Just as California was a Pacific Eldorado agriculturally, that is, figuratively an extremely fertile seaboard land, similarly it possessed a wealth of other resources, especially petroleum and sodium borate (commonly known as borax). At times writers have referred to these two resources as black gold and white gold, respectively.
Though California’s oil bonanza did not occur until the 1890s, drilling for the viscous substance started back in the 1860s. George S. Gilbert, previously a whale oil vendor, set up a small petroleum refinery on his ranch near Ventura in 1861. He sold the kerosene yield, which buyers used for home lighting. In that same decade Phineas Banning explored for petroleum near Wilmington, while up north in Humboldt County San Francisco investors drilled the state’s first well at Petrolia in 1865. News of Gilbert’s venture reached Thomas A. Scott of the Pennsylvania Railroad, who sent Yale University geologist Benjamin Silliman to California in 1864 to assess the state’s petroleum prospects. The geologist’s report, based largely on Gilbert’s optimism, led Scott to purchase more than 250,000 acres, mostly in and around Ojai. Scott then sent his nephew, Thomas R. Bard, to drill on the purchased land. While little came of Bard’s petroleum probes, he managed to make a fortune off the sale of lands belonging to his uncle and himself.
While Bard temporarily withdrew from oil ventures, a host of smaller operators, mainly in southern California, tried their luck in the 1870s and 1880s. Lyman Stewart and Wallace L. Hardison, Pennsylvania oilmen, drilled at Newhall, in northeastern Los Angeles County, in 1883. They met with enough success to buy land for further exploration while turning to the added pursuits of refining and marketing. Three years later and short of investment capital, Stewart and Hardison persuaded the cash-equipped Bard to join them in forming the Sespe Oil Company. By the end of the company’s first year of operation it had produced 50,000 barrels of oil, which constituted about 15 percent of California’s total output. When in 1890 the triumvirate founded Union Oil Company of California, headquartered in Santa
Paula, the state was poised for a petroleum future. Within the next decade, Union established refineries at San Pedro and at a location on the Carquinez Strait, built tankers and pipelines, and operated numerous wells in several Southland counties. In 1900 the firm ranked as a leader in the nation’s oil industry.
Union was not the only successful petroleum corporation in California during this time. In the Bay Area, the Pacific Coast Oil Company was active. Southward, in Los Angeles Edward L. Doheny and Charles Canfield partnered in 1892 in developing the city’s first oil field. The site was located near the La Brea Tar Pits, where the skeletal remains of entrapped prehistoric animals have since been found. In the resulting oil boom, 2,300 wells were dug during the next five years. Thereafter, Doheny became a major supplier of fuel oil for the Southern California Railway, a subsidiary of the Santa Fe Railroad. During that time, as railroads turned from coal to petroleum fuel, he opened drilling fields in Fullerton, Brea Canyon, and outside Bakersfield. In 1902 he sold his Petroleum Development Company to the Santa Fe Railroad. By then Doheny was probably the best-known oil promoter in the state. Also by then, he had founded the Mexican Petroleum Company, the first business of its kind to secure an oil contract from the nation south of the border. His spinoff asphalt company paved a good many of the streets in Mexico’s major cities. For most of the early twentieth century Doheny’s oil operations in California, Mexico, and, later, Peru linked him closely to the Pacific Rim as well as to Washington, D. C., where he lobbied on behalf of his extensive interests. By the 1920s, this Los Angeles-based tycoon was one of the richest men in the United States.
Standard Oil was also a major factor in the rise of California’s oil industry. From the 1870s to the 1890s it transported by rail large quantities of its eastern oil products to the Golden State. These products, which the state’s other petroleum firms also marketed, included oil for fuel, street paving, lighting, and machine lubrication. Standard bought the above-mentioned Pacific Coast Oil Company in 1900, six years later renaming it the Standard Oil Company (of California). By then the black gold of “Oildorado” had become a coveted prize in the nationwide competition among the petroleum giants of the day.
From the 1890s through the early 1920s and beyond, Union Oil and other California petroleum companies shipped much of the state’s oil to West Coast markets aboard tankers docked and loaded at the Port of Los Angeles. The opening of the Panama Canal resulted in huge quantities of California oil being transported across the Pacific and through that passageway to destinations in the Atlantic Basin.
Though small compared to the oil-extraction industry, borax mining constituted a further broadening of California’s economic base in the late nineteenth century. In 1881 Aaron and Rosie Winters, a couple living in the Ash Meadows region of Death Valley, learned of the search by Nevada prospectors for borax, a mineral used in laundry detergents and other products. California orange growers used it to kill blue mold on their golden globes. Borax is found in salt beds, and when refined could be sold profitably. Gathering a sample of the crystalline substance, Aaron conducted the prescribed flame test. When the flame burned green, indicating the authenticity of the substance, he is supposed to have exclaimed to his wife: “She burns green, Rosie. We’re rich, by God!”
The Winters sold their Death Valley claim for $20,000 to William T. Coleman, a San Francisco businessman and former vigilante leader. Coleman started the Harmony Borax
Works near present-day Furnace Creek, located in Death Valley. He hired Chinese workers to scrape the “white gold” ore from the parched lake beds. They labored in temperatures that sometimes reached 130 degrees Fahrenheit, earning about $1.50 per day. Large wagons pulled by so-called “twenty-mule teams” carried the ore to a rail station in Mojave. The cargo was then transported to a refinery at Alameda in the Bay Area. After processing and packaging, the borax was marketed.
At the end of the nineteenth century California’s infant borax business began its climb to international stature. In 1890 Francis Marion “Borax” Smith, an Oakland businessman, bought Coleman’s properties for $550,000. He then combined his Nevada borax holdings with those he purchased from Coleman, forming the Pacific Coast Borax Company. Next, the newly consolidated firm adopted the “Twenty-Mule Team Borax” trademark that would become famous throughout the West and beyond. Smith invested his earnings in Bay Area real estate, amassing a fortune. Today’s U. S. Borax Incorporated, headquartered in California, traces its roots back to the days of the Death Valley mule train. It is global, with offices throughout the Americas, Europe, and Asia, and is one of the major transoceanic shippers operating out of the Port of Los Angeles. Again, maritime commerce played a key role in California’s development as a Pacific Eldorado.
World History
