Piles of Green From Black Gold

The discovery turned Spindletop into a boomtown and gave birth to a breed of men whose larger-than-life escapades inspired the character of Jett Rink in Edna Ferber's book "Giant," later brought to life by actor James Dean. These fiercely independent wildcatters often bored holes thousands of feet beneath the prairie on little more than a hunch. Some struck oil, some went broke and some did both.
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 A few managed to get rich beyond anything the planet had ever seen.

In "The Big Rich," Bryan Burrough spins an engaging account of the Texas oil business, centered on a group of friends who became known as the Big Four: H.L. Hunt, Sid Richardson, Clint Murchison and Hugh Roy Cullen. Mr. Burrough, who drew on county courthouse records and numerous interviews with those who knew the Big Four, tells us: "There really were poor Texas boys who discovered gushing oil wells and became overnight billionaires, patriarchs of squabbling families who owned private islands and colossal mansions and championship football teams, who slept with movie stars and jousted with presidents and tried to corner an international market or two."

Haroldson Lafayette Hunt (1889-1974), known to all as H.L., was an inveterate gambler who managed to sire 14 children with three women while parlaying oceans of Texas oil into what was probably the world's largest fortune. The oil discovery that propelled him into being not just rich but "big rich" was a field in East Texas that he acquired in the 1930s by talking an aging wildcatter into selling the leases to him for a fraction of what they were worth. In the 1950s, Hunt became increasingly interested in politics: He was a member of the ultraconservative John Birch Society and promoted his anticommunist views with a foundation and on the radio. Hunt seemed less inclined than others in the Big Four to luxuriate in his riches. He famously carried his lunch to work every day in a brown paper bag.

Sid Richardson (1891-1959), a lifelong bachelor, spent much of his early career partnering with Clint Murchison (1895-1969), a childhood friend from Athens, Texas. Through shrewd wildcatting, Richardson amassed a fortune that allowed him to move in political circles in the 1940s and '50s, hobnobbing with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight Eisenhower, Lyndon Johnson and J. Edgar Hoover. Although federal officials could never prove it, Mr. Burrough says, Murchison got rich in the 1930s by pumping oil from fields even after the government had placed strict production limits on them in a price-control effort. Murchison, who was fond of saying that "money is like manure -- you've gotta spread it around to make things grow," was the first of the Texas oilmen to begin living larger than life, hopping from his ranches to Dallas to his private island in the Gulf of Mexico in a Douglas DC-3.
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Hugh Roy Cullen (1881-1957), the most successful Houston oilman of the era, was known as a "creekologist" because he believed (correctly, apparently) that he could detect oilfields by studying creeks, ravines and other natural formations. In March 1947, Cullen told a crowd at a Texas Hospital Association banquet that he and his wife were preparing to create a foundation that would draw its funding from some of his most lucrative oilfields; he estimated that he could afford to direct the profits from selling 40 million barrels of oil into the foundation annually. Two days later, when the entire board of the Houston Chamber of Commerce came to thank him, according to Mr. Burrough, Cullen told them that he had changed his mind: "We've decided, after looking at our property, that we can double that figure." Cullen ended up giving away more than 90% of his fortune, much of it to Houston hospitals and cultural institutions.

In the book's introduction, Mr. Burrough writes that, as a child growing up in Central Texas, he was "always vaguely ashamed" about being born out of state (he doesn't say where). "I'll never forget the day a boy in my fifth-grade class actually called me a carpetbagger." As a carpetbagger, Mr. Burrough can perhaps be forgiven making some basic mistakes in Texas geography. Throughout his description of the early years in which Murchison and Richardson were beginning to hit big oil, Mr. Burrough refers to the boomtown of "Buckburnett." The actual name of the town is Burkburnett, named after legendary rancher and oilman Samuel Burk Burnett. Writing about the Circle T ranch, once owned by one of H.L. Hunt's children, the author puts the ranch "east of Dallas," but it's northwest of the city, closer to Fort Worth.
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Like the business Mr. Burrough writes about, "The Big Rich" also hits a few dry patches, primarily after the main characters fade away and are replaced by their bickering and sometimes philandering children. The most famous of the progeny were known more for their antics than for their business prowess. Hunt's sons Bunker and Herbert lost an estimated $4 billion in their attempts to corner the world silver market in the late 1970s. Clint Murchison Jr. became known as the man who owned the Dallas Cowboys before undercutting his fortune with a string of bad debts in the 1980s.

In the end, Sid Richardson's quartet of great-nephews, the Bass brothers of Fort Worth, emerged with the strongest legacy. During the decades after Richardson's death, Sid, Robert, Lee and Edward Bass built a $50 million chunk of their great-uncle's money into a combined fortune estimated at $5 billion, mostly by savvy investing. Theirs is an impressive story of business success, but it can't compete with the gaudy tales of Texas wildcatters and the riches that flowed following that first strike at Spindletop.

Mr. Lunsford is the Journal's aerospace editor. He lives outside Fort Worth, Texas, and spent his childhood among the oil wells of West Texas.

Louis J. Sheehan, Esquire