Bryan Burrough (8 page)

Murchison was shy and would remain so all his life; if he didn’t absolutely have to talk to someone, he avoided it. Though capable of warmth around family and friends, strangers found him standoffish and occasionally rude. In sharp contrast, 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.”

In the summer of 1919 the hottest oil play in the country was centered around the raucous boomtown of Buckburnett, on the Red River border with Oklahoma. Richardson and Murchison, taking rooms at the YMCA, dived headlong into the thick of it, using their savings—and, it appears, a good chunk of money from Murchison’s father—to join the hectic trade in oil leases. It was a thrilling ride for two young country boys on the make, with muddy streets and prostitutes, wads of leases exchanged between grimy oilmen on every corner, and gunshots echoing in the night. Lease trading was all about oil field intelligence; the value of a lease fluctuated largely on rumor—that the land held oil beneath it, that a major oil company was set to drill an adjoining lease, that a nearby test well had come up dry. 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.

While Murchison could calculate royalty payments in his head, it was Richardson who did much of their snooping. Throughout his career, Richardson augmented his down-home charm with tricks that old friends call crafty but a neutral observer might consider sneaky. According to an oilman who knew him well in later years—hereinafter referred to as the Old Family Friend—Richardson once said he made his most daring bet at Buckburnett as he was studying a highly anticipated test well Gulf Oil was drilling on the Texas side of the Red River. It was what oilmen call a “tight hole,” that is, everything about it was top secret. 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 managed to quadruple their money.

They did well in those early months; in later years, Richardson claimed, probably inaccurately, that he made his first million at Buckburnett. Whatever he made, he didn’t keep it long. The two pals had been trading leases for barely nine months when disaster struck, at a time when almost all their money was tied up in drilling blocks along the Red River. In early 1920 the overheated commodities markets collapsed, forcing the price of oil down from $3.50 a barrel to a dollar. Richardson and Murchison awoke one morning to find all their capital invested in land no one would be drilling anytime soon. Worse, they had borrowed money—probably from Murchison’s father—to assemble the block, and both men now faced their first serious debts.

Unable to afford even room and board, the two sheepishly moved into Doc Bass’s house in Wichita Falls, which soon became a clubhouse for their oil field friends. Murchison, meanwhile, used the idle time to court the girl he hoped to marry, Anne White, the charming, petite daughter of one of Tyler’s wealthiest families. He had proposed to Anne as a teenager, but despite a plea from his father, Anne’s father had judged her too young to marry. Now, during a visit to Wichita Falls, she accepted his proposal, and this time her father consented. The wedding, representing the union of two of East Texas’s most prominent families, was the social event of the year in Tyler. Richardson limped down the aisle as an usher. Either Murchison’s fortunes had improved overnight, or his father had given him more money, because the 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.

By the time Murchison returned to Wichita Falls oil prices had recovered, and Clint went to work buying new leases. 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. Murchison’s instinctive mastery of banking and lending practices translated easily into an understanding of oil field drilling and geology. Unlike older oilmen like Roy Cullen who still believed in creekology, Murchison put his faith in science. One of the first men he ever hired was a talented geologist named 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. They needed it. Between 1921 and 1925, Anne gave birth to three children, all boys, John, then Clinton Jr., then Burke.

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. The fact was, Murchison no longer needed Richardson; he knew the oil game now, and, unlike Richardson, he had the family money to play it. County leasing records suggest it took years for Richardson to unload the last of his land along the Red River, at which point he was all but broke. A single yellowed clipping from a Dallas newspaper indicates he returned to East Texas to try to drill a well of his own in 1922. Land records there show he did it by going into partnership with a dozen of his relatives, who turned over their mineral rights for a song. Richardson got one of Doc Bass’s crews to drill the hole. It came up dry.

Murchison, meanwhile, remained in North Texas and thrived. He partnered with a local wildcatter named Ernest Fain, and through the early 1920s they hit strike after strike. The partnership grew prosperous enough to open offices in a Wichita Falls building, and eventually generated enough cash that they were able to add a side business that drilled wells for other oilmen, called “contract drilling.” By 1925, when he turned thirty, Murchison was already a wealthy man, taking in about thirty thousand dollars a month. But the North Texas boom was waning, and he began to cast about for something new. When Ernest Fain balked at drilling outside the area, Murchison dissolved the partnership.

He took his proceeds, an estimated five million dollars, and moved Anne and the boys to cosmopolitan San Antonio. He joked to friends that he was retiring, but in truth he just wanted a settled life, one where he could work finite hours in a clean office, making it home for dinner while Ernest Closuit and a group of new employees worked in the oil fields. There were new fields popping up around San Antonio, and Murchison invested in them, all the while casting envious eyes at the massive cattle ranches that stretched south to the Mexican border; like Richardson, what Murchison really wanted was to be a gentleman rancher.

The easy life he envisioned in San Antonio, however, was not to be. That winter Murchison took Anne and her sister to New York for a vacation, embarking from New Orleans on a ship. On her return Anne noticed faint brown spots on her skin. Doctors diagnosed yellow jaundice, probably caused by contaminated shipboard water. Her condition quickly deteriorated; she entered the hospital and died in May 1926. Murchison was stricken. He left the children in the care of relatives and disappeared, driving around the state, alone, for weeks at a time, a whiskey bottle usually at his side. What remained of his business began to decay. “When Anne died,” Murchison told his secretary many years later, “people said I stayed drunk for a year.”

From the moment the first American settlers crossed into Texas in the early 1800s, no one wanted much to do with the western half of the state. Out beyond Fort Worth, for six hundred miles all the way to El Paso, stretched little but arid, lifeless plains, much of it flat as a frying pan and just as hot. Once the Indians were run off, West Texas proved good for little but cattle ranching, and a drought during the 1910s forced many small ranchers back east. By the 1920s there was no reason to go to West Texas and every reason to leave; most counties had few if any paved roads, a single town, and maybe a few hundred people. To most Texans the entire region was an afterthought, Hell with cows.

In the twenty years after Spindletop, oilmen began venturing out onto the plains, buying leases here and there; every rancher between Fort Worth and Pecos was certain there was oil beneath his land if only someone would drill a hole. For the most part, geologists scoffed. A few wells were drilled; none found anything but the faintest showings of oil. 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.

All the majors plunged in, leasing millions of acres from the small towns of Midland and Odessa all the way south to the Rio Grande and west to El Paso. 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 same year a fast-talking Fort Worth promoter named Roy Westbrook, obliged to drill a well he hadn’t planned to satisfy his suspicious investors, struck oil even farther west, in remote Winkler County, which wraps around the southeast corner of New Mexico. The Hendricks Field, as it was called, lured scores of oilmen into the farthest corners of West Texas.

The most desolate spot in which Texans would ever find serious quantities of oil, Winkler County, was to figure prominently in the careers of both Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson. There was no actual town there. The only settlement, Kermit—named after Theodore Roosevelt’s son, who had visited on a hunting trip—was a smattering of houses. There were no paved roads, no post office, no hotel, no telephones. There were barely any people. The 1920 census put the population at eighty-one; by 1926 there were exactly six registered voters. There were no rivers and no lakes, just mile after mile of yellowy grass, a belt of sand dunes, and a hot wind that blew its grains into every nook and cranny. 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.

The new gushers in West Texas roused Murchison from his struggle with alcohol and depression. By chance he already owned several leases in Winkler County. His geologist, Ernest Closuit, was already analyzing data from the new field when Murchison dispatched him west to drill a test. Murchison, meanwhile, hit the phones. Not for him the muddy boots and windblown tents of a remote drill site: Clint Murchison found more oil on the telephone than most of his peers would ever draw from the ground. He first began buying leases. By the end of 1926 he had put together eighty acres on the edges of the Hendricks Field.

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. A lumberyard worker at Pyote said he could locate secondhand pipe and lay the pipeline if Murchison paid. Murchison arranged a line of credit and work got under way, but before the pipe reached Pyote he received crushing news: Humble Oil was building a pipeline of its own. Murchison didn’t have enough production to feed the pipeline himself. If other producers sold to the Humble line—as they would—he would face a massive loss.

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. Natural gas had been used to heat homes and factories in England for a century but had never caught on in the United States; most Texas oilmen simply allowed the gas they found to escape into the atmosphere. Murchison was amazed how simple the business was; once a pipeline was built, all he did was sit back and collect monthly checks. When other West Texas towns expressed interest in having gas lines of their own, Murchison incorporated the Wink Gas Company and built lines to Pecos, Barstow, and Pyote. A friend in Oklahoma said his town could use one, too, so Murchison sent work crews north and by mid-1928 had a pipeline furnishing gas to the towns of Kingfisher and Hennessey. He sent salesmen fanning out across South Texas and soon had contracts to supply gas to Navasota, Sealy, Bellville, Eagle Lake, and Columbus.