by Paul R. Spitzzeri
William E. Youle was the subject of a prior post here regarding mention in the 1888 annual report of the California state mineralogist concerning the veteran oil driller’s work at Turnbull Canyon in the Puente Hills near the recently established town of Whittier. Youle’s notable efforts included with the California Star Oil Works, which brought in the state’s first well in modern Santa Clarita in 1876, and, not quite a decade later, at the Puente Oil Company field where La Habra Heights and Rowland Heights meet when he was superintendent for William Lacy and William R. Rowland.
When Whittier was established, its founding Pickering Land and Water Company, which acquired canyon land from its namesake, hired Youle to drill their, with it noted that, in 26 years in the industry, he’d worked on 65 wells, of which only one failed to yield crude. While there was some small production with a well in Turnbull Canyon, the field there was not a success, but Youle continued his career, which, by 1913, included 200 drilled wells.
Not long before his death in September 1926, Youle provided a lengthy reminiscence, under the byline of “An Old-Timer,” though his photo is included and a description reads:
Mr. W.E. Youle, the author, has embodied in these pages many interesting facts which have not heretofore appeared in print, and which will doubtless be read by every oil man with the closest interest. The author has put in plain words, a mass of data that has all the thrill of fiction and told with a realistic touch that will hold the interest of the reader to the end.
As to the “thrill of fiction,” the reader will have to judge, but Youle penned a short preface offering the hope that his piece contained “some very interesting facts on the OLD and NEW way of drilling for OIL,” while he claimed “I am one of the very few men living today who started in the oil industry as early as 1863,” this including a baker’s dozen of years in the east and just shy of a half-century in the Golden State.
Youle began by noting he was born in Pontiac, northwest of Detroit, in 1847, and left home with a schoolmate, supplied with some money by their parents, to attend business school in what later became the Motor City. At a hotel there, they heard stories of the oil industry in Pennsylvania, launched just four years as America’s first field, including how “fortunes were being made overnight” and that “fabulous wages were obtainable.”
The friends traveled by rail to within eight miles of Oil City after having “tramped through mud that, even now, I recall as ‘just awful.'” By then, production there was 90% of that of the entire country, which was 7,500 barrels daily. Notably, Youle observed that the fist oil well to produce crude was drilled in Cumberland County, Kentucky in 1829, though salt water was the aim, while, in 1848, some oil from springs at Oil City was collected by Seneca Indians and sold as medicine.
When Youle arrived at that town in 1863, he worked for an early refinery for a few months and then became a “toolie” and engaged in his first drilling project, earning $4 daily. The well depth was then up to 800 feet and done at a cost of some $3 per foot, though some spots later had wells at 2,000 feet. In the decade of 1864-1874, he drilled up to 60 wells, while he also was a superintendent for the United States Oil Company, the biggest in the nascent industry, with all this work occurring within 20 miles of Oil City.
At the end of 1865, Youle was hired to drill wells at Oil Springs, near Petrolia, in Ontario, Canada and worked on a half-dozen wells during the next year—he does not mention Burdette Chandler, who worked in Petrolia. After a short stay, he returned to Pennsylvania, remaining, as noted above, until 1874, though another sojourn took place at Burning Springs, West Virginia, but he did not do well financially and headed back to Oil City.
A turning point in Youle’s career was when he corresponded with Demetrius G. Scofield, an officer with a Pennsylvania firm for which the driller worked and then left for California, where, the article continued,
Mr. Scofield had been in touch with Dr. [Vincent] Gelsich [Gelcich], a chemist of Los Angeles, who had been gathering samples of oil, collected from seepages in Southern California. He had analyzed, among others, samples of Pico Canyon oil, and as a result Col. R.S. Baker, A.H. Denker, Alex Mentry and other business men of Los Angeles filed claims on the Pico Canyon government land.
Gelcich (1828-1885) hailed from Croatia, studied medicine in Italy, where he fought for independence from Austria and France and when Giuseppe Garibaldi was defeated, headed to San Francisco, operating a medical practice there. By 1863, he was near San Jose and married a niece of Pío and Andrés Pico, former governor and military commander of Mexican-era California. It was through Andrés that Gelcich learned of the oil seepages at Pico Canyon and formed, with him and others, a petroleum mining district.
Gelcich served as a United States Army surgeon in California during the Civil War and then settled in Los Angeles and practicing medicine, while maintaining his prior residence and practice in San Francisco. He continued his interest in oil in what became known as the San Fernando district and, with F.P.F. Temple as president, helped launch, in 1873, the Los Angeles Petroleum Refining Company. The firm built a refinery, albeit a very modest one, near Lyon’s Station at Newhall, with the edifice completed in April 1874.
Temple put a good deal of money into his well at Towsley Canyon and formed another firm, the Lesina Oil Company, and, while some oil was extracted, packed and shipped to Los Angeles, apparently for use in lighting and lubrication, he never realized much success, especially when Rodolfo Carreras, a Cuban who claimed to have a new refining process that turned out to be a bust.
Youle’s account then turned to his work in Pennsylvania, with much detail provided, including on “Early Machinery and Tools,” which we’ll leave out, except for an anecdote about a well-known thespian, who invested successfully in several oil wells and left the Pennsylvania field in April 1865, leaving his residence intact with clothing, papers and more and telling a partner he’d be gone just a few days. It was soon learned that the prospector actor, John Wilkes Booth, assassinated President Abraham Lincoln at Washington directly after leaving Pennsylvania.
The second part of Youle’s recollections were titled “IN THE CALIFORNIA FIELDS,” and he began by observing,
To whom to give the credit of discovering the first oil in California would be hard to determine. The evidence shows these oil springs scattered along from Los Angeles County to and including Humboldt County. The Padres knew of these leaks from the mother formation—therefore who was the first man to discover oil in California is a question too hard for me [though, obviously, the indigenous people knew of the seepages!]
When Scofield left Pennsylvania for California, Youle related, “I asked him to write to me and give me his impressions of the country” and, in 1875, the reply was that “he was then securing territory near Newhall” adding that “success could be made and that a little later he might start a well or two.” Youle continued that “his description sounded good to me” and he answered Scofield that, once he had contracts completed in Pennsylvania, “I might come to California a little later,” though he had to sell assets and pay debts before he headed west in late 1876.
What was not mentioned was that Scofield had a stock brokerage business, focusing on such petroleum products as kerosene for lighting in San Francisco and when the business collapsed in August, during a severe financial downturn that began the prior year (and, in Los Angeles, included that city’s biggest business failure to date, that of the bank of Temple and Workman), it was reported that Frederick B. Taylor was funding stock purchases by Scofield, but tried to withdraw his support when the situation got dire.
Just prior to the failure of Scofield’s brokerage, however, he, Taylor and partners launched a new venture, with Youle recalling,
I arrived in California late in 1876 and found that Scofield had interested his firm, F.B. Taylor & Co, also Mayor [Andrew J.] Bryant of San Francisco, and others, to organize what was then called the California Star Oil Company. They had secured the services of C.A. [Charles Alexander] Mentry, who had spent some time in the Pennsylvania oil fields. They had erected a light drilling rig, close to the shallow wells of previous prospectors in Pico Canyon . . . and drilled to 300 feet.
At about 100 feet in oil bearing sand a test was made and a capacity of some 30 barrels was assumed, so Youle continued that “this was as far as the operations had proceeded when I reached the coast, together with J[ohn].A. Scott, a refiner of Titusville, Pa. [where oil was first discovered in 1859), to whom Scofield had also written of the California developments.”
Youle noted that “Scott at once busied himself putting up a small still at Newhall to refine the oil” and this included taking the modest 15-barrel still erected by the Los Angeles Petroleum Refining Company of Gelcich and Temple and installing it at the new site with two larger stills, completing the new Pioneer Oil Refinery, a state historic landmark, in August 1877.
It was added that Scofield was in the area before corresponding with Youle “and had examined what little work had been done there by Col. Baker, Denker and their associates.” A small shaft and a couple of tunnels were drilled and these men had a “three-pole derrick and used a car axle with a piece of steel welded in the bottom and eye in the top for a rope.” Power was generated by “two men teetering on a spring pole, allowing the bit to hit the rock” and, with this primitive apparatus, the well reached 90 feet and brought up some five or six barrels of crude a day. It was added that “these activities had apparently convinced Scofield that by prudent development a productive field could be proven.”
After working on a claim at Moody Gulch near San Jose and Los Gatos, Youle remembered, “I returned to Pico Canyon, May 1877, to undertake a fishing job on a well started by R[obert].C. McPherson (for the California Star Oil Company),” and remarked that it was something of a wildcat, or unproven location, given its distance from the producing well at Pico Canyon. The “fishing” meant removing abandoned and broken tools and pipe, but “it proved to be a dry hole and the location was abandoned.”
This circumstance led Mayor Bryant and others to withdrawn from the enterprise, leaving it to Scofield and Taylor to pursue work there, though they turned their attentions to the northern California well site. A notable comment from Youle about his first days in the Golden State was:
After sizing up the California formation and its possibilities for oil I concluded there would need [to] be much money and effort expended to find it. The only business I knew at all was the drilling of wells—the making a success of both locating a favorable place for the well and drilling [the] same into production with my earnest effort in those days. With no California oil geology the drilling of the wells and the results obtained gave me practical geology which I think was very valuable in the early days of California oil production—the different fields I located and proved will corroborate my statement.
Work in the Santa Clara County area was such that “bad blood existed” and “there were several gun plays,” including the critical wounding of one man.” It was also rough work for the drillers, putting in 12-hour days or longer with the most rudimentary of living conditions. Still, the effort drew the attention of banker and future United States representative and senator Charles N. Felton, who “told me that he was not particularly attracted by the showing at Newhall (Pico Canyon)” because “it was so far from a market that even if a good production was found a big expense would follow to place the production in the San Francisco market.”
Moreover, with the fact that “Los Angeles County had a very small population,” it made sense that “Pico could wait until a test could be made” with the northern well.” It was added that “so far there had been no commercial success in the California oil production” and so “it was up to me to try my best for success and help put the California fields on the map.”
In the south, Mentry was drilling for Scofield and California Star, managed to deepen well number 4 and “succeeded in more than doubling the production, which was at this time about 60 barrels per day,” more than at the northern well. Importantly, the crude quality or gravity was about the same, so “we all thought that a success could be made in either field.” This led Felton to tell Youle “that he realized the importance of getting a production of oil in California and that he and his associates were in the oil business to stay until a success or failure was developed.”
We’ll halt our drilling down to the details of this notable, if not containing “all of the thrill of fiction,” look at some early oil history—national, state and local—and return next with part two of William E. Youle’s six decades of work in the industry, so be sure to join us then!