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One of America's most colorful oilmen was Ernest Whitworth Marland, a man who had much in common with other industrial giants of his age-- the Mellons, Rockefellers, the Morgans.Moving to Ponca City, Oklahoma, from Pennsylvania shortly after the turn of the century, Marland quickly found oil on the lands of the Ponca and the Osage Indians. E.W. Marland was a man of paradox--an advocate of unhampered oil exploration but also a champion of oil conservation, a man who lived in luxury but espoused the common causes of his idol, Franklin D. Roosevelt.

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9780806112381

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The life and times of Ernest Whitworth Marland, whose flyer to fortune in the ??20's epitomized those last years of unlimited opportunity, and whose decline personalized the end of the age of freedom- as well as the many tensions that went with it. Born with wealth and trained as a lawyer, Marland drifted into oil in Pittsburgh, then went west as a young man where be struck oil in Oklahoma, soon extended his empire to vast; proportions. Driven by pride and self-interest, a love of bigness as well as an understanding of the little man, a materialistic conception of happiness- which was fulfilled, Marland became one of the big oil producers, and when he lost most of his money and control, spent a few of his last years as a Congressman and as governor of Oklahoma.....There's little of the speculative fever of the big plunge here, for what is essentially an impersonal, professional biography of financial enterprise. Beyond the regional, the market looks limited. (Kirkus Reviews)

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John Joseph Mathews, who died in 1979, was one of Oklahoma's genuinely gifted writers. He was the author of Wah' Kon-Tah: The Osage and the White Man's Road, a poetic description in prose of the spiritual life of the Indian, and a Book-of the-Month Club selection in 1932. His other books include Life and Death of an Oilman: The Career of E. W. Marland (1951), about the controversial governor of Oklahoma and the founder of the company  that later became known as Conoco, and The Osages: Children of the Middle Waters (1961), a narrative history of his tribe. Talking to the Moon was first published in 1945 and is reissued with a foreword by Elizabeth Mathews, his widow. Mathews was the great-grandson of Old Bill Williams, a noted frontiersman, and was a mixed-blood Osage. For many years he served as a member of the Osage Tribal Council. Educated at the University of Oklahoma in geology and at Merton College, Oxford, where he took his degree in natural sciences, Mathews was a fine American blend of scientist and poet, philosopher and producer, historian and storyteller, Indian and white.

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