The Kings of Big Spring

by Bryan Mealer

  Within three years, the population nearly tripled as the town—like others in the Permian Basin—shifted from agriculture to petroleum. All the major oil companies established permanent offices, while four refineries sprang up to process the crude into gasoline, diesel, and kerosene.

  Joshua S. Cosden built the biggest one, on the east side of town. But the Cosden & Company refinery was relatively small compared to the $50 million empire that Cosden had already built and lost in spectacular fashion.

  “J. S. is down, but he’ll bounce back,” friends of the tycoon said. In fact, Big Spring was where Cosden was plotting his historic rebound and where he would establish, once and for all, his reputation as the “Rubber Ball” of the oil industry. Cosden’s comeback would position Big Spring to shine on a global stage, while setting into motion the events that eventually brought my father back to town, hoping to glean just a fraction of the oilman’s prevailing luck.

  * * *

  Cosden was born in 1881 and raised on a farm in Kent County, Maryland. At twenty, he took a job as a reporter for the Public Ledger in Philadelphia before moving to Baltimore to sell insurance and real estate. In 1908, after reading news of oil discoveries in Oklahoma and of ordinary men making fortunes, Cosden headed west, stopping in the Osage Indian reservation in the town of Bigheart, where a boom was under way.

  That same year, the first Model T Ford came off the assembly line in Detroit and pushed the demand for gasoline. Out in Bigheart, there was no refinery to distill the oil into fuel, and Cosden saw his niche. His only problem was that he was broke. So he did what Sid Richardson, Clint Murchison, H. L. Hunt, and other legendary Texas oilmen would do in the coming years when possessed with vision and empty pockets: he borrowed other people’s money.

  Back in Baltimore, Cosden assembled a group of wealthy friends he would come to rely on over the course of his career. Their seed money allowed him to buy six acres south of Bigheart, where he set out building a small “teapot” refinery. While it was under construction, Cosden and his wife lived in a tent before building a small cabin.

  The Southwestern Refining Company was completed in 1910, but Cosden quickly ran into problems. The nearest wells were several miles away, with no pipeline or road to connect them to the refinery. Rather than wait for these to arrive, Cosden transported the oil in a rolling tank wagon that he’d bought secondhand. The contraption was so rickety it leaked oil as it bounced over the rocks and pastures, forcing Cosden to run behind with a bucket. The little amount of fuel he and his wife managed to produce, they sold themselves door-to-door.

  The following year, a giant tornado struck Bigheart and destroyed the refinery, along with their cabin. It also flattened oil rigs in the fields and leveled most of the town. The only place for Cosden and his wife to live was in the hole they’d dug as a tornado shelter, where they stayed for two weeks. As soon as Cosden rebuilt, a fire destroyed his boiler and stills, forcing him to start all over again.

  But somehow he remained undeterred, and his backers never lost faith. By 1912, rail tankers bearing his company’s name were rolling through Bigheart and he was finally turning a profit. That year, he borrowed more money to purchase a second refinery, in West Tulsa, on the banks of the Arkansas River, and sank everything into expanding it. Wanting to ensure a steady stream of oil, he started his own pipeline company. By 1915, he’d connected the Cushing field, Oklahoma’s biggest producer, straight to his refineries, which by then were processing eighteen thousand barrels per day into fuel and other derivatives. The lubricating oil and wax plant he built alongside it was said to be the finest anywhere, producing some twenty thousand pounds of wax daily.

  But transporting and refining oil weren’t enough for Cosden. He wanted control over the entire process, from the ground to the gas tank. He wanted to drill for oil. So in 1916, around the time my family was fleeing the Texas drought, Cosden visited one of the biggest investment banks in New York City and laid out his plan.

  “I walked into their offices at two-thirty in the afternoon and walked out at four-fifteen with the money assured,” Cosden told one reporter. With few questions, the bankers had given him $12 million.

  Cosden began drilling the Cushing field, then built his West Tulsa plant even bigger. He added a hundred cracking stills, which squeezed more gasoline out of a barrel of oil by “cracking” the heavier components. Only the mighty Standard Oil had been using that kind of technology. Standard also owned most of the patents for cracking oil into gasoline and other products, so Cosden simply hired better engineers and wrote patents of his own.

  When finished, his Tulsa refinery was the largest in the world, and as oil continued to flow from his own wells, Cosden became one of Tulsa’s richest men. That year, in a bold expression of his value, his company took out a whopping million-dollar insurance policy on his life that required thirteen different firms to broker it—one of the biggest individual policies in the nation.

  The press found the thirty-four-year-old Cosden irresistible. He was blond and handsome and spent money with extravagance, once writing a $12 million check for an oil company while sitting in the lobby of a Tulsa hotel. At the same time, friends and associates described him as refreshingly humble and well liked. The papers remarked that he rarely touched booze.

  In 1912, Cosden built the most expensive home in Tulsa, a four-bedroom Craftsman known as Mission Manor, then built an even bigger one that featured the city’s first indoor swimming pool. In 1917, he began erecting his monument. The sixteen-story Cosden Building, located downtown on the corner of Fourth and Boston, was Tulsa’s first skyscraper and the tallest building west of the Mississippi. In the meantime, Cosden divorced his wife, with whom he had three children, and married Nellie Neves Roeser, the wife of Charles Roeser, a less-successful oilman who lived across the street. The tabloids wrote of how Nellie spoke French and called her the most gorgeous woman in Oklahoma.

  For a while the couple lived in the penthouse of the skyscraper before absconding to the East Coast. They purchased a sprawling estate in Port Washington, Long Island, and another in Newport, Rhode Island. For the winter they built a spectacular Spanish-style villa in Palm Beach, designed by Addison Mizner, which Vogue described as “the finest private residence in America.” The servants’ quarters alone had thirty bedrooms.

  By 1920, hardly a decade since sleeping in a hole in Bigheart, Cosden was worth between $50 and $75 million. On Long Island, the Cosdens’ neighbors included Vincent Astor, the Guggenheims, and the Whitneys, all of whom they regularly entertained. After meeting the Prince of Wales in London, the Cosdens made headlines in September 1924 when they hosted the prince on his visit to America. The party lasted until dawn, when His Royal Highness was seen stumbling to his hired car.

  Society writers, perhaps jealous, often dismissed the Cosdens as gold-dipped social climbers. “Men and women whose surnames had been in Blue Book and Social Register since the days of their great-great-grandparents permitted themselves small gasps at the slashing, heedless way the Cosdens spent and spent,” wrote one reporter. Cosden’s money, said another, “lacked the age that gives wine its bouquet and families their dignity and prestige.”

  In fact, it was the splashy, new-moneyed millionaires of the Jazz Age like Cosden whom F. Scott Fitzgerald had in mind when he wrote The Great Gatsby. Cosden even confessed that the book was one of his favorites. Yet by the time Gatsby was published, in April 1925, Cosden was already ruined.

  Actually, his self-made empire had been damaged for some time. Reports vary about what caused the crash, but most agree that Cosden bet too aggressively on Wall Street, even going so far as pledging his company stock as security. When the market plunged in 1920–21, he lost heavily, dropping three hundred thousand dollars in one hour, according to one report. Cosden tried buying much of the company stock himself to hold it up, but it was no use. Overproduction and surplus had caused oil prices to dip and stagnate, and profits were on the decline. In January 1925, the board of directors
staged a takeover of the company and assumed $100 million in assets, including the sixteen-story monument in downtown Tulsa. The company’s name was changed to the Mid-Continent Petroleum Corporation.

  To recoup, Cosden was forced to unload his personal empire piece by piece. He sold the Long Island estate to his neighbor, Vincent Astor, while the widow of Horace Dodge, the car magnate, swept up the Palm Beach villa for a cool $4 million. Cosden’s “retirement,” reported the New York Times, “is said by oil men to have removed him from the field of major personalities in that business.”

  And thus, the first of Joshua S. Cosden’s fortunes was gone.

  For months, nobody saw or heard from him. At one point, a reporter managed to track down Cosden’s first wife, now remarried, and asked what she thought about his turn of luck.

  “He’ll stage a comeback,” she said. “I ought to know. While Joshua and I were married, he went broke twice—but never for long.”

  Indeed, while the New York society writers were savoring his downfall, poking fun at how other millionaires were snatching up his thoroughbreds for pennies on the dollar, Cosden was already down in Texas making deals.

  The low prices that had helped bury his company now provided him a perfect foothold. By the fall of 1925, he’d leased sixteen sections near Odessa, some sixty miles southwest of Big Spring. Then, in February 1927, a local newspaper announced that he’d sold a block of leases in Brown County—some seventeen hundred acres west of Comanche—to the Prairie Oil and Gas Co., which had paid him a million dollars. News of the sale quickly reached Wall Street, where Cosden had already gone, brimming with confidence and new life. Once again, he convinced wealthier men, such as Standard Oil brokers Pforzheimer & Co., to gamble on his hunches. In just a few days, he returned to Texas with $5 million guaranteed, reorganized his company, and started buying land.

  He based the new Cosden Oil Company in a plush office in Fort Worth and started building. He snatched up a string of small oil companies and a spread of leases near Oklahoma City, where he planned a giant tank farm. When his staff warned he was moving too fast, Cosden chided them. “The trouble with you fellows,” he said, “is that you have no vision.”

  In 1928, he set his ambitions on Big Spring and Howard County, where Magnolia had just hit its gusher on Dora Roberts’s ranch. He bought leases near the biggest proven wells—paying Roberts a reported one thousand dollars an acre—but he wasn’t about to sell his oil to anyone. As crews started production, he set out to build a refinery.

  Once again, Cosden’s timing was impeccable. The T&P Railway was just in the process of switching from coal oil to diesel and needed a steady supply. John Lancaster, head of the railroad, took Cosden on a personal tour around Big Spring to choose an ideal location. Lancaster not only agreed to buy fuel for the railway, but to ship it anywhere along its route. And with that assurance, Cosden bought two hundred acres on the east side of town, installed new stills and a thermacracker, and started connecting pipe to the newly discovered Howard-Glasscock field, which produced over ten million barrels of oil before the year was over.

  By August 1929, just eighteen months after reentering the game, the Prince of Petroleum had spun a profit of $15 million, with company assets valued at $25 million. “Cosden Recovers,” the New York Times proclaimed, “without investing a dollar himself.” His comeback, reported the Associated Press, was being regarded by oilmen as “one of the outstanding achievements in the history of the industry.”

  * * *

  With rail cars of oil rumbling into Big Spring, the population tripled to over twelve thousand people and the modern town took shape. By then John Lewis and the family were living on his daughter Fannie’s farm north of town, where, like so many farmers in the South, they were trying their hands at growing cotton. But it seems unlikely that farming was profitable enough to keep Bud away from the action in the oil fields. With his experience, he probably had no trouble finding a mechanic’s job and the high boom wages would’ve been plenty to support Bertha and the kids, all of whom were now under the age of five.

  I’m sure my family was aware of Josh Cosden, since he was the most famous oilman in the Southwest. There’s no evidence of them ever crossing paths, or of any of them working at his refinery. But I’d like to believe they weren’t so removed from people like him, so displaced and out of range that they missed the providence that came to men like Cosden and Frank Day. After losing Julia, Goldie, and the farm, and wandering from place to place, I like to think my family had found some purchase in Big Spring, that they’d found a home where the boom could swirl around them with all its befalling luck, and just maybe they could reach out and grab a piece.

  * * *

  Already, Big Spring was shaping up to be a different kind of boomtown, less lawless and depraved. The shrewd merchants, railroad engineers, and cattlemen who founded the town had sensed what was coming and planned ahead. They raised money to pave the streets so the trucks could move freely without mud, installed electric lights along the main thoroughfares to stave off crime, and fortified the county jail so it was impervious to drunken mobs. They built a water system to prevent outbreaks of disease and installed fire hydrants, while construction crews built offices for the influx of new business.

  But when office space ran short, rancher Dora Roberts stepped in to help. Roberts was one of the earliest settlers in the county and no doubt its most influential. In 1883, she’d married a young cattle trader and moved to a dugout on the edge of the frontier. Her husband was later killed while breaking a wild bronc, and in 1909, a second husband also died tragically and in similar fashion, crushed by his own horse. Roberts continued to manage the ever-growing ranch on her own, and when oil made her the richest person in West Texas, she dedicated much of her wealth toward the betterment of the town. In 1928, as the population grew, she and Lorin McDowell—whose ranch was finally giving oil—financed the construction of Big Spring’s first office tower. The Petroleum Building, as it was called, featured brass ornaments, a marble interior, and a row of concrete Aztec warriors who stood sentry along its rooftop. And while standing only six stories high, it would loom over the future of Big Spring and my family in particular.

  The true totem of the oil bonanza, however, was going up a few blocks away—the gift of another come-lately oil millionaire. After a few gushers were tapped on W. R. Settles’s ranch, he remained the modest cattleman and devout Presbyterian he’d always been. After donating his first well to his church, Settles was bombarded with myriad suggestions of what to do with his money. Big Spring had only three hotels to accommodate the crush of newcomers, and rooms were in short supply. Town leaders convinced Settles to spend his royalties on building not only a new hotel for the expanding city, but one that would dwarf all others.

  They chose a prime location on the corner of Third and Runnels and hired David S. Castle, the architect who’d designed many of Abilene’s finest buildings. No expense was spared. The cost of the fifteen-story hotel, plus furnishings, ran to seven hundred thousand dollars, almost equal in value to all other construction in Big Spring that year. A spectacular marble staircase rose from the lobby and split in two directions toward the mezzanine, where the grand ballroom contained one of the largest crystal chandeliers in the world. The floors were polished maple, the paneling was mahogany, and the furnishings were the finest walnut. An eleven-piece orchestra played the first two nights of its opening, with over three hundred people packed into the ballroom.

  The Herald devoted an entire section to the event. Fred W. Crow, the hotel’s manager, told the paper, “I have no hesitancy of comparing the class, service and beauty [of] the Settles Hotel to the New Yorker in New York City. In fact, I think this hotel is superior in many respects.”

  As tall buildings cut a new skyline in Big Spring, the Cosden Oil Company continued to grow in Fort Worth. When the value of its stock reached $130, Cosden urged investors to let it soar. “It will go to $510,” he triumphed. Cosden’s second fortune ha
d come in half the time as his first, and the oilman was looking to bounce even higher. He was flying, pushing for orbit, when, in October 1929, the bottom fell out of the world.

  The stock market crash didn’t penetrate the oil patch’s joie de vivre right away. In fact, Cosden voiced confidence the lull would pass, even breaking ground on new construction at the refinery. For nearly a year, his stock price held firm despite the flagging markets. But by June 1930, with crude having plummeted from four dollars a barrel to ten cents, the company’s value fluttered to the ground like a punctured balloon. Profits vanished under mounting expenses and employees were cut loose. Before long, the Cosden Oil Company was in receivership and the second of Josh Cosden’s fortunes was gone.

  As the Great Depression settled over the region, drilling rigs were stacked and hauled away, holes were capped, and oil towns emptied as the boom chasers returned to their farms and cities to wait out the bust. Landowners defaulted on loans as oil royalties disappeared. Banks began to fail along with shops and restaurants in every little town that had grown fat off the boom. It would take several more years for the oil economy to recover, at which point it would thrive in the face of global despair. But until that miracle happened, Josh Cosden returned to New York, where he became terribly ill. My family, meanwhile, returned to the road.