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

would remain so for years. One meeting was all Murchison needed to get the one hundred thousand dollars. “If you are honest and you are trying, your creditors will play ball,” he told Cain afterward.
    Once the franchises were secured, the challenge became building a pipeline 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. He had hoped his brother Frank could raise money to repay the loans in Chicago, but their brokerage firm, Peabody & Co., ran into management problems, and Frank was forced to step in and actually run Peabody himself. Still, Murchison was confident that once the pipeline was complete, gas sales would allow him to repay the banks and his 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 pipeline finally completed.
    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—this despite the weekly struggle every Friday to meet payroll. What saved him was the fact that he knew more about banking than any other oilman in Texas. He coaxed every last dollar he could out of the Dallas banks, then pushed back repayment, all but daring the bankers to foreclose. By 1932 his debt had grown to more than four million dollars, far more than his net worth. “Aren’t you concerned about owing all this money you can’t pay?” Ernest Closuit asked him.
    “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.”

VI.
    The town of Monahans, thirty miles south of the new Hendricks Field in far West Texas, was a cluster of sandblown shanties clinging to the railroad line out to El Paso. Though the seat of Ward County, it had barely two hundred people, many of them trying to eke out a living on the ranches outside town. By 1926 West Texas was in the tenth year of an agonizing drought, and a number of ranchers had given up, leading off their remaining cattle and letting the desert reclaim their land.
    One of the most desperate was a man named George Washington O’Brien. 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 had sold leases to Gulf in the rush of the mid-twenties, but Gulf had shown no inclination to drill. O’Brien was certain there was oil under his dirt, a conviction that grew when Ward County’s first well, a small one, came in that November. Unable to mobilize Gulf, O’Brien decided to drill his own well. 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