by Paul R. Spitzzeri
About forty persons came out in heavy rain this past Thursday evening for a presentation to the Orange County Historical Society on some history of the Olinda Ranch area of today’s city of Brea at the northeastern corner of the county. This included the acquisition of public land, formerly set aside as extra grazing land for the Spanish and Mexican era ranchos and made available for sale by the State of California and between the rancho Cajon de Santa Ana (long owned by the Yorba family) and the San Juan y Cajon de Santa Ana (for years the domain of the Ontiveros clan), by James W. Shanklin, a federal land register and state surveyor general.
Shanklin’s several thousands of acres were utilized for grazing and farming, such as alfalfa used for livestock feed, from the time he purchased the land in 1874 and very little changed for a baker’s dozen of years until he sold a substantial portion of it to William H. Bailey, a recent transplant from the Hawaiian island of Mau’i, where he was born to Congregationalist missionaries.
The Baileys were among the cadre of such figures who were largely responsible for the tremendous upheaval—economically, politically and socially, as well as spiritually—that rent the Pacific island kingdom from about 1820 onward. The family ran a seminary school but also owned a large plantation on the highlands below the famed Mauna Haleakala and which they named Olinda, after the town and region in the state of Pernambuco in Brazil.
When Bailey and other family migrated to California, settling in Oakland, they also owned a ranch in Happy Valley in Shasta County, southwest of Redding, as well as what was deemed Olinda Ranch in our region. An early project of Bailey was the establishment of the town of Carlton, formed in the great Boom of the 1880s when such enterprises were launched throughout greater Los Angeles.
As with many of these communities, heavily advertised with the usual proclamations of the best soil, finest weather and coming amenities like a hotel, school, bank or other signposts of a nascent town, Carlton soon withered away when that boom went bust, though traces of it can still be found in street names in what is now the western end of Yorba Linda, including Brooklyn, Wabash and Chicago, located just north of Imperial Highway.
While Bailey undoubtedly experienced major financial reverses during that period, he held on to his Olinda Ranch land long enough so that, when Edward L. Doheny, not long after he and Charles Canfield opened up the great Los Angeles oil field, partnered with the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railroad and, in 1897, brought in the first well in Orange County (which was formed in 1889, just after the end of the boom) near Bailey’s ranch, the latter also tapped into production.
In fact, after the first well in what was commonly called the Olinda oil field, within the Fullerton district, the typical mad rush of development and drilling ensued, with many companies, some “fly by night” firms and others more substantial and long-lasting, hurrying to get those gushers. By 1900, activity was fast and furious and over subsequent decades, many tens of millions of barrels of crude were extracted from the field.
Some of this history has been shared in this blog, most recently in a post from not quite a year ago, but this entry looks at some of the earliest references to oil prospecting in the Olinda area dating back to 1865, the year the the search for petroleum was launched in greater Los Angeles and this being just several years after America’s first oil well was successfully brought into production in western Pennsylvania.
That momentous year when the Civil War ended and, as our region was emerging from a terrible half-decade of flood and drought, smallpox epidemics, grasshoppers looting farms and more, brought the formation of early oil companies and efforts to drill in what was then termed the San Fernando field in a hilly area west of today’s Interstate 5 near Santa Clarita—F.P.F. Temple became very active in this region in the middle 1870s during the area’s first boom, for instance.
There was also obvious interest in the section surrounding the La Brea tar pits, several miles west of Los Angeles and which had long been used by the indigenous people for caulking or glue and in the Spanish, Mexican and early American periods for covering roofs. Lesser known, however, is that Brea Canyon, between the eastern limits of the San Gabriel Valley and the coastal plain of what became Orange County, also had large seepages that served the same purposes.
In 1871, when the three men effected a dissolution of their Hellman, Temple and Company bank, Temple and his father-in-law, Homestead owner William Workman, acquired from Isaias W. Hellman, interests in petroleum claims in Brea Canyon. This might have been the result of some early efforts in that area to engage in prospecting, though not apparently yielding any tangible results.
An early reference to oil in the broad Olinda section is an advertisement in the 21 February 1865 edition of the Los Angeles News taken out by Robert Carlisle and an associate named Sargent warning:
All persons are hereby notified not to purchase any OIL SPRINGS, or PETROLEUM SPRINGS on or east of the CANADA DE LA BREA . . . as the undersigned are the sole owners of the above mentioned property.
Carlisle was the volatile owner of the adjoining Rancho Santa Ana del Chino, which was actually the inheritance of his wife Francisca, daughter of longtime Chino Ranch owner Isaac Williams and grand-daughter of its grantee, Antonio María Lugo. Just a little over four months later, Carlisle was killed in a notorious daytime shootout at the Bella Union Hotel in Los Angeles and his hot-headedness and penchant for turning to violence on a dime were well-known.
The ad was clearly taken out over a dispute to these untapped, but potentially very valuable lands and it is worth noting that the Brea Canyon mentioned was not the north-south section through which Brea Canyon Road (which was created in 1873) and the 57 Freeway pass today, but, rather, today’s Tonner Canyon, which branches off to the northeast from that state highway and runs through the Tres Hermanos Ranch.
Another notable item relating to this area was buried in a late April notice of a sheriff’s sale of foreclosure, in which Los Angeles merchant Philip Sichel (like Hellman, an early member of the Jewish mercantile community of the Angel City) was the plaintiff and Abel Stearns, former merchant and owner of huge swaths of what is now southeastern Los Angeles and much of Orange County, was the defendant.
The land involved comprised the aforementioned Rancho San Juan y Cajon de Santa Ana and the notice observed that what was excepted from the foreclosure sale of the ranch were two tracts. The first was 1,398 acres comprising “the Anaheim vineyard lands” and which followed an earlier sale of over 1,100 acres by the rancho’s grantee Pacifico Ontiveros to the German colonists who established the town of Anaheim. The other involved “all such rights as the said Ontiveras [sic] and wife [María Martina Osuña] granted to Bernardo Yorba, to use the brea in the Cañada de la Brea.”
The 13 May edition of the News briefly reported that,
On Tuesday last, at Cañada de la Brea, about thirty miles from this city, Paul R. Hunt was shot and killed by Peleg Smith. There are various and conflicting accounts of the killing, and we refrain from particulars which the trial will be apt to bring out. A tract of land in the vicinity of the Cañada is claimed by different parties who had placed Hunt and Smith to hold the land in their respective interests.
Hunt was a notorious figure in Los Angeles, having come to the city in 1853 and, after a failed run for Justice of the Peace the following year and then for Mayor in 1855, secured election to the Common (City) Council, though the existing members tried to nullify it apparently arguing that he obtained the votes of indigenous people by underhanded means (sometimes this involved offering copious amount of alcohol).
While successful in getting seated, Hunt, several months later, was charged and found guilty of trying to kill county jailer, Francis Carpenter, though the verdict was appealed and, several years later, the matter was dropped by the District Attorney. Hunt seems to have decamped to San Francisco and, perhaps, went to Hawaii, but he turned up again in the early Sixties and was an admitted to the bar, with much of his practice looking to have involved representing the estates of deceased persons.
It may be that his status of a lawyer led to his being “placed” at Brea Canyon to protect the interests of persons regarding potential oil land and it may also be that the dire state of the regional economy meant a dearth of business for his legal services. As for Lyman “Peleg” Smith, the native of Louisville and a Gold Rush ’49er who was in Los Angeles since at least 1860, he was indicted in 1862 for assaulting the Los Angeles city marshal and then for grand larceny.
In early June, the county grand jury ignored the bill brought forward by the district attorney charging Smith and John White with murder along with another for three men charged as being accessories and, on an application for habeus corpus involving their continued detention in the county jail, Smith and White were were admitted to $10,000 bail by a state Supreme Court justice. Whether Smith was able to post that very large amount for the era or the matter was dropped, he headed for Arizona Territory, where he was a merchant and trader until his death more than four decades later.
While the dispute at Brea Canyon was apparently forgotten, a bit of a bombshell was dropped in fall 1867 by longtime County Judge William G. Dryden, a colorful figure known for his copious use of profanity and outbursts in chambers and who knew William Workman as far back as 1841 when Dryden was a key figure in an attempt by the independent Republic of Texas to invade and seize much of New Mexico, where Workman resided and with the latter’s involvement in the Texas scheme uncertain—in any case, Workman headed for Los Angeles just before the botched invasion was launched.
The 18 October 1867 edition of the News reported that,
Hon. W.G. Dryden, in a speech delivered in front of the Bella Union Hotel [such orations outdoors in front of prominent buildings were common] . . . charged the members of the Soucal Cañon Asphaltum Company, with having employed and paid one Lyman Smith to assassinate Paul R. Hunt. We publish herewith the names of the locaters of the Asphaltum claims referred to . . . and among them our citizens will recognize the names of many of the most respectable business men and citizens of the county, of all trades and professions. If so grave a charge from the county judge of the county as it does, be true, it is due to the citizens of the county that it be at once investigated and our worthy County Judge who has, in a public speech, denounced a large body of respectable citizens as assassins, is compelled to charge the next grand jury with the duty of investigating the charge, that parties guilty of such crime may be indicted and brought to trial, no matter what their social position may be. If his Hon. the Judge, fails to make such charge to the next grand jury, he stands convicted before the community of either being an accessory to murder after the fact, or of being a common defamer of the character and reputation of gentlemen who occupy high positions in the county.
Among the shareholders of the company, the name of which refers to Soquel Canyon, which merges with Carbon Canyon on the eastern fringes of what became the Olinda oil field, and which formed in 18 March 1865 to take three dozen tracts that were 1,000 feet on each side and believed to have deposits of asphaltum, bitumen, naphtha and petroleum in those two canyons, were such well-known figures as lawyers E.J.C. Kewen and J.R. Gitchell; the “Port Admiral” of what is now the Port of Los Angeles, Phineas Banning; George Dalton; Benjamin Dreyfus of Anaheim; Ozro W. Childs; Henry D. Barrows; William H. Perry; Commodore Perry Switzer of Switzer’s Camp and Switzer Falls; and Carlisle.
Which interests Hunt represented, however, are not apparently known, but one wonders if Dryden, who held the charter for the Los Angeles water works earlier in the sixties before it was destroyed by the terrible floods of the winter of 1861-1862 and had many other business interests, was involved with that side.
Whatever the situation, Dryden was challenged to follow through with his shocking accusation, but, even as the grand jury was impaneled, the jurist did not act and the Sacramento Bee, as cited by the News, observed that, if Dryden failed to prove his claims against the Soucal firm, which appears to have dissolved around or shortly after 1865, then “he becomes worse than an assassin by failing to discharge his duty . . . and prostituting that high and responsible office by fostering and protecting individuals whom he has publicly declared to be guilty of murder.” Moreover, the Bee thundered, each day that Dryden did not do something, it “proves that he is accessory after the fact, or a falsifier or defamer of the character of gentlemen too base to be tolerated in any community not corrupt to the very core.”
The controversy soon died away, though it is unclear if there were any ramifications for Dryden, who died two years later still in his position as County Judge. As for the possibilities of oil in what became the Olinda field area, we’ll pick the story up tomorrow with part two, so check back then.