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

itself in a fascination with card games, a passion he would indulge to his dying day.
    His mother, Ella, doted on her youngest, lavishing him with praise and, as Hunt recounted with an odd pride in later years, breast-feeding him until he was seven years old. All the flattery and attention imbued Hunt with a keen sense of entitlement, a feeling that he possessed a unique intellect, exponentially more insightful than anyone he met, and this, too, became a lifelong trait. By the time Hunt was born his father, a stern but savvy man known as “Hash” Hunt, had built his initial eighty-acre farm into a five-hundred-acre spread, among the largest in Fayette County. June helped on the farm, but by his sixteenth birthday he was showing signs of restlessness. He and his father weren’t getting along. When June said he had no interest in college, his father and older brothers pressed him to become a bank clerk, a natural fit for a boy so good with numbers. But June had no more interest in a teller’s cage than young Clint Murchison a decade later. He yearned to see the world.
    And so, one day in 1905, sixteen-year-old H. L. Hunt packed a deck of cards in his bedroll and ran away from home. From St. Louis he took a train into western Kansas, planning to try his luck as a laborer. He ended up a dishwasher in a railroad restaurant in the town of Horace. That lasted a month. From Kansas he headed on to Colorado, where he cut sugar beets. South of Salt Lake City, he signed on as a sheepherder. Riding the rails into Southern California, he took a job driving mule carts brimming with road gravel. Outside the town of Santa Ana, he took his first ranch job, again driving mule teams. For two years Hunt ambled from job to job as the spirit moved him, planting cattle feed outside Amarillo, lumberjacking in northern Arizona, and narrowly missing the San Francisco earthquake of 1906—he had left the city just days before to try out for a semipro baseball team in Reno.
    For a time his brother Leonard joined him. They ranged across the Pacific Northwest through 1908 and 1909, working the harvests in Washington, Montana, and then the Dakotas. When Leonard returned to Illinois to take a teaching job, Hunt headed north into Canada looking for work. He had just arrived at a small town outside Moose Jaw, Saskatchewan, when he found the telegram from his parents. Leonard was dead; of what it wasn’t said. It was February 1910. Hunt returned for the funeral, then returned west for a year, until March 11, 1911, when he received the call that his father had died. Once again he went home.
    In the days after his father’s funeral, Hunt finally confronted his future. He was twenty-two at that point, with a five-thousand-dollar inheritance, enough in 1911 to get him started in just about any business he wanted: farming, ranching, tavern owner, anything. He couldn’t sit still for college, he knew that. All Hunt knew was that farm life bored him. He had already gone west. Then, remembering his father’s stories of the lush farmland around a southern Arkansas town he had visited during the Civil War, he decided to head south. Like Roy Cullen, Hunt was proud of his southern heritage. The leisurely life of a plantation planter appealed to him, and in late 1911 he arrived at the town his father had remembered, Lake Village, in the heart of Arkansas’s best cotton country, just inland from the Mississippi River in the state’s southeast corner.
    Cotton prices were booming, and so was Lake Village, a bustling town on the shores of Lake Chicot. The population had grown to fifteen hundred in the last few years. Taking a room at the hotel, Hunt used most of his inheritance to buy a 960-acre farm called Boeuf Bayou five miles south of town, then headed to Little Rock to buy horses and mules. That first year his cotton crop was wiped out by the first Mississippi River flood in thirty-five years, but Hunt recovered nicely. Negros worked his land, allowing Hunt to