by Paul R. Spitzzeri
In the aftermath of the spring 1865 killing of former Los Angeles Common (City) Council member and attorney, Paul R. Hunt, by Lyman Smith at the Cañada de la Brea, the original Brea Canyon in what is now Tonner Canyon where there were competing oil interests, including the Soucal Oil Company (this name referring to nearby Soquel Canyon, where claims were established as well as in adjacent Carbon Canyon, on former public lands from the Spanish and Mexican periods), early oil prospecting continued, at least in concept, in these very early years of such activity in greater Los Angeles.
The 26 August 1865 edition of the Los Angeles News briefly reported that,
We learn that Major Stroble has commenced the work of boring for petroleum at Cañada de la Brea, about twenty [more like 30, actually] miles distant from this city. The enterprise above mentioned has been opened under the direction of an incorporated company with heavy capital; with fine machinery and an energetic manager.
This is almost certainly referring to the Soucal firm, which included Benjamin Dreyfus, a leading figure of the German-founded colony of Anaheim when it was established eight years earlier. As to the manager, Max Frantz Otto Strobel was a colorful, idiosyncratic and peripatetic figure who was born in Bavaria in 1826 and was in military service until upheavals of revolution in 1848 forced his exile to England and then to America.
Strobel, with civil engineering and surveying experience under his belt, worked at the United States Coast Survey in Washington where he met another unorthodox individual, John C. Frémont, who’d just been court-martialed due to a series of actions in California during the recent Mexican-American War, including an unauthorized purchase, from F.P.F. Temple, of Alcatraz Island.
Strobel was hired by Frémont to join him on another cross-continental expedition (others in the early Forties made the “Pathfinder” a national name) and then managed the massive Mariposa ranch—the 1860 census there lists the civil engineer under the owner, who had no listed occupation. During the Fifties, he also took part (as did Los Angeles’ Horace Bell) in William Walker’s notorious filibustering scheme in Nicaragua, which collapsed spectacularly in 1857 and Strobel returned to Mariposa.
With the outbreak of the Civil War, Frémont joined the Union Army as a Major-General and sold the Mariposa at the outset of 1863. Strobel headed to San Francisco where he joined the stockbrokers Sanders Sparrow and James Mars in forming an agency involved in the booming mining regions along the Colorado River and the border between California and Arizona Territory.
Strobel moved to Los Angeles that year to serve as agent for Sparrow, Mars and Company and also became a majority stockholder in the Great Central Mining Company of San Francisco, but, when the boom petered out, he turned his attention to Anaheim and the brief efforts he undertook for the Soucal Oil Company.
After that enterprise ended, Strobel ran twice unsuccessfully for Los Angeles County Surveyor, formed a real estate business, served as Anaheim’s mayor, ran a newspaper, opened a law office and then, working with John Forster, native of England and owner of the vast Rancho Santa Margarita, and San Francisco capitalist James Lick, headed to London in fall 1872 to arrange for the sale of the latter and the recruitment of colonists for the former.
He died there in February 1873 and the Anaheim Gazette paid him high tribute for his “indescribable charm of manner” and his resolve to, in the face of financial misfortune, “press ever forward” on his next business project. The paper grandiosely remarked that Strobel’s death came “just as with a victor’s hand he reached forth to grasp the prize for which he had so long and earnestly striven, the dread fiat came and as life gave way, he realized for the first time the Impossible.”
The next mention of the future Olinda oil field with respect to Brea Canyon was in the 1 August 1868 edition of the Los Angeles Star (recently resuscitated after four years of inaction due to Civil War championing of the Confederacy) and its brief discussion of the operation of the Los Angeles Gas Works, recently established by investors including William H. Perry, a former Soucal stockholder, and which had its plant next to the Plaza Church in the Angel City.
The gas company, to date, had 500 burners in residences and business and 32 street lamps in operation with some 8,000 feet of pipe laid in its system and a storage capacity of about 10,000 cubic feet. Daily consumption was a fifth of that total and it was noted that,
The gas is made from asphaltum which is obtained within the city limits, where there is a supply sufficient for about two years . . . When the supply is exhausted at that point, we understand the Cañada de la Brea will yield an unlimited quantity.
The firm did also import Australian coal to supplement its local supply and F.P.F. Temple was soon involved in the company, as well, along with his own interests at Cañada de la Brea, acquired with his father-in-law William Workman from their recent banking partner, Isaias W. Hellman, and his heavily invested endeavors at the San Fernando oil field north of the city at present-day Santa Clarita.
Benjamin C. Truman, a journalist, wide-traveler and enthusiastic booster of southern California when he arrived here during this post-Civil War period as greater Los Angeles embarked on its first significant and sustained boom, mentioned Brea Canyon twice in a lengthy meditation on the region in the 6 November 1869 edition of the Star, which he later owned.
In a brief discussion concerning the natural resources of the region, Truman observed that,
Brea, or, asphaltum, is found in vast quantities in many places throughout the county. There are hundreds of acres of it in the Cañada de la Brea, fifteen miles from the city [Truman was new to the area, but it is notable how Brea Canyon kept inching closer to Los Angeles over the years!], from which the gas used in Los Angeles is manufactured.
Whether the aforementioned sources were exhausted or not, it is significant to note Truman’s report that Brea Canyon’s seepages were being tapped for gas production in the Angel City, even if oil drilling had, it seems, not gotten very far to that point.
The writer, by the way, continued to observe that brea “is also used as a fuel to a considerable extent,” while he concluded by commenting that “large quantities of oil deposits also exist, there being several flowing wells in the San Fernando foothills”—how much throughout the region actually lie deep underground was, of course, far beyond what Truman and others could image.
Lastly, he remarked that “coal is also said to exist in the mountains of the Santa Cena,” this almost certainly meaning the Santa Ana Mountains, southeast of Brea Canyon and the future Olinda, where a Coal Canyon was later named, while an 1877 map of the region identified those “coal” claims in Soquel and Carbon (the name coming from these) canyons that were almost certainly remnants of the Soucal Oil Company’s brief period of operation.
Truman, however, had another thought for the value of Brea Canyon. Given the rising importance of agriculture, this just a few years of the ravages of floods and devastation of drought all but ruined the cattle industry, long the backbone of the greater Los Angeles economy, with wheat and other field crops, oranges, and grapes for winemaking becoming predominant, he considered the question of water supply.
Observing that there were those long periods of dry weather, the journalist mentioned, decades ahead of his time that “reservoirs may be made in various parts of this country, where, from the winter rains, water may be housed and used during the summer.” Truman then went on to surmise that,
For instance, at the Cañada de la Brea, fifteen miles (!) from Los Angeles, a reservoir might be constructed, equal in capacity to that made by the Moors [of Muslim-controlled Spain] for leading the waters of the Guadalquiver [sic] into their beautiful and far famed capital of Granada. This reservoir was built between two steep mountains, and was 279 feet in length, 75 feet in width, and 156 feet in depth. A system of reservoirs can be constructed in the Cañada de la Brea, whereby many millions of gallons of water may be saved, and thousands of acres may be irrigated; in fact, the whole of Los Coyotes ranch—57,000 acres—may be watered through this means.
This remarkable passage suggested that much of the Brea Canyon area, between the Chino and Puente hills ranges, could be converted into a substantial water retention system, more or less a precursor to the dam-and-reservoir projects that were developed in greater Los Angeles from the 1910s onward. Obviously, Truman’s reference to Moorish Spain is interesting given this region’s Spanish antecedents.
As for his mention of the Rancho Los Coyotes, it wasn’t quite 57,000 acres, being about 8,000 acres smaller at 48,806, the maximum eleven square leagues under Mexican land law and the same size as the Rancho La Puente of Workman and Rowland. Los Coyotes, one of the five ranchos (along with Las Bolsas, Los Alamitos, Los Cerritos and Santa Gertrudes) carved out of the massive 1784 Nieto grant, one of the first land grants in Spanish Alta California, covered an area of plains within the broad Los Angeles basin that includes such modern cities within Orange and Los Angeles counties as Artesia, Buena Park, Cerritos and La Mirada.
Abel Stearns, a Massachusetts native and early Los Angeles merchant who acquired Los Alamitos in the early 1840s (fellow Bay State native and the Angel City’s first store owner, Jonathan Temple purchased Los Cerritos during that period), gradually absorbed much of the ranch land of central and northern Orange County, as well as in San Bernardino County, and amassed a cattle-ranching domain of around 200,000 acres.
With the floods and droughts wreaking their substantial damage on greater Los Angeles, however, Stearns got into a huge amount of debt, much of it from money borrowed from San Francisco capitalists and banks. In 1868, a friend, Alfred Robinson, organized a trust with other San Francisco men of means in the form of the Los Angeles and San Bernardino Land Company, so Truman was writing his account of the asphaltum resources as well as the water storage potentialities of Brea Canyon in this context of the anticipation of the sale of the Stearns Ranchos to small farmers—this being a hallmark of the boom that was just taking shape.
Naturally, it was too early for such grand plans as the Brea Canyon reservoir to be undertaken, though it is worth pointing out that, in the late 1920s, as the Colorado River project was in process, a plan was floated to flood the nearby Carbon Canyon, place a dam at the border of Orange and San Bernardino counties and fill the sections to the east as a reservoir—this to substantially do what Truman posited sixty years before. It was decided to build the Puddingstone dam and reservoir, instead, north where Pomona and San Dimas meet.
As for the future Olinda oil field, the next development of note came in 1873 when the Los Angeles Herald of 21 October 1873 reported,
Th[e Anaheim and Spadra] road, which has been in process of construction for some weeks past, under the direction of Mr. M[ichael] F. Quinn, was completed on Saturday [the 18th]. It is now as passable as any of the streets of our city, and four horses can with ease haul 5,000 pounds of grapes over it.
This route, connecting the growing town to the south with the hamlet, founded about a half-dozen years earlier, in what is now the southwest section of Pomona (which was created in 1875), was long considered desirable to connect inland valleys with the coastal plain, especially as Anaheim leaders pursued their Anaheim Landing wharf where the San Gabriel River enters the Pacific at modern Seal Beach and Long Beach.
The paper remarked that “the entire expense of the road was $1,000,” with half paid by Los Angeles County and the rest by the citizens of the two towns connected by it—compare this to the cost of constructing the 57 Freeway through the canyon about a century later! The account concluded that “it passes through Brea Cañon, and opens a very fine section of country.” Harbor Boulevard through Fullerton and nearby areas was long called Spadra Road and Brea Boulevard through that city is also the same route.
In its 9 May 1874 issue, the Los Angeles Express cited the Anaheim Californian newspaper’s brief mention that “a petition is in circulation for a county road from the forks of Brea Cañon to the San Bernardino [County] line.” While there were no specifics offered, it would seem likely that such possible routes would include the old Brea Canyon that is now Tonner Canyon leading into the Tres Hermanos Ranch, much of which is in San Bernardino County in the City of Chino Hills, as well as what, four decades later, when the Olinda oil field was in full swing, became Carbon Canyon Road connecting Orange and San Bernardino counties.
The 4 August edition of the paper, in its concise summary of a Board of Supervisors meeting, recorded that there was a “Petition of Fisher and others for [a] road through La Brea cañon,” which would appear to mean that there was a proposal that Quinn’s thoroughfare in that section be declared a public highway.
This is because the Express of 10 October briefly noted that the minutes of the prior day’s meeting of the Supervisors that “the Brea Cañon road was declared a public thoroughfare, and the [Road] Commissioner was ordered to open the same” accordingly. The creation of the road was another milestone in the further development of an area that, a quarter century later, would be instrumental in the oil districts that embraced such areas as the Canyon and Olinda.
To wit, we’ll return tomorrow with part three as we jump ahead several more years into the 1880s and pick up the story with the next effort to prospect for oil, so be sure to return and check that out.