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bought enough mineral rights someone might drill the land. He asked if Cullen would come work for him, traveling the state to acquire lease rights. It was easy work; most farmers would turn over their rights for pennies on even a remote possibility someone might find oil beneath it. “I don’t know anything about oil, Jim,” Cullen said. “I’ve never read an oil lease in my life.” Cheek’s offer, though, was attractive: all expenses paid, a solid salary, plus one quarter of anything they brought in. Cullen talked it over with Lillie, and felt he couldn’t say no. Which is how, at the advanced age of thirty-four, Roy Cullen became an accidental oilman.
    He first headed to the Houston Public Library, where in time he read every book he could find on the geology of oil. What he found was a mishmash of fairy tales and guesswork; the first genuine geophysical equipment, using technology developed during World War I to bounce sound waves off underground structures, wouldn’t be in wide use until the 1920s. Some thought oil flowed in underground rivers or pooled in subterranean caverns. Oil fields were thronged with characters who claimed to have special oil-finding powers, preachers who swore they had X-ray eyes, and drifters who used everything from divining rods to psychic powers to direct drillers. In the 1910s major oil companies began to hire staff geologists, but for years their use was met with skepticism. As one oilman complained, “Rocks! Rocks! Sam, all they talk about is rocks. Do they think we’re running a stone quarry?”
    What oil had been found in America was discovered, as at Spindletop, near visible seaps and existing wells. A few companies had begun “surface mapping,” reasoning they might deduce what lay beneath the land by what lay atop it. Studying the land was known colloquially as “creekology,” from the analysis, such as it was, of creek beds and hillsides. Later, when he began drilling wells on his own, Cullen became a renowned creekologist, sinking wells in low areas and other sites he thought promising. He embraced geology’s new tools, especially the seismograph, but much of his work was pure instinct.
    Cullen’s maiden trip for Jim Cheek was to Coryell County, in Central Texas, where Cheek had arranged a meeting of farmers at the school. “Gentlemen,” Cullen said, nervously addressing the crowd, “I’m not an oilman, I’m a cotton man. But I’m going into the oil business, and if you’ll give me leases on your land, I’ll do everything possible to get the oil rights developed.” By morning Cullen signed forty-three leases, each for one dollar “and other valuable considerations.” If Cullen and Cheek could find someone to drill a lease, and if oil was found, they would share percentages of any profits with the landowner. Those were big if’s; few Texas farmers ever saw a nickel from oil.
    For the next five years Cullen roamed West Texas, leasing oil rights everywhere he went, roving as far west as the Pecos River and south to the Rio Grande. It was good money, though it kept him away from home for long periods. In time Cullen saved enough to buy a two-story house at the corner of Alabama and Austin. Soon his mother moved in, and Lillie gave birth to two more children, both girls. Of all the hundreds of leases Cullen signed during those years, he and Cheek managed to attract investors who drilled exactly three oil wells at a total cost of $250,000. Every penny was squandered; all three wells came up dry. What Cullen got, though, was an education and, through Jim Cheek and other new friends, a wealth of contacts in downtown Houston.
    By 1920 Lillie was making noises about how much he was traveling. Cullen was almost forty by then, and his five children barely knew him. Couldn’t he find work in Houston like other fathers? Which is how, armed only with his library books and a reputation for hard work and honesty, Cullen decided to drill a well on his own. For backing he