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

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.

THREE
    Sid and Clint

I.
    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