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

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