Bryan Burrough (6 page)

Among those who liked the sound of Cullen’s strategy was Jim West, the cantankerous lumberman who had invested with Cullen from the beginning. West dabbled in oil himself, but his wells had all come up dry. One Saturday in 1927 he called Cullen to his downtown office and made him an offer. As Cullen remembered the conversation twenty-five years later, West said: “I’ve got three million dollars lying around. And I’ve got the West Production Company, which don’t amount to much. I’ll put the three million in my oil company, and give you one-fourth interest—if you’ll go in with me. You’ll be president—and have complete charge of the company.” Cullen said he’d think it over.

The following Tuesday, having heard nothing from Cullen, West telephoned him again. “I made a proposition to you last Saturday, and since then I haven’t heard a damn thing from you,” West said. “I offered to give you almost a million dollars, and you haven’t taken the trouble to reply. What’s your answer, Roy? ”

“Not interested,” Cullen said.

For a moment West was speechless. “Not interested!” he barked. “My God—what do you want!”

“Tell you what I’ll do,” Cullen said. “I’ll go in the oil business with you—fifty-fifty. For every dollar you put in, I’ll put in a dollar. But only on condition that I have full charge—no interference.” West went quiet for a moment. “Roy,” he said after a moment, “I didn’t know you had that kind of money.”

He didn’t. “I’ll put up five thousand dollars,” Cullen said, “and you put up five thousand. We’ll each have half-interest.”

West didn’t understand. “I offered you three million dollars, Cullen—and you’d get a quarter of that (outright). You’ll turn that down and put up five thousand of your own money? ”

“That’s right,” Cullen said. That way, he went on, “I won’t be working for you.”

Later they flipped a coin to determine whose name went first. Cullen won; the new partnership was named Cullen & West. Cullen purchased two big Union Tool drilling rigs—the first he owned outright—and moved them to the east side of the old Blue Ridge Field in Fort Bend County, south of Houston. The Blue Ridge dome had produced some good wells beginning in 1913, but had since dwindled. West objected. “I’ve drilled wells on that side of Blue Ridge,” he said. “There ain’t any oil there. You’ll be throwing the money away.”

Cullen looked balefully at his new partner. “I’m supposed to be in charge—isn’t that it, Jim? ” he said.

“Sure you are,” West said. “But—”

“Then that’s where we drill,” Cullen said.

Drilling on a site known as the Bassett Blakely tract, Cullen again headed straight for the Frio—and brought in a good well, nearly sixty thousand barrels a day. In quick succession he brought in four more by the end of 1927, all solid producers. Increasingly confident he could find oil in untouched sands deep below the abandoned fields around Houston, Cullen then announced his intention to enter the derelict Humble Field. Sixteen miles northeast of downtown Houston, Humble was one of the state’s oldest oil fields, a salt dome discovered in 1903, two years after Spindletop. Its production, like that of many older fields, had dwindled. By the time Cullen began studying its geophysical data, Humble was an oil ghost town, littered with the skeletons of abandoned derricks and pockmarked with unused waste pits.

Jim West thought Cullen had lost his mind. “They’ve drilled so many wells out there that there isn’t room to put down another hole,” he protested, “even if there was any oil left, and there ain’t.” Laying out a map, Cullen pointed to a spot he wanted to drill near the field’s southeast corner. West asked when he planned to inspect the site. Cullen said he didn’t intend to. “You’re gonna lease it without even looking at it?” West asked. “Are you crazy, Roy?”

“We have geophysical reports on the entire area,” Cullen said. “Looking at it won’t add anything to that. It won’t mean anything.”

“Well, it will to me!” West barked. “I’m going out there!”

“Go ahead, Jim,” Cullen said. “I’d go with you, but I’ll be too busy getting ready to drill it.”

West returned from his inspection trip more determined than ever to stop his partner from drilling. “You’ll have to tear down old derricks to find a place to drill a hole,” he said. “You’ll have to fill in the slush pits. That field is like a piece of Swiss cheese!”

Cullen ignored him. The two men were temperamental opposites, and he suspected their partnership wouldn’t last long. Out at Humble, his men cleared away the old derricks and readied a drill site. As they drilled down toward the Miocene, Cullen began studying the old wells nearby. Most had filled with salt water. Poring over well logs and his library books, Cullen understood that three thousand feet below the field lay a band of blue mud, what the drillers called gumbo. Below that was five feet of salt water, followed by more gumbo. It flooded the wells, and previous drillers had given up trying to get through it.

This was the first challenge a deep driller on the Gulf Coast faced, but Cullen thought he had found a way through it. Once the drill bit sank into the lowest layer of gumbo, he instructed his tool-pusher to set their casings, an outer pipe that shielded the hole from water, all the way down through the salt water to the gumbo. It worked; both the salt water and the gumbo were kept out of the well. Free to go deeper, Cullen hit a pool of pure “pipeline” oil—oil so free of impurities it could be pumped directly into a big company’s pipeline.

But Cullen was determined to go even deeper, into virgin dirt beneath the Humble Field. That, however, brought him face-to-face with the most serious obstacle a deep driller could encounter, the dreaded “heaving shale.” Jackson shale, as geologists termed it, lay about thirty-five hundred feet below most Gulf Coast fields, a tier of crumbled rock that pressed in around a drill bit, freezing it. No driller had defeated it, and with other shallow fields to attack, few had tried very hard.

Cullen ordered his driller, Dalton Brown, to “thin up,” that is, pump water into the hole instead of drilling mud, the better to clear the broken shale from the drill bit. After what Cullen characterized as “a startled glance,” Brown tried it, and the drill began to spin more easily. Still, a thick “bridge” of shale lay at the bottom of the hole, and they needed to get through it. Cullen had his plan ready. It was late at night when he instructed Brown to use the drill bit as a pile driver, lifting it and dropping it onto the shale bridge in an effort to break through. He kept water pumping into the hole to keep the drill bit spinning freely. It took several hours but it worked, and by midnight, when Cullen lay down by the derrick to grab some sleep, they had penetrated the slushy, oil-bearing sand underneath, the sought-after Yegua sand. Four hours later Cullen heard Brown shout: “Wake up, Mr. Cullen. I think she’s coming in!”
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In the dim predawn light Cullen rose to see oil and gas spewing so violently from their hole that the four-inch flow line, which connected the well to a storage tank, had come loose and was wildly slashing the air. Cullen dashed to the storage tank, leaped atop it, and held the thrashing line until his crew could tie it down. It was the kind of daredevilry other operators might have avoided, but Cullen did it time and again, and his crews loved him for it. Years later, Lynn Meador remembered a dangerous blowout a Cullen crew encountered in Fort Bend County. One spark meant an explosion that would kill them all, but Cullen, who could easily have directed operations from the safety of his car, stayed in the thick of it on the derrick floor. When one young man panicked and ran, Cullen, covered in black oil, grabbed him by the belt and pulled him back. It took all day to maneuver a half-ton cement collar onto the well to cap it, and Cullen stayed through all of it.

“That was one of the many performances of his that have made those who know him admire him,” Meador said. “He was never a man to tell his employee, ‘You do this.’ When there was a dangerous task to be done, it was ‘Follow me.’ ”

Cullen brought in a series of big producers from the Yegua sand at Humble, opening the way not only for the field’s renewal, but the renewal of other Gulf Coast fields as well. It was his victory over the “heaving shale,” however, little known to anyone outside the oil business, that brought him the kind of recognition only a fifth-grade dropout could appreciate. Seven years later, in 1935, the University of Pittsburgh’s engineering department, after launching a quiet investigation into the factors that led to deeper drilling in Texas, awarded Cullen a doctor of science degree for his achievement.

After Humble, Cullen headed back to Blue Ridge and hit another series of big producers. At night he and Lillie sat out on the veranda in their rockers, sipping iced tea and talking about the children and their lives. Cullen was almost fifty by then, graying at the temples, and the money in his bank accounts indicated he was a millionaire, not that anyone noticed. Unlike so many other independents, he had so far resisted selling his wells, despite Jim West’s constant agitation to do so. 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.

W
hile Roy Cullen remained close to his home and family, working in the worn, discarded fields around Houston, wildcatters across the state were finding oil in new and uncharted areas. As at Ranger and Buckburnett in the 1910s, their discoveries triggered scrambles to amass acreage that overnight turned drowsy country villages into rollicking boomtowns: at Mexia, east of Waco, in 1921; at Luling, east of Austin, in 1922; then a series of gushers that pushed the oil frontier deep onto the empty plains of West Texas. The boomtowns became moveable feasts for young, energetic Texans who scurried from gusher to gusher, furiously buying and trading leases, drilling a well or three, then moving on to the next town when the frenzy died down.

For the first time a handful of wildcatters began to get seriously rich. Those first Texas oil millionaires, however, often found keeping their fortunes was tougher than making them. The classic case was a Massachusetts rubber heir named Edgar B. Davis, the mammoth 350-pound dreamer who found oil at Luling. 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 clubhouses for Luling—one for whites, one for blacks—then gave his hometown back in Massachusetts a check for one million dollars.

His fortune was already streaming through his fingers when, on a trip to San Antonio, Davis ran into an old friend, a onetime newspaperman named J. Frank Davis. Frank was down on his luck, so Edgar, on a whim, suggested he write a play. They came up with a topic, reincarnation, and Edgar pledged to finance the whole thing. In no time Frank Davis banged out a three-act drama he called
The Ladder.
It followed a group of characters from an English castle in 1344 through three reincarnations, the last in New York circa 1926. It was by all accounts a spectacularly awful play, which did nothing to dampen either Davis’s enthusiasm for it. Edgar enlisted a Broadway producer and staged tryout performances that summer in Detroit and Cleveland.

Despite reviews that were at best lukewarm, Davis insisted on conquering Broadway.
The Ladder
opened at the Mansfield Theatre on October 22, 1926, with a stalwart cast led by Antoinette Perry and Hugh Buckler. 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. As his money ran low, the state of Massachusetts sued Davis for back taxes. He couldn’t pay, and the Depression wiped him out. He went bankrupt in 1935. 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.

In the 1920s Texas was littered with men like Edgar Davis. Most remain forgotten. Some made millions. A few would make history.

Neck-deep in this adrenalized rush were two lifelong friends, keen-eyed country boys from the town of Athens, sixty miles southeast of Dallas. During their boyhoods Athens was a dirt-road-and-buggy village deep in the East Texas pines, three thousand or so farmers struggling to pry cotton from the infuriating sandy soil. The area had been settled only in the 1840s, and by 1900 its first family was the Murchisons, whose patriarch, Thomas Frank Murchison, migrated from Mississippi to East Texas and finally in 1855 to Athens, where he clerked at the general store.
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T.F., as he was known, soon started his own store and, after years of loaning money to men who couldn’t pay their bill, founded Athens’s first bank in 1890. The two-story brick building went up right on the square, adjacent to the Murchison store.

T. F. Murchison had six children, and when he died in 1902 he left everything to his three sons. Over time the second boy, John Weldon Murchison, took control of the bank. Wed in 1893, John and his wife, Clara, raised eight children in a Victorian home that took up an entire block on Tyler Street, known as the “street of plantation homes.” A whiff of the antebellum clung to all the Murchisons. Though he hadn’t fought in the Civil War, T.F. liked to be called “Colonel Murchison,” and he famously had little use for Yankees, easterners, or railroad men, attitudes that permeated his clan. In a town where dusty overalls were the rule, the Murchison children and grandchildren could be seen walking to the private Bruce Academy in polished shoes and tailored woolen clothes. The Murchisons “were sort of snobby,” one family acquaintance recalled. “They thought they were better than the rest of the people in Athens because they were Murchisons.”
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