by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
“Daddy, you cheated me!” he exclaimed.
“I did not,” his father said. “People will try to get at you any way they can, and you might as well learn now.”
John Richardson traded cattle in his spare time, and by his teens his son was trying it as well. When he wasn’t crating peaches, the younger Richardson began taking Clint Murchison along to buy cattle in Louisiana. Virtually every story told of Richardson and Murchison’s early years emphasizes what great boyhood friends the two had been. No doubt that became true. But Richardson’s career would be marked by an ability to befriend those who could help him most, and one suspects that sixteen-year-old Sid Richardson’s primary interest in eleven-year-old Clint Murchison was his father’s money. The elder Murchison, in fact, later lent Richardson several thousand dollars to buy cattle. Taking Clint under his arm wasn’t just a good deed. It was smart business.
In later years, Richardson’s favorite story of the cattle-buying expeditions with Murchison revolved around a trip the two made to Ruston, Louisiana. As Richardson told it, he decided to buy a natty suit and masquerade as a clueless city-slicker, a charade he insisted somehow allowed him to buy his cattle for cheaper prices. Whatever his tactics, Richardson and Murchison proved able cattle buyers. They found “trading” to be a thrilling pasttime. During his senior year of high school in 1909, Richardson claimed he made thirty-five hundred dollars in profits.
At some point the Richardsons briefly relocated to—or perhaps vacationed in—the West Texas town of Mineral Wells, where Sid’s sister Annie began dating a sharp young doctor named E. P. Bass, who was to have a profound influence on Richardson’s life. Bass had a medical degree from Tulane, and after the family returned to Athens, he married Annie Richardson, in 1909. Bass proved his merits after Richardson was badly injured when a buggy he was driving overturned, crushing one of his legs below the knee. As with so many Richardson stories, details of precisely what happened are sketchy. In a note to the Henderson County Historical Society in Athens, a nephew said the accident broke Richardson’s right leg when he was nineteen; in a 1954 interview, Richardson said he was fifteen and the injured leg was his left.
Whatever the case, doctors wanted to amputate the leg. But E. P. Bass managed to save it during an operation in which he removed two inches of bone and built a “trough” to connect the remnants. In time Richardson managed to walk unaided, but for the rest of his life he limped. “I practiced me a walk that wouldn’t make me limp,” he once said. “Took me a year. Now I take long steps with the left laig, short steps with the other. That swingin’ walk of mine is my own invention.”
In September 1910 Richardson enrolled at Baylor University in Waco, but after two semesters of classes he did not return. An Athens man was registrar at Simmons College in Abilene, so Richardson enrolled there, in the fall of 1911. A tradition on campus holds that he was a bright but lazy student, far more interested in whiskey than classwork. The dean of students, J. D. Sandefer, is said to have called Richardson into his office on several occasions after he returned to his dormitory long after curfew. According to this tradition, Sandefer repeatedly lectured Richardson that he was squandering his abilities. “You have the brains and the personality to do whatever you want to do, and be what you want to be,” he is quoted saying. “If you would just lay aside this foolish waste of time, and set your heart on being a man.”
There is ample evidence that Richardson was a heavy drinker, which may explain a tendency to engage in fistfights. Once, explaining why he disliked the game of golf, he quipped that the single time he played eighteen holes he drank an entire bottle of bourbon. Carousing had no further effect on his studies, however, because in January 1912, after only four months in Abilene, Richardson’s father died. There was no more money for Richardson’s education. His brother-in-law, “Doc” Bass, was dabbling in the oil business, and it was probably on Bass’s suggestion that Richardson decided to find work in the oil fields.
He began as a laborer, hauling pipe by day and apprenticing on derrick floors at night. Richardson never said where he first worked, but it was likely the new Elektra field west of Fort Worth in 1911. Some of his favorite stories emerged from this period. In one, he was working alone one night, shoveling coal into a derrick furnace, when he was suddenly surrounded by coyotes. He spent the hours until dawn atop the red-hot furnace, hopping from one foot to another, until rescued by the arrival of day-shift workers. In time his education attracted notice, and he was hired as an office boy for the Oil Well Supply Company in Wichita Falls. Richardson once said this job came to an end after he engaged in a fistfight with a bookkeeper. The fight, however, impressed one of his bosses, who decided to send him back out into the field, this time as an oil scout in Louisiana. Scouts are the oil industry’s happy spies, spending their days driving from well to well, checking production trends, gauging competitors’ strategies, and picking up rumors. It’s a job where charm and likeability matter more than subterfuge, and Richardson, a natural raconteur, was good at it.
A career in oil, however, was never Richardson’s dream. What he wanted to do was trade cattle. After two years in the oil fields he returned to Athens in 1914, borrowing money from Clint Murchison’s father to purchase a herd. The venture didn’t last long. As Richardson told a Fort Worth newspaper in 1954, “my herd died of tick fever, and I lost my taw. What’s more, I owed Mr. Murchison’s bank six thousand dollars. I went back to Wichita Falls to get me some oil money.”
Perhaps Richardson’s favorite story was returning to Athens one year—to the day—later. Scouting was good money, and Richardson entered the town square at the wheel of a new Cadillac. “I swung back around that dusty square twice so’s all the bench warmers would see me good, and then I marched into the bank and paid Mr. Murchison his money in cash,” he recalled. “Then I drove out of town again. ’Fore the dust had settled, all those old boys got off their benches and started for the oil fields. They said, ‘If that dunce can make so much money, we’ll go, too.’ ” One of those impressed was young Clint Murchison.
IV.
Richardson was waiting the day Murchison, still wearing his army uniform, stepped off the train in Fort Worth in the spring of 1919. Murchison intended to head next to Athens, but Richardson insisted they go right to work. The first thing he did was march Murchison to the Washer Brothers men’s store and buy him a pair of nice suits. “You gotta get outta that uniform right now,” Richardson said. “You wear that and when you go around to talk to people they’ll want to talk about the war. We aren’t talking anything but oil.” Murchison didn’t make it home to visit his mother for another six weeks.2
Despite their common backgrounds, they were a mismatched pair. Murchison was energetic, impatient, and, like many country boys before him, intellectually insecure. His favorite book was the dictionary, which he employed to adorn his vocabulary with ever-larger words; during drives he loved nothing more than challenging a fellow traveler to query him on word definitions. Richardson, meanwhile, hated nothing so much as pretension. A nifty hat, a pocket square, a dropped name—anything could prompt a cutting remark from Richardson, usually delivered with a wry smile. When Murchison used a big word, Richardson would wrinkle his brow and say, “What’s that word again, Murk? ”
Murchison was shy and would remain so all his life; if he didn’t absolutely have to talk to someone, he avoided it. Though capable of warmth around family and friends, strangers found him standoffish and occasionally rude. In sharp contrast, Richardson presented himself as the essence of the Texas good ol’ boy, joshing, laughing, and cursing in a thick backwoods accent. In later years, if a subordinate or family member made a mistake, Richardson would scowl and call him a dunce or a knucklehead; then, just as his target appeared crestfallen, he would grab him around the shoulders for a hug. “Sid,” says one longtime friend, “could just make you feel great.”
In the summer of 1919 the hottest oil play in the country was centered around the raucous boomtown of
Buckburnett, on the Red River border with Oklahoma. Richardson and Murchison, taking rooms at the YMCA, dived headlong into the thick of it, using their savings—and, it appears, a good chunk of money from Murchison’s father—to join the hectic trade in oil leases. It was a thrilling ride for two young country boys on the make, with muddy streets and prostitutes, wads of leases exchanged between grimy oilmen on every corner, and gunshots echoing in the night. Lease trading was all about oil field intelligence; the value of a lease fluctuated largely on rumor—that the land held oil beneath it, that a major oil company was set to drill an adjoining lease, that a nearby test well had come up dry. When completing a trade, Murchison and Richardson usually made 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 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 plains, buying leases here an
d 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.
