not a jail nor a courthouse for miles around. Men and women, manacled to a common chain, were marched like slave convicts down the road to the nearest temple of justice, a rough pine shack in a 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 loads out. Long lines of them choked the already impassable road. Wagons were heaped with the pipes through which the oil must be led; with lumber, hardware, rigs, tools, portable houses—all the vast paraphernalia of sudden wealth and growth in a frontier community.
Tough careless young boys drove the nitroglycerin cars, a deadly job on those rough and crowded roads. It was this precious and dreadful stuff that shot the oil up out of the earth. Hard lads in corduroys took their chances and pocketed their high pay, driving the death-dealing wagons, singing as they drove, a red shirt tail tied to a pole flaunting its warning at the back of the load. Often an expected wagon would fail to appear. The workers on the field never took the trouble to trace it or the time to wait for it. They knew that somewhere along the road was a great gaping hole, with never a sizable fragment of wood or steel or bone or flesh anywhere for yards around to tell the tale they already knew.
Acres that had been carefully tended so that they might yield their scanty crop of cabbages, onions, potatoes were abandoned to oil, the garden truck rotting in the ground. Rawboned farmers and their scrawny wives and pindling brats, grown spectacularly rich overnight, walked out of their houses without taking the trouble to move the furniture or lock the door. It was not worth while. They left the sleazy curtains on the windows, the pots on the stove. The oil crew, clanking in, did not bother to wreck the house unless they found it necessary. In the midst of an inferno of oil rigs, drills, smoke, steam, and seeping oil itself the passer-by would often see a weather-beaten farmhouse, its windows broken, its front askew, like a beldame gone mad, gray hair streaming about her crazed face as she stared out at the pandemonium of oil hell about her.
The farmers moved into Osage, or Oklahoma City, or Wahoo. They bought automobiles and silk shirts and gew-gaws, like children. The men sat on the front porch in shirt sleeves and stocking feet and spat tobacco juice into the fresh young grass.
Mile on mile, as far as the eye could see, were the skeleton frames of oil rigs outlined against the sky like giant Martian figures stalking across the landscape. Horrible new towns—Bret Harte wooden-front towns—sprang up overnight on the heels of an oil strike; towns inhabited by people who never meant to stay in them; stark and hideous houses thrown up by dwellers who never intended to remain in them; rude frontier crossroad stores stuffed with the necessities of frontier life and the luxuries of sudden wealth all jumbled together in a sort of mercantile miscegenation. The thump and clank of the pump and drill; curses, shouts; the clatter of thick dishes, the clink of glasses, the shrill laughter of women; fly-infested shanties. Oil, smearing itself over the prairies like a plague, killing the grass, blighting the trees, spreading over the surface of the creeks and rivers. Signs tacked to tree stumps or posts; For Ambulance Call 487. Sim Neeley Undertaker. Call 549. Call Dr. Keogh 735.
Oklahoma—the Red People’s Country—lay heaving under the hot summer sun, a scarred and dreadful thing with the oil drooling down its face a viscid stream.
Tracy Wyatt, who used to drive the bus and dray line between Wahoo and Osage, standing up to the reins like a good-natured red-faced charioteer as the wagon bumped over the rough roads, was one of the richest men in Oklahoma—in the whole of the United States, for that matter. Wyatt. The Wyatt Oil Company. In another five years the Wyatt Oil Companies. You were to see their signs all over the world. The Big Boys from the East were to come to him, hat in hand, to ask his advice about this; to seek his favor for that. The sum of his daily income was fantastic. The mind simply did not grasp it. Tracy himself was, by now, a portly and not undignified looking man of a little more than fifty. His good-natured rubicund face wore the grave slightly astonished look of a common-place man who suddenly finds himself a personage.
Mrs. Wyatt, plainer, more horse-faced than ever in her expensive New York clothes, tried to patronize Sabra Cravat, but the Whipple blood was no match for the Marcy. The new money affected her queerly. She became nervous, full of spleen, and the Eastern doctors spoke to her of high blood pressure.
Sabra frankly envied these lucky ones. A letter from the adder-tongued Felice Venable to her daughter was characteristic of that awesome old matriarch. Sabra still dreaded to open her mother’s letters. They always contained a sting.
All this talk of oil and millions and everyone in Oklahoma rolling in it. I’ll be bound that you and that husband of yours haven’t so much as enough to fill a lamp. Trust Yancey Cravat to get hold of the wrong piece of land. Well, at least you can’t be disappointed. It has been like that from the day you married him, though you can’t say your mother didn’t warn you. I hope Donna will show more sense.
Donna, home after two years at Miss Dignum’s on the Hudson, seemed indeed to be a granddaughter after Felice Venable’s own heart. She was, in coloring, contour, manner, and outlook, so unlike the other Oklahoma girls—Czarina McKee, Gazelle Slaughter, Jewel Riggs, Maurine Turket—as to make that tortured, wind-deviled day of her birth on the Oklahoma prairie almost nineteen years ago seem impossible. Even during her homecomings in the summer vacations she had about her an air of cool disdain together with a kind of disillusioned calculation very disconcerting to her former intimates, not to speak of her own family.
The other girls living in Osage and Oklahoma City and Guthrie and Wahoo were true products of the new raw Southwest country. They liked to dress in crude high colors—glaring pinks, cerise, yellow, red, vivid orange, magenta. They made up naïvely with white powder and big daubs of carmine paint on either cheek. The daughters of more wealthy parents drove their own cars in a day when this was considered rather daring for a woman. Donna came home tall, thin to the point of scrawniness in their opinion; sallow, unrouged, drawling, mysterious. She talked with an Eastern accent, ignored the letter r, said eyether and nyether and rih’ally and altogether made herself poisonously unpopular with the girls and undeniably stirring to the boys. She paid very little heed to the clumsy attentions of the Oklahoma hometown lads, adopting toward them a serpent-of-the-Nile attitude very baffling to these frank and open-faced prairie products.
Her school days finished, and she a finished product of those days, she now looked about her coolly, calculatingly. Her mother she regarded with a kind of affectionate amusement.
“What a rotten deal you’ve had, Sabra dear,” she would drawl. “Really, I don’t see how you’ve stood it all these years.”
Sabra would come to her own defense, goaded by something strangely hostile in herself toward this remote, disdainful offspring. “Stood what?”
“Oh—you know. This being a pioneer woman and a professional Marcy, and head-held-high in spite of a bum of a husband.”
“Donna Cravat, if you ever again dare to speak like that of your father I shall punish you, big as you are.”
“Sabra darling, how can you punish a grown woman? You might slap me, and I wouldn’t slap you back, of course. But I’d be terribly embarrassed for you. As for Father—he is a museum piece. You know it.”
“Your father is one of the greatest figures the Southwest has ever produced.”
“Mm. Well, he’s picturesque enough, I suppose. But I wish he hadn’t worked so hard at it. And Cim! There’s a brother! A great help to me in my career, the men folks of this quaint family.”
“I wasn’t aware that you were planning a career,” Sabra retorted, very much in the manner of Felice Venable. “Unless getting up at noon, slopping around in a kimono most of the day, and lying in the hammock reading is called a career by Dignum graduates. If it is, you’re the outstanding success of your class.”
“Darling, I adore you when you get viperish and Venable like that. Perhaps you influenced me in my early youth. That’s the new psychology, you know. You used to tell me about Grandma trailing around in her white ruffled dimity wrappers and her high heels, never lifting a lily hand.”
“At least your grandmother didn’t consider it a career.”
“Neither do I. This lovely flower-like head isn’t so empty as you think, lolling in the front porch hammock. I know it’s no use counting on Father, even when he’s not off on one of his mysterious jaunts. What is he doing, anyway? Living with some squaw? … Forgive me, Mother darling. I didn’t mean to hurt you.… Cim’s just as bad, and worse, because he’s weak and hasn’t even Dad’s phony ideals. You’re busy with the paper. That’s all right. I’m not blaming you. If it weren’t for you we’d all be on the town—or back in Wichita living on Grandma in genteel poverty. I think you’re wonderful, and I ought to try to be like you. But I don’t want to be a girl reporter. Describing the sumptuous decorations of dandelions and sunflowers at one of Cassandra Sipes’ parties.”
Goaded by curiosity and a kind of wonder at this unnatural creature, Sabra must put her question: “What do you want to do, then?”
“I want to marry the richest man in Oklahoma, and build a palace that I’ll hardly ever live in, and travel like royalty, and clank with emeralds. With my skin and hair they’re my stone.”
“Oh, emeralds, by all means,” Sabra agreed, cuttingly. “Diamonds are so ordinary. And the gentleman that you consider honoring—let me see. From your requirements that would have to be Tracy Wyatt, wouldn’t it?”
“Yes,” replied Donna, calmly.
“You’ve probably overlooked Mrs. Wyatt. Of course, Tracy’s only fifty-one, and you being nineteen, there’s plenty of time if you’ll just be patient.” She was too amused to be really disturbed.
“I don’t intend to be patient, Mamma darling.”
Something in her hard, ruthless tone startled Sabra. “Donna Cravat, don’t you start any of your monkey business. I saw you cooing and ah-ing at him the other day when we went over the Wyatts’ new house. And I heard you saying some drivel about his being a man that craved beauty in his life, and that he should have it; and sneering politely at the new house until I could see him beginning to doubt everything in it, poor fellow. He had been so proud to show it. But I thought you were just talking that New York talk of yours.”
“I wasn’t. I was talking business.”
Sabra was revolted, alarmed, and distressed, all at once. She gained reassurance by telling herself that this was just one of Donna’s queer jokes—part of the streak in her that Sabra had never understood and that corresponded to the practical joker in Yancey. That, too, had always bewildered her. Absorbed in the workings of the growing, thriving newspaper, Sabra let the conversation fade to a dim and almost unimportant memory.
Sabra was sufficiently shrewd and level headed to take Sol Levy’s sound advice. “You settle down to running your paper, Sabra, and you won’t need any oil wells. You can have the best-paying paper and the most powerful in the Southwest. Bigger than Houston or Dallas or San Antonio. Because Osage is going to be bigger and richer than any of them. You mark what I say. Hardly any oil in the town of Osage, but billions of barrels of oil all around it. This town won’t be torn to pieces, then. It’ll grow and grow. Five years from now it’ll look like Chicago.”
“Oh, Sol, how can that be?”
“You’ll see. There where the gambling tent stood with a mud hole in front of it a few years ago you’ll see in another five years a skyscraper like those in New York.”
She laughed at that.
Just as she had known that Yancey had again left her on that night of the Mescal ceremony, so now she sensed that he would come back in the midst of this new insanity that had seized all Oklahoma. And come back he did, from God knows where, on the very crest of the oil wave, and bringing with him news that overshadowed his return. He entered as he had left, with no word of explanation, and, as always, his entrance was so dramatic, so bizarre as to cause everything else to fade into the background.
He came riding, as always, but it was a sorry enough nag that he bestrode this time; and his white sombrero was grimed and battered, the Prince Albert coat was spotted, the linen frayed, the whole figure covered with the heavy red dust of the trampled road. He must have ridden like an avenging angel, for his long black locks were damp, his eyes red rimmed. And when she saw this Don Quixote, so sullied, so shabby, her blood turned to water within her veins for pity.
She thought, it will always be like this as long as he lives, and each time he will be a little more broken, older, less and less the figure of splendor I married, until at last …
She only said, “Yancey,” quietly.
He was roaring, he was reeling with Jovian laughter as he strode into the Wigwam office where she sat at her neat orderly desk just as she had sat on that day years before. For a dreadful moment she thought that he was drunk or mad. He flung his soiled white sombrero to the desk top, he swept her into his arms, he set her down.
“Sabra! Here’s news for you. Jesse! Heh, Jesse! Where’s that rum-soaked son of a printer’s devil? Jesse! Come in here! God, I’ve been laughing so that I almost rolled off my horse.” He was striding up and down as of old, his shabby coat tails spreading with the vigor of his movements, the beautiful hands gesticulating, the fine eyes—bloodshot now—still flashing with the fire that would burn until it consumed him.
“Oil, my children! More oil than anybody ever thought there was in any one spot in the world. And where! Where! On the Osage Indian Reservation. It came in an hour ago, like the ocean. It makes every other field look like the Sahara. There never was such a joke! It’s cosmic—it’s terrible. How the gods must be roaring. ‘Laughter unquenchable among the blessed gods!’ ”
“Yancey dear, we’re used to oil out here. It’s an old story. Come now. Come home and have a hot bath and clean clothes.” In her mind’s eye she saw those fine white linen shirts of his all neatly stacked in the drawer as he had left them.
For answer he reached out with one great arm and swept a pile of exchanges, copy paper, galley proofs, and clippings off the desk, while with the other hand he seized the typewriter by its steel bar and plumped it to the floor with a force that wrung a protesting whine and zing from its startled insides. He had always scorned to use a typewriter. The black swathes of his herculean pencil bit deeper into the paper’s surface than any typewriter’s metal teeth.
“Hot bath! Hot hell, honey! Do you realize what this means? Do you understand that two thousand Osage Indians, squatting in their rags in front of their miserable shanties, are now the richest nation in the world? In the world, I tell you. They were given that land—the barest, meanest desert land in the whole of the Oklahoma country. And the government of these United States said, ‘There, you red dogs, take that and live on it. And if you can’t live on it, then die on it.’ God A’mighty, I could die myself with laughing. Millions and millions of dollars. They’re spattering, I tell you, all over the Osage Reservation. There’s no stopping that flow. Every buck and squaw on the Osage Reservation is a millionaire. They own that land, and, by God, I’m going to see that no one takes it away from them!”
“Oh, Yancey, be careful.”
He was driving his pencil across the paper. “Send this out A.P. They tried to keep it dark when the flow came, but I’ll show them. Sabra, kill your editorial lead, whatever it was. I’ll write it. Make this your news lead, too. Listen. ‘The gaudiest star-spangled cosmic joke that ever was played on a double-dealing government burst into fireworks to-day when, with a roar that could be heard for miles around, thousands of barrels of oil shot into the air on the miserable desert land known as the Osage Indian Reservation and occupied by those duped and wretched——!”
“We can’t use that, I tell you.”
“This isn’t the Cimarron. It’s the state of Oklahoma. That’s treason—that’s anarchy——”
“It’s the truth. It’s history. I can prove it. They’ll be down on those Osages like a pack of wolves. At least I’ll let them know they’re expected. I’ll run the story, by God, as I want it run, and they can shoot me for it.”
“And I say you won’t. You can’t come in here like that. I’m editor of this paper.”
He turned quietly and looked at her, the great head jutting out, the eyes like cold steel. “Who is?”
“I am.”
Without a word he grasped her wrist and led her out, across the old porch, down the steps and into the street. There, on Pawhuska Avenue, in the full glare of noonday, he pointed to the weatherworn sign that he himself, aided by Jesse Rickey, had hung there almost twenty years before. She had had it painted and repainted. She had had it repaired. She had never replaced it with another.
THE OKLAHOMA WIGWAM YANCEY CRAVAT PROP. AND EDITOR.
“When you take that down, Sabra honey, and paint your own name up in my place, you’ll be the editor of this newspaper. Until you do that, I am.”
As they stood there, she in her neat blue serge, he in his crumpled and shabby attire, she knew that she never would do it.