Texas

  “Oh, no! Look at that fellow. One of the most important men we have. He samples every load of water. What kind of rock? What consistency? What kind of sand?’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘It’s his job to paint a picture of the inside of our well. Every different layer, if he can do it. Because only then do we know what we have.’

  The operation of the rig, twenty-four hours a day, was so compelling—with men delving into the secrets of earth, lining the hole with casing to keep it open, cementing sections of the hole, fishing like schoolboys for parts which had broken and lodged at the bottom, calculating the tilt of the rocks and their composition—that it became a fascinating game which preoccupied all of Larkin and much of Texas, for it was known throughout the oil industry that ‘Rusk #1 west of Jacksboro is down to eighteen hundred feet, stone-dry.’ Spectators learned new words, which they bandied deftly: ‘They’re undereaming at two thousand.’ ‘They’ve cemented-in at two thousand two.’ And always there was the hope that on this bright morning the word would flash: ‘Rusk #1 has come in!’

  But the town was also involved in something equally colorful, for the ten roughnecks who had come with the rig were proving themselves to be of a special breed, the likes of which Larkin had never before seen. Rugged, powerful of arm, incredibly dirty from the slop of the rig, impatient with anyone who was not connected with the drilling business, they were among the ablest professionals in the country. The three top experts had come down from the oil fields of Pennsylvania, where their forebears had been drilling for oil since 1859, when Colonel Drake brought in that first American well at Titusville; he had struck his bonanza at a mere sixty-nine feet. The next echelon were Texas men who had worked in Arkansas and Louisiana in years when activity focused there. But the men who gave the crew character were Texans who had worked only in this state. They were violent, catlike men who knew they could lose a finger or an arm if they dallied with the flashing cable or did not jump quickly enough if something went wrong with the walking beam.

  On the job they were self-disciplined, for if even one man failed to perform, the safety of all might be imperiled, but off the job they wanted things their way, and what they wanted most was booze, women and a good poker game. This brought them into conflict with the Ku Klux Klan, which had disciplined Larkin along somewhat divergent lines, and the trouble started when three of the men imported high-flying ladies from Fort Griffin and set them up at Nora’s place, where the creekologist Dewey Kimbro and his girl Esther still maintained quarters.

  Within two nights the Klansmen learned of the goings-on, and in their hoods three of them marched out to Nora’s to put a stop to this frivolity, but they were met by the three roughnecks, who said: ‘What is this shit? Take off your nightshirts.’

  ‘We’re warning you, get those girls out of town by Thursday night or face the consequences.’

  ‘You come out here again in those nightshirts, you’re gonna get your ass blown off. Now get the hell out of here.’

  The Klansmen returned on Thursday night, as promised, but the three sponsors of the girls were on the night shift, so the protectors of morality satisfied themselves by having the three girls arrested and hauling them off to jail. When the oilmen reached Nora’s after a hard night on the rig, they expected a little companionship, but instead found Nora weeping: ‘They warned me that if the girls ever came back, and that included Esther, they was gonna burn the place down.’

  The oilmen, collecting the other two from their shift, marched boldly to the jail and informed the custodian there, not the sheriff, that if he didn’t deliver those girls in three minutes, they were going to blow the place apart. He turned them loose, and with considerable squealing and running, the eight rioters—three girls, five oilmen—roared back to Nora’s, where they organized a morning party with Esther.

  The Klan met that night to decide what to do about the invaders, and many of the men looked to Floyd Rusk for guidance: ‘What I say is, let’s get the well dug. If we find oil like Kimbro assures me we will, we’ll all have enough money to settle other questions later.’ When there was grumbling at such temporizing, he said: ‘You know me. I’m a law-and-order man.’

  ‘There ain’t much law and order when a gang of roughnecks can raid our jail and turn loose our prisoners.’

  ‘Oilmen are different,’ Rusk said, and there the matter rested, for in Texas, when morality was confronted by the possibility of oil, it was the former which had to give … for a while.

  Dewey Kimbro had guessed wrong on Rusk #1. It went to three thousand feet, and was still stone-dry. So the great Larkin oil boom went bust, but it was not a wasted effort, for at two thousand three hundred feet Dewey had spotted in the slush pond indications of the Strawn Sand formation, which excited him enormously. Sharing the information only with Rusk, he said: ‘Let them think we missed. Then buy up as many leases as we can west of our dry Number One, because Strawn is promising.’

  So, wearing his poor mouth, Rusk went to one landowner after another, saying: ‘Well, looks like the signs deceived us. But maybe over the long haul …’ He offered to take their mineral leases off their hands at twenty-five cents an acre, and when he had vast areas locked up, he asked Kimbro: ‘Now what?’

  ‘I’m dead certain we have a major concentration down there. I see evidences of it wherever I look. It’s got to be there, Mr. Rusk.’

  ‘But where?’

  ‘That’s the problem. East of Number One or west? I can’t be sure which.’

  ‘Your famous gut feeling? What’s it say?’

  Kimbro drove Rusk out to the area and showed him how Rusk #1 had lain at the bottom of a dip: ‘It’s the land formations west of here that set my bells ringing. Damn, I do believe our field is hiding down there, below the first concentration of Strawn Sand, like maybe three thousand feet.’

  ‘We have money for only one more try. Where should it be?’

  ‘I am much inclined toward the tank,’ and he indicated a spot close to the statue which sentimentalists had erected to mark the spot where the lovers Nellie Minor and Jim Logan had committed suicide by drowning—that was the legend now—but Rusk objected to digging there: ‘The women in town would raise hell if we touched that place.’ So they moved farther west, and finally, on a slight rise, Dewey scraped his heel in the dust: ‘Rusk Number Two. And I know it’ll be good.’ When he said this, Rusk asked: ‘If you know so much, why don’t the big boys? They have their spies here, you know.’

  ‘The big companies depend on little men like me to find oil for them. Then they move in, fast. We get our small profit. They get their big haul.’ ‘I want the big haul, Kimbro.’

  ‘So do I. So let’s drill over here where I’ve marked Rusk Number Two.’

  ‘That’s on Yeager’s land.’

  ‘But it’s in your mineral rights.’

  ‘We’ll have trouble if we go back again.’

  ‘Law’s on our side.’

  So Rusk #2 was started, with the same drilling team and the same girls staying at Nora’s; when there was still a good chance for oil, even the Klan had to adjust.

  With scouts from nine large companies watching every move Dewey Kimbro made, Floyd Rusk drilled a second dry hole at three thousand one hundred feet, and now his money began to run out. He had invested most of his ready cash in hiring the drilling crew, and a good portion of his savings in buying up leases.

  But when the crunch came, Dewey Kimbro, like a true wildcatter, wanted to risk more money: ‘Mr. Rusk, so help me God, what we must do is acquire more leases. If you have to pawn your wife’s wedding ring, do it and get those leases. They’ll be dirt cheap now. People are laughing at us. But they don’t know what we know.’

  ‘And what’s that?’

  ‘More signs of oil, I saw them myself when I took the samples at twenty-nine hundred feet.’

  ‘Was that significant?’

  ‘Significant? My God, don’t you realize what I’m saying? On Rusk Number One we found ind
ications at twenty-three hundred feet. Now, over here, at Rusk Number Two, we find it at both twenty-three hundred and twenty-nine hundred. Means that oil is down there somewhere. My judgment is our next well has got to hit. I know the field must lie between Number One and Number Two, and we’ve got to get those leases.’

  ‘You find the money. I don’t have any more.’

  So Dewey Kimbro set out to con the entire state of Texas into supporting his wild dream of an oil field north of Larkin, in an area which had never produced a cup of oil. He hectored his friends from his student days at A&M, and young men who specialized in the practical courses offered there often did well, so they had money, but they refused to risk it. He badgered his oil acquaintances from the eastern fields, but they knew from their own studies that Larkin held no promise. And he buttonholed any gambler who had ever taken a chance on Texas oil, traveling as far as Nevada and Alabama to trace them.

  He was, of course, only one of several hundred visionaries who were flogging the Texas dream that year. Some crazies were trying to convince their friends that there had to be oil in unlikely places like Longview, Borger and Mentone. Others claimed that the area north of Fort Stockton had to have oil, and a hundred others lobbied for places of their choice, where oil would never be found. It was a time of oil fever, and no one had the malady more virulently than Dewey Kimbro.

  Except, perhaps, Floyd Rusk, for when the fat man realized that all his savings and even his ranch were committed to this adventure, he became monomaniacal about bringing in the field that Dewey kept assuring him existed under the leases which he already controlled. He was determined to see this exploration through, for he had convinced himself that he could recognize the formations when Kimbro pointed them out. Millions upon millions of years ago a lake of oil had been trapped down there among the sandstone and the limestone tilts, and he wanted it.

  But he had no money. Digging the two dry holes had exhausted his funds, and with Kimbro finding little success in borrowing replacements, he did not know where to turn, but one morning when the drillers said they wanted to haul their rig back east to more promising sites, and would do so unless paid promptly, he went to the one person in whom he did not wish to confide.

  Emma Larkin Rusk, the onetime prisoner of the Comanche, was sixty-six that year, a frail shadow weighing not much over a hundred pounds. The stubs of her ears showed beneath the wisps of hair that no longer masked her deformity, and her balsa-wood nose seemed to fit less properly, now that she had lost so much weight. But she was alert and already knew that her difficult son was in trouble.

  ‘My first two wells were dry,’ he said.

  ‘I know.’

  ‘But we’re sure the next one will hit.’

  ‘Why don’t you drill it?’

  ‘No money.’

  ‘None?’

  ‘Not a dime.’

  ‘And you want me to lend you some?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She sat with her hands folded, staring at her unlovely son, this glutton who had never done anything right. When she had hoped to make a man of him, through R. J. Poteet, he had fumbled the opportunity, and when in 1901 after her husband’s death she had turned over the operation of the ranch to him, he had bungled it so badly that she had to step back in and save it. Now he wanted to borrow her life savings, the funds which allowed her to live in her own house rather than impose on him and Molly.

  There was no sensible reason why she should lend this grotesque man the money he wanted, but there was an overpowering sentimental one. He had carved the nose she wore and which had made such a difference in her life, and although their relationship had been a miserable one, she loved him for that one gesture. She had known great terror in her life, and little love apart from that which her daydreaming husband had given so freely, so she cherished every manifestation made in her behalf. Floyd was her son, and at one accidental point in his miserable life he had loved her. She would lend him the money.

  But life had made her a wily woman, so before she relinquished her funds she drove a bargain. When he asked her ‘What interest?’ she said ‘None,’ and he thanked her. Then she added: ‘But I do want five thousand more acres for my Longhorns,’ and since he was in the perilous position of having to accept any terms in order to get his gambling money, he said: ‘Promised,’ and she asked: ‘Fenced in?’ and he had to reply: ‘Yes.’

  However, when they went out to inspect the land she had thus acquired for her chosen animals, she saw that the proposed rig was going to stand very close to the statue commemorating the two lovers, and Floyd expected her to raise the devil. Instead she stood quietly and looked at the unassembled derrick. ‘How appropriate,’ she said. ‘They lived in turbulence. Better than most, they’ll adjust to an oil boom … if we get one. I’m sure they hope you hit, Floyd. I do.’

  And so with his mother’s money Rusk kept his gamble alive.

  Then began the days of anxiety. Even with Emma’s contribution the partnership lacked enough funds to start drilling its third well, the one that seemed likely to produce, and this meant that the ill-assorted team—gross, surly Floyd and tenacious, ratlike Dewey—faced double disasters. The leases on the very promising land, which they had taken for only one year, were about to run out, and the drilling crew was eager to move east. The partners knew they had less than two months to resolve these problems.

  The nature of a Texas oil lease was this: if a lease expired on 30 June 1923, as these did, the holder had a right to start drilling at his choice of time up to one minute before midnight on the thirtieth. If he did not or could not start, the lease lapsed and could be resold to some other wildcatter. But if the holder did start his drilling within his time allowance, the full provisions of the lease came into effect and prevailed for centuries to come. So each of the partners, in his own way, began to scrounge around for additional funds.

  Rusk stayed in Larkin, badgering everyone, begging them to lend him money, and he was embittered when his Ku Klux Klan compatriots turned him down. Some did so out of conviction, because they felt it was his greed that had brought the ten oil-field roughnecks, with their devil-driven ways, into Larkin. But most rejected him because they saw him to be a burly, aggressive, overbearing man who deserved to get his comeuppance.

  Kimbro, on the other hand, traveled widely, still hoping to find the speculator who would grubstake him for the big attack on the hidden field. He would go anywhere, consult with anyone, and offer almost any kind of inducement: ‘Let me have the money, less than a year, ten-percent interest, and I’ll give you one-thirty-second of my participation.’ He offered one-sixteenth, even one-eighth, but found no takers.

  When he returned to Larkin in April 1923, he was almost a defeated man, but because he was a born wildcatter he could not let anyone see his despair. Each morning when he was in town he repaired to the greasy café where the oilmen who had begun to infiltrate the area assembled to make their big boasts, and he knew it was essential that they see him at the height of his confidence: ‘We expect to start Number Three any day now. Big investors from Tulsa, you know.’ But each day that passed brought the partnership closer to collapse.

  Now the serious gambling started, the reckless dealing away of percentages. One morning Floyd rushed to the café, took Dewey into the men’s room, and almost wept: ‘The drilling crew is hauling their rig back to Jacksboro.’

  ‘We can’t let them do that. Once they get off our land, we’ll never get them back,’ so the partners, smiling broadly as if they had concluded some big deal in the toilet, walked casually through the café, nodding to the oilmen, then dashed out to the rig.

  Rusk had been right, the men were starting to dismantle it prior to mounting it on trucks, but when Dewey cried: ‘Wait! We’ll give you one-sixteenth of our seven-eighths,’ they agreed to take the chance, for they, too, had seen the Strawn signs.

  Later Rusk asked: ‘Could we afford to give so much?’ and Dewey explained the wildcatter’s philosophy: ‘If the well
proves dry, who gives a damn what percentage they have? And if it comes in big, like I know it will, who cares if they have their share?’

  A week before the termination of the leases the partners still had insufficient funds to drill their well, but now Kimbro heard from two of his A&M gamblers who wanted to get in on the action, but to get their money he had to give away one-eighth of his share to the first friend, one-sixteenth to the other—and the final ownership of the well became so fractionized that the partners could scarcely untangle the proportions.

  Three days before the leases expired, scandal struck the operation, for the two A&M men, always a canny lot, heard the rumor that their old buddy Dewey Kimbro had pulled an oil-field sting on them, and they rode into town ready to tear him apart: ‘He sold two hundred percent of his well. Peddled it all over East Texas.’

  ‘What’s that mean?’ the Larkin men asked.

  ‘Don’t you see? If he drills dry, and he’s already done so twice, he owes us nothing. He’s collected twice, spends about one-quarter of the total, and goes off laughing with our dough.’

  They drove out to the proposed drilling site at the tank to challenge Kimbro, but when they found him hiking back and forth over the rolling terrain, trying to settle upon the exact spot for his final well, they found him honestly engaged in trying to find oil. He had not sold two hundred percent of what he knew was going to be a dry well; he was gambling his entire resources upon one lucky strike, and as Texas gamblers, they were satisfied to be sharing in his risk.

  Two days before the lapse of their leases, Rusk and Kimbro finally got a break. An Oklahoma wildcatting outfit had figured that if Dewey Kimbro, once of Humble and Gulf, thought there was oil in the Larkin area, it was a good location in which to take a flier. They had drilled a well just to the east of Rusk #1, gambling that the suspected oil lay in that direction and not toward the tank. These men, of course, could not know that Dewey had struck indications to the west, so down they went to five thousand feet, missing the field entirely and producing nothing but a very dry well, whose failure they announced on June 28.