by Paul R. Spitzzeri
At the end of the 19th and early 20th centuries, there was ,largely centered in greater Los Angeles, something that might be seen as something of a successor to the famous Gold Rush of decades prior; in fact, there were frequent references to the discovery of “black gold” in the form of crude oil when it came to our region.
The earliest local efforts date to the mid-1860s with crude (!) methods of drilling in what is now the Santa Clarita area and which was followed in the early to mid 1870s by further explorations, including those by F.P.F. Temple and his Los Angeles Petroleum Refining and Lesina Oil companies. He appeared to be making some headway in his prospecting prior to the collapse of his Temple and Workman bank in 1876, shortly after which the Star Oil Company found success in that section.
In the early 1880s, William R. Rowland, son of John Rowland, co-grantee with William Workman of the Rancho La Puente, found a large deposit of crude atop the Puente Hills and parlayed that into the Puente Oil Company, a very successful producer for decades at that important field. Later that decade, in Santa Paula in Ventura County, Hardison and Stewart established what became Union Oil Company.
In 1892, Edward Doheny and Charles Canfield, with a minimum investment and basic drilling equipment, opened the Los Angeles field northwest of downtown. Five years later, Doheny brought in the first well in Orange County in the Olinda field in what is now Brea. While Canfield was successful with his own subsequent ventures, Doheny became the most powerful oil figure on the West Coast in subsequent years.
By the dawn of the new century, the oil boom spawned a great many successful ventures, as well as far more failures and no small number of questionable operations. This leads us to the featured artifact from the Museum’s holdings for this post, a 25 January 1901 stock certificate for the Juanita Oil Company. The Los Angeles-based firm had some local leases, south and west of the city, considered for drilling, but their operations were largely at Summerland, on the coast south of Santa Barbara and near McKittrick, west of Bakersfield.
Juanita ran its business in a colorful way, from the gimmick of initial shares of stock that could be had for just a penny to ads that employed snappy language and a plethora of pithy platitudes, but it also garnered attention, though not necessarily helpful, for the spiritualist leanings of its founder and president, Bascom A. Stephens (1855-1913), whose peripatetic life featured a propensity for conflict and controversy, with his company essentially flaming out rapidly after just over a year of existence.
Stephens was born in Lockington, Ohio, north of Dayton, but moved with his family to California while a small child in the late 1850s. After residing in Ione, in the lower elevations of the Sierra Nevada gold country southeast of Sacramento, the Stephens family moved to Santa Clara, where he completed his schooling and then became a Seventh Day Adventist minister. He displayed his talent for oratory as well as for pugnaciousness early in his career when he became a fiery temperance (anti-alcohol) advocate.
Still in his teens in 1874, Stephens, in a letter to a San Jose newspaper, accused J.L. Hatch, the local public school principal in Santa Clara of coming home intoxicated after the latter disagreed with the former about the direction of the temperance movement. Hatch went to court, suing the paper’s editor for libel, and winning the case and then learned that Stephens was the author of the piece, which was not, as was often the case, but is not now, submitted under a pseudonym. Hatch confronted the young man, who strenuously denied authorship but then confessed, though he also defended doing so for a righteous cause. Hatch told a San Jose paper in 1889,
I could never look upon him thereafter without pity and loathing. His subsequent course leads me to believe that he is the same loathsome creature still, a conscienceless liar and libeller.
By 1880, Stephens, who was married and would have three children with wife May Overshimer, was a pastor in Auburn, northeast of Sacramento, but the following year he left the ministry to run a newspaper in Santa Cruz. That, too, was a veritable blink in the eye and it was later stated that he abandoned that project, owing money on it but skipping town without making good on his debt. Stephens then took a position as a typesetter for a Phoenix, Arizona newspaper. After a short stint there, he headed to National City near San Diego and the Mexican border and then quickly decamped for Los Angeles.
In a year during 1882-1883, he worked as a reporter for the Los Angeles Times and its rival, the Express, and also served as the district president for the local chapter of the Patriotic Order of the Sons of America and got involved in Republican Party politics, including the formation of a Young Republicans League. In early 1883, attorney Will D. Gould gave up running the Los Angeles Commercial and Stephens stepped in, albeit briefly.
That’s because, he returned to Arizona, south to Tucson, where he was a reporter for a paper. During another brief tenure, he became interested in mining west of town and wrote a guide to a boomtown area. By summer 1884, though, he was again the City of Angels, where he was secretary of a Republican Party rally and took up employment once more with the Times before decamping by the end of the year to be a reporter with the Herald. Early in 1885, he launched a real estate company called Apple and Stephens, though this appeared to last only briefly.
Still, he dabbled in journalism and wrote some lengthy features for the Times in 1885 about the Apache Indians and their long struggles against Americans and Mexicans in Arizona and México. By early 1886, he was back in the game full-time working as a correspondent with the Express when he got into another major controversy. Elias J. “Lucky” Baldwin, the mining tycoon whose loan to the Temple and Workman bank, when foreclosed upon three years after the institution’s collapse, gave him tens of thousands of acres of valuable greater Los Angeles property, frequently consorted with teenage girls far younger than him and was in court several times regarding these relationships, including one in which he was shot by a former young paramour.
When Louise Perkins sued Baldwin for a breach of promise of marriage, Stephens wrote an article that sent the tycoon and his attorney, G. Wiley Wells, into spasms of anger. The 7 February 1886 edition of the Times reported that, as court was called into session the prior day, Wells went to the reporters’ section and “angrily shook a newspaper clipping at B.A. Stephens, of the Express.” The paper continued that “THE THING GROWS WARM” as
Baldwin came with him in very bad temper, and shaking his fist as Stephens’s ear, said: “I shall hold you personally responsible for this! I’ll see you outside, sir. I’ll hold you personally responsible!” Mr. Stephens [replied]: “There was no intention to misrepresent.” Baldwin insisted there was, and repeated his threats to hold the reporter personally responsible, and to “see him outside,” or “see him later.” The Stephens got warm, and said: “Go to h—l, you G—d d—d old rascal!” Baldwin turned on him menacingly, and Stephens jumped up and started to meet him, saying, “I’ll meet you anywhere, or fight you now.”
Wells read portions of the Stephens piece in court, including a claim from Perkins during her testimony that Baldwin had prostitutes in his house, including those introduced by one of the tycoon’s daughters. The Times, in a parenthetical statement, noted that the report was about the same as what it recorded, though it added that the Stephens report was “hastily condensed at the office by another person, who did the work inaccurately.” Perkins later won a $75,000 judgment, though this was knocked down to $15,000 on appeal.
Almost exactly a year later after the Baldwin brouhaha, Stephens was embroiled in another cataclysm over his writings. This involved the irrepressible Horace Bell, best known for his 1881 “memoir” called Reminiscences of a Ranger, in which played fast and loose with the facts while spinning yarns that are highly entertaining if too often to be regarded warily for those looking for accuracy. Bell was also an attorney and publisher of the aptly-named paper, The Porcupine, and his was known for a short fuse and his ease of making enemies. This included his coverage of the Perkins-Baldwin trial.
In May 1886, Stephens was in the Temple Block, built by the brothers Jonathan and F.P.F. Temple, but lost by the latter after the bank failure and now the site of Los Angeles City Hall, when he was accosted by Bell. The reason was that, in reporting on a speech given by the latter, the journalist quoted him as saying that some elites forgot that their mothers were washerwomen and that Bell told the crowd “I have not forgotten my mother was one.”
Taking umbrage at what he thundered was a misrepresentation, Bell confronted Stephens and reported the Times of 6 May:
The two went together to Major Bell’s office to argue it out, but, after the exchange of a few words, the Major became excited and drew a cane on Stephens with the threat to administer a summary beating. Stephens backed into a hall, followed by the Major. The opportune appearance of Deputy Sheriff Field and a couple of lawyers prevented a conflict.
Ten days later, Bell filed a criminal complaint against Stephens, but it appears to have gone nowhere. Stephens again joined the Times that August, but, after a few months, moved to Pomona, where he took the reins of that city’s Progress newspaper. It was not long, though, before another row with the voluble Bell developed.
In March 1887, Stephens filed suit against his adversary for libel for Bell’s diatribe against him in The Porcupine, in which the latter wrote that “the Baldwin Wells gang then sent a wretch named B.A. Stephens to Indiana and elsewhere to find some fleck in our good name.” Bell asserted that, this alleged project having failed, Stephens resorted to “subsidizing vagabonds to make false statements . . . in things alleged to have happened thirty years ago.” This account ended with the assertion that Stephens “escaped lynching by fleeing the State.”
Bell’s response was to file his own suit against Wells (which was interesting given the attorney’ wrath against Stephens in the Baldwin case), the Progress proprietor and a third man and the substance of the case was a riposte by Stephens against his adversary that was introduced into court by Bell’s own counsel, leading the plaintiff to leap out of his chair, waving his arms and yelling, “I want that stopped,” adding “I don’t want him [Wells] to read that, the G—d d—d thief, and I will be G—d d—d if he shall. I don’t want any G—d d—d fooling.”
The Times, who were among the many enemies of the hyperbolic Bell, had no qualms about reprinting the Progress attack on him, which began with Stephens asserting of Bell that “so violent was his abuse of his wife that she was at one time committed to the Stockton Insane Asylum.” After averring that it was “absurd” to libel Bell, the Pomona journalist wrote that he “murdered Tomas Miranda in Los Angeles twenty years ago in cold blood” and because the sole Anglo who witnessed the killing died before a trial, District Court Judge Robert M. Widney “was forced to enter a nol[le] pros[equi],” meaning the case had to be dropped.
The next accusation was that, in November 1858, he attacked a cousin he was courting “and did stab her” leading to Bell being forced to leave Indiana, to which he returned after purportedly being exiled from Los Angeles for wanton behavior, going to Nicaragua to filibuster with William Walker and allegedly fleeing in cowardice from battle, and then returning to his home state. Other claims were that Bell was not a major, but, in three months of actual Union Army service during the Civil War, was a quartermaster-sergeant; that he attacked for Union Army General Edward Bouton with a sword cane just the past Monday; was the cause of his mother’s death; attempted to assassinate David Waldron (former owner of Washington Gardens south of Los Angeles) and most salaciously,
It was a common report at the time his wife went crazy that it was because that just subsequent to confinement she discovered him in flagrante delictu [sic] with a female negro servant.
There is much more to this remarkable legal matter that could well become a future post on this blog, but, while Wells was eventually dismissed from the case, Thornton and Stephens were convicted of libel, though the punishment was a fine of $150 for the latter, who gave up the Progress during the legal proceedings. Small wonder that reports of his entanglements at Santa Clara as a teen temperance advocate came forward not long afterward! For another interlude of no more than a few months, Stephens was, in 1890, publisher of a publication called Los Angeles Life.
Ironically, Stephens then got involved in a filibustering scheme not all that different from what Bell was involved in more than three decades prior, when he became “Secretary-General” of the comically short-lived and badly bungled Republic of Lower California, in which a small cadre of Anglos sought to establish a white-led independent nation in Baja California in 1890. To add to the strange scenario, Stephens was accused of leaving his wife and children in Los Angeles and traveling over the border with a married Angel City spiritualist and then leaving her in Ensenada (where Walter P. Temple ended up residing forty years later) as he returned in disgrace to California.
After his binational wanderings, the 9 December 1893 edition of the Los Angeles Herald lambasted Stephens as “a great hullabaloo bamboozler on the spiritualist line” adding that “Bascom petrified and paralyzed a lot of well meaning people hereabouts.” The same day, a Santa Cruz newspaper related that he hired a horse and buggy in Los Angeles, drove the conveyance to San Diego, disposed of it and was the subject of an arrest warrant from the livery stable owner. The account ended “this Stephens is the man who started the first daily [paper] in Santa Cruz, and left without paying a small bill in this office.”
The 30 December edition of the Los Angeles Times quoted extensive from the San Diego Union about more of “the erratic, the volatile” Stephens, who mounted a disguise including the shaving of his “once fluffy mustache.” It was added that he’d planned yet another publication, to be called The Mexican Fruit-Grower, but, while he found some patronage, the effort “died a-borning, and lapsed into the limbo of brilliant but impossible things.” Seeking to elude the aforementioned arrest warrant, Stephens made it back to Los Angeles, while “his lawful wife and children are living in utter destitution” and May was said to be seeking to file for a divorce.
With this, we are going to put an end to this first part and invite you to check back in very soon for part two, as we pick up the strange saga of Stephens in the late 1890s and carry the story to the founding of the Juanita Oil Company, its short history, and then follow his tale through the remaining dozen years of his life.