By the time Williams reached Giddings, picked up Walter Schneider, and turned his Blazer toward the airport, he was convinced that his bare-boned strategy just might work. Find the best chalk well in Texas, which he believed he had. Lease a little land around it. Try to determine which way the faults or fractures ran in the chalk. Move in as close as possible to the City of Giddings No. 1. And drill an off-setting well. The oil was down there. No doubt about it. Trying to locate it with a string of drill pipe, battling through chalk that, at times, appeared to be impenetrable, and probing around ten thousand feet below the surface of the ground had never been an easy task.
One place to hit. An ungodly amount of places to miss.
The oil patch had forever been rife with a lot of odd theories about the locations where oil could be discovered and ways to discern where it might be. For more than a century, poor boy operators had met with mediums and spiritualists, used water witches, divining rods, and doodlebugs, outfitted with an array of electrical wires, dials, and bells.
A doodlebug was placed in a shrouded sedan chair and carried across empty pastures by four men. A wildcatter knew to drill on the spot where the bells caught life and began to ring. Some oilmen only chose to spud in their wells near cemeteries because tombstones always occupied the high ground, which might be a salt dome.
A few, H. L. Hunt among them, drilled near a creek or wouldn’t drill at all. They were constantly searching for a faint trace of oil that might be coating the top of the water and were classified as creekologists. Others were more like H. R. Stroube, known as closeologists. They were adamant about trying their luck as close as they could get to a high-dollar, money-making well, so close, in fact, they could smell the strong aroma of oil coming out of the ground. Max Williams may not have realized it at the time, but he was quickly becoming a self-styled closeologist.
If Williams were right and Ray Holifield was as good a geologist as advertised, Giddings just might be on the threshold of becoming a town – no longer forgotten, no longer ignored or overlooked – that had the potential of changing many lives, not the least of which was his own.
After surveying the rusting carcass of a dead well brought back to life, a well whose pulse had never weakened, Williams drove Walter Schneider back to his service station and talked again to Ray Holifield. He had seen the well. The myth was as real as he had hoped it would be. He needed for Holifield to track down the right locations and Randy Stewart to lease the right acreage. Irv Deal would handle the operation and put the crew together.
Williams would raise the money. His nerves were on edge. He wasn’t for sure whether the gamble in hard ground around Giddings excited him, frightened him, or just made him wary. The difference between riches and financial disaster was often a single step, a single decision, right or wrong.
Ray Holifield, tucked away in his Dallas office, sat down with a lease map and began carefully marking the fault lines where he believed they extended away from the City of Giddings well. He handed the map to Randy Stewart and said, “Get me every available acre of land within those lines.”
Back in the beginning, Stewart said he really had no idea what oil or gas looked like underground. He simply referred to himself as a legal mind getting paid for doing some legal work. While Williams and Deal folded up their real estate businesses and began poking around for oil in Palo Pinto and Pearsall, Stewart suddenly found himself spending more and more time out of the office, on the road, and trying to piece together scraps of acreage that made up those elusive leases. He pored through musty old records hour after hour, day after day, tracking down those who owned the land or the leases, and figuring out who, if anybody, possessed a clear title to the acreage. He assembled it all. Names. Addresses. Phone numbers. Did the phone still work? Had that sacred patch of ground been abandoned, sold, passed on, settled during probate, or lost to hard times?
For him, it was always something different, but somebody always had a title or at least one that could be cleared up with a few legal dance steps. Family trees often had a few crooked limbs and split branches that the family chose not to speak about, not in public anyway. When Max Williams decided that he wanted land in a certain region, however, Randy Stewart had a knack for finding enough old records to make sure he got it. The search for a title often began like a wild goose chase, but Stewart considered himself to be a pretty decent goose hunter.
Stewart drove immediately to Giddings, booked a room at the Sands Motel, and headed directly to the County Clerk’s office at the courthouse. He carefully checked through the records, which, he said, were poorly organized and kept in a cramped vault. It might not be impossible to find the information he wanted, but, then again, it might take him a lifetime to track down the data he needed.
Stewart quickly glanced through the telephone book and discovered that Lee County was at least large enough to have it own abstract company with records, the yellow pages ad said, that dated “back to the sovereign.” The company might be a godsend, and it was located directly across the street from the courthouse.
Stewart remembered, “That evening I went scouting. Having come up from Pearsall, which had a bustling oil play, I expected to find some activity around Giddings as a result of the City Well. I kept looking for the sight of rigs. Nothing. As darkness fell, I looked for rig lights. Again, nothing. It was after eight o’clock, night lay around the city, and Giddings had gone to bed. I drove past the city well on county road 448 and eased out into the country toward Serbin. A few miles out of town, I turned around and headed back. My car window was down, and suddenly I heard the clanking of iron, the squeal of turning metal. It was a Eureka moment. At last, I thought, someone is drilling just off to the west, just past a tree and brush line.”
Randy Stewart parked, climbed out of his car, cloaked by the darkness of night, and waded into the tall grass. He pushed through the brush, ducked beneath low-hanging tree limbs, and stumbled out onto the open. He expected to find a drilling pad, a rig, maybe even a pump jack. Instead, he found himself standing alongside the railroad right-of-way. And in front of him was a work car with workmen pounding their hammers into metal spikes as they repaired the tracks. To Randy Stewart, it sounded for all the world like a working drilling rig. Without a word, he turned back into the tall grass, walked to his car, and drove sheepishly back into the sleeping town.
The next morning, he walked into the Lee County Land and Abstract Company and met the Knox brothers, identical twins, John and Bob. Stewart introduced himself as a landman for a small oil company and said, “I’m looking for leases in certain areas in and around town.”
The Knox brothers glanced at each other. It was about time. No one had come looking for leases or oil in a long time.
Randy Stewart knew Giddings was small. He knew the town moved at a slow place. He quickly learned that morning business in Giddings took place over coffee, and no one was in a hurry. He sipped coffee for two hours with the Knox brothers, talked about oil, discussed the fortunes and misfortunes of the chalk, and, somewhere between the first and second pot, they all became lifelong friends.
The title plant consisted of land maps that covered the length and breadth of Lee County, as well as copies of all recorded instruments affecting the land. The documents were organized and entered by survey and abstract, which were critical for any landman. The county records, on the other hand, had only been filed by name, and if Stewart did not happen to know the right name, which he didn’t, he would never find the right survey or abstract. The Knox brothers had given him access to a gold mine, provided there was more than a single reservoir of oil beneath Giddings.
John and Bob Knox were petroleum geologists by profession, educated at The University of Texas, and they had prospected for oil, gold, and copper throughout the four corners of the American Southwest. They had returned to Giddings, their hometown, to take over the land and abstract business for their father, John Knox, Sr., who had also served as Lee County surveyor until his death.
On