Three days after the fall of Fort Sumter, a small, lively man with stick-out ears, cowlicked brown hair, and a shy, enchantingly sweet smile, sat having supper in the shanty-like hotel of a new oil settlement that would one day be named after him. Henry Rouse was thirty-seven years old, a bachelor, with the biggest following of children of any man around. The pockets of his rumpled suit bulged stickily with licorice and peppermints, and small friends surrounded him like the Good Humor Man. They scrambled up for rides on his big black mare, tagged him on foot, and listened saucer-eyed to his stories. With grownups, he was still bothered sometimes that had made him give up a law career, but with children it vanished magically.

-from The Great Oildorado (1959)