The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes

by Bryan Burrough

Joiner was the salesman. Lloyd was his “expert,” the one who compiled data into thick geological reports, much of it nonsense. They never found serious amounts of oil, but—and this was the point—they did manage to raise enough money to make a living. Barely.

“Geological, Topographical and Petroliferous Survey, Portion of Rusk County, Texas

The next well, he promised, would be the gusher. At that point, Joiner got lucky. A Humble Oil team struck oil in a new field barely sixty miles southwest. The strike came from a previously unknown stand, the Woodbine. Suddenly all anyone in East Texas wanted to talk about was the Woodbine. Joiner wasted no time capitalizing on the news, selling twenty-five-dollar shares in a third Daisy Bradford well to dozens of local families, raising enough to lure a first-class driller over from Shreveport, a man named Ed Laster.

In fact, a Sinclair Oil scout found Laster’s sample in a barrel that same night, but dismissed it as a common wildcatter’s ruse called “salting the well,” aimed at enticing a larger oil company to buy the well.

Then, just as preparations neared completion that afternoon, a car drove up. A man got out, a hefty six-footer wearing a shirt and tie and a straw boater. His name was H. L. Hunt.

He was a strange man, a loner who lived deep inside his own peculiar mind, a self-educated thinker who was convinced—absolutely convinced—that he was possessed of talents that bordered on the superhuman.

He may have been right: in the annals of American commerce there has never been anyone quite like Haroldson Lafayette Hunt. At a time when itinerant wildcatters like Sid Richardson couldn’t find time for a wife let alone a family, Hunt would build three, two in secret. If they made a movie of his life, no one would believe it could be true.

He was born in 1889, the youngest of eight children reared by an aging Confederate veteran who had moved north after the war, to a farm in downstate Illinois, seventy miles east of St. Louis. His family called him June, short for Junior, and he was barely walking when his parents realized his intelligence bordered on that of a prodigy. In later years his siblings swore he could read the newspapers aloud at the age of three. His capacity for mathematics became a local legend; people marveled how the child could multiply large sums in his head. Early on, June’s math skill manifested itself in a fascination with card games, a passion he would indulge to his dying day.

odd pride in later years, breast-feeding him until he was seven years old.

his father, a stern but savvy man known as “Hash” Hunt, had built his initial eighty-acre farm into a five-hundred-acre spread, among the largest in Fayette County.

And so, one day in 1905, sixteen-year-old H. L. Hunt packed a deck of cards in his bedroll and ran away from home.

narrowly missing the San Francisco earthquake of 1906—he had left the city just days before to try out for a semipro baseball team in Reno.

Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, when he found the telegram from his parents. Leonard was dead; of what it wasn’t said. It was February 1910. Hunt returned for the funeral, then returned west for a year, until March 11, 1911, when he received the call that his father had died. Once again he went home.

Lake Village, in the heart of Arkansas’s best cotton country, just inland from the Mississippi River in the state’s southeast corner.

That first year his cotton crop was wiped out by the first Mississippi River flood in thirty-five years, but Hunt recovered nicely.

In time he made as much gambling as he did from the cotton fields.

He didn’t drink.

He developed a reputation for honesty. When he borrowed money for a harvest, he repaid it on time. He dated a girl here and there, but for the most part he kept to himself, drawing about him a sense of mystery in the little southern town. When he was flush, Hunt took a train to the big-money poker games in Memphis and New Orleans, where he adopted the moniker Arizona Slim, a nickname he kept the rest of his life.

Then twenty-five, Lyda Bunker was a plain, plumpish schoolteacher from a prominent family, a quiet, stable woman who was about to be married to another man. Hunt had been seeing Lyda’s sister.

Their first child, a daughter they named Margaret, arrived in November 1915. Two years later came a boy, Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr. They called him Hassie.

That’s when his luck ran out. Believing the cotton boom was poised to end, he placed a massive bet that prices would go down; when they didn’t, he lost everything, including what little money he had put away. According to family lore, Hunt only saved his farm at a high-stakes poker game in New Orleans, during which he managed to turn his last hundred dollars into one hundred thousand dollars.

His epiphany, as Hunt remembered it years later, came in January 1921, as he was negotiating to buy land from a family named Noell.

“What is it that you are trying to do?” he asked himself. “Are you going to bury yourself here for the remainder of your life? ” Why not rent out the land and try something new?

All Hunt could raise was fifty dollars from a trio of gambling buddies. It was enough. He took his pals and boarded the train to El Dorado.

This, Hunt saw, was a place a smart man could make easy money. “All I need,” he muttered, “is a deck of cards and some poker chips.

Hunt made a killing. Again and again he raked in big pots, three times taking the biggest game in town. He quickly amassed enough cash to buy his way into one of the town’s few hotel rooms, and within days he had enough to rent a shack at the foot of South Washington where he opened his own dingy cardroom. Within weeks he had saved enough to take over the first floor of a nicer building up the street, a large single room he packed with card tables, chairs, and floor areas to throw dice. Hunt’s ad hoc casino was a tidy, safe place in a violent, dirty town; he earned a good reputation and caused no trouble.

As Hunt told the story years later, a group of twenty or thirty white-robed Klansmen arrived outside his establishment one night that summer. “Shut this place down,” the leader yelled. “Shut it down or else. . . .

In the first instance of what came to be known as the “Hunt luck,” that first well, the Hunt-Pickering No. 1, struck oil, a decent amount, before petering out several weeks later. Rather than buy a thirty-five-hundred-dollar pump jack to restart it, they sold the well to another independent, who promptly went out of business before paying. It was a dispiriting experience, but as Hunt noted years later, “it served the purpose of getting me started in the oil business.

sweet-talk a farmer named Rowland into assigning Hunt a lease on his forty-acre farm in return for a twenty-thousand-dollar IOU

Hunt, meanwhile, began drilling in Rowland’s fields, and in January 1922 his second well came in strong, five thousand barrels a day. He soon started two more, and both proved good producers as well.

He began to borrow from the El Dorado banks, always repaying in full and on time. Soon he had drilled enough wells that he found himself with employees, who became known around town as “Hunt men.” When Hunt men had troubles of their own, their boss listened, nodded his head, and loaned them money. They proved loyal and indefatigable workers, in time helping Hunt hit a string of strong producers in the fields outside El Dorado.

Usually busy in the oil fields or, at night, at a poker game, Hunt was rarely at home.

Their new house was as much a receptable for their savings as a place to live.

But in the weeks after his daughter’s death, it was Hunt who underwent the most profound change. Maybe it was the grief. Maybe at the age of thirty-five, it was an early midlife crisis. Maybe it had been his plan all along. Whatever it was, Hunt decided he had no interest in living out his days a country oilman in the Arkansas boondocks, monitoring oil flows and depositing checks.

Four months after his daughter’s death he suddenly sold all his holdings for a six-hundred-thousand-dollar promissary note, then had a bank discount it for cash. He was leaving the oil game, he told Lyda. With the money in hand, Hunt announced he was taking an extended trip—alone—to Florida. He said he was thinking of investing in the state’s postwar real estate boom, and maybe he believed it. But it wasn’t real estate he was looking for, as an operetta he began composing on the train to Tampa suggests. He called it, “Whenever Dreams Come True, I’ll Be with You.” “Up to the time I met you,” he wrote, “life was as drab as can be.... Something was missing for me. You are my love now forever . . .” Leaving his pregnant wife and three young children behind in Arkansas, H. L. Hunt headed to Florida in search of romance.

He said his name was Bailey, and just her luck, he was interested in real estate. Frania gave him her phone number. Later, she took a call from a man who identified himself only as “

When they returned to Tampa, he asked her to dinner. She politely declined. He called again a few days later. Once again they drove out to see the property, and this time when they returned Hunt asked her to his hotel room. She slapped him, saying she wasn’t that kind of girl.

In no time Frania, rootless and lonely, began to weaken beneath Major Hunt’s romantic onslaught, so much so that when Hunt, during a long drive to St. Petersburg on the night of November 10, mentioned marriage, she was helpless to deny him.

Dazed, she signed some kind of ledger, as did Hunt, and before she knew it, the Latin gentleman was reading aloud from a Bible.

After honeymooning in Orlando, Hunt said he needed to return to Louisiana for business. He promised to send for her and, after another brief return to Tampa he did, in February 1926, telling her to meet him in New Orleans for Mardi Gras.

Hunt disappeared on frequent business trips, but for now she was happy. He didn’t make the birth, a boy who bore his father’s initials, Howard Lee Hunt.

Frania was deep into her pregnancy that summer, he explained it would be necessary for the family to move to Dallas. There Frania unpacked her things in a two-story brick home at 4230 Versailles Avenue, in the city’s nicest residential area, Highland Park. Not long after, she gave birth to their third child, a girl they named Helen Hilda Hunt. Once again Hunt couldn’t make it to the hospital. He was too busy, off on important business in the remote East Texas pines, where he had stumbled on a down-on-his-luck wildcatter named Columbus Joiner, a man with whom he was about to make history.

Their new house was finished, a three-story, eight-bedroom English Revival mansion that was easily the largest in the area. They named it The Pines.

In February 1926, just as Frania was moving into her new apartment in Shreveport a hundred miles to the southwest, Lyda gave birth to a second son, a twelve-pound butterball they named Nelson Bunker Hunt. Three years later came a third, Herbert, named for the president Hunt favored, Herbert Hoover. Still later came a fourth, Lamar.

No one in the family kissed—ever. Once, when Hassie went to kiss his mother’s cheek, Hunt shooed him away. “Stop that,” he said. “Don’t be kissing people.” No one was quite sure what Hunt had against kissing, but his authority in the family remained unquestioned, as it always would.

Hunt, like most oilmen, put a premium on intelligence-gathering, seeking to learn everything he could about existing and aborning wells.

For the first time he incorporated his own company, Hunt Oil, and gathered around him a half-dozen seasoned oil scouts, sending them nosing around southern Arkansas and especially several new fields opening in northern Louisiana. Hunt’s men, led by the ever-present Old Man Bailey, proved top notch. Time and again they identified the best spots to drill. Hunt struck oil in the Tullos-Urania Field outside Monroe, Louisiana, then at several places near Shreveport. By 1929 he had opened offices in El Dorado and Shreveport and was operating more than one hundred wells, though with oil selling at barely $1.25 a barrel he was forced to plow most of his profits back into the search for still more acreage. He had emerged as one of the region’s largest independent operators, a wealthy man by Arkansas standards, but still far from serious riches.

For the first time his eyes turned to Texas. The West Texas boom that lured Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson out onto the plains also attracted Hunt. He and Old Man Bailey drove west in 1927, putting together a drilling block near Ballinger in Runnels County, but the few wells they attempted came up dry. The West Texas fields were large compared to those in Louisiana, however, and Texas continued to intrigue Hunt.

Miller was marketing a new drill stem that Hunt used; Hunt, in fact, was one of his best customers, and Miller wasn’t above freshening the relationship with the odd tip. “There’s a wildcatter working down in East Texas, and he may have something going,” Miller said. “He might call on us to run a drill-stem test on his well, and I thought you might be interested.

Columbus Joiner and his crew prepared for the test. One of Joiner’s men, M. M. Miller’s brother Clarence, saw the car drive up and scrambled down from the derrick. After a minute Joiner ambled over. “H. L. Hunt,” Miller said, “meet C. M. Joiner.