R.K. Sawyer and Jim Moloney teamed up to publish the story of The Tarpon Club of Texas & the Genius of E.H.R. Green. Their synopsis of the fabled sporting club and its founder, Edward ‘Ned’ Green, reads more like fiction than history. E.H.R. ‘Ned’ Green was the one-legged son of the world’s richest female business tycoon, Hetty Green, who was known in financial circles as “the Witch of Wall Street.” In 1892, Hetty sent her 24-year-old son to Texas as the youngest railroad president in the United States. Within just six years he became an accomplished railroad man, banker, politician, and founder of the world’s most extravagant hunting and fishing club – The Tarpon Club.
When Ned opened the Tarpon Club in 1899, it was the most expensive, expansive, and exclusive club the world had ever seen. Green located his club on St. Joseph Island adjacent to Aransas Pass in the Coastal Bend of Texas. Its membership was dubbed the “First Four Hundred Sportsmen of America,” a privileged group with “more politicians and businessmen than in any other similar organization in the United States” and whose “wealth combined reaches into the hundred-millions.” Newspapers announced an unparalleled membership roster that included President William McKinley and former president Grover Cleveland. Neither, we learn, were ever members. The truth was still exceptional. The Tarpon Club membership encompassed past, present, or future senators and governors, and businessmen such as New Yorker Edwin Gould, heir to the Jay Gould estate, C.P. Huntington, developer of America’s first trans-continental railroad, Isaac Ellwood of American Steel and Wire, and John Warne Gates of steel, Spindletop, and railroad fortune.
Outdoorsmen from the Tarpon Club killed so many ducks that sharks congregated in the shallows of Harbor Island by Aransas Pass 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, a time when the importance of conservation was only just beginning to enter the nation’s vocabulary.
Between 1898 and 1902, press from around the world covered everything Tarpon Club. In 1903 the coverage stopped. A year later the legendary club closed its doors. Writers speculate that Ned Green shuttered the club because of a broken heart, and others because he just got bored. Neither is consistent with Ned’s character. The Tarpon Club was calculated to further Green’s political ambitions. Founder Ned Green wanted to be governor of Texas but was sidelined because of his alliance with African Americans during a time of little racial tolerance, and his love for a Chicago prostitute in a state still resonating with Bible Belt sentimentality. When Ned’s political aspirations were thwarted, the Tarpon Club was no longer of value. Ned Green left Texas in 1910, leaving behind much more than the legacy of the Tarpon Club – the most renowned sporting club ever known.