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Sheriff Finn Craig's deputies earned $75 a month in 1920, but each of them had to furnish his own horse on rural patrol---in delivering court summons and in collecting delinquent taxes. The automobile had arrived in El Dorado, to be sure, as the five blocks of pavement in and about the town square bore mute testimony, but hitching posts and livery stables were also still much in evidence---bearing proof that the county seat had not departed from its horse-and-buggy days. One of the paved blocks at the center of town extended south from the town square on Washington Street to include Rufus N. Garret's three-story brick hotel, built in 1910 or 1911, which catered mainly to overnight drummers calling on the business houses in town, but which in the past several months had accommodated a number of oil men. (2)

Oil men were not new to El Dorado and south Arkansas. A test well had been drilled at Urbana, ten miles east of El Dorado in Union county, as early as 1914 with no results. The well on a lease which the Penn-Wyoming Oil Company acquired. Then in 1916 Chance Adams, Charles Murphy, and Ed Jones drilled a well close to the Columbia County line that was a dry hole. (3)

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2. Interviews with residents of El Dorado: John W. McPherson, a former railroad employee of the Rock

Island and Missouri Pacific, Nov. 25, 1972: the late Winifred Brewster,a former peace officer, May 19, 1972; Harry B. Reeves, Aug. 24, l973; Frank Hudson, a deputy under Sheriff Craig and later Union County Judge, at Homer, La., Oct. 12, 1972. Also, Clayte H.Whitten, "Found in Old Newspapers," El Dorado Daily News, June 10, 1973; John Fleming "El Dorado's Garrett Hotel, A Repository of Memories," Little Rock Arkansas Gazette, Apr. 5, 1970. The architect for the Garrett Hotel was George R. Mann, who was the architect for the present state capitol building in Little Rock. Rufus Garrett was president of the First National Bank of El Dorado and he and several other businessmen had the hotel built. By the time of the oil boom, Garrett was the sole owner, and he had leased the hotel to Paul Marks.

3. Joseph K. Mahony II, "The Day the Busey Well Blew In" (Paper delivered at the Twenty-Seventh

Annual Meeting of the Arkansas Historical Association, Magnolia, Arkansas, May 3, 1968); Claude A. Brown, "Oil in Arkansas; In the Beginning, El Dorado's Mud Gushed Fortunes," Little Rock Arkansas Democrat, Apr. 15, 1956.

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