by Paul R. Spitzzeri
The reminiscences of oil driller William E. Youle, published in the 21 May 1926 Souvenir Number of the Petroleum Reporter, are interesting and instructive when it comes to the development of petroleum prospecting in California and American generally, and part one covered his recollections through 1878, a couple of years after he migrated from Pennsylvania and then worked on projects in modern Santa Clarita as well as in the Bay Area.
The firm he was employed by in this region was the California Star Oil Company, credited with bringing into production the first substantial well in greater Los Angeles in 1876, located at Pico Canyon. With some success there, Youle remarked, that, in 1879, the Pacific Coast Oil Company was formed, incorporating the Santa Clara firm which hired Youle for efforts in that section, the California Star, and others.
Among those involved were Demetrius G. Scofield, largely responsible for Youle’s migration to the Golden State, future federal representative and senator Charles N. Felton and Wells Fargo president Lloyd Tevis and Scofield was praised for attracting these powerful figures and others to join the new firm. Youle added “I don’t wish to belittle those men who made early efforts to shafts, tunnels and very shallow wells at the outcroppings and tar beds; they also proved something even if it was not a success.” Among these, presumably, was F.P.F. Temple, who expended much money and effort in the Santa Clarita-area field, often called the San Fernando, but more commonly Newhall.
The writer, however, added that “to [Charles A.] Mentry and myself as field men credit should be given for the locating and drilling of the first wells that looked like a commercial success” at Pico Canyon and Moody Gulch in the Bay Area, along today’s Highway 17 between San José and Santa Cruz, while commenting that “these wells . . . were the very first to start the California oil industry to success.” Notably, though, as Pacific Coast contemplated where to concentrate its early efforts, Youle advocated for Moody Gulch while Mentry pushed Pico Canyon and he noted “it was proven that Mentry was right,” though Youle continued his work in the north, to some middling success, though he allowed that it was more educational than commercial.
When Moody Gulch proved to be disappointing, “it was then decided to move the greater part of the equipment to Newhall, where rigs were put up” and, through 1884, Youle worked on up to a dozen wells there and “deeper down the dip” than Mentry’s well number 4 “that had struck the crooked formation.” He also mentioned the importance of deodorizing, which also involved removing sulfur, so that Pacific’s work was the first to successfully implement this process. Another important early project, after fighting with the Southern Pacific Railroad about freight rates, was Pacific’s plan to build a pipeline and order a tanker to ship by sea before the SP decided to work with the oil company. In the later 80s, however, a line from Newhall to Ventura was completed and a craft commissioned to carry crude to the Bay Area for refining.
Youle, after noting that Pacific was purchased at the end of the century by Standard Oil Company, the John D. Rockefeller-controlled conglomerate that had a near monopoly on American oil, though Scofield became president of the California subsidiary that later became independent after anti-trust legislation forced the breakup of Standard. As to Newhall, he commented,
Up to 1885 Pico Canyon was the only production in California that proved a success. The extent of this field was only some 300 acres, located in Pico Canyon and hills; we brought the production up to about 600 barrels [daily]. The sands were thick and close grained, and wells were not big producers; they were, however, lasting, and have produced millions of barrels of oil. They are pumping wells there today that I drilled about 45 years ago.
In 1883, Pacific leased some Pico Canyon property to Wallace Hardison and Lyman Stewart, veterans of the Pennsylvania oil region who came west when Rockefeller took virtual control of that genesis of the American industry. Youle observed that “they surrounded us with four dry holes” which “cost Hardison & Stewart a lot of money,” but a fifth well, closer to Pacific’s producers, became a producer with it added that Pacific “leased this location . . . to give them a chance to get some of their money back.”
With that successful well, however, Hardison and Stewart could not acquire further leases, so, having found land in Ventura County, they sold their producing well to Pacific and, at Santa Paula formed what became Union Oil Company, a giant in the California industry for many years until acquired by Chevron (formerly Standard Oil of California) in 2005. Another early Ventura oil prospector was Thomas Bard, also later a United States senator, whose efforts in the last half of the 1860s were unsuccessful, while an 1800-foot well was drilled nearby in 1877 and some very heavy oil extracted, but little that was helpful for the kerosene trade, though some was used for coating pipes or saturating roof paper. Only later would deeper wells, accessed by machinery with better technology, yield lighter crude for fuel that made Ventura County and Union Oil famous.
By 1885, Youle remarked, “very little success for fuel oil was obtained until the Puente wells were struck” and he added that the “Pico Canyon field had been fairly thoroughly prospected when I moved one of my drilling rigs to Puente,” where, at the peak of the Puente Hills where La Habra Heights and Rowland Heights adjoin, he was told by promoters William Lacy and William R. Rowland, a two-time Los Angeles County sheriff who inherited the portion of Rancho La Puente from his father, John, after the senior Rowland died in 1873, “to examine the oil seepages and formation.” The driller commented that “up to this date (1885) I had the most experience as an expert in California formation—we as yet had no geology on oil formation.”
This trip included a review of efforts by Burdette Chandler, a native of New York who worked in the Petrolia field of Ontario, Canada and then came to Los Angeles, where he lived in Boyle Heights. Youle wrote that “the Chandler wells were very shallow; they struck a tar sand at less than 100 feet and these wells proved they were too close to the outcroppings.” He then “drilled several wells. They were all good producers; my first well started of at 25 barrels per day, at about 800 feet, but a later well started at 150 barrels from a depth of 1600 feet,” this meant that “this as the first real hunch that ‘deeper drilling pays.'”
When the first Puente well hit oil, Rowland brought Hardison and Stewart, Felton and the Los Angeles banker Isaias W. Hellman, who later ran Wells Fargo and the Bank of Nevada from San Francisco and “they saw and remarked that we were the first to prove that the tar springs and the heavy oil from the shallow wells was a by-product coming from the lighter oil deeper down the dip of the formation.” He went on,
Hardison & Stewart and Senator Felton said they believed the fuel problem was solved—the company held the same belief (“The Puente Oil Company” had been formed, with W.R. Rowland as president). The success of the two wells [a second following closely on the heels of the first] so encouraged us that we sought a market for the oil. As a result of these efforts, it was arranged to supply the Lankershim [Grain] Mill and L.A. Gas Company of Los Angeles with fuel oil at $2.00 per barrel, F.O.B. [“Free on Board” or “Freight on Board” for shipment by rail through the Southern Pacific, which built its line through the Workman and Rowland portions of La Puente more than a decade prior] Los Angeles; also we furnished the brick yards with oil to burn brick. A loading station was established on the railroad at Puente and a pipe line built from this point to the field, a distance of five miles; it was a two-inch pipe, the first oil pipe laid in the Los Angeles basin. The oil was sold untopped [not distilled, processed or refined], just as it came from the well—the first asphalt oil put on the market. Success was with us from the start . . . In history, the Puente Oil Co. should have the credit of putting the first carload of fuel oil into market, and that at a price which prohibited the use of wood or coal. The Puente Oil Co. later built a refinery at Chino [after that town, to the east several miles, was founded in 1887]. The company operated for over 30 years and then sold out to the “Columbia Oil Company” [owned largely by Rowland, Hardison relation William B. Scott and Los Angeles Times publisher Harry Chandler, owners of the nearby Tres Hermanos Ranch.]
As for Hardison & Stewart, their further efforts in Ventura County led to drilling at Adams Canyon northwest of Santa Paula, where Union had its early headquarters, and Youle recorded that “the first big flowing well in California was stick in about the year 1893” at that location by the company. Meanwhile, Youle, in the employ of Puente Oil for about four years, headed north to Kern County in 1889, where, after inspections of several areas at the west end of the valley, he told the owners of Bakersfield’s Kern Valley Bank that the prospects were good. In 1890, however, he drilled a trio of wells that yielded far more water than oil, but work at what became the famous Sunset field brought material useful for asphalt and it remained dominant until the Kern River field of lighter gravity oil was opened in 1898.
When this happened, Youle commented, “Bakersfield and Kern County were in very bad shape financially—dry years [several drought periods in the Nineties affected southern California broadly] and the lack of feed for stock and sheep made matters bad for banks and business men.” When, however, oil came in at Kern River, northwest of Bakersfield, and at McKittrick at the west end of the valley, “the banks were soon loaded with money and the situation was saved” so that “never since then has Bakersfield seen hard times.”
Next to be discussed by the veteran driller was the “Los Angeles Boom” at the oil field of that name as he remarked that “Los Angeles field started in about 1890” as “indications of oil were in many places.” Youle added that
E[dward] L. Doheny [but whose partner was Charles A. Canfield] sunk a shaft a few feet deep, resulting in a very small production of oil, but it was enough to excite the surrounding lot owners to organize and drill. A book started after the first well was brought in. Several hundred wells were drilled, most of which were producers. No large capacity wells were found. The wells were as thick as the holes in a pepper box—a well to a lot, and there were several hundred lots.
With low capacity, production dropped fast and, on his visits, Youle saw similarities to his old days at Oil City, Pennsylvania, in which wells on small lease sites meant that “a very few made money, and in a short time their only assets were old tanks and rigs.” He continued that, if the Los Angeles field had only a tenth of the wells, they “would have been ample to develop all the oil” and “would have produced ten times as long if the territory had been conservatively operated.”
Youle, though, posited that,
Of course if they had struck big gushers there would have been some chance for the lot owners. Even them, a well to two acres is thick enough to properly operate such fields. The Los Angeles fields were inexpensive to drill and operate. The cost of 90 per cent of the rigs, machinery and drilling could have been saved, which would have been a nice dividend for the operators.
The driller turned to his visit to Coalinga, to the northwest of Bakersfield and other lower San Joaquin Valley fields and where he sent in 1891 by Lacy and Rowland, who were curious about investing in land there for future prospecting. Youle observed some oil springs at the head of a canyon with light gravity oil seeps and “advised the company to secure as much territory as it could.” Puente Oil pursued a project with two weeks, with some shallow drilling revealing some oil, but “the panic in 1893,” the largest in American history lasting some four years, “came on and the company concluded to move their machinery to Puente where they had a fixed production and more territory to develop.”
While Lacy and Rowland backed out of Coalinga, Charles Canfield and his new partner Joseph Chanslor, who owned what became the prominent Chanslor-Canfield-Midway Oil Company (C.C.M.O.), pursued claims there to great success as the 19th century came to a close, while the Santa Maria field in northern Santa Barbara County made Union Oil and others fortunes. By 1904, Youle noted, “California was now developed into one of the biggest oil fields in the world,” though over-production, a common problem, depressed prices, though this also resulted in “nearly every fuel consumer to change their furnaces for oil, the railroads had commenced to use oil for fuel” and more consequences. As the 20th century dawned, refineries were built along the coast and storage increased dramatically, while “the thick oil sands in California convinced every operator of the lasting qualities of the wells,” a condition that still obtained in 1926.
With this, we’ll return next with a part three, carrying the remembrances of Youle, a resident of the Boyle Heights section of Los Angeles, to a conclusion, after which we’ll explore more of the contents of this edition of Petroleum Reporter, so come back for those.