More on this book
Kindle Notes & Highlights
In the fall of 1929, sitting there on his back porch in Houston, Roy Cullen was a happy man. However, 1930 would be another year.
Typical of the oddball adventurers drawn to Texas during the 1920s, Davis enticed Luling’s city fathers to help him drill for oil following a séance with the noted mystic Edgar Cayce. Combining his savings with theirs, Davis drilled a dry hole, then another, then four more. Finally, on a steamy August afternoon in 1922, his last dollar spent, his office furniture sold, his telephone disconnected, Davis drove into the countryside to see how his seventh and last attempt was faring. He pulled up and stared. A geyser of oil was shooting into the Texas sky.
The Luling field stretched for twelve miles, and after drilling dozens of wells along its length, Davis sold out to Magnolia for twelve million dollars in 1926, roughly three hundred million dollars in today’s dollars. He then embarked on a spending spree that has gone down as one of the strangest in the history of Texas Oil. He first threw a barbecue outside Luling, said to have been the largest in Texas history, to which he invited every citizen in three adjoining counties. Then he began handing out bonuses to his crew, a two-hundred-thousand-dollar check to each of five men. He built
...more
It was a colossol flop, but Davis paid to keep the play open for two long years at a cost, it was said, of $1.5 million. It was the beginning of the end.
A writer for The New Yorker found him living in Luling in 1948, broke, a man in his late seventies passing his last days playing bridge. He died in 1951, forgotten.
But what Clinton Williams Murchison lacked in physical appeal he made up for with a mind that whirred like a Swiss timepiece. Headstrong and independent, disdainful of his father’s stuffy ways, young Clint was Tom Sawyer with an abacus, the kind of seven-year-old who skinned squirrels and sold the little pelts for nickels. He loved the outdoors, spending lazy afternoons fishing with a Negro man outside town, ignoring the disapproving clucks of his neighbors. While his brothers took jobs at the bank, teenaged Clint was drawn to the excitement of the Athens lifestock pens, where roving traders
...more
Within days America entered World War I and Clint, impatient and eager to see the world, enlisted.
He was heading to Fort Worth to work with a young oilman who had bombarded him with letters of the money to be made in North Texas, his old peach-picking pal Sid Richardson.
One protégé, the evangelist Billy Graham, once said, “Sid Richardson told me years ago, ‘Don’t put anything in writing. If you use the telephone, they can never use it against you.’ ”
A portrait of Richardson hangs in the Permian Basin Hall of Fame and Museum in Midland, but Richardson’s is the only biographical file at the facility that is restricted—reviewable only with the family’s approval.
Family stories suggest that Richardson, unlike his friend Clint Murchison, was not exactly a go-getter. When he was sixteen he took a dollar-a-day after-school job at a cotton compress, but was fired for laziness.
But Richardson’s career would be marked by an ability to befriend those who could help him most, and one suspects that sixteen-year-old Sid Richardson’s primary interest in eleven-year-old Clint Murchison was his father’s money. The elder Murchison, in fact, later lent Richardson several thousand dollars to buy cattle. Taking Clint under his arm wasn’t just a good deed. It was smart business.
His brother-in-law, “Doc” Bass, was dabbling in the oil business, and it was probably on Bass’s suggestion that Richardson decided to find work in the oil fields.
Richardson once said this job came to an end after he engaged in a fistfight with a bookkeeper. The fight, however, impressed one of his bosses, who decided to send him back out into the field, this time as an oil scout in Louisiana. Scouts are the oil industry’s happy spies, spending their days driving from well to well, checking production trends, gauging competitors’ strategies, and picking up rumors.
They said, ‘If that dunce can make so much money, we’ll go, too.’ ” One of those impressed was young Clint Murchison.
His favorite book was the dictionary, which he employed to adorn his vocabulary with ever-larger words;
Richardson, meanwhile, hated nothing so much as pretension.
Richardson presented himself as the essence of the Texas good ol’ boy, joshing, laughing, and cursing in a thick backwoods accent. In later years, if a subordinate or family member made a mistake, Richardson would scowl and call him a dunce or a knucklehead; then, just as his target appeared crestfallen, he would grab him around the shoulders for a hug. “Sid,” says one longtime friend, “could just make you feel great.
When completing a trade, Murchison and Richardson usually made sure to retain a minority interest in the sold lease, allowing them to cash in on other men’s wells months and sometimes years after cutting the original deal.
If Gulf found oil, though, nearby leases would skyrocket in value. When Richardson heard that a team of Gulf executives from far-off Pittsburgh was to visit the well any day, he hustled into town and pulled Murchison out of a poker game. They piled into a car and drove to the drill site, told the night crew they were the Gulf men, and quizzed them on the well, which, as it turned out, the drillers were expecting to be a gusher. By the next morning Richardson and Murchison had bought up every available lease nearby—by one account, $50,000 worth. When the well came in not long after, they
...more
The wedding, representing the union of two of East Texas’s most prominent families, was the social event of the year in Tyler.
newlyweds left the reception in a yellow Rolls-Royce, Clint’s wedding gift to Anne. For Christmas he gave Anne’s father a mink coat.
It was then he began to display his true genius. For the first time he actually began drilling his own oil wells. Chronically short of cash—like most wildcatters—he would trade a share in one lease for a rig to drill another; once he got the rig, he would trade shares in its production for another rig, and so on. He called it “financing by finaglin’ ”; other oilmen watched him in awe.
Unlike older oilmen like Roy Cullen who still believed in creekology, Murchison put his faith in science.
Ernest Closuit, whom he lured from Gulf. Within months the two began to find oil in commercial quantities—several of his strikes lay on the vast Waggoner Ranch—and Clint soon moved Anne into a rented home of their own.
By then Murchison was no longer working with Richardson. Exactly why has never been explained, although family members speculate that as a bachelor Richardson was willing to take more risks.
eventually generated enough cash that they were able to add a side business that drilled wells for other oilmen, called “contract drilling.
like Richardson, what Murchison really wanted was to be a gentleman rancher.
Then, much as happened at Spindletop, a local attorney named Rupert G. Ricker began buying leases around his hometown of Big Lake, a flyspeck located in the high mesa country two hundred miles west of San Antonio. When Ricker ran out of money, the leases passed to one of his old army chums, who with a partner hoped to sell the land to a major company to drill. Finding no takers, and facing the expiration of their leases, they were forced to actually drill a well. As fate would have it, it was a gusher, the fabled Santa Rita No. 1, and it triggered a massive land rush across West Texas.
In 1926 a rancher named Ira Yates, having pestered oil scouts for years to drill a hole beneath his land in Pecos County—Roy Cullen had turned down the opportunity—finally succeeded in having a well drilled; it, too, was a gusher, opening the legendary Yates Field, one of the largest ever found in Texas.
The opening of the Hendricks Field, however, triggered the birth of a consummate Texas boomtown, dubbed Wink, which sprouted in a cattle pasture and within months was home to ten thousand oil workers, speculators, prostitutes, gamblers, and merchants to feed them.
One night while he and Closuit were meeting in San Antonio, their test well came in strong. Within weeks they had a dozen more just like it. The problem was, there was no place to put the oil. For the moment, Murchison did what oilmen had always done: he built two giant, five-hundred-thousand-barrel storage tanks. The nearest railhead was at Pyote, south of Wink, but there was no way to get the oil there. Though he knew nothing about pipelines, Murchison decided to try to build one.
Then, walking down Wink’s muddy main thoroughfare one evening, Murchison had a thought: Why not offer gas heating and light to the locals? He already had the pipe; it took a matter of weeks to lay it down one side of the street. Residents were invited to tap into it anywhere they could, five dollars a month for a home, ten dollars for a business.
Murchison incorporated the Wink Gas Company and built lines to Pecos, Barstow, and Pyote.
Southern Union Gas Company.
Murchison would arrange and build the pipelines, Closuit would drill for the gas, and Frank Murchison was sent to Chicago to begin raising money.
Murchison operated this way the rest of his life; as the son of a banker, he knew he could always find a gullible loan officer somewhere.
“If you are honest and you are trying, your creditors will play ball,
150 miles across the Continental Divide to link Santa Fe and Albuquerque to the gas wells in the mountains. It was an engineering effort that would have daunted lesser men. Murchison surveyed the route from an airplane, dropping flag-tipped bags of flour to mark the route he wanted. Roads needed to be laid across canyons and mountainsides, then huge sections of pipe trucked in and buried, often in rain- and snowstorms. The pipe alone cost three million dollars, all of which Murchison got on credit.
main trade creditor, the Oilfield Supply Company.
Construction had just begun in the fall of 1929 when the stock market crashed. In a matter of weeks America sank into a national depression. Murchison watched in dismay as his cash flow sputtered, coughed, then finally stopped altogether. He couldn’t pay his workers, endangering the entire pipeline project. One week he made payroll only by borrowing forty thousand dollars from one of his father’s friends. When the pipeline reached a point seven miles outside Albuquerque, they ran out of money once more. Only when Wofford Cain appealed to the mayor to return a portion of their cash bond was the
...more
All through the worst months of the Depression during 1930 and 1931 Murchison signed up new customers for Southern Union, and barely two years after its founding he could boast service to forty-three towns in six states
“No,” Murchison said with a smile. “If you’re gonna owe money, owe more than you can pay, then the people can’t afford to foreclose.
In 1928, according to his grandsons, O’Brien was on the verge of bankruptcy. His only hope, one he shared with every rancher west of the Pecos, was oil.
He gathered his sons, borrowed a derrick from a water-driller, and managed to get down several hundred feet before giving up, the apparent victim of a broken drill bit. Desperate, his bank threatening to foreclose, O’Brien drove into Monahans and found a doughy, down-on-his-luck character who said he was an oilman. He introduced himself as Sid Richardson.
Whatever holes he drilled, however, came up dry. He had no cash flow, and no way to repay the bank. But he still had credit at the equipment-rental compounds in Winkler County, and with a borrowed rig he struck oil on George O’Brien’s ranch in early 1929.
Most Fridays he drove his maroon Chevrolet in from West Texas, washed the dust from his clothes, then headed to Dallas, where Clint Murchison had purchased an old polo club and was transforming it into a family compound.
There Richardson joined a revolving group of young oilmen who drank and cursed and played poker through the long weekends. Monday morning he would head west again. It was a good life, soon to end.
He wandered from farm to farm talking about oil prospects, but seemed to spend much of his time tending to several elderly widows in Rusk County, over toward the Louisiana line. The ladies gave him tea and afternoon conversation, and their mineral rights.
What the old gent didn’t mention was that he was down to his last forty-five dollars and had found the widows after reading their husbands’ obituaries in the Dallas newspapers.
