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gasoline to the public; in the 1920s only the majors did that. By and large, an independent who found oil was looking to sell his production as quickly as possible to one of the majors. Oil wells could make an ordinary Texan rich, but typically only after being sold to Gulf, Magnolia, Texaco, or the ’umble, as Humble was known. Yet the symbiosis between independents and majors went deeper. The majors amassed their own acreage and drilled their own wells, but they couldn’t be everywhere, not in a state as vast as Texas. They sat on millions of acres they hadn’t the time or money to drill, and often the easiest way to test a plot of land was to let a wildcatter drill it. The independent bore a portion of the cost—and the risk—the two split any profits, and if serious production was found, the major swooped in and bought it all. In many cases a major would actually advance an independent the cash—known as “dry hole money”—to drill a promising tract. Wildcatters thus became the woolly frontiersmen of oil, discovering new pockets of petroleum the majors could then develop into rich fields.
    “The major companies . . . were eager to assist independents,” the Houston wildcatter George Strake remembered. “They were happy to see every wildcat that was drilled. They’d give you tips that would send you on a lease-buying spree. When you needed something you could borrow it from one of the majors, and if it looked like you had a good thing, they’d come in and buy you out before you finished the well.” Everyone knew the game. The challenge was finding the oil.
    Of all the thousands of men who swarmed into the muddy tent-camps at Ranger, Buckburnett, and other boomtowns in those boisterous years after World War I, four would find the most. 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. If Texas Oil had a Mount Rushmore, their faces would adorn it. A good ol’ boy. A scold. A genius. A bigamist. Known in their heyday as the Big Four, they became the founders of the greatest Texas family fortunes, headstrong adventurers who rose from nowhere to take turns being acclaimed America’s wealthiest man.

II.
    On an autumn afternoon in 1920, two men ambled across a weed-strewn pasture seven miles south of downtown Houston. a The younger man, a thirty-nine-year-old would-be oilman named Hugh Roy Cullen, led the older man, his lead investor, Judge R. E. Brooks, across their acreage, pointing out the features he felt made it a smart spot to drill. Cullen was a serious man, just under six feet, with wide-set blue eyes, a thatch of black hair he combed to one side, and enormous hands. He was looking for a dip in the land, a sign, he felt, of oil beneath.
    “See, Judge, that’s dippin’ there,” Cullen said, pointing to a patch of dirt.
    “I can’t see it,” the judge said. “I think it’s rising.”
    That the judge couldn’t find oil in a barrel didn’t matter to Cullen; all that mattered was that Brooks and a dozen other leading Houston citizens had committed money to this drill site. Cullen politely suggested Judge Brooks pick the spot to break ground, and he did. When Cullen realized they had nothing to mark it, he walked to a mound of what Texans tastefully call “cow chips,” picked up a few dry chunks, and piled it on the ground—which is how the man who would become Houston’s greatest wildcatter came to drill his first actual oil well beneath a pile of handpicked cow manure.
    History has not been kind to Roy Cullen, a fifth-grade dropout who in his heyday was probably America’s richest man. If he is remembered at all outside Houston, it is usually as an early champion of Texas ultraconservatism, a compulsive letter-writer who jousted with politicians from Franklin Roosevelt to Dwight Eisenhower. Stern, humorless, and a bit of a scold, Cullen at his zenith was a Faulkneresque figure in a white summer suit, a man who