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

the train depot, Hunt peered down the muddy main thoroughfare, South Washington Street, which was packed with people. The town’s population had exploded from maybe a thousand people to something over fifty thousand in less than a year. There were no rooms to rent. People were sleeping in tents all over town; the last available berths, the barber’s chairs, rented for two dollars a night. Space was at such a premium that the city council had begun renting space on the sidewalks, tranforming the eastern side of South Washington into a row of outdoor grills dubbed Hamburger Alley. This, Hunt saw, was a place a smart man could make easy money. “All I need,” he muttered, “is a deck of cards and some poker chips.”
    The next day Hunt hit the tables. The gambling halls of El Dorado teemed with professional card players, but there were so many new marks flooding into town, Hunt made a killing. Again and again he raked in big pots, three times taking the biggest game in town. He quickly amassed enough cash to buy his way into one of the town’s few hotel rooms, and within days he had enough to rent a shack at the foot of South Washington where he opened his own dingy cardroom. Within weeks he had saved enough to take over the first floor of a nicer building up the street, a large single room he packed with card tables, chairs, and floor areas to throw dice. Hunt’s ad hoc casino was a tidy, safe place in a violent, dirty town; he earned a good reputation and caused no trouble. Soon, though, the city council began a cleanup campaign, closing down the brothels and Hamburger Row.
    This being Southern Arkansas in the early 1920s, El Dorado’s anti-vice campaign was augmented by the forces of the Ku Klux Klan. As Hunt told the story years later, a group of twenty or thirty white-robed Klansmen arrived outside his establishment one night that summer. “Shut this place down,” the leader yelled. “Shut it down or else. . . .”
    Hunt stayed open, but once again he began thinking about a change in careers. El Dorado was an oil town now; it was natural that he would consider oil as a line of work. He decided to start small, throwing in with a partner and several friends to lease a half-acre plot outside of town; he secured a drilling rig by paying the overdue freight on an old rig abandoned beside the rail depot. In the first instance of what came to be known as the “Hunt luck,” that first well, the Hunt-Pickering No. 1, struck oil, a decent amount, before petering out several weeks later. Rather than buy a thirty-five-hundred-dollar pump jack to restart it, they sold the well to another independent, who promptly went out of business before paying. It was a dispiriting experience, but as Hunt noted years later, “it served the purpose of getting me started in the oil business.”
    Closing the gambling hall, Hunt set his sights on establishing a viable oil company. He raised money from friends in lots of two hundred dollars, then had one of the casino’s floor men, a character known as Old Man Bailey, sweet-talk a farmer named Rowland into assigning Hunt a lease on his forty-acre farm in return for a twenty-thousand-dollar IOU—a sum far larger than Hunt had access to. Rowland grumped a bit, to the point that Bailey was obliged to take a room in his farmhouse to placate him. Hunt, meanwhile, began drilling in Rowland’s fields, and in January 1922 his second well came in strong, five thousand barrels a day. He soon started two more, and both proved good producers as well.
    In early 1922, thanks to the efforts of local authorities and the Klan, El Dorado was safe enough for Hunt to send for Lyda and the children. They moved into a rented house on Peach Street, where a year later Lyda gave birth to a third child, a daughter they named Caroline. Hunt’s luck in oil ebbed and flowed. He hit a good well or two, then watched in dismay as production fell to a trickle. He began to borrow from the El Dorado banks, always repaying