Bryan Burrough (2 page)

Four miles southwest of town, out on the barren coastal moors pockmarked with marshes and sinkholes, rose a lonely mound. Cattle nibbled grass all around it. The locals called it the Big Hill, but it was hardly a hill at all, more a bump on the earth, barely fifteen feet high. The prairie grasses, waving now in the north wind, gave way at its crest to a whitish spray of alkali, making it look like a grandfather’s balding head. The older children sometimes tried to scare the little ones by saying the Big Hill was haunted. There were legends the pirate Jean Lafitte had buried treasure there. Sometimes at night you could see strange dancing lights. The Big Hill certainly smelled satanic, owing to the sulfur springs that spat and bubbled all around its weary base.

Atop the mound, silhouetted against the gray morning sky, stood the skeleton of an oil derrick, a latticework triangle of wood, sixty-four feet high. At its base that morning two men could be seen working, a square-jawed young man named Curt Hamill and his helper, Peck Byrd. At around nine, a buckboard pulled up below. Their boss, Curt’s brother Al, trudged up the hill with a new drill bit. The old one had ground to pieces the day before when they struck solid rock.

The Hamills, honest, strongly built men known for working themselves to exhaustion, were water-well drillers who had switched to oil three years earlier, nursing the odd trickle of crude out of the ground at Corsicana, south of Dallas. Called to Beaumont, they had been working this new well for seven weeks now, reaching eleven hundred feet, and they had already found the rainbow sheen of oil in the muck they drew from below. They told no one but the owner, who instructed them to drill deeper. Yet even that modest showing of oil would surprise folks in Beaumont. Most everyone around town thought they were daft to be looking for oil here anyway. Everyone knew the only serious oil under American soil was back east, in Pennsylvania, or up north, in Kansas.

When Al brought up the new bit, he and Curt attached it to the drill stem, then began lowering steel pipe into the hole. Curt clambered high on the derrick, onto the swivel boards, where he worked the elevator wires as the pipe slowly disappeared into the earth. An hour later they had fed thirty-five joints of pipe into the hole, reaching seven hundred feet or so, when suddenly the pipe began to shake violently. A moment later, the rig began to shudder and quake.

As the Hamills watched, dumbstruck, reddish-brown drilling mud began to bubble up from the hole, slowly at first, then faster, till the entire drilling platform was awash. With the rush of mud came a hissing sound, then a gurgling, as if some giant beast below was spitting up. Beneath them the Big Hill began to rumble. The flow of drilling mud began to jump and leap, creating a fountain right there in front of them. Then, suddenly, the fountain exploded, an eruption of mud that shot straight up into the morning sky high above the derrick.

Al and Peck Byrd dived to the side, rolling beneath a barbed-wire fence. The geyser of mud drenched Curt, high on the swivel boards, momentarily blinding him. He leaped for the ladder and skittered to the ground like a circus acrobat, though years later he would say he had no memory of doing so. Al yelled for him to run, but Curt paused. Now rocks began to shoot out of the hole, firing into the sky and falling around them. With them came the rotten-egg smell of natural gas. The traveling block, caught in the geyser, began to lift off the ground, and Curt saw that if it hit the top of the derrick, it could destroy everything. Bravely wading through the rain of mud and rocks, Curt wobbled across the derrick floor and kicked out the clutch, stopping the machinery. Then he dived out, rolling down toward Al.

Just then drill pipe began shooting out of the hole, tons of it, rocketing up through the crown block, destroying the top of the derrick. The pipe surged high in the air, then broke into sections, tumbling back to the ground as the men covered their heads. After a moment Curt took his shirttail and cleared his eyes. It was then he thought of the boiler. It was still on fire. If flames lit the gas escaping from the hole, well, Curt didn’t want to think of that. All three men crawled to their feet and ran for the boiler pit, where they took buckets of water and threw them into the firebox, dousing the flame. Then they ran. From safe spots on the hillside below, they watched as the geyser of mud slowly fell, foot by foot, then stopped.

Silence.

Slowly the three men crept back up the hill. The derrick still stood, just barely, but all their machinery was a wreck. To one side the drill stem, heaved from the hole during the tumult, protruded from the hillside like a thrown spear. Six inches of drilling mud covered the derrick floor. Discarded pipe lay everywhere. Al stared at it. It was rented pipe, and he knew they would have to pay for it.

Drillers hated blowouts like this; they could ruin months of hard work. Al had just grabbed a shovel, starting the cleanup, when suddenly a six-inch plug of mud exploded from the hole like a cannon shot. Then, once again, silence enveloped the Big Hill. The men glanced at one another. Al edged toward the hole. Taking care, as if perched on the edge of a balcony, he looked down into it. It took a moment for his eyes to focus, but then he saw it: Something was down there. Something moving evenly up the hole, then receding back into the darkness. As Al watched, it flowed up again, then down again, the movement regular now. For the longest few seconds, the thing down in the shadows once again heaved toward him, then eased back. To Al Hamill, it was as if he was peering into the very heart of the Earth, and it was breathing.

What happened next would change the course of history.

There is a legend in America, about Texas, about the fabulously wealthy oilmen there who turned gushers of sweet black crude into raw political power, who cruised their personal jets over ranches measured in Rhode Islands, who sipped bourbon-and-branch on their private islands as they plotted and schemed to corner entire international markets. In popular culture the Texas oilman tends to come in two guises, the overbearing, dim-witted high roller with a blonde on either arm, and his evil twin, the oilman of Oliver Stone and Mother Jones, the black-Stetsoned villain whose millions pull the levers of power in Washington. He can be young and conflicted and obscenely rich, as in James Dean’s portrayal of the wildcatter Jett Rink in
Giant,
or smooth and conniving and obscenely rich, like J. R. Ewing of television’s
Dallas,
but he is almost always crass and loud and a tad mysterious, a classic American other.

There is truth behind the legend, a surprising amount in fact. There really were poor Texas boys who discovered gushing oil wells and became overnight billionaries, patriarchs of squabbling families who owned private islands and colossal mansions and championship football teams, who slept with movie stars and jousted with presidents and tried to corner an international market or two. Back before television, before
Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous
, they were the original Beverly Hillbillies, counting their millions around the cement pond as they ogled themselves on the cover of
Time.
They helped make Texas Oil an economic and political powerhouse, a world whose contributions, large and small—from Enron and two George Bushes to the Super Bowl—shaped the America we know today.

This is their story, told through the lives of the four Texas families—and a few of their peers—who rose the highest and, in some cases, fell the hardest. Each of their patriarchs began in obscurity, and all, through a historic quirk of fate, laid the foundations of their fortunes in a single four-year span. They married, bore and lost children, and became the country’s first shirt-sleeve billionaires, transforming America’s idea of what it meant to be rich even as they played host to kings and queens and accumulated every toy of their age: mansions and ranches and castles, airplanes and yachts and limousines, skyscrapers, hotels, and cabinet members. As they reshuffled the deck of America’s most powerful families, eventually helping to propel three of their favorite sons into the Oval Office, the country was enthralled by them, then suspicious, then, after a fateful fusillade of gunfire, came to view them as nefarious caricatures.

In time their salad days dissolved into a sordid litany of debauchery, family feuds, scandals, and murder, until collapsing in a tangle of rancorous bankruptcies. Some survived, others didn’t. A few count their millions today. As the movies say about almost every story set in Texas, theirs is a big, sprawling American epic, marked by exhilarating highs and crashing lows, and it all began, sort of, with a queer character named Patillo Higgins and that odd hump of dirt they called the Big Hill. History would know it as Spindletop.

For outsiders, it can be tough to wrap one’s mind around Texas. The first challenge is its sheer size: 801 miles from north to south, 777 miles across; if plopped down on the Eastern Seaboard it would subsume all of Maine, Vermont, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Connecticut, Rhode Island, New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, with room left over for North Carolina. Its enormity encompasses every North American landscape short of glaciers: pine forests in East Texas, deserts and sand dunes in West Texas, marshland and moors along the coast, mountains as high as eight thousand feet, and enough flat scrubby plains, stretching from Dallas to El Paso, to sate a Mongol horde.

The second challenge is the Texas mind-set: proud, stubborn, and independent, perhaps unsurprising for a state that in 1901 was only fifty-six years removed from its previous status as an independent country. In the intervening years Texans had defeated the last Comanches and pushed the line of settlement out onto the plains. The state’s suffocating parochialism was a by-product of its isolation; while Europeans poured into Eastern cities, Texas experienced almost no immigration in the late 1800s. Old ways hardened. Change was resisted. Outside interests, especially commercial interests, were met with suspicion; a wave of progressivism swept the state in the 1890s, during which Texas attorneys general filed several antitrust suits against the monopolistic Standard Oil, even though the company had practically no presence in the state. Self-sufficient and inward-looking, people thought of themselves as Texans first, Americans second. By 1901, “the early 19th-century American values were in no way eroded in Texas,” the historian T. R. Fehrenbach has written. “There was no reason why they should have been. During a century of explosive conquest and settlement, the land changed very little, and the people not at all.”

Turn-of-the-century Texas was half Old South, half Old West, a rural frontier society that, for all its ballyhooed pride, had very little to preen about. As the rest of America industrialized, Texans still lived off the land. In the eastern half of the state cotton, still picked from the bush by Negro and poor white sharecroppers, was the cash crop. Vast ranches, one or two as large as Delaware, spread across West Texas and the Panhandle, where cowboys herded cattle and sheep onto new railroads for sale to meat-packers up north. The only industry to speak of was lumber, hewn in sawmills dotting the East Texas backwoods. Not until 1901 did the state boast a multimillion-dollar corporation, when the Houston lumberman John Henry Kirby, the fabled “Prince of the Pines,” formed the giant Kirby Lumber Company.

It was into this backward, agrarian world that Patillo “Bud” Higgins, the Johnny Appleseed of Texas Oil, emerged in the 1890s. Higgins was the dreamer every new era demands, a one-armed Beaumont eccentric who in a day when Texas was known for cattle and cowboys and not much else envisioned giant pools of oil beneath its dirt and giant cities that would sprout above them. Born a gunsmith’s son in 1863, confident, rail-thin, and peripatetic, Higgins had been a juvenile delinquent, losing his left arm during a drunken evening in which he and a pair of teenage pals wildly fired pistols into a Negro neighborhood. Confronted by a local deputy, Higgins shot and killed him, while the deputy’s return fire hit his arm, which later had to be amputated. A jury called it self-defense.

In his twenties Higgins became what is known today as a born-again Christian, emerging as a church deacon and throwing himself into a variety of money-making schemes. He worked on the railroad and carted dust at a sawmill before trying his hand as a cabinetmaker, fishmonger, and real estate agent. In 1886, noticing that all of Beaumont’s bricks were imported from Houston and New Orleans, he opened a brickyard, the area’s first. Three years later, determined to find ways to make his kiln more efficient, he embarked on a tour of northern brickyards, examining facilities in Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania. In Dayton and Indianapolis he saw how a kiln burning over an oil fire burned more evenly than over a wood fire. Intrigued, he headed on to the oil fields of western Pennsylvania to see what this oil business was all about.

He found an industry in its infancy, barely thirty years old. A man named Edwin Drake had found the first oil there in 1859; most of it was refined into kerosene and various lubricants. In the ensuing years much of the industry had come under the control of John Rockefeller’s giant Standard Oil, which as Higgins made his rounds was under mounting attack for its monopolistic practices. What he learned in Pennsylvania fired Higgins’s imagination. Telltale signs of oil found there had come on the surface of the land, in seeps and sulfur springs any man could see. His father had been a Confederate soldier, and Higgins remembered stories he told of rebels around Beaumont lubricating their guns with some sort of oily substance they found south of town, at the Big Hill. He had played and bathed in the sulfur springs at its base as a child, and taken his Sunday school students on picnics nearby. Higgins returned to Texas certain there was oil under the Big Hill.

Believing the oil beneath Spindletop would transform Texas, Higgins worked out a Utopian scheme of development, complete with pipelines, refineries, iron smelters, a deepwater port, and a metropolis he named Gladys City, after his favorite Sunday school student, Gladys Bingham. No one around Beaumont took any of this seriously, but in 1892 Higgins did manage to entice a member of his church, a lumberman named George W. Carroll, to cosign the five-thousand-dollar note he needed to lease a thousand-acre parcel that covered about half of Spindletop hill. Once Carroll became involved, several adjoining landowners signed over their lease rights. They founded a company, Gladys City Manufacturing.