TRUE TALES FROM THE OIL FIELD

Would you like to know about the noble men who risked everything to make Texas the oil capital of America? Well find another book, because this one's about gambling, pimps, prostitutes, crooked officials, hard drinking, liquor fueled brawling and the roughnecks at the center of it all...real life in Texas oil boomtowns.

"On all sides of me persons, to all appearances lunatics,could chatter about only one thing, and that thing: oil."

In 1901 George Parker Stoker was twenty-three and a freshly hatched MD seeking his fortune. He stepped off the train at Beaumont into a world of mud and mayhem. Within a day he was at the Spindletop field and had inherited the only medical practice in town from an old doc who wanted to "go on a drunk" for a few months.

Stoker spent the next few years patching up the inmates of this oil patch asylum. He worked at Spindletop, Batson Prairie and Saratoga. These were no tea-sipping crowds. The work was as hard as the men, who risked death in ways that Edgar Allen Poe couldn't have dreamed up. But boy were they paid!

All that idle cash made saloons pop up like toadstools, tacked together from pine planks with leaky roofs and no doors...because they never closed. It was also a magnet for gamblers, swindlers, thugs, pimps and prostitutes. You couldn't call them ladies of the evening, because more than a few worked the day shift.

"Pimps, professional gamblers, drillers, gun-men and business men stood at the bar, drinking, arguing, swearing and telling filthy stories...half-dressed prostitutes stood with their arms around drunken men, sat in their laps or danced with them in vulgar postures."

The "Kid Doctor," as Stoker was called because of his youthful appearance, saw it all. He treated them all too, giving each the best care he could in that carnival of contusion and contagion. He set bones and treated gruesome burns. He dealt with as many gunshots and stab wounds as a battlefield surgeon. And he delivered babies galore.

"One of the gamblers drew a long knife, reached over and with a quick slash let the old man's bowels out through the walls of his belly. 'Doc,' he cried, 'my guts are cut out. Do something for me quick!'"

These are his true recollections, written in 1948; tales of those wild boomtown days told in gaudy detail and pleasing prose. Dr. Stoker had a gift for description and a style like Charles Dickens. The man could write.

You'll read about gushers and gamblers, explosions and epidemics, drillers and delinquents - and lawlessness so bad the Texas Rangers were called in.

This special edition is limited to just 254 copies, one for each county in Texas. That's not many books. It is a 128 page jacketed hardcover, housed in a custom hand-made slipcase crafted in our in-house bindery in Rockport. PLEASE NOTE that each cloth title label (that's the "blood"-splattered cloth on  the front of each slipcase) is one of a kind. No two will look alike. Some may well be bloodier than others.

Order your copy now. And while you're at it, get one for a somebody you like. You'll have fun talking together about these stories.