Farms and ranches previously all but worthless were cut up into small tracts and drilling sites, and these were sold for unheard-of prices.

Up leaped another forest of skeleton towers some ten miles long and half as wide.
But this was the open range with nothing except the sky for shelter, so towns were knocked together--queer, greasy, ramshackle settlements of flimsy shacks--and so quickly were they built that they outran the law, which is ever deliberate.

The camps of the black-lime district, which had been considered hell holes, were in reality models of order compared with these mushroom cities of raw boards, tar paper, and tin.
Gambling joints, dance halls, and dens more vicious flourished openly, and around them gathered the scum and the flotsam that crests a rising tide.
Winter brought the rains, and existence in the new fields became an ugly and a troublesome thing.

Roads there were none, and supplies became difficult to secure.

The surface of the land melted and spinning wheels churned it; traffic halted, vehicles sank, horses drowned.
Between rains the sun dried the mud, the wind whirled it into suffocating clouds.