The true story of Ira Yates: A Study in Faith

Ira Yates was born in West Texas in 1859 and grew up around Texas Longhorn cattle. Starting late, he attended public school for only 3 weeks before starting to work on a ranch. With his brothers, he drove herds of Longhorns up the Chisholm Trail to the cow-towns in Kansas.

He always thought of West Texas as a place of opportunity, but two times early in his adult life he lost everything he had. Once he got a job filling pot-holes in the streets of San Angelo to earn money to feed his family. He tried running a butcher shop and then a livery stable, always struggling to make ends meet. In 1911, in partnership with a friend, Yates bought a ranch in Crockett County, TX. In 1913, while still running that ranch, he gave 216 head of cattle valued at fifty dollars per head, ($10,800) for a failing dry-goods store in Rankin, TX, despite pleadings of his wife and the advice of friends who warned him against the crazy venture.

The store was going pretty good when, in1915 he traded the store for a ranch that covered 25 sections of land (16,640 acres) about 60 miles from the Mexican Border, land that friends called “worthless.” A previous owner told Yates “a crow couldn’t live on that land, the water is scarce, greasy and smells bad and the place is not worth the taxes due on it." In that part of West Texas it is dry and dusty and it takes an average of 10 acres of land, often 15 or more acres, to support a single cow. Nevertheless, Yates made the deal and moved his wife and nine children to that dry desert, worthless country.

In 1926, when Yates was about to lose everything yet again, a young oil explorer approached Yates and said, “Let me drill 4 exploratory wells on your land. You never know what we might find.”  Ira Yates answered, “Why not. I have nothing to lose.”

At 1,100 feet, the drillers struck oil it what became one of the largest major oil fields in the world at that time, and they did it on Ira Yates “worthless” West Texas ranch. It was the day before his 67th birthday. Within months his wells were flowing 80,000 barrels a day. At today’s price, that would be $5,760,000 a day! People were coming from all over the country trying to lease small parcels of land with drilling rights from Yates. If they drilled and struck oil, Yates would get royalties, money from every barrel they pumped out of the ground. One day as he sat on his front porch, he sold $180,000 worth of leases.

Ira Yates had owned that “worthless” land, including the mineral rights, for 11 years and had struggled to feed his few cows and his family. 11 years of wondering how long he could keep it up, sometimes wondering where his next meal would come from.

For all of that 11 years that oil had been there, right under his feet as he walked that dry, sun-baked land. For all of that time, untold millions of dollars were legally his, available to the “believer”, but unseen to those with no vision. For all of those years, he had been a billionaire but was unable to access that wealth because he could not see “the evidence of things not seen”. Remember that “greasy water”? That was “the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.”

It took a young “evangelist”, an oil explorer with a vision to make Ira Yates see the possibilities.

Remember these words of God

Proverbs 29:18 Where there is no vision, the people perish:

Romans 8:28 And we know that all things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are the called according to his purpose.

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Hebrews 11:1 Now faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen.

Hebrews 11:6 But without faith it is impossible to please him: for he that cometh to God must believe that he is, and that he is a rewarder of them that diligently seek him