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Borger: Last Dance at Sundown: The True Story of the Wickedest Town in Texas
“ Last Dance at Sundown is a narrative nonfiction story that unmasks an unruly town during an unruly time, written with the spirit and power of a novel, proving once again that civilization came late to Texas, and the truth is far more entertaining than fiction. The book is storytelling at its best.”
Out on a wild and lonely patch of prairie land in the Texas Panhandle, amidst the coyotes, whirling dervishes, horned toads, and rattlesnakes, a single wooden oil derrick birthed the boomtown of Borger.
Asa Borger was a visionary.
Or maybe he was just a gambling man.
But he could see the distant parade of civilization marching toward an oilfield, and surely when they came, the wildcatters, roughnecks, and roustabouts would need to place to hold their homes and take their money.
They needed a town.
Asa Borger built them one.
The town, his namesake, was as tough, as harsh, as wild as the Godforsaken land around it, a den of corruption and iniquity, fueled in 1926 by the largest oil strike in Texas, a land known for its big oil and big rich.
The unpaved streets of Borger were lined with dance halls and gambling parlors and brothels. Bootleggers made more money than oilmen.
Want a girl for the night?
Want a man killed?
It cost about the same.
Borger was known as the “Sodom of the Plains,” the “Wickedest Town in Texas.”
It took the Texas Rangers to tame it and Martial Law with the Texas National Guard to bring some measure of law and order to its wayward and nefarious ways.
It’s finally time to tell the true story of historical Borger as seen through the eyes of early day newspapermen who wrote about a strange array of eccentric and often villainous characters walking the streets of a boomtown.
Out on a wild and lonely patch of prairie land in the Texas Panhandle, amidst the coyotes, whirling dervishes, horned toads, and rattlesnakes, a single wooden oil derrick birthed the boomtown of Borger.
Asa Borger was a visionary.
Or maybe he was just a gambling man.
But he could see the distant parade of civilization marching toward an oilfield, and surely when they came, the wildcatters, roughnecks, and roustabouts would need to place to hold their homes and take their money.
They needed a town.
Asa Borger built them one.
The town, his namesake, was as tough, as harsh, as wild as the Godforsaken land around it, a den of corruption and iniquity, fueled in 1926 by the largest oil strike in Texas, a land known for its big oil and big rich.
The unpaved streets of Borger were lined with dance halls and gambling parlors and brothels. Bootleggers made more money than oilmen.
Want a girl for the night?
Want a man killed?
It cost about the same.
Borger was known as the “Sodom of the Plains,” the “Wickedest Town in Texas.”
It took the Texas Rangers to tame it and Martial Law with the Texas National Guard to bring some measure of law and order to its wayward and nefarious ways.
It’s finally time to tell the true story of historical Borger as seen through the eyes of early day newspapermen who wrote about a strange array of eccentric and often villainous characters walking the streets of a boomtown.
424 pages, Kindle Edition
Published July 29, 2022
8 people are currently reading
4 people want to read
About the author
Caleb Pirtle III
75 books47 followersCaleb Pirtle III is the author of more than seventy-five books. His novel, Back Side of a Blue Moon, received both the Beverly Hills Book Award and Best of Texas Book Award for Historical Fiction.
He has written four noir thrillers in the Ambrose Lincoln series: Secrets of the Dead, Conspiracy of Lies, Night Side of Dark, and Place of Skulls. . Secrets and Conspiracy are also audiobooks on audible.com. His most recent releases are Back Side of a Blue Moon, Friday Nights Don't Last Forever, Last Deadly Lie, and The Man Who Talks to Strangers. His short stories are featured in three anthologies: Run, Scream, and Bridges.
Pirtle is a graduate of The University of Texas in Austin and became the first student at the university to win the National William Randolph Hearst Award for feature writing. Several of his books and his magazine writing have received national and regional awards.
Pirtle has written two teleplays: Gambler V: Playing for Keeps, a mini-series for CBS television starring Kenny Rogers, Loni Anderson, Dixie Carter, and Mariska Hargitay, and The Texas Rangers, a TV movie for John Milius and TNT television. He wrote two novels for Berkeley based on the Gambler series: Dead Man’s Hand and Jokers Are Wild. He wrote the screenplay for one motion picture, Hot Wire, starring George Kennedy, and John Terry.
Pirtle’s narrative nonfiction, Gamble in the Devil’s Chalk is a true-life book about the fights and feuds during the founding of the controversial Giddings oilfield and From the Dark Side of the Rainbow, the story of a woman’s escape from the Nazis in Poland during World War II. His coffee-table quality book, XIT: The American Cowboy, became the publishing industry’s third best selling art book of all time.
Pirtle was a newspaper reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and served ten years as travel editor for Southern Living Magazine. He was editorial director for a Dallas custom publisher for more than twenty-five years.
He has written four noir thrillers in the Ambrose Lincoln series: Secrets of the Dead, Conspiracy of Lies, Night Side of Dark, and Place of Skulls. . Secrets and Conspiracy are also audiobooks on audible.com. His most recent releases are Back Side of a Blue Moon, Friday Nights Don't Last Forever, Last Deadly Lie, and The Man Who Talks to Strangers. His short stories are featured in three anthologies: Run, Scream, and Bridges.
Pirtle is a graduate of The University of Texas in Austin and became the first student at the university to win the National William Randolph Hearst Award for feature writing. Several of his books and his magazine writing have received national and regional awards.
Pirtle has written two teleplays: Gambler V: Playing for Keeps, a mini-series for CBS television starring Kenny Rogers, Loni Anderson, Dixie Carter, and Mariska Hargitay, and The Texas Rangers, a TV movie for John Milius and TNT television. He wrote two novels for Berkeley based on the Gambler series: Dead Man’s Hand and Jokers Are Wild. He wrote the screenplay for one motion picture, Hot Wire, starring George Kennedy, and John Terry.
Pirtle’s narrative nonfiction, Gamble in the Devil’s Chalk is a true-life book about the fights and feuds during the founding of the controversial Giddings oilfield and From the Dark Side of the Rainbow, the story of a woman’s escape from the Nazis in Poland during World War II. His coffee-table quality book, XIT: The American Cowboy, became the publishing industry’s third best selling art book of all time.
Pirtle was a newspaper reporter for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram and served ten years as travel editor for Southern Living Magazine. He was editorial director for a Dallas custom publisher for more than twenty-five years.
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
August 28, 2022
This is a book you don’t want to miss!
The story of Borger Texas in the 1920s was recorded in numerous newspaper accounts. Those historical chronicles were researched and salvaged in the fifties by J Ron Hardin. They might never have come to light except for Caleb Pirtle. He gathered up the historical accounts that Hardin saved, and he breathed life into them. He did it in such a way that you can practically feel yourself choking on the polluted, oil-filled air of Borger.
We’ve all seen lots of movies about the Wild West, but none of them can portray the shocking truth like the story Caleb Pirtle delivers. The wicked, often scary history of a boom town that sprouted up after the discovery of oil, is brilliantly brought to life by Pirtle’s masterful story telling. This isn’t a thriller or mystery, but it delivers the same kind of emotional punch that edgy, traumatic fiction can elicit.
Let me fill you in on some of what I learned while reading this book about Borger. According to an eyewitness, “The dirt street was pocked with muddy chug holes. Slot machines lined the sidewalks. There were thousands of tents and unpainted wooden shacks that had been quickly put together. Metal shacks and anything that was easy to haul in had become a dwelling of some kind. I heard it reported that there were thirty-thousand people on Borger's three-mile-long street.”
Add bootleg liquor, gambling dens, dance halls with painted women, and an unsavory element of lawbreakers who had no respect for life, and you have the making of a wickedness that Borger exemplified. As for law and order, the lawmen were often as crooked as the lawbreakers. Can you imagine being a preacher and having to hold seven funerals in a day? The idea of people being shot dead, buried and forgotten was just par for the course in Borger.
If Borger’s criminals didn’t kill you, you had lots of other factors to keep you wondering if you’d survive long enough to see another sunrise.
Here’s another quote from the book that helps to bring home that point. “SOME BELIEVE BORGER is hell on earth. At least the fires are as hot, and the town lives in constant fear that a blaze will break out, always without warning, and consume them with a raging inferno”
With this extraordinary story, Pirtle takes the hard, cold facts of Borger’s history and weaves them into a gripping, true-to-life drama. The past becomes an “in your face” experience. I didn’t even know that Borger existed before I picked up this book. Now Caleb Pirtle’s searing yet precise and exciting descriptive tale has made it a place I can’t forget. That’s the genius of Caleb Pirtle.
This is definitely a book you’ll want to read!
The story of Borger Texas in the 1920s was recorded in numerous newspaper accounts. Those historical chronicles were researched and salvaged in the fifties by J Ron Hardin. They might never have come to light except for Caleb Pirtle. He gathered up the historical accounts that Hardin saved, and he breathed life into them. He did it in such a way that you can practically feel yourself choking on the polluted, oil-filled air of Borger.
We’ve all seen lots of movies about the Wild West, but none of them can portray the shocking truth like the story Caleb Pirtle delivers. The wicked, often scary history of a boom town that sprouted up after the discovery of oil, is brilliantly brought to life by Pirtle’s masterful story telling. This isn’t a thriller or mystery, but it delivers the same kind of emotional punch that edgy, traumatic fiction can elicit.
Let me fill you in on some of what I learned while reading this book about Borger. According to an eyewitness, “The dirt street was pocked with muddy chug holes. Slot machines lined the sidewalks. There were thousands of tents and unpainted wooden shacks that had been quickly put together. Metal shacks and anything that was easy to haul in had become a dwelling of some kind. I heard it reported that there were thirty-thousand people on Borger's three-mile-long street.”
Add bootleg liquor, gambling dens, dance halls with painted women, and an unsavory element of lawbreakers who had no respect for life, and you have the making of a wickedness that Borger exemplified. As for law and order, the lawmen were often as crooked as the lawbreakers. Can you imagine being a preacher and having to hold seven funerals in a day? The idea of people being shot dead, buried and forgotten was just par for the course in Borger.
If Borger’s criminals didn’t kill you, you had lots of other factors to keep you wondering if you’d survive long enough to see another sunrise.
Here’s another quote from the book that helps to bring home that point. “SOME BELIEVE BORGER is hell on earth. At least the fires are as hot, and the town lives in constant fear that a blaze will break out, always without warning, and consume them with a raging inferno”
With this extraordinary story, Pirtle takes the hard, cold facts of Borger’s history and weaves them into a gripping, true-to-life drama. The past becomes an “in your face” experience. I didn’t even know that Borger existed before I picked up this book. Now Caleb Pirtle’s searing yet precise and exciting descriptive tale has made it a place I can’t forget. That’s the genius of Caleb Pirtle.
This is definitely a book you’ll want to read!
Displaying 1 of 1 review