The race was to lease as much promising acreage as possible from ranchers and farmers and then begin the process of proving up the resource. All shales, it was soon learned, were not the same; some were more productive than others. One wanted to find the “sweet spots,” the potentially most productive acreage, before anyone else. The advance men of this particular revolution were the thousands of “land men” who knocked on screen doors and left notes in rural mailboxes and got landowners to trade their heretofore worthless mineral rights in exchange for the possibility of future royalties—and
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