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by George Parker Stoker (Author), Michelle M. Haas (Editor)
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. In 1901, George Parker Stoker was twenty-three and a newly 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. This was no tea-sipping engagement. 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. Roofs leaked and there were no doors...because they never closed. 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.
