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Picture of a Derrick By Floyd Beaver  $29.50 |
Picture of a Derrick
by Floyd Beaver
ISBN: 1-4107-1741-0
Hardcover, 315 pages 6"x9¼"
FROM THE PUBLISHER
Their numbers are diminishing – those who can remember how the days
of oil in Oklahoma’s Osage County – when a fabulous wealth of
shallow and easily drilled oil was found soon after the turn of the
century, drawing from around the world a horde of that rough and
romantic breed known as "Wildcatters," followed soon after by
further hordes of lawyers, politicians, drifters, and gamblers.
Those already here were swept aside or overrun in the rush for oil.
The fact that the Osage Indians owned rights to the oil added still
more turmoil to the scene. A system of "headrights" was instituted
for the protections of the Indians, but the system itself led soon
to arson, murder and political corruption in the Osage Nation so
great the newly formed FBI was called in for one of its first
investigations.
Floyd Beaver’s Picture of A Derrick presents a full spectrum of
emotions in dealing with all the elements of a wild city (Tulsa),
and a national (Osage Indians), who were invaded by red, black and
white – who vied in a highly charged arena of all but lawless greed,
ambition, and an often inelegant scramble for wealth and power!
Although told as fiction the story’s spirit is the blood and passion
of the real people who brought forth from the chaos of the early oil
fields of great State.
Floyd Beaver was born in Tulsa in 1920. His father moved the family
to the Osage oil fields when he was a child. He attended school with
Osage Indian children and grew to manhood in the oil fields. After
service in the U.S. Navy during WWII, Beaver graduated from Tulsa
University. He was Wire Desk man on the Tulsa Tribune, and
eventually moved to California as an advertising man in the San
Francisco area. He has a hundred published short stories in books
and national television. Beaver’s Picture of A Derrick, is a happy
coming together of heritage, training and experience, unusual in one
man, which has resulted in a gripping story of the discovery of
Oklahoma crude, a little known period in Oklahoma history few other
writers could have produced.