Bryan Burrough by The Big Rich: The Rise, Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes

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