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of Texas oilmen—with the asterisked exception of Howard Hughes—created anything like a true American fortune, nor left any lasting footprints on history. Their success, however, raised a tantalizing question: What if there really was another Spindletop out there, and what if it were discovered not by a large company but by a single Texan, working alone? Just how wealthy would Patillo Higgins have become had he been able to keep Spindletop to himself?
    One well, one fortune. It was the stuff of myth, the El Dorado of Texas Oil, and as a new decade dawned, a horde of young second-generation oilmen would begin trying to find it.

TWO
    The Creekologist
    Some day we’ll have a big white house to live in.
    —HUGH ROY CULLEN AT AGE TWELVE

I.
    B y 1920, two decades after Spindletop, the discovery of oil hadn’t changed Texas much. Of the forty-eight states, it ranked just fourth in oil production. During the 1910s many oil field workers actually fled the state to work in fields opening in Oklahoma. “Why do you waste your time in Texas?” one asked a soon-to-be famous geologist named Wallace Pratt. “Why don’t you come up to Oklahoma where all the oil is?” What oil was pumped from Texas fields was still largely controlled by eastern interests; the biggest companies that flowered at Spindletop were now headquartered back east, Gulf in Pittsburgh, Sun in Philadelphia. Even the Texas Company, after a squabble between its Houston-based executives and eastern investors, was now based in New York. Academics viewed the state of Texas as an economic colony of the East, a view that would endure for years after it was no longer true.
    All this began to change in the months after the armistice that ended World War I in November 1918. The war years had been good to middle America; between 1914 and 1918, the average wage rose 63 percent. The United States was still an agricultural country and farmers did even better; during the war, wheat and corn prices doubled. Cotton prices tripled. Wartime restrictions, reinforced by the frugality of uncertain times, obliged many Americans to stow their new money in mattresses and savings accounts—until the war ended.
    Then, in 1919, an orgy of consumer spending inaugurated the Jazz Age. All across America, wartime parsimony gave way to an explosion of household purchasing as families finally opened their wallets to buy the new technologies the new American oil had wrought. Farmers bought tens of thousands of tractors. Housewives ordered new stoves and ranges. Corporations ordered new industrial boilers. No item, though, sold faster than automobiles. In 1900 there were eight thousand cars in the United States. By 1916 there were three and a half million. By 1921 there were 10.5 million. And every single one needed gasoline. Between 1900 and 1920, American energy demand quintupled.
    The surge in demand produced postwar gasoline shortages, as American refineries strained to produce enough fuel to satisfy the country’s new appetites. Major oil companies doubled and redoubled their exploration budgets in the scramble to find new oil, hiring geologists and scouts by the scores and sending them scurrying down every paved road in the Southwest, and quite a few that weren’t. Nearly thirty-four thousand American oil wells were drilled in 1920, more than twice the number just five years earlier. Booms came (and went) in Kansas, Arkansas, Kentucky, Louisiana, and California.
    Suddenly, though, it wasn’t just oilmen who were looking for oil. The Jazz Age ushered in a period of “get-rich” mania, producing a classic American frenzy of speculative ventures. Everywhere slick promoters, backed by modern advertising, pushed ordinary citizens to plunge their savings into a range of new and often risky investments: real estate in Florida and California, gold and silver mines in Nevada, all manner of Wall Street offerings—and oil. Magazines thrummed with stories of the fortunes being made in Oklahoma,