CHAPTER 5
SOUTH TEXAS
DOWN MEXICO WAY
A successful businessman and state senator in Oklahoma, Oliver Winfield Killam saw trouble coming. The World War had ended in November 1918, but Killam believed the nation was headed toward a post-war economic downturn. And that's what happened in 1919.
Selling his business and personal property and foregoing his political career, he left Oklahoma for an unusually rain-soaked Laredo in the spring of 1920. At 45, married and with three children, he had decided to reinvent himself. He would become a millionaire Texas oil man, finding oil in a part of the state where no one thought it could be found-along the Mexican border. Of course, though he had a college degree, Killam knew nothing of the oil business other than good money could be made from it.
Easily obtaining an oil lease on the Hinnant Ranch in Zapata County, Killam and two partners, T.C. Mann and L.T. Harned, organized the Mirando Oil Co. The company name came from Nicolas Mirando, original owner of the Spanish land grant on which the Hinnant Ranch was later established. Coincidentally, in Spanish, "Mirando" means "look." Fittingly, when Killam formed the company, he was still just "looking" for oil. The only geologic data he considered in selecting a lease was that it had some hills on it that reminded him of the terrain in the proven oil play in Oklahoma around Bartlesville.
What happened next is a familiar story in Texas oil history. Killam's first well, the Hinnant No. 1, proved a duster. Drillers found a trace of oil with Hinnant No. 2, but when they started bailing the well in, pipe slipped down the hole and blocked the oil sand. With existing technology, the well could not be salvaged so Killam had the Hinnant No. 3 spudded in. The well came in as a 30- barrel producer, small papas (potatoes) compared to boisterous plays elsewhere in the state, but it proved that oil could be found in South Texas.
With drilling continuing on the 10,000 acres Killam now had under lease, in September 1921, he purchased a section of land in Webb County and had a surveyor lay out a town site. He called it Mirando City, and when he and new partner Colon Schott of Cincinnati brought in a 4,000- barrel gusher just south of there on December 10, 1921, yet another Texas oil boom was on.
The only slight problem Killam had was owning a robust oil field with no way to get his product to market. With the nearest road 22 miles from the play, he had a pipeline built from the Schott Field to the railroad. In 1923, to further enhance the commercial potential of his field, Killam built a refinery at Mirando City.
In 1926, Killam sold much of his holdings to the Magnolia Petroleum Co. for $1.25 million. He retained his refinery, which he ran until the 1930s, along with his pipeline and two other oil companies he had created. On July 4, 1937, oilmen attending the Oil Jubilee in Laredo, named Killam "King Petro."
THE LULING FIELD
As the state's early oil plays went, the Luling Field did not break any records for size or production, but the man who brought it in deserves recognition as one of Texas's more eccentric oil men.
Unlike most rags-to-riches Texas wildcatters, Edgar B. Davis had already been a millionaire twice-the first time as a shoe manufacturer, the second as an investor in an East Indies rubber plantation-before coming to the Lone Star State to give the oil business a shot. He gave away most of his first fortune and lost his second earning a third.
