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

spend much of his time playing cards. In time he made as much gambling as he did from the cotton fields.
    Now in his mid-twenties, Hunt had grown to be a serious, solitary young man, quiet, focused, and disciplined. He had a clerk’s face, a soft nose, and wide-set eyes. He dressed neatly. He didn’t drink. Around Lake Village he was considered a touch odd, a deep thinker, a man who read the newspapers and could sometimes be seen writing poetry or song lyrics. Still, people liked him. He developed a reputation for honesty. When he borrowed money for a harvest, he repaid it on time. He dated a girl here and there, but for the most part he kept to himself, drawing about him a sense of mystery in the little southern town. When he was flush, Hunt took a train to the big-money poker games in Memphis and New Orleans, where he adopted the moniker Arizona Slim, a nickname he kept the rest of his life. Then, in the fall of 1914, Hunt’s mother died, and within weeks, perhaps unsurprisingly, he proposed marriage to a Lake Village girl who was very much like the departed Ella Hunt.
    Then twenty-five, Lyda Bunker was a plain, plumpish schoolteacher from a prominent family, a quiet, stable woman who was about to be married to another man. Hunt had been seeing Lyda’s sister. Love came quickly, though, and both broke off their relationships to be married, in a simple ceremony at the Bunker home. The newlyweds moved into one of the Bunkers’ rental houses and began a family. Their first child, a daughter they named Margaret, arrived in November 1915. Two years later came a boy, Haroldson Lafayette Hunt Jr. They called him Hassie.
    Hunt’s fortunes continued to rise and fall on cotton prices and his poker winnings, and Lyda, now with two mouths to feed, began urging him to find something more stable. “June,” she pleaded more than once, “why don’t you get a regular job?” But Hunt was addicted to the adrenaline he found dealing cards, parcels of land, and, when the war ended in 1918, cotton futures. That’s when his luck ran out. Believing the cotton boom was poised to end, he placed a massive bet that prices would go down; when they didn’t, he lost everything, including what little money he had put away. According to family lore, Hunt only saved his farm at a high-stakes poker game in New Orleans, during which he managed to turn his last hundred dollars into one hundred thousand dollars. He kept his land, but much of it was now hamstrung with bank liens, and when the recession he expected finally hit in 1920, the price of both cotton and land went into free fall. For the first time Hunt began to question his style of living. He turned thirty-two that year. He wasn’t a kid anymore.
    His epiphany, as Hunt remembered it years later, came in January 1921, as he was negotiating to buy land from a family named Noell. During a long afternoon of talks at the Noell home, Hunt found himself listening as one of the other men discussed the manic scene at El Dorado, seventy miles west of Lake Village in south-central Arkansas. Oil had been found there the previous spring, and thousands of people were flooding into town in hopes of finding more. It sounded exciting—far more exciting than another year of praying for cotton and land prices to rebound. Hunt stepped outside onto the porch and gazed at a setting sun. “What is it that you are trying to do?” he asked himself. “Are you going to bury yourself here for the remainder of your life? ” Why not rent out the land and try something new?
    Hunt headed into Lake Village determined to raise enough cash to give El Dorado a try. Both town banks, however, strapped for cash themselves, turned him down. All Hunt could raise was fifty dollars from a trio of gambling buddies. It was enough. He took his pals and boarded the train to El Dorado. When they arrived, they disembarked into a roiling boomtown thronged with gamblers and prostitutes and hustlers of every stripe. From the steps of