by The Big Rich: The Rise;Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes
Frania Tye didn’t see Mr. Hunt again for several weeks. When he next called, in October, he pressed her for dinner, and she relented, embarking on what she later described as a whirlwind courtship. Every night they dined out, sipping Cokes and ginger ale, as Hunt regaled her with stories of his youth wandering the West, felling trees and boxing and playing semipro baseball. He said he was a Louisiana oilman and that his full name was Major Franklyn Hunt, and when she asked if he had been in the military, he said no, that everyone in the South was a colonel or a major. In no time Frania, rootless and lonely, began to weaken beneath Major Hunt’s romantic onslaught, so much so that when Hunt, during a long drive to St. Petersburg on the night of November 10, mentioned marriage, she was helpless to deny him.
The next morning Hunt took her to a pawn shop and bought her a simple gold band. Afterward they drove to a white stucco bungalow in Tampa’s bustling Cuban quarter, Ybor City, where Old Man Bailey was waiting with a justice of the peace, a Latin gentleman. When Frania asked about a marriage license, Hunt said Florida didn’t require one. Dazed, she signed some kind of ledger, as did Hunt, and before she knew it, the Latin gentleman was reading aloud from a Bible.
“Do you take Frania Tye as your lawful wife? ” he asked Hunt.
“Yes,” Hunt said.
“Do you take Franklyn Hunt as your lawful husband? ” he asked Frania.
“Yes,” she said.
The justice pronounced them man and wife, and if that status was legally questionable without a marriage license, it didn’t matter to the newlyweds, not yet anyway. The idea that her husband might already have a family never entered Frania’s mind; what was in Hunt’s, other than a rapid consummation of their union, was anyone’s guess. For the rest of his life he never spoke or wrote a meaningful word about Frania Tye. But from the moment they walked out of that Ybor City bungalow, Hunt treated her as his wife. After honeymooning in Orlando, Hunt said he needed to return to Louisiana for business. He promised to send for her and, after another brief return to Tampa he did, in February 1926, telling her to meet him in New Orleans for Mardi Gras.
On the steamship across the Gulf of Mexico Frania became seasick, and by the time she reached Louisiana she realized she was pregnant. Hunt appeared overjoyed. After a few days enjoying the French Quarter, he spirited her to Shreveport, where they lived briefly in a hotel before Hunt rented an apartment on Hearndon Street. Frania settled in to prepare for the baby, who was due in October. Hunt disappeared on frequent business trips, but for now she was happy. He didn’t make the birth, a boy who bore his father’s initials, Howard Lee Hunt.
For the next three years Frania remained content in her new, if slightly bizarre, life. Major Hunt traveled constantly, never quite making it back to Shreveport for Thanksgiving or Christmas. On his return he was always sweet and apologetic, always making sure she had plenty of cash on hand, but after the couple moved into a small brick home on Gladstone Street, a few of the neighbors appeared to grow suspicious, wondering aloud just where the peripatetic Major Hunt was actually going. For her part, Frania would later insist she never suspected a thing. Her husband traveled for his oil field job, simple as that. She was too busy with their growing family to give it much thought. In October 1928, two years after little Howard’s arrival, she gave birth to a second child, a girl Hunt named Haroldina. Then, in the spring of 1930, Frania became pregnant for a third time.
By that point Hunt was doing a good deal of his traveling in Texas, and when Frania was deep into her pregnancy that summer, he explained it would be necessary for the family to move to Dallas. There Frania unpacked her things in a two-story brick home at 4230 Versailles Avenue, in the city’s nicest residential area, Highland Park. Not long after, she gave birth to their third child, a girl they named Helen Hilda Hunt. Once again Hunt couldn’t make it to the hospital. He was too busy, off on important business in the remote East Texas pines, where he had stumbled on a down-on-his-luck wildcatter named Columbus Joiner, a man with whom he was about to make history.
IV.
After secretly settling Frania Tye in Shreveport, Hunt had returned to El Dorado to find his first family slowly recovering from his infant daughter’s sudden death. Their new house was finished, a three-story, eight-bedroom English Revival mansion that was easily the largest in the area. They named it The Pines. Hunt bought a mammoth Packard limousine whose chauffeur drove Margaret, Hassie, and little Caroline to school each morning. The family continued to grow. In February 1926, just as Frania was moving into her new apartment in Shreveport a hundred miles to the southwest, Lyda gave birth to a second son, a twelve-pound butterball they named Nelson Bunker Hunt. Three years later came a third, Herbert, named for the president Hunt favored, Herbert Hoover. Still later came a fourth, Lamar.
Hunt’s life as a covert bigamist did nothing to mar the idyllic days at The Pines. If anything, he spent more time with his children than before. Hassie operated a lemonade stand in the driveway. Margaret learned to drive. Meals were a time for Hunt to educate his growing brood, lecturing the children on everything from politics and music to the complications of serving on a bank’s board of directors. Every night after dinner Lyda played their new grand piano, and everyone would gather around and sing, Hunt theatrically draping his arms around Lyda, crooning, “I can’t give you anything but love … baby.” It was as close as the Hunts ever came to displays of intimacy. No one in the family kissed—ever. Once, when Hassie went to kiss his mother’s cheek, Hunt shooed him away. “Stop that,” he said. “Don’t be kissing people.” No one was quite sure what Hunt had against kissing, but his authority in the family remained unquestioned, as it always would.
On his return to El Dorado, Hunt wasted no time getting back into oil. Though not unwilling to bet money on a rank wildcat, he preferred to improve his odds by investing in areas where oil had already been found. Mostly he drilled his own wells, but sometimes he bought ones other men had started; under both strategies, Hunt, like most oilmen, put a premium on intelligence-gathering, seeking to learn everything he could about existing and aborning wells. For the first time he incorporated his own company, Hunt Oil, and gathered around him a half-dozen seasoned oil scouts, sending them nosing around southern Arkansas and especially several new fields opening in northern Louisiana. Hunt’s men, led by the ever-present Old Man Bailey, proved top notch. Time and again they identified the best spots to drill. Hunt struck oil in the Tullos-Urania Field outside Monroe, Louisiana, then at several places near Shreveport. By 1929 he had opened offices in El Dorado and Shreveport and was operating more than one hundred wells, though with oil selling at barely $1.25 a barrel he was forced to plow most of his profits back into the search for still more acreage. He had emerged as one of the region’s largest independent operators, a wealthy man by Arkansas standards, but still far from serious riches.
For the first time his eyes turned to Texas. The West Texas boom that lured Clint Murchison and Sid Richardson out onto the plains also attracted Hunt. He and Old Man Bailey drove west in 1927, putting together a drilling block near Ballinger in Runnels County, but the few wells they attempted came up dry. The West Texas fields were large compared to those in Louisiana, however, and Texas continued to intrigue Hunt. When oil was found in 1929 at Van, east of Dallas, he tried to lease land but found the majors had already snatched up the best acreage; the one well he managed to drill came up dry. Then came the stock market crash, which overnight gave way to an economic depression the likes of which America had never before seen. Hunt survived with little trouble, but money remained tight, and by that following summer of 1930 he still hadn’t found a drop of oil in Texas.
Then, on September 5, Hunt took a call from an El Dorado oil field equipment man named M. M. Miller. Miller was marketing a new drill stem that Hunt used; Hunt, in fact, was one of his best customers, and Miller wasn’t above freshening the relationship with the odd tip.
“There’s a wildcatter working down in East Texas, and he may have someth
ing going,” Miller said. “He might call on us to run a drill-stem test on his well, and I thought you might be interested.”
He was. This, in fact, was exactly the kind of inside information Hunt valued most. Still, he was short on cash that week, so before driving to Texas he put in a call to the owner of an El Dorado clothing store, a squat, bald character named Pete Lake. Lake had lent Hunt money in tight spots before, and was always interested in new action. They left that same day, taking Lake’s car into Louisiana, where they stopped for maps in Shreveport, then headed into East Texas to find the drill site in remote Rusk County. That afternoon, six miles past the hamlet of Henderson, they turned down a rutted dirt road that ran deep into the pines. A mile down the road they arrived at a clearing where a crowd of about twenty people was watching as Columbus Joiner and his crew prepared for the test. One of Joiner’s men, M. M. Miller’s brother Clarence, saw the car drive up and scrambled down from the derrick.
After a minute Joiner ambled over.
“H. L. Hunt,” Miller said, “meet C. M. Joiner.”
There was an instant rapport between the two wildcatters, and not just because they were dressed in almost identical outfits; slacks, ties, matching white shirts and straw boaters. Joiner needed money; Hunt wanted to invest. He had thought he might offer to pay for Joiner’s casing in return for a share of the lease. But Joiner squelched the idea the moment Hunt brought it up. “All taken care of,” he said. “Got a string of used casing on the way any time now.”
What Hunt didn’t realize was that Joiner stood at the middle of a spreading net of intrigue. To raise money for his third well on the Daisy Bradford land, he had sold three rounds of investment certificates to dozens of local people. In return for a hundred dollars, each of the certificates entitled the buyer to 4 of the 320 acres Joiner had set aside for investors; this meant only the first eighty certificates were valid. Never one to let ethics stand in the way of fund-raising, however, Joiner had wildly oversold the certificates, selling rights to the same land to multiple buyers; one lease went to eleven different people. It was only a matter of time before someone found out. Worse, Joiner’s own driller, Ed Laster, had betrayed him to a Kansas oil company, selling off his drilling data and rock samples. The Kansas company had already begun leasing up nearby acreage.
As Hunt sat back to await the drill-stem test that afternoon, he knew none of this. He watched as Laster, standing up on the derrick floor, lowered the twelve-foot drill stem to the bottom of the hole, where it began boring into the earth. When they reached the planned depth it pierced a pocket of natural gas, which whistled out of the hole in a rush. Laster quickly pulled it up from the hole. A moment later, the rig began to shudder. The ground rumbled so violently, one of the derrick’s supports broke with an audible crack. Suddenly a shower of mud erupted from the hole, shooting as high as the top of the derrick, before calming into a small fountain, flooding the derrick floor. When the fountain ebbed to a stop, Laster dipped his finger into it and put it to his mouth. “Whaddya think? ” someone shouted.
Laster tasted oil. “It ought to make a pretty good well,” he announced, “if we can bring it in.”
The crowd surrounded Joiner, farmers in overalls thrusting their hands forward in congratulations. Joiner closed his eyes and leaned against a pine tree. “Not yet,” he said. “It’s not an oil well yet.” The hole would need to be stablized, a process that could take several weeks, before Joiner could determine how much oil he really had.
Still, there was no containing the rumors, or the excitement that began to spread through the downtrodden villages of Rusk County. By the next morning, in fact, people had begun streaming into Henderson. A line of shacks sprouted down at the main road, the locals selling hamburgers and cots; the little encampment was dubbed “Joinerville.” Each day that September more scouts and lease traders poured into the area. Taking a room in Henderson, Hunt called in his men from El Dorado and waded into the thick of the trading, swapping IOUs for four hundred acres of leases south and east of Joiner’s well; Joiner had almost everything north and west. As the fervor spread, Joiner was celebrated as a local hero. The newspapers proclaimed him “Daddy of the Rusk County Oilfield”; after that everyone called him “Dad.” The town of Overton feted Joiner with an all-day parade. When the inevitable finally occurred—one of his investors, comparing his certificates to others, realized he had been cheated and sued to place Joiner’s acreage in receivership—the Tyler Courier-Times rushed to his defense, denouncing the “slick lawyers” who dared to attack their savior. “It’s high time the independent operators had their inning,” an editor wrote. “Now, if this be bolshevism, then we’re bolshevists.”
It took almost a month for Ed Laster to ready the Daisy Bradford No. 3 for completion, laying the casing and cementing it into place. When they ran out of wood, they took to stoking the boiler with old tires. After the last drill test, Laster had blocked the hole with a cement plug, and by Friday morning, October 3, word had spread that he was preparing to drill out the plug and see what lay beneath. By nine o’clock that morning nearly eight thousand people had tromped through the woods to the drill site. Kids sold soda and sandwiches, while bootleggers hawked bottles of white lightning. All morning the clearing thrummed with anticipation. All that was missing was Joiner himself, said to be recovering from a bout of flu in Dallas.
By midmorning Laster had drilled through the cement plug and begun to run the bailer, which cleared mud and water from the bottom of the hole in hope of freeing up any oil. The bailer ran all afternoon and when night fell lanterns were lit so Laster and his crew could work into the evening. The crowds reaassembled when they resumed work in the morning, but by noon there was still no sign of oil. Joiner appeared then, climbing through the wire fence around the derrick with a young oilman named D. H. Byrd, known as “Dry Hole” Byrd for a string of fifty-six straight dry holes he had once drilled; Byrd, like so many of the eager young men who flocked to Rusk County that fall, would later become one of the wealthiest oilmen in Dallas. But Joiner’s appearance failed to bring any signs of oil. By nightfall the crowds began to disperse.
The next day, Sunday, October 5, Laster and his crew, now glassy-eyed with fatigue, continued swabbing the well. The farmers and townspeople began arriving after church services and remained through the day, but by the time darkness fell, there was still no oil. Again lanterns were lit, and again Laster and his crew worked into the darkness. Finally, around nine o’clock, Laster detected a faint gurgling sound deep in the well. For a fleeting second he smelled gas. “Put out the fires!” he hollered. “Put out your cigarettes! Quick!”
The ground began to rumble. A roar came from the hole. As Laster and his men dived for cover, a jet of black oil suddenly exploded from the derrick floor, arcing into the night sky, falling like rain on everyone. The crowd went wild, dusty farmers hugging their wives, grown men rolling in the oil-soaked mud, one worker firing a pistol into the air again and again. After a minute or two, Laster spun a set of valves, diverting the gush of crude into the waiting storage tanks.
Suddenly everything went quiet. Dad Joiner asked D. H. Byrd to measure the flow on the gauges. “Whisper it to me,” he said.
Byrd checked the gauges, then leaned in close to Joiner. “She’s flowing at sixty-eight hundred barrels a day,” he whispered.
For a split second Joiner lost his composure. “SIXTY-EIGHT HUNDRED BARRELS!” he yelled. “UNBELIEVABLE!”
By any standard, it was a massive well. The people of Rusk County went to bed that night convinced they were sleeping atop an ocean of oil. The professionals, however, weren’t so sure. Within days the flow from the Daisy Bradford No. 3 eased to 250 barrels an hour; worse, it was “flowing in heads,” that is, in uneven spurts, 100 barrels one hour, 500 the next. Within days many scouts were dismissing it as a freak.
Not H. L. Hunt. Great fortunes are built on great convictions, and from the moment he watched Joiner’s drill test Hunt was certain this was a giant
field. On October 20, two weeks after the initial strike, he began drilling his first lease, south of the Daisy Bradford. Over the years several dry holes had been drilled east of the Joiner leases. It got Hunt to thinking. The more he studied the land, the more he became convinced that the field stretched north and west of Joiner’s well, on the four thousand acres Joiner had already leased. An idea began to form. Maybe, Hunt mused, the play wasn’t to drill near the Joiner leases. It was to buy the Joiner leases.
His opportunity, he sensed, lay in the old wildcatter’s legal troubles. Already his investors were beginning to sue. One lawsuit, seeking to force Joiner into involuntary receivership, had been filed in Dallas; if Joiner lost, all his leases might be thrown into the hands of a court-appointed receiver. Joiner tried to hide from process servers at the Hotel Adolphus, but a lawyer slipped a hundred-dollar bill to a bellboy, flushing Joiner out, then forcing him to attend a hearing on October 31. It was a confusing session, with Joiner’s attorney asking for a voluntary receivership, and by the time the judge gaveled it to a close a receiver had in fact been named, though Joiner retained control of his leases, at least for the time being. As the crowd filed out, no one was quite certain what had happened. It was then that Hunt, standing outside the courtroom, approached Joiner in the hallway.
“Mr. Joiner,” Hunt said, “I’m offering to buy you out lock, stock, and barrel.”
“Boy,” Joiner said before walking off, “you would be buying a pig in a poke.”
Hunt returned to East Texas more determined than ever to buy Joiner’s land. If he could only raise the money, he felt Joiner could be persuaded. Unfortunately, at the moment Hunt had a grand total of $109 in free cash. For several days he scurried between Henderson and Dallas, talking to every oilman he could find, including scouts representing several of the majors, but none were interested in a partnership with him, much less advancing him any cash. Finally he arm-twisted his Arkansas pal Pete Lake into a deal; Lake agreed to supply $30,000 in return for a 20 percent stake in Joiner’s leases. It was enough to get discussions started. He and Lake then returned to Dallas, determined not to leave until they had Joiner’s land.