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

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.”

V.
    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