Bryan Burrough

by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes

  In 1900 Oklahoma Territory was still the Wild West, and Cullen did his business on horseback, almost dying at one point during a blizzard. In his spare time he expanded his father’s forlorn farm, building up a herd of cattle until rustlers stole most of the animals one dark night; Cullen strapped on a Colt revolver but, to his relief, found his livestock unguarded in a remote pasture. In December 1903 he returned to Texas long enough to marry a quiet Schulenberg girl named Lillie Cranz he had been courting for five years. They settled back in Oklahoma. Cullen bought land and built a shack, where their first child, Roy Jr., was born followed by two girls, Lillie and Agnes.

  For seven years Cullen made his way as an independent cotton broker, but he lost most of his savings in the financial panic of 1907, and cotton markets were slow to recover. By 1911, when he turned thirty, Cullen was itching for a change. He made an impromptu study of southern cities, and was impressed when he read in the newspaper that city fathers in Houston, hoping to lure shipping after a hurricane devastated nearby Galveston in 1901, were planning to dredge a ship channel to the Gulf of Mexico. As it happened, Lillie’s parents owned a parcel of land on its path. Liquidating his holdings in Oklahoma, Cullen took a leap of faith and moved his family to Houston. He rented a bungalow on Hadley Street, leased an office downtown, and set his sights on learning about real estate.

  Houston in 1911 was a sleepy bayou city of seventy-eight thousand men, women, and children who spent their days swatting mosquitoes, mopping their brows, and sipping iced tea. It was oppressively humid, so hot diplomats at the British consulate received hardship pay. Few streets were paved—the main avenue downtown, Travis, was a bed of seashells—and when it rained the roads were often impassable, stinking green water sloshing out of the ditches into the roadways. The air was so damp that bedsheets stayed moist nine months a year. There were oil fields scattered north and east of the city but few real oilmen, with the notable exception of the Hughes family, whose odd little boy, Howard, could be seen tooling his tricycle around his south-side neighborhood. The wealthiest men in Houston, magnates like John Henry Kirby and Big Jim West, made their fortunes in East Texas lumber and dabbled in oil, cotton, and cattle.

  Cullen managed to sell his wife’s family parcel to an oilman named R. E. Brooks, a friend of his new neighbors, but beyond that he bought little and sold less. “The real-estate business,” he noted years later, “was not exactly booming in Houston in those days.” He stuck it out for four frustrating years before giving up and returning to the only business he knew, trading cotton, buying a seat on the Houston Cotton Exchange and placing advertisements in Texas papers announcing his willingness to buy bales sent to Houston. He had bank credit behind him and what remained of his savings, but he also had children to support, and business, at least initially, was torpid. He was brooding on his dismal prospects one day in 1915 when, as he trudged into his office, a man named Jim Cheek stuck his head into the hall. Cheek was a real estate developer who was busy building houses around town.

  “Roy, I’ve got a proposition for you,” Cheek said. “Can you come into my office for a minute? ”

  Like many businessmen across Texas, Cheek was thinking about getting into oil. He didn’t know the first thing about it, but he knew real estate, and he figured if he bought enough mineral rights someone might drill the land. He asked if Cullen would come work for him, traveling the state to acquire lease rights. It was easy work; most farmers would turn over their rights for pennies on even a remote possibility someone might find oil beneath it. “I don’t know anything about oil, Jim,” Cullen said. “I’ve never read an oil lease in my life.” Cheek’s offer, though, was attractive: all expenses paid, a solid salary, plus one quarter of anything they brought in. Cullen talked it over with Lillie, and felt he couldn’t say no. Which is how, at the advanced age of thirty-four, Roy Cullen became an accidental oilman.

  He first headed to the Houston Public Library, where in time he read every book he could find on the geology of oil. What he found was a mishmash of fairy tales and guesswork; the first genuine geophysical equipment, using technology developed during World War I to bounce sound waves off underground structures, wouldn’t be in wide use until the 1920s. Some thought oil flowed in underground rivers or pooled in subterranean caverns. Oil fields were thronged with characters who claimed to have special oil-finding powers, preachers who swore they had X-ray eyes, and drifters who used everything from divining rods to psychic powers to direct drillers. In the 1910s major oil companies began to hire staff geologists, but for years their use was met with skepticism. As one oilman complained, “Rocks! Rocks! Sam, all they talk about is rocks. Do they think we’re running a stone quarry?”

  What oil had been found in America was discovered, as at Spindletop, near visible seaps and existing wells. A few companies had begun “surface mapping,” reasoning they might deduce what lay beneath the land by what lay atop it. Studying the land was known colloquially as “creekology,” from the analysis, such as it was, of creek beds and hillsides. Later, when he began drilling wells on his own, Cullen became a renowned creekologist, sinking wells in low areas and other sites he thought promising. He embraced geology’s new tools, especially the seismograph, but much of his work was pure instinct.

  Cullen’s maiden trip for Jim Cheek was to Coryell County, in Central Texas, where Cheek had arranged a meeting of farmers at the school. “Gentlemen,” Cullen said, nervously addressing the crowd, “I’m not an oilman, I’m a cotton man. But I’m going into the oil business, and if you’ll give me leases on your land, I’ll do everything possible to get the oil rights developed.” By morning Cullen signed forty-three leases, each for one dollar “and other valuable considerations.” If Cullen and Cheek could find someone to drill a lease, and if oil was found, they would share percentages of any profits with the landowner. Those were big if’s; few Texas farmers ever saw a nickel from oil.

  For the next five years Cullen roamed West Texas, leasing oil rights everywhere he went, roving as far west as the Pecos River and south to the Rio Grande. It was good money, though it kept him away from home for long periods. In time Cullen saved enough to buy a two-story house at the corner of Alabama and Austin. Soon his mother moved in, and Lillie gave birth to two more children, both girls. Of all the hundreds of leases Cullen signed during those years, he and Cheek managed to attract investors who drilled exactly three oil wells at a total cost of $250,000. Every penny was squandered; all three wells came up dry. What Cullen got, though, was an education and, through Jim Cheek and other new friends, a wealth of contacts in downtown Houston.

  By 1920 Lillie was making noises about how much he was traveling. Cullen was almost forty by then, and his five children barely knew him. Couldn’t he find work in Houston like other fathers? Which is how, armed only with his library books and a reputation for hard work and honesty, Cullen decided to drill a well on his own. For backing he enlisted Judge Brooks, who helped him assemble an investor group of a dozen leading citizens, including John Henry Kirby and Captain James Baker, grandfather of the James Baker who served as secretary of state during the first Bush administration. The group gave Cullen forty thousand dollars, he chipped in twenty thousand dollars from his savings, and after selecting a forty-acre tract south of Houston, began laying plans to drill for oil beneath his pile of cow manure.

  In truth, the drill site Cullen chose lay not on some farmer’s pasture but in the decrepit old Pierce Junction oil field. Gulf and other majors had been poking holes in the salt dome beneath Pierce Junction for a decade—fifty-two wells in all—and had very little to show for it. There was a good natural-gas well on the dome’s southeast flank. Cullen had been studying it for months when one morning he took out his handkerchief and placed it over a gas-release valve. It showed no color. Still, on a hunch, Cullen returned every day for two weeks, and one morning he saw a faint hint of yellow on his handkerchief. Each day the color grew deeper, until Cullen saw a rich amber. It was just a hunch, but he was
willing to bet the amber was a sign of oil.

  He secured an appointment with Gulf’s Houston geologist, L. P. Garrett, and spread a map of Pierce Junction on his desk. He pointed to an area known as the Howe lease. “Let me have a lease on this land,” he said, “and I’ll drill you a well.”

  “On the Howe land?” Garrett said. “It’s too far off the dome, Roy. You won’t do any good there.”

  “Give me the lease anyway,” Cullen said. “If the well is no good, you won’t lose anything.”

  There were delays getting started. The driller Cullen selected, Judge Brooks’s son Emory—he was part of the deal—was busy on another job. Meanwhile, an oil scout caught wind of Cullen’s plans, and before Cullen could break ground another independent set up a derrick on an adjacent lease. Just as Cullen’s drill bit finally chewed into the prairie, the neighboring crew struck oil. Cullen’s confidence soared. On the day he expected to reach oil-bearing sand—the depth where the competing crew had found oil—Cullen called out his entire family to watch. It was a Sunday afternoon, and everyone wore their church clothes, Lillie and the girls in dresses, Roy Jr. dressed in a white suit with an immaculate blue shirt. Judge Brooks came out, along with several other investors and their families.

  Years later, Cullen described the scene as if it had been staged for Hollywood. Minutes after he gave the signal to drill, the well erupted in a geyser of oil, blowing the “Christmas tree” of steel valves into the sky and spattering the spectators, who laughed and whooped as Cullen and his drilling crew struggled to control the bucking well. Roy Jr. ran to and fro in the black rain, ruining his Sunday clothes. “We’re rich! We’re rich!” one of the wives kept shouting. “We’ll never have to work a day again!”

  Once under control, the well flowed twenty-five hundred barrels a day, a strong producer. Pierce Junction not only assured Cullen’s future as an oilman, it cemented his ties to Houston’s downtown elite and thus to the investors who might fund his future efforts. Captain Baker was the first to cash out—at a five-to-one return—while the others endured three more wells, all dry, and settled for 300 percent returns.

  Cullen had found his oil by drilling beside, or on the flank, of a salt dome, a strategy larger companies had been pursuing with some success since 1914 as production atop the older Gulf Coast domes began to peter out. Cullen thought it an idea worth pursuing. By the time the Pierce Junction well came in, he already had another dome in his sights. Damon’s Mound, a lonely finger-shaped hummock a mile in length, barely eight hundred feet wide, rose thirty yards above the coastal scrub fifty miles south of Houston, near the Brazos River and the town of Rosenberg. Others had drilled it but managed only a handful of meager producing wells. Cullen thought his flanking strategy might find oil others had missed.

  To Cullen’s irritation, the first well came up dry, as did the second, and the third; his investors, he was acutely aware, were quickly losing their earlier profits. For months Cullen rose before dawn at the house on Alabama Street, kissed Lillie good-bye, and drove down to tramp Damon’s Mound in his greenish-white Witch Elk boots and khaki jumpsuit, eyes studying the scrub for anything that might suggest oil beneath; many nights Cullen didn’t come home at all, grabbing sleep on the ground beside the drilling rig. More than one new hand, spying his slumbering figure, mistook him for a bum. When he did make it home, streaked with mud and sweat, his skin pimpled with insect bites, Lillie would be waiting on the veranda, and they would walk up the stairs in silence. “Help me get my boots off, Lillie,” he would say, slumping on the bed. “Let me get a shave and a bath. Tomorrow’s another day.”2

  But the days stretched into months, then into years, and every well came up dry. Cullen spent thirty-six months at Damon’s Mound, the most frustrating period of his life—“three years in hell,” he called it. Finally, in 1924, after drilling a dozen holes around the dome, he gave up. In the meantime, his Pierce Junction well had played out. Cullen had several thousand dollars in the bank, but no cash coming in. Roy Jr. had gone off to college in upstate New York, the two older girls were in high school, and now they had two more little girls to pay for. At night, lying in bed, Lillie wondered how long this could go on. “We got to keep going a little longer, honey,” Cullen would say. “I want the children taken care of. Tomorrow’ll be another day.”

  He decided to take another crack at Pierce Junction. In his first well back, Cullen drilled down to the Miocene sand at four thousand feet and found nothing. Rather than try again nearby, he decided to drill a thousand feet deeper, to the Frio sand. He hit a small producer, sixty-five barrels a day, and it got him thinking. Every prospect in the area had been drilled to the Miocene. Why not drill deeper? There were technical challenges involved, and deeper drilling cost more, so Cullen put the matter to his backers in the Second National Bank’s boardroom. “The trouble with this business,” he told them, “is that everybody expects to find oil on the surface. If it was up near the top, it wouldn’t be any trick to find it… . You got to drill deep for oil.”

  It was an iffy proposition; all of Cullen’s investors, Big Jim West and John Kirby and the others, had lost their profits at Damon’s Mound. Still, they backed his new strategy. Heading straight for the Frio this time, Cullen hit the second gusher of his career, a pool almost as big as the first. It came in strong on a rainy night, blowing off the Christmas tree, the spewing oil coating the glasses of his driller so thoroughly he couldn’t see to cap the well for hours. The investors got their money back and more, and if Cullen’s financial future wasn’t yet certain, his reputation as an oilman was. “That man had guts,” one investor, J. E. Duff, said years later. “If he thought there was oil under a tract, he’d spend his last dollar drilling it, regardless of what anyone thought. And he had an uncanny nose for oil. But when he missed, it didn’t faze him. Nothing ever discouraged him.”3

  The second Pierce Junction well created a new mantra for Cullen. Hit the flanks of the old abandoned salt domes, and drill deeper. If he didn’t find oil, drill deeper still. Many of his field hands, a number of whom would work with Cullen for the next thirty years, could imitate his laconic instructions in their sleep: “Boys, let’s go a little deeper.” His longtime operations manager, Lynn Meador, once said, “When they start to lower Mr. Cullen into a grave, I’ll bet he’ll sit up and say, ‘Boys, dig her a couple of feet deeper.’ ”4

  Among those who liked the sound of Cullen’s strategy was Jim West, the cantankerous lumberman who had invested with Cullen from the beginning. West dabbled in oil himself, but his wells had all come up dry. One Saturday in 1927 he called Cullen to his downtown office and made him an offer. As Cullen remembered the conversation twenty-five years later, West said: “I’ve got three million dollars lying around. And I’ve got the West Production Company, which don’t amount to much. I’ll put the three million in my oil company, and give you one-fourth interest—if you’ll go in with me. You’ll be president—and have complete charge of the company.” Cullen said he’d think it over.

  The following Tuesday, having heard nothing from Cullen, West telephoned him again. “I made a proposition to you last Saturday, and since then I haven’t heard a damn thing from you,” West said. “I offered to give you almost a million dollars, and you haven’t taken the trouble to reply. What’s your answer, Roy? ”

  “Not interested,” Cullen said.

  For a moment West was speechless. “Not interested!” he barked. “My God—what do you want!”

  “Tell you what I’ll do,” Cullen said. “I’ll go in the oil business with you—fifty-fifty. For every dollar you put in, I’ll put in a dollar. But only on condition that I have full charge—no interference.” West went quiet for a moment. “Roy,” he said after a moment, “I didn’t know you had that kind of money.”

  He didn’t. “I’ll put up five thousand dollars,” Cullen said, “and you put up five thousand. We’ll each have half-interest.”

  West didn’t understand. “I offered you three million dolla
rs, Cullen—and you’d get a quarter of that (outright). You’ll turn that down and put up five thousand of your own money? ”

  “That’s right,” Cullen said. That way, he went on, “I won’t be working for you.”

  Later they flipped a coin to determine whose name went first. Cullen won; the new partnership was named Cullen & West. Cullen purchased two big Union Tool drilling rigs—the first he owned outright—and moved them to the east side of the old Blue Ridge Field in Fort Bend County, south of Houston. The Blue Ridge dome had produced some good wells beginning in 1913, but had since dwindled. West objected. “I’ve drilled wells on that side of Blue Ridge,” he said. “There ain’t any oil there. You’ll be throwing the money away.”

  Cullen looked balefully at his new partner. “I’m supposed to be in charge—isn’t that it, Jim? ” he said.

  “Sure you are,” West said. “But—”

  “Then that’s where we drill,” Cullen said.

  Drilling on a site known as the Bassett Blakely tract, Cullen again headed straight for the Frio—and brought in a good well, nearly sixty thousand barrels a day. In quick succession he brought in four more by the end of 1927, all solid producers. Increasingly confident he could find oil in untouched sands deep below the abandoned fields around Houston, Cullen then announced his intention to enter the derelict Humble Field. Sixteen miles northeast of downtown Houston, Humble was one of the state’s oldest oil fields, a salt dome discovered in 1903, two years after Spindletop. Its production, like that of many older fields, had dwindled. By the time Cullen began studying its geophysical data, Humble was an oil ghost town, littered with the skeletons of abandoned derricks and pockmarked with unused waste pits.