Eagle Ford Giving New Life to Ghost Town

On a hot Saturday at high noon, Helena seemed like the frontier town it once was.

Spurs jangled. A crowd gathered to watch a gunfight. Shots rang out.

In the self-proclaimed "toughest town on earth," where horse thieves, cattle rustlers, brawls and vendettas were part of the fabric of early Texas life, the sheriff and the son of a wealthy rancher died in a re-enactment of Helena's most famous gunfight.

It was all part of the annual Indian Summer Heritage Festival in Helena, now a ghost town at the heart of the Eagle Ford Shale.

In its heyday, the original Karnes County seat had more than 500 residents. Now, the area around Helena has a collection of historic buildings, honey mesquite, gently rolling coastal prairie and oil -- lots of oil.

The Eagle Ford Shale is 20,000 square miles and swoops across 26 counties. But at the heart of one of the country's biggest energy fields sits Helena, which once faded into economic irrelevance.

Analysts with Wood Mackenzie say that just 4 percent of the Eagle Ford's acreage produces 25 percent of the field's crude oil and condensate, the light oil recently green-lighted by the federal government for export by some South Texas operators. Helena is at the center of an area that sits atop a deep geologic formation called the Karnes Trough, considered "the core of the core" -- a place with prolific wells.

Helena has evidence of its decline: historical markers, cemeteries, a shuttered restaurant and a tumbledown gas station with a rusting metal roof. But the ghost-town title doesn't entirely fit: There's also a museum in the old courthouse, a historic mansion under renovation, a restaurant and bar ("Beer. Ice. Food") and a man camp to house oil-field workers. Trucks ferrying crude oil rumble nonstop through the nearby intersection of Texas 80 and Farm-to-Market 81, about 60 miles southeast of San Antonio.

"You see the rural life and the oil companies and coming together, melding together," Sue Carter, president of the Karnes County Historical Society, told the San Antonio Express-News.

Helena had a church, a college, school, Masonic lodge, drugstore, blacksmith shop, two hotels, general stores, two newspapers and a jail. It also had 13 saloons. A "Helena Duel" had opponents tied together at the left wrist and a three-inch knife in their right hand.

It was the biggest town for miles and a trading stop between San Antonio and the coast. During the Civil War, Helena was key point for moving Confederate cotton to the port in Matamoros.

An 1884 gunfight is thought to have doomed the town, though.

At a saloon the day after Christmas in 1884, Emmett Butler shot the Karnes County sheriff and went down in a hail of bullets when he tried to get away. His father, legendary trail driver and rancher W.G. Butler, soon came to claim his son's body with 25 of his cowboys.

When he called out to demand the name of the person who killed his son, the only reply was silence. Butler made a vow. Tommy Knotts of the Bandera Cattle Co., the group that re-enacted the fight, played W.G. Butler at the Indian Summer Heritage Festival.

"This town killed my boy," he yelled. "I'm going to kill this town."

It was just like 1884. Or maybe not.

There are many versions of what happened. Some say that W.G. Butler's vow to "kill the town" was only a romantic legend, albeit one good enough to have inspired a TV episode of "Death Valley Days," the series that featured stories based on the American West.

In all of the Helena stories, there is a lot of drinking and shooting, the death of Sheriff Edgar Leary and Emmett Butler, and the same ultimate result: Helena dies, too.

The San Antonio and Aransas Pass Railway Co. soon wanted to pass through Karnes County, but Helena didn't raise the money or offer the right-of-way the rail line wanted. So Butler offered a slice of his own land instead. The railroad missed Helena by eight miles and the town withered. Businesses and people drained away south toward Karnes City and Kenedy. Helena lost the courthouse and county seat. The school closed.

Helena became one of at least 200 Texas ghost towns. By some counts, Thomas Tunstall of the University of Texas at San Antonio has said, there are as many as 1,000 ghost towns in the state.

Butler descendant Karen Russell Ewing drove from Duncanville for the re-enactment, festival and a family reunion.

Which version of the history involving her great-great Uncle Emmett does Ewing think is correct? "I have no idea," she said, shaking her head and adding, "Poor Emmett."

Sue Carter, who is W.G. Butler's great-great granddaughter, wishes he was remembered more for something other than a vendetta. Butler owned 75,000 acres and drove an estimated 100,000 head of cattle to market. "He's always remembered as the man who killed Helena. He doesn't get any credit for being the man who started Karnes City," Carter said.

Today, the Karnes County Historical Society owns 16 acres in Helena, all of it leased to Marathon Oil Corp. The society expects to get its first royalty check soon, which it will use to keep repairing buildings. Employees and contractors of ConocoPhillips, an operator in the area, have helped with electrical work and taking the inventory of historic items.

The stone courthouse is a museum that's a treasure trove of historic photos, clothing and artifacts. It has everything from old school desks to stacks of school books, criminal dockets and marriage certificates. Longtime Karnes County ranching and farming families who have stumbled into oil wealth have been helping pay for restoration work.

"Thanks to the Eagle Ford, there's a lot more resources and more disposable income," said H.B. "Trip" Ruckman III, the president of Karnes County National Bank and a descendant of John Ruckman, one of Helena's founders.

There are several buildings on the 16 acres, including the 1873 Helena Courthouse, jail cells, the old post office building, a farm house and the 1878 John Ruckman House, listed on the National Register of Historic Places and undergoing a restoration. John Ruckman was a postmaster, merchant and rancher who frantically tried to raise enough money to get the rail line to come through Helena when Butler offered the railroad free land.

Descendant Paul Ruckman, Trip Ruckman's cousin, remembers spending the night in the mansion as a child. His great aunts, John Ruckman's unmarried daughters, lived there for years and donated the home in the 1960s. It sat empty for decades.

"For many years, this was a favorite house for all the high school beer parties," Ruckman said. "Over the years we operated on sort of a shoestring. We had local handymen come out and do this and that. An extensive restoration plan was done in 1980. We got this wonderful plan and didn't have any money to implement it. This is the first time we've really been able to take a comprehensive look at things."

The Eagle Ford is unlikely to bust in Helena anytime soon. By 2020, Wood Mackenzie expects Eagle Ford to reach 2 million barrels per day, with crude and condensate production equal to the entire Alaska North Slope at its peak.

The firm says that 60 percent of the production will be generated from 15 percent of the field; 25 percent of the production will come from 4 percent of the area.

Cody Rice, an analyst with Wood Mackenzie, said that the best areas include northern Karnes County moving east into DeWitt County. Companies are packing wells tightly, a technique called "downspacing."

"Karnes-DeWitt is the core of the play. The density of development there is the highest of anywhere in the play. The economics are pretty aggressive," Rice said. "Wells are prolific, with an attractive mix of products. They've got the perfect combination of high (initial production) rates with lucrative product split heavily weighted to liquids. Those are big, big wells."

A good Eagle Ford well makes around 500 barrels of oil per day. Initial production falls off quickly, but companies with acreage in the Karnes Trough sometimes report initial rates of thousands of barrels per day, according to regulatory filings.

Crude oil is trading around $80 a barrel, and there are concerns that further dips will erode the shale boom. But Chris Smith of the firm Drillinginfo said that the "super core" of the Eagle Ford has a break-even at a price far lower than $80.

"There's still a lot of wells to be drilled. It's a large area," Smith said. "I think that gets into the $30s for a break-even." Other parts of the Eagle Ford offer good economics. But "nothing like the Karnes Trough," Smith said.

Carter hopes the oil boom will give the community a chance to preserve history in a way it couldn't afford to before. At the recent Indian Summer Heritage Festival, she held a microphone and welcomed more than 200 people. "Everybody be prepared for the shooting," she said.

Carter looked around the festival, a far cry from old Helena, with children sitting atop a gentle Texas longhorn named Tumbleweed.

"Let everybody in the petting zoo know we're going to be shooting the cannon. Hold the horses. Grab the babies. OK," Carter said, "Fire away."