The Queen of Hamburger Row---clip

The Queen of Hamburger Row---clip:
..........The crowds of people had come in by the trainload, starting the day after the Busey oil discovery well blew in. As the boom continued and the “get-rich” stories spilled over into the Arkansas countryside, thousands of men left their farms and small towns to head for El Dorado. Soon the city was bursting at the seams with a population that had soared to over forty thousand.
The streets were packed, rooms to rent were non-existent, and tents were thrown up to take the overflow. A tent city housing the thousands of newcomers sprouted up on the vacant land around the railroad station and on the west side of South Washington Avenue. Prior to the boom, almost all of the retail businesses were located around the red brick Victorian courthouse on the town square, and the residential areas were within easy walking distance of downtown. The streets were only paved for a block off the square, and, when the pavement ended, the streets were a combination of dirt and gravel.
Along with hundreds of oil speculators who came to town to buy and sell oil leases and drilling rights were the working oilmen who came up from Texas and Louisiana, bringing drilling equipment and know-how to the budding oilfields. Most of these men had worked in the oilfields, and they were, for the most part, the only pros in the business. They were the roughnecks who worked on the rigs, the derrick builders, the drillers, and the tool dressers. These men had no real hope of getting rich. They were in El Dorado because the work was there. Over fifty drilling rigs were operating in south Arkansas six months after the boom, and these rigs had to have trained men.
Along with this flood of newcomers came thousands of beggars, crooks, and prostitutes who preyed off the population. Gospel preachers came to tell the wicked to mend their ways; speculators rushed in, buying up any and all available mineral rights, and then quickly ran up the price, sold out, caught the fever, bought the leases again, and continued the wild cycle.
When this deluge of humanity rushed into town, El Dorado had few prostitutes, and, at first, the few girls who were plying their trade asked and received astronomical prices for their services. But when the tales of these high-priced prostitutes reached places like Galveston and other wide-open towns in Texas and Louisiana, a flood of prostitutes invaded the city. Barrelhouses, the saloons where gambling and prostitution flourished and whisky was served, were thrown up by the dozens, and several barrelhouses even sent their prostitutes out to the oilfields on horseback to service their customers, since nothing was off limits. Before the first year of the boom was over, the masses had strained the fabric of the community, and the few law officers in town had given up trying to control the thousands of thieves who preyed on the crowds. Certain sections of town were exempt from any law enforcement, and the infamous South Washington Street, nicknamed Hamburger Row, was as dangerous as any of the frontier towns of the Old West.
When the thousands of newcomers arrived in the town, the few restaurants in the city were overwhelmed. To temporarily alleviate the problem, the El Dorado City Council passed an ordinance allowing hamburger stands to be set up on city sidewalks, and soon the sidewalks on South Washington Avenue from Cedar Street to Hillsboro Street became lined with vendors grilling hamburgers. The city of El Dorado survived this onslaught of lawlessness, but hundreds of newcomers did not.
The boom also brought heavy oilfield drilling equipment, which was offloaded at the train station onto large wagons. The wagons rolled down streets built to sustain only buggies or, at the most, small, light-weight automobiles and trucks. The available small trucks couldn’t haul the heavy equipment, and soon hundreds of mules and oxen were brought in from the oilfields of Texas and Louisiana to pull the equipment from the train station to the oilfields. When the first teams of mules and oxen came through town, pulling a huge double wagon stacked with drilling equipment, the whole town turned out to watch them. However, within a few weeks, the iron-cased wheels on the hundreds of heavy wagons that followed broke down the loose gravel and dirt streets, and, when it rained, as it often does in south Arkansas, the streets became impassable. To battle the mud, merchants built wooden sidewalks that extended down Hamburger Row, and enterprising men constructed plank walkways that could be pulled up and let down for pedestrians to cross the streets. Of course, they charged every person who used the plank walkways, but in the boom town atmosphere where everything was for sale, to be charged to cross the street was accepted as normal.