Wichita Falls: Oil, Rails, and a Waterfall That Wasn't

The name promises a waterfall, and the city has one, though not the original. The natural falls on the Wichita River that gave this place its name washed away in an eighteen eighty-six flood, and the city went without a namesake cascade for nearly a century before building a replacement in the nineteen eighties. It is a small irony for a city that tends to construct things on its own terms.

Wichita Falls was settled in the eighteen seventies in the Red River country of North Texas, where the Wichita River winds southeast toward its junction with the Red. It stayed modest. Cattle country, later a railroad stop when the Fort Worth and Denver City Railway arrived in eighteen eighty-two, until the ground beneath it turned out to be hiding something.

Oil had been seeping into local water wells since around nineteen oh one. The Electra field opened in nineteen eleven. But the real transformation came on July twenty-ninth, nineteen eighteen, when a wildcat well outside the nearby town of Burkburnett blew in and revealed one of the largest oil fields in North Texas. Within months Burkburnett had become one of the most famous boomtowns in American history, and Wichita Falls became its supply hub and refinery center.

By nineteen twenty the population had surged past forty thousand. Nineteen refineries were operating in and around the city. Wichita Falls handled the oil's next life after it came out of the ground: processed it, shipped it, banked the proceeds. The town of Burkburnett was later immortalized in the nineteen forty film Boomtown, with Clark Gable and Spencer Tracy. Wichita Falls got the refineries.

The oil economy faded with the fields. Today the city is a regional medical and military hub, anchored in part by Sheppard Air Force Base, which opened in nineteen forty-one and remains one of the largest pilot training installations in NATO.