On January 10, 1901, the discovery well in the Spindletop field came in with an earth-shaking roar, shooting a geyser of oil a hundred feet into the cold southeast Texas morning sky. No human had ever seen anything like it.

That well changed the world forever. Texas oil immediately fueled the automobile boom. Four decades on, in World War II, the Allies would burn seven billion barrels of oil – six billion of which came from America, the great preponderance of it from Texas and the surrounding states.

Much like the state itself, the saga of Texas oil is so big as to defy compression between the covers of one book. But the journalist Bryan Burrough – himself a native Texan – managed to do it a few years ago in what he called an “engineered history.” That is, he told the story through the prism of four outsized Texas oil pioneers: Roy Cullen, Sid Richardson, Clint Murchison and H. L. Hunt.

The book is The Big Rich: The Rise and Fall of the Great Texas Oil Fortunes. And as the author contends, if Texas oil had a Mount Rushmore, the faces of these four men would adorn it. “Two did it the old-fashioned way, drilling holes deep in the earth. One did it with his mind. The fourth did it with a fountain pen,” Burrough reports, and he characterizes them as “a good ol’ boy, a scold, a genius, and a bigamist.” Each of their stories could be a fascinating book in itself.

But, as is so often the case with great wealth, succeeding generations – with the singular exception of Sid Richardson’s heirs, the Bass family – managed to dissipate it. None did so more spectacularly than two of H. L. Hunt’s sons (from the first of his three families), who engineered the fabulously failed attempt to corner the silver market in the late 1970s. In Burrough’s hands, these too become riveting stories.

A defining if totally unappreciated aspect of the genius of America is that – unlike virtually any society in the history of the world – we vested the nation’s illimitable natural resources not in the crown or the state, but in the landowner. Nowhere has this genius manifested more importantly than in oil – and nowhere more dramatically than in the Lone Star State. Burrough’s The Big Rich remains for me the most comprehensive and most entertaining chronicle of that drama.  
 

©2016 Nick Murray. All rights reserved. Reprinted by permission. Nick reviews current books, articles and research findings in the “Resources” feature of his monthly newsletter, Nick Murray Interactive. To download the current sample issue, visit www.nickmurray.com, and clock on “Newsletter.”