In September 1930, a bigamist in a straw boater drove up to a wooden oil derrick in a clearing in East Texas. His name was H.L. Hunt, and he was on his way to becoming rich. Billionaire rich.

The petroleum found beneath that patch of pine forest and elsewhere in Texas between 1930 and 1935 would produce the state's great family fortunes, Bryan Burrough writes in "The Big Rich," a galloping history of the wildcatters whose drive, ranches and gaudy mansions inspired both the Beverly Hillbillies and their malevolent neighbor, J.R. Ewing.

Burrough, co-author of "Barbarians at the Gate," here presents a Lone Star epic, the story of four families — the Hunts, Basses, Murchisons and Cullens — "who rose the highest and, in some cases, fell the hardest" in a century when cheap Texas crude begat a world of oil-fueled ships, trains and cars.

"If Texas Oil had a Mount Rushmore, their faces would adorn it," he writes in his lean, easy cadences. Their lives had as many highs and lows as the price of crude itself.

Burrough introduces his protagonists with a novelist's eye for detail. Hugh Roy Cullen, a fifth-grade dropout and former cotton buyer, made his bundle by drilling the flanks of already tapped fields. He learned to dig deep, through layers of blue mud, saltwater and a tier of shale that defeated other drillers.

Clint Murchison, a banker's son with a "big head, beanbag nose, no neck to speak of," brought something different to the game — a gift for what he called "financing by finaglin'." He would trade a share in one lease for a rig to bore another. Then he'd swap shares in that rig's production for another rig.

POLITICAL INFLUENCE

Hunt was perhaps the oddest "oilionaire." Breastfed until age 7 (he said proudly), Hunt could multiply large sums in his head as a boy. After drifting around the West cutting sugar beets, driving mule teams and lumberjacking, he bought a cotton farm but earned as much money from gambling. He made his fortune by buying out a wildcatter who hit a pool of East Texan oil that proved to be 45 miles long.

Burrough grew up in Texas but wasn't born there; a classmate in fifth grade called him a carpetbagger. He combines a hometown boy's affection with an outsider's perspective, showing how oilmen bought private islands, pumped the crude that helped the Allies win World War II, purchased fake Matisses and real Remingtons. We also see how they influenced American politics.

Some feared "creeping socialism" and funded radio programs and publications that would forge a new conservative political agenda steeped in anti-Semitism and racism. They were anti-Communist and pro-religion, anti-labor and pro-business.

Others sought to tug the levers of power, writing checks or dispatching cash in paper bags. They hobnobbed with Franklin D. Roosevelt and Dwight D. Eisenhower. Lyndon B. Johnson rode oil money into the White House, as did George W. Bush, Burrough says.

SORTING THE DETAILS

Burrough says he spent three years digging through archives, interviewing surviving members of Big Four families and reading more than 200 books and thousands of articles. He pored over land records, oil leases and lawsuits filed in county courthouses.

This yielded more detail than most readers need, but what could he cut? Surely not the oilman who wore $100 bills as bowties. Or the one who rode a pet lion.

And then there's the scene in which Hunt's wife Lyda learned that her husband had secretly kept another woman, with whom he had four children.

"Daddy always said that his genes were so outstanding that he wanted to leave a lot of them to the world," Lyda told her daughter Margaret, according to this account.

When he died in 1974, Hunt left behind 13 children sired with three women and a trail of legal agreements, trusts and lawsuits documenting his curious lifestyle.

TEXAN WATERGATE

Burrough takes us through the decline of Texas crude when cheap Saudi oil came on stream; the rise of the next generation (Bunker Hunt struck oil in Libya); and a "Watergate, Texas- style," complete with wiretaps. We are treated to chapters on the last Texas oil boom, brought on by the Arab oil embargo, and the bizarre silver-buying binge by Bunker and Herbert Hunt.

Though this book forms an epitaph for a bygone era, it's not without relevance today.

"Texas oil, and to a degree the Big Four families, brought true national power to the state," Burrough concludes, "and it's a power America grapples with to this day."