The Tarpon Club of Texas

Hardcover, by R.K. Sawyer and Jim Moloney

In 1899, the Tarpon Club of Texas was the most expensive, and exclusive club the world had ever seen. E.H.R. “Ned” Green located the club on St. Joseph Island adjacent to Aransas Pass. Its membership was dubbed the “First Four Hundred Sportsmen of America,” a privileged group with “more politicians and businessmen that in any other similar organization in the United States” and whose “wealth combined reaches into the hundred-millions.”

Tarpon Club members killed so many ducks that sharks congregated in the shallows near Harbor Island to gorge on downed birds before they could be retrieved. In their pursuit of the tarpon – the silver king – club members smashed records and set standards in the nascent sport of big game fishing. It was America’s gilded sporting era.