Wildcatters was originally published in 1981 by Doubleday and later acquired by Beard Books. It tells the story of the last years of the Texas oil boom of the late 70s and early 80s.
Sally describes the book, Wildcatters, and her experience writing it this way:
“It was a wide-open time. Independent oil producers were staking claims and drilling for oil all over the southern United States. They mostly followed the frontier maxim, ‘Get while the getting’s good, and move on.’ Having spent 16 months traveling around Texas in that period, I can tell you that the plot lines of the TV series Dallas were not far-fetched. Nor were the colorful characters an exaggeration.
“That era is over. Much exploration has moved overseas and environmental concerns have moved front-and-center. Wildcatters focuses on the years before the transition. It focuses on the desire of Dick Moncrief, a third generation oilman, to stake his claim in the Middle East. This required challenging his grandfather, oil biz icon W.A. “Monty” Moncrief. One of the most charismatic individuals I have ever met.
Dick finally closed a deal with the Israelis to drill in Sinai. He then found oil a few days before the land was returned to Egypt in 1979. He proved his grandfather’s skepticism right, yet he pointed the way forward. Last time I spoke with Dick, he was spending his time in places like Baku.
People often ask me how I came to write Wildcatters.
“It was my first book, and very different what came after. Most notably because it’s set a business dominated entirely by men. I actually backed into my subject, then fell in love with it. I had been sent to Texas by Harper’s Magazine, to cover the trial of Cullen Davis, who came from an oil-biz family in Fort Worth. He was charged with murdering his wife.
“In some ways the trial was fascinating, and I enjoyed hanging out in Amarillo with the other reporters. But I ultimately found the proceedings tedious. Plus the fine Texas writer Gary Cartwright was at the trial writing what would become an excellent book, Blood Will Tell. I knew Cartwright had the story covered. But I’d gotten caught up in the fun of interviewing people in the oil business. I decided they would make a better story. And in the late 70s, I was burned out on New York.
“Spending 16 months in the company of oil entrepreneurs, mud salesmen, lease hustlers, unimaginably rich socialites, artists, wild-man writers, and disreputable hangers-on changed the way I look at the world. It made me more tolerant and open to people whose values are different from mine. In the then-provincial world of Texas, I became cosmopolitan. And I fell in love with the big sky and endless sense of possibility that forms the irreducible essence of the great frontier. And still shapes how Americans view themselves and the world beyond.
People will tell you that Texas is different, and then undertake to define that difference.
“It’s bigger, they will say—that’s obvious. Rich people are richer, they will say—and at least they seem to be. Texas is unashamed, Texas is boastful, Texas is everything every other place is, but more so. All these things are true, of course. But although they explain why Texas is special, they do not explain why it is different. Or at least was different in my time there.
“What made Texas different is not so much its money as its blood, and its awareness of that blood.
“It’s not the blood spilled in Saturday night brawls. Or shed in the bizarre murders whose trials make headlines around the country. When I was in Texas, it was the blood of human bloodlines. There was always that cattle breeder’s awareness of whose blood ran through a man or woman’s veins. And an awareness of what that blood demanded. People in Texas then were raised to be what others in their families had been. Or they were in those two most Texan of family businesses, oil and cattle. Family was destiny, as surely as it was in the Mafia. Success was measured by what one achieved beyond those who went before.
“In America, in the 1970s, it was not universally assumed that a young man would feel a responsibility to do whatever his grandfather or father had done. Or the need to surpass them in their chosen field. The story of succession and inheritance is the oldest story in the world, but it’s no longer a familiar one. Families today break up, sons and daughters follow their own path. And the wealth of the land that binds people together is no longer easily come by or kept. Yet this was a story still to be told in much of Texas, where the young bulls locked horns with the old bulls and fought to inherit the earth. And that’s what made Texas different in its deepest heart.”
