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

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