Ranger: The Boom That Won a World War

On October eleventh, nineteen seventeen, a drill bit punched through limestone below a rancher's field outside Ranger, Texas, and the McCleskey Number One well roared in at more than a thousand barrels a day. Within a year the population of Ranger rocketed from one thousand to thirty thousand. Fifteen hundred people a day passed through the train depot. More than eight hundred wells were pumping by nineteen twenty.

The timing was extraordinary. Russia had just collapsed out of World War One, cutting the Allies off from thirty percent of the world's oil supply. Ranger and the surrounding fields, which together became known as the Ranger-Desdemona-Breckenridge region, poured enough petroleum into Allied tanks and ships to help turn the war. By nineteen twenty-one the boom had busted just as fast as it started. Today Ranger is a town of a little over two thousand, its brick downtown a monument to those four furious years when it briefly became one of the most important places on earth.