Land Report 100: No. 62 Clayton Williams Jr.

OF THE COUNTRY’S 100 LARGEST LANDOWNERS, FEW ARE AS COLORFUL AS CLAYTIE.

A passionate approach to land stewardship is but one of Clayton Williams’s claims to fame. The diehard Texas Aggie is a born entrepreneur whose many pursuits have ranged from insurance salesman to banker, farmer, rancher, real estate developer, big-game hunter, philanthropist, conservationist, and, at one pivotal point in his career, front-running gubernatorial candidate. And like any self-made man, he can ride out tough times with the best of them—even down to his last bullet.

Williams’s trailblazing traits date to his colorful forebears, who mixed it up with the likes of Kit Carson, Billy the Kid, and Geronimo. The native Texan was born in Alpine in 1931 and raised in Fort Stockton. After attending Texas A&M and fulfilling his military obligations, he cut his teeth selling life insurance in Mineral Wells. But fate called him back to West Texas, where in a Fort Stockton coffee shop he learned about a farm for sale. He struck a deal with its owner to form an oil and gas partnership, and the cornerstone of his career was set. From that small start, his financial empire eventually grew to include a host of companies, from cow-calf operations to a safari company to several entities bearing the ClayDesta moniker, a nod to himself and wife Modesta.

It was in Modesta that the wildcatter found a soul mate who shared his love of the land and sense of adventure. In his book Claytie: The Roller-Coaster Life of a Texas Wildcatter, Mike Cochran describes Williams’s run as “an exciting mix of hard work and great fun, building pipelines and drilling wells one day and branding calves and working cows the next—all embellished with a spectacular marriage. Claytie and Modesta really are bigger than life.”

After an unsuccessful run for governor of Texas in 1990, Claytie turned his considerable energies on going public with Clayton Williams Energy Inc. (CWEI). With an estimated net worth of $100 million, his name was added to the Forbes Four Hundred. Today, he is a fixture on the Land Report 100 and ranked No. 62 in 2009 with 146,655 acres. During the past decade, CWEI has drilled 167 horizontal wells, mostly in the Austin Chalk formation as well as the Cotton Valley Reef in Texas, in Louisiana, in Mississippi, and in New Mexico.

“Claytie is, by all measures, one of a kind,” says Cochran. “He’s an absolutely wonderful character. With his ranch he’s been really innovative and was recognized nationally for some of the innovations to trap water and to get the best use of the land.”