LandReport.com » Clayton Williams

Land Report 100: No. 62 Clayton Williams Jr.

Land Report Editors — Thu, 21 Jan 2010 19:54:48 +0000

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.”

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The Land Report Winter 2009

Land Report Editors — Tue, 15 Dec 2009 07:00:20 +0000

Enjoy the digital edition of the Winter 2009 issue of the Magazine of the American Landowner.

Land Report 100 – Clayton Williams

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Shuttered Texas Silver Mine to Reopen?

Stephen O'Keefe — Fri, 05 Sep 2008 07:00:35 +0000

First it was ethanol and the price per acre in the Corn Belt. Then oil and gas began propping up land values in mineral-rich areas such as the huge shales found coast to coast. Now other commodities are driving other forgotten or overlooked real estate markets, including an out-of-the-way section in Far West Texas where the state’s richest silver mine is slated to reopen after a seven decades of inactivity, according to this press release.

Silver was first discovered in the Big Bend region of Far West Texas in the 1880s and mined at La Mina Grande in Presidio County from 1883 until 1942. More than 35 million ounces were produced. This area of the Lone Star State is home to some of the largest ranching empires in the country, and includes several Land Report 100ers: Brad Kelley, Jeff Bezos, and Clayton Williams, among others. The recent and sustained increase in the price of silver led Aurcana, a Canadian mining company, to pay $43 million to Silver Standard Resources to acquire the flooded mine, which it plans to reopen in 2010. Annual production estimates of 3.2 million ounces per year are forecast. More to come.

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