"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.
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