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.”

81 – Linnebur Family – 110,000 acres

Although their property has been divided among various family members, the Linneburs are collectively one of Colorado’s largest landowners. Brothers Gene and Lloyd each own substantial parcels, and the widow and four sons of a third brother, Emmett, are still active landowners.

10 – Stan Kroenke – 600,000 acres

After we debuted The Land Report 100 in 2007, the letters and emails began to arrive. How could we have overlooked Stan Kroenke? Sports fans recognize him as the co-owner of the St. Louis Rams and the owner of the Denver Nuggets, the Colorado Avalanche, and numerous other franchises. And wine lovers know him as one of the proprietors of Napa Valley’s Screaming Eagle Winery. Real estate professionals estimate that Kroenke owns an estimated 600,000 acres in Montana and Wyoming. Plus, he holds a 400,000-acre Crown lease in Canada.

More Coverage on the Yellowstone Club Bankruptcy Case

It wasn’t two years ago that every media outlet known to man was clamoring over one another to give more column inches to the biggest, gawdiest monstrosity in the West: the Yellowstone Club’s record-breaking $155-million home. Though we’ve banged the drum on many an occasion, I’m pleased to say The Land Report did not jump on that bandwagon. But we readily admit to watching the feeding frenzy as those same news channels cover the demise of the elite enclave, including these two incisive reports. Read more

Yellowstone Club Files for Bankruptcy

The world’s only private ski and golf community has sought bankruptcy protection. The Yellowstone Club, an exclusive 13,400-acre retreat in Montana’s Gallatin Mountains whose members include Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates and former vice president Dan Quayle, filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in federal bankruptcy court yesterday. Read more

Shuttered Texas Silver Mine to Reopen?

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. Read more

Sale of the Forbes Trinchera Ranch

Land Report Editor Eric O’Keefe discusses one the biggest sales of 2007, the 171,000-acre Forbes Trinchera Ranch in Colorado to hedge fund manager Louis Bacon. Read more

Sold! Forbes Trinchera Ranch

The Forbes family has sold the ranch. In the largest transaction involving The Land Report 100 in 2007, the four sons and one daughter of Malcolm Forbes signed off on the sale of their 171,400-acre Trinchera Ranch in Southern Colorado to hedge fund manager Louis Bacon of Moore Capital for $175 million on November 15, 2007. Bacon, who runs Moore Capital Management and was estimated to be worth $1.8 billion by Forbes, ranked No. 262 on the magazine’s list of the wealthiest Americans this year.

Land Report Editor Eric O’Keefe discusses this sale HERE.

So what did Bacon get for $175 million? For starters, the largest remaining undeveloped tract within the historic Sangre de Cristo land grant, an enormous swath of snow-capped peaks, grassland valleys, and vast expanses of conifer forest. The original 1843 land grant encompassed more than 1 million acres and extended from Northern New Mexico above Taos into Colorado’s San Luis Valley. The Sangre de Cristo was subsequently carved up, parceled off, and the subject of countless legal shenanigans.

More than a century later, Malcolm Forbes bought the Trinchera Ranch, which is located in Costilla County 160 miles southwest of Denver near Fort Garland. Forbes later acquired an adjacent parcel called the Blanca Ranch to create the present property.

Land Report Editor Eric O’Keefe discusses this sale HERE.

What didn’t Bacon get for $175 million? For one thing, he doesn’t have the right to develop the 267-square-mile tract. Those rights were given away in 2004 when the Forbes family donated the largest conservation easement in the state’s history to Colorado Open Lands, a non-profit land trust. In return for this gift, the family received a substantial tax break.

According to The Pueblo Chieftain, Bacon has long been a proponent of groups that support conservation and set up the Moore Charitable Foundation in 1992 to aid their efforts. He himself has given conservation easements on two Long Island properties. I asked Dan Pike, the president of Colorado Open Lands, about Louis Bacon, and he said, “He’s probably as good a buyer as we could have hoped for.”

A closing note. Most published reports indicate that Malcolm Forbes paid $50 an acre to purchase the ranch in 1969. In 2007, his heirs sold it for more than $1,000 an acre. And that was after they had donated their record-setting conservation easement. As anyone familiar with easements knows, they limit land use and therefore lower land value. Yet the Forbes family was still able to sell the Trinchera Ranch for more than 20 times what Malcolm Forbes paid almost 40 years earlier.

Land Report Editor Eric O’Keefe discusses this sale HERE.

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