The Oklahoma oil boom was a fabulous time, never to be repeated, and these photographs capture the forests of derricks, overflowing tanks, gambling wildcatters, and men and women who made it all possible. The text ties them all to their historical place, providing an exciting panorama of the young industry that was such a vital element in the development of the Sooner State.

Explores the effects of oil wealth on the Osage Inidians, focusing on the Osages' interactions with local non-Indians as well as on tribal politics, particularly the cultural and poitical right between full-bloods and mixed bloods that continues to the present day. Also documents the lawlessness, corruption, and occasional violence, arguing that the notorious happenings in the 1920s were part of a long history of systematic exploitation of the Osages.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A twisting, haunting true-life murder mystery about one of the most monstrous crimes in American history, from the author of The Wager and The Lost City of Z, “one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today."—New York Magazine • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • NOW A MARTIN SCORSESE PICTURE “A shocking whodunit…What more could fans of true-crime thrillers ask?”—USA Today “A masterful work of literary journalism crafted with the urgency of a mystery.” —The Boston Globe In the 1920s, the richest people per capita in the world were members of the Osage Nation in Oklahoma. After oil was discovered beneath their land, the Osage rode in chauffeured automobiles, built mansions, and sent their children to study in Europe. Then, one by one, the Osage began to be killed off. The family of an Osage woman, Mollie Burkhart, became a prime target. One of her relatives was shot. Another was poisoned. And it was just the beginning, as more and more Osage were dying under mysterious circumstances, and many of those who dared to investigate the killings were themselves murdered. As the death toll rose, the newly created FBI took up the case, and the young director, J. Edgar Hoover, turned to a former Texas Ranger named Tom White to try to unravel the mystery. White put together an undercover team, including a Native American agent who infiltrated the region, and together with the Osage began to expose one of the most chilling conspiracies in American history. Look for David Grann’s latest bestselling book, The Wager!

In 1905, a gusher of black gold sprang up southwest of Tulsa, two years before Oklahoma became a state. The site, known as Glenn Pool, became the first major oil field in Oklahoma, with reserves so huge that it could produce millions of barrels of crude. As word of the boom spread, a rush of laborers, lease buyers, oilmen,promoters, producers, and speculators flooded into the area with dreams of striking it rich. Oil fields adjacent to Glenn Pool developed, and Tulsa, which grew to be Oklahomas second largest city, became the hub of the oil industry. Tulsa: Oil Capital of the World tells the story of one Oklahoma towns rise to fame and fortune and its emergence as an international leader in business and politics.

"Oil," writes Ruth Sheldon Knowles, "is the most hazardous, expensive, heartbreaking gambling game in the world." And, as this book dramatically proves, the men who have been the gamblers of the American oil business have been some of the most colorful and fantastic personalities in our history. The Greatest Gamblers is the story of our remarkable oilmen and the vast industry they have created-from its simple beginnings in 1859 at Titusville, Pennsylvania, to the big-business oil operations of today. Here are the wildcatters, the prospectors, the scientists, the hunch players (Mrs. Knowles points out that independent oilmen have discovered more than three-fourths of America's oil fields). Here you will meet "unlucky" Dad Joiner, whose fortunes changed only in his seventies when a worthless ten-acre tract of Texas wasteland proved the key to one of America's two biggest oil fields; and H. 1. Hunt, who parlayed an oil lease he won at a poker game into an oil business that made him one of the richest men in the United States. Harry Sinclair ... Tom Slick … Mike Benedum … Everette DeGolyer … Charles Canfield … Edward Doheny — the pages of this book are crowded with the stories of such men, their tough boom towns, their dogged persistence and wild successes, and the brutal competition they faced. But The Greatest Gambler is also the story of a prospectors' rush that has become an organized industry. An absorbing portion of the book tells how the industry has found new uses for petroleum and its by products, and how this sometimes involved as much heartbreak as prospecting. There were the ships that exploded when oilmen first tried to market petroleum as marine fuel, the locomotive roundhouse that blew up when they first tried to convert railroads to oil. Mrs. Knowles discusses knowledgeably the present predicament of the petroleum industry and what is necessary to find and develop America's remaining great oil and gas resources. The Greatest Gamblers is a lively and authoritative account of what is probably the most fascinating and adventurous business of all.

During the oil-boom days of the early twentieth century, a few lucky or shrewd individuals made millions of dollars virtually overnight. It is a familiar theme in the romantic mythology that sprang up about the era. But the people who produced those millions are the real story, told in these word-for-word recollections of early-day workers in the "oil patch." In vivid, often poignant detail these men and women recall the grueling toil, primitive living and working conditions, and ever-present danger in a time when life was cheap and oil was gold. In the late 1930s employees of the Federal Writers Project, a branch of the New Deal Workers Progress Administration, recorded the voices of these pioneers as they offered their memories, sometimes wryly humorous and sometimes bitter, of the turmoil that was the daily lot of the oilfielders. We meet colorful, tough-talking "Manila Kate," who took over her husband's drilling outfit after he died in an explosion. A welder vividly recalls the death of his closest pal, a skilled hand who loved to take chances. In an oil-field shantytown the support of good-hearted neighbors assuages the pain of a bereaved and impoverished family. A "shooter" recalls the deadly danger of the "soup wagon" the buckboard that delivered the nitroglycerin to the well--or blew up on the way. While many of the individuals witnessed bizarre accidents that became almost routine in the early oil fields, their personal stories also show how uncertain job security and wages could be, even before the Depression, when dry holes and plummeting oil prices left thousands of workers broke and homeless. Many of the interviewers provide valuable technical details about early oilfield operations. Yet it is the stories of the people, the workers themselves, that endure. The early oil industry was built upon their toil, their pain, and their courage, all of which are evident in every word recorded here.

The Industrial Workers of the World, or Wobblies, a radical labor union, played an important role in Oklahoma between the founding of the union in 1905 and its demise in 1930. In Oil, Wheat, & Wobblies, Nigel Anthony Sellars describes IWW efforts to organize migratory harvest hands and oil-field workers in the state and relationships between the union and other radical and labor groups such as the Socialist Party and the American Federation of Labor. Focusing on the emergence of migratory labor and the nature of the work itself in industrializing the region, Sellars provides a social history of labor in the Oklahoma wheat belt and the midcontinent oil fields. Using court cases and legislation, he examines the role of state and federal government in suppressing the union during World War I. Oil, What, & Wobblies concludes with a description of the IWW revival and subsequent decline after the war, suggesting that the decline is attributable more to the union's failure to adapt to postwar technological change, its rigid attachment to outmoded tactics, and its internal policy disputes, than to political repression. In Sellars's view, the failure of the IWW in Oklahoma largely explains the failure of both the IWW and the labor movement in the United States during the twenties.

A legend among oilmen, Tom Slick was an independent operator in the truest sense. His office was his buggy during his early days of wildcatting the Mid-Continent oil field around 1910. And even after great success brought him to posher surroundings in an Oklahoma City office suite, his style remained hands-on. His impromptu deals were often brokered on street corners and over the telephone in his typical laconic style. Well into the 1920s he was the last of a breed who had no stock holders or board members to answer to, and instead "worked out of his hip pocket." Slick's extraordinary rise paralleled that of the modern petroleum industry. He began his career in the oil fields of western Pennsylvania, the birthplace of the American oil business. Before 1910, he headed west, traveling with his father and brother to the fields of Kansas to work as contract drillers. Slick met with failure in these early years, as he moved on to Oklahoma in an attempt to locate oil. In 1912 he received the financial backing to drill one more well, which turned out to be the discovery well for the vast Cushing Field. This amazing success was followed by more discoveries of fields - a frenzy of acquiring, drilling, then selling that in 1929 culminated with Slick's sale of his Oklahoma holdings in the Prairie Oil and Gas Company - up until that time, the largest sale of oil properties by an individual. In this first biography of Tom Slick, Ray Miles fleshes out the man who, despite his legendary drive - and the high-profile nature of the oil business - was exceedingly private and withdrawn. Miles relies on newspaper accounts, court and business records, correspondence, and personal interviews with family, friends, and associates to render a portrait of one of the most successful and colorful, yet elusive, businessmen of his day.

A groundbreaking new history of the United States, showing how Christian faith and the pursuit of petroleum fueled America's rise to global power and shaped today's political clashes Anointed with Oil places religion and oil at the center of American history. As prize-winning historian Darren Dochuk reveals, from the earliest discovery of oil in America during the Civil War, citizens saw oil as the nation's special blessing and its peculiar burden, the source of its prophetic mission in the world. Over the century that followed and down to the present day, the oil industry's leaders and its ordinary workers together fundamentally transformed American religion, business, and politics -- boosting America's ascent as the preeminent global power, giving shape to modern evangelical Christianity, fueling the rise of the Republican Right, and setting the terms for today's political and environmental debates. Ranging from the Civil War to the present, from West Texas to Saudi Arabia to the Alberta Tar Sands, and from oil-patch boomtowns to the White House, this is a sweeping, magisterial book that transforms how we understand our nation's history.