Bryan Burrough by The Big Rich: The Rise, Fall of the Greatest Texas Oil Fortunes Read Free Book Online

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