California Gold

by John Jakes

  From the hill’s summit he saw the ranch beside the Santa Clara River. The house was substantial but not opulent; it spread in several wings and was constructed of tawny stucco, with red half-round roof tiles. A few vaqueros worked around the barns and outbuildings.

  A broad-shouldered woman with black braids answered the fall of the enormous ring knocker. Mack worked out the words in his head before he addressed her.

  “Hablo con Señorita Hellman, por favor.”

  “¿Señorita Hellman?”

  He nodded.

  “Pero ella no está aquí.” The Indian woman took pity on his Spanish and repeated in English, “Not here.”

  “Will she be back soon?”

  “No, she packed everything. She has gone to Paris.”

  “Paris, France?”

  “Is there another?”

  He felt a stab of disappointment. For days he’d thought of Carla. Every night, too. She was a craving, like a drug. He’d repeatedly been tempted to ride over here to Ventura County, but had kept from it by telling himself what he already knew: She was beautiful, but she was willful and dangerous.

  Instead, he’d decided on this kind of visit—to cut it off with a polite good-bye, tell her he’d repay the loan and that would be it between them. She’d stolen a march. He turned the brim of his hat in his hands. The Indian woman started to shut the great carved door.

  “Wait. I came to say good-bye to Señorita Hellman. Please write my name down—Macklin Chance.”

  Indifference gave way to politeness. “Ah, Chance. Señor Chance. For you she left a message.”

  “What is it?”

  “She said to tell you it was necessary for her to leave for a while—”

  “Necessary? Why?”

  The woman ignored his question. “She said she would see you again, you are to be assured of it.”

  She bid him good-day and closed the door. As he mounted the mule, he saw the dark-gray clouds boiling from the west, full of storm. He turned the mule’s head out into the bitter wind, mightily confused about Carla’s sudden departure, and his own reaction to it.

  Two days later, waiting in a barbershop in Newhall, he picked up a Los Angeles paper from the week before.

  DOMESTIC VIOLENCE IN SAN DIEGO!

  Police Summoned to

  Beavis Mansion!

  Tycoon Hospitalized with

  Stab Wounds!

  Wife Piles Alienation of Affection Suit; Heiress Named

  A rotten scandal, Hellman said. Now Mack understood. He also knew Carla’s disposition. She might flee the trouble, but not forever…

  You are to be assured of it.

  He was overjoyed, and at the same time he dreaded the moment of reunion. He was angry about his confusion and helpless to get rid of it. The one certainty was that she’d be back.

  IV

  ROUGHNECKS

  1889-1895

  They called it la brea, the tarry stuff in Southern California that congealed in pools, hinting at huge deposits of petroleum lying below.

  For a long time, hardly anyone cared. To the early coastal Indians, brea was a common brown-black substance useful for waterproofing canoes and baskets, cementing bundles of yucca fibers to make brushes, or setting ornamental inlays of shells. Now and then an enterprising member of the Chumash or Yokut tribe hauled some of the stuff inland and bartered it to other tribes for spearheads and furs. It was not considered particularly remarkable—not by the tribes, and not by the early settlers. Coming down from the mountains into California, newcomers saw oil seeps hellishly aflame on the plain, and glimpsed similar fires far up in narrow canyons. Later, a few of their brighter counterparts collected buckets of this pitch, as they called it, using it to grease the hubs of their wagons and the moving parts of their farm machinery.

  It wasn’t until the 1850s, however, that Californians made a serious attempt to dig out the tarry material for commercial purposes. Even then, those wanting to sell or lease land to prospective wildcatters found that they needed promotional help, and hired the inevitable consultants. One such was the famous and distinguished chemist Professor Benjamin Silliman of Yale. Silliman wrote enthusiastic endorsements of the riches lurking under the ground in California, including several tracts he never visited. He analyzed and lauded the quality of certain samples of California oil, but when some rival academicians, perhaps jealous of the professor’s high consulting fees, proved that the samples were enhanced with Devoe’s Kerosene, an eastern product widely available in California stores, Silliman’s reputation was ruined.

  Still, even honest promotion couldn’t make California oil better than it was. Back in 1859, Colonel E. L. Drake had sunk his famous well at Oil Creek, Pennsylvania, and touched off an oil boom there. Pennsylvania crude was high-grade stuff; it could be refined into superior lubricating and illuminating oils. It yielded grease of a fine, thick consistency and lamp oil that burned clean, bright, and hot, virtually without smoke. No such claims could be made for the lubricants and oils haphazardly produced in California a few years later. The state’s pioneer oil industry was a pygmy, and a weak pygmy at that. Nevertheless, California oil attracted men from Pennsylvania and elsewhere who migrated west late in the century, eager for the wealth that had eluded them back home. When they arrived, the familiar pattern repeated once again: It was the outsider, the newcomer with more greed than geology, who would suck California’s black gold out of the earth and make it pay.

  24

  IN THE SPRING OF 1889, in Ventura County, Mack Chance worked for a driller named Mulroy. Mulroy had a lean purse; he hunted for oil the two-thousand-year-old Chinese way, using a drilling tool attached to a spring pole. Hour after hour, Mack pulled the pole down on its fulcrum, then released it to slam the tool into the ground. Mindless, grueling work, it paid only $1.50 a day. Mulroy’s shallow holes were all sunk on the south side of the Santa Clara River, and every one was a duster. After Mulroy abandoned the sixth, Mack decided he could learn nothing more, and quit.

  Up north of the river, in the foothills of the San Rafaels, oil sands promised a profit, but the slopes were too steep for conventional derricks. Hardison & Stewart Oil, out of Santa Paula, designed horizontal tunnels for the hillsides. When complete, and infused with water, the tunnels allowed seeping oil to float out on top of the water and then, by gravity, trickle through a system of wooden ditches down to large open collection tanks.

  Mack worked the rest of 1889 on the crew digging the tunnels into Sulphur Mountain. Some were sixteen hundred feet, longer than most deep wells. To provide the diggers with light, mirrors were set up and properly angled at the tunnel entrance, reflecting sunshine into the shaft. It was an ingenious system. Someone told Mack that Africans had invented it long ago.

  Mack earned $3 a day for the tunnel work and sent most of the money to Potter in Los Angeles for the taxes on San Solaro; the lawyer had promised to advance him any shortfall sum for the year, and wrote to say that, thus far, there had been only one threat of legal action by a purchaser. Deep in the tunnel, awash in his own briny sweat, Mack struck all the harder with his pick whenever he thought of Enrique Potter. If the lawyer had such faith in him, he had to justify it.

  After hours, he asked questions of the older men, the supervisors, about the nature of the underground oil formations (unpredictable), and the characteristics of California crude (in one word, poor).

  In December an explosion in a tunnel killed four men. As Mack watched the pine coffins being loaded on a wagon, he decided he’d learned all he could from the Sulphur Mountain operation.

  He rode Railroad to San Solaro. The gateway arch was rusting and weeds and scrub vegetation stood knee-high, but the padlocks on the depot remained secure. In Los Angeles he paid a call on Potter, who was now fending off three purchasers with legalistic letters containing vague promises of repayment.

  Then Mack left the city and rode over the mountains to the flatlands of Kern County, where he discovered work was scarce. In a month, he fou
nd nothing in the oil business and was soon down to eating one meal a day. Finally, he took the first job that came along, a bad one, in a godforsaken spot called Asphalto.

  Lying in the western part of Kern County, Asphalto produced what its name suggested: asphalt for roofing and street paving. Huge kettles boiled the raw asphalt for twelve hours, putting a permanent stench in the air, then the hot asphalt was poured from the sediment into forms of sand, for shaping, hardening, and eventual shipment.

  To get the asphalt, miners worked in large open pits. Because the stuff quickly destroyed clothes, they worked naked. At the end of a twelve-hour tour—in the oil fields, this word was pronounced to rhyme with hour, for no reason ever satisfactorily explained to Mack—a corps of boys with wooden horse-scrapers swarmed over the miners, scraping off the tarry stuff and a lot of skin too. Mack and the others then washed down in stinging petroleum distillate. They sat naked in the mess tent, their chests and flanks still shining from the distillate, as if lacquered. Mack discovered you never got totally clean. The management insisted on covering the mess benches with newspaper, and at the end of his very first meal, he stood up and found big sheets of paper stuck to his ass.

  The work paid $3 a day because it was mindless, filthy, and lonely. A few coarse whores hung around Asphalto, but even they expressed distaste for the smelly, sticky miners. In the dark of the bunk tents, men made love to each other. Mack often lay awake, forearm on his forehead, hand clenched, listening, longing for Nellie, struggling against the urges of a young man’s body.

  A new man came to work, a man of intimidating bulk. He wore a wide belt with a studded buckle and he often used it as a weapon, so others called him Strap. One night, outside the bunk tent, Mack found Strap Vigory grappling with one of the scraper boys, a timid lad named Homer.

  “Look, Vigory, leave the boy alone,” Mack said.

  “You interferin’ with a man’s pleasure?” Vigory said, touching his studded buckle.

  “Never. So long as it’s Homer’s pleasure too. Doesn’t appear that it is. Homer, scoot out of here.”

  “Yeah, Homer, I see you later. This gent an’ me, we got business.”

  Mack and Strap Vigory squared off, buck naked, in a ring of miners excitedly making bets. Strap used his belt while Mack fought bare-knuckled. Strap lashed him and flayed him around the head and shoulders, drawing blood, but Mack waded in, and in ten minutes his deft punching wore through the bigger man’s defenses and put him down. The fourth time Strap fell, he didn’t get up. Mack left him snorting and thrashing.

  Next morning, in the wagon stable where he quartered Railroad, Mack found the mule lying motionless—bludgeoned to death by some kind of blunt instrument. Strap Vigory had already disappeared. Deciding he’d had a bellyful of Asphalto, Mack quit at the end of that week.

  By early autumn he was back in Santa Paula. It was a small place, about three hundred in the permanent population, but that was swelled by a constantly changing troupe of wildcatters, roughnecks, gamblers, and other parasites who fed on the oilmen. There were also some characters with no discernible reason for their presence unless it was a desire to hide out from civilization, and maybe the law. A lot of the transients lived in tents or packing-box hovels, which lent the town an even more temporary air. Santa Paula’s rough element boasted that they had a saloon for every seven families. Shootings were a common occurrence.

  Mack signed on as a roughneck with Hardison & Stewart Oil, which soon was to merge with two others, Sespe Canyon Oil and Torrey Canyon Oil, into a larger and stronger firm called Union. With some of his wages Mack finally bought a pistol, a secondhand Model ’73 Peacemaker Colt, six-shot, .45-caliber. It was a popular frontier weapon, simple and well built, with walnut stocks and a blued finish. Mack chose the more citified snub-nosed version, the so-called Shopkeeper’s model. He packed it in a holster riding behind him, at the top of his right buttock.

  Hardison & Stewart sent him to a crew working in the hills north of the river. On the fourth day of spudding in a new well, the bit cocked in the hole and couldn’t be dislodged. Mack volunteered to go down after it, not out of any bravado, but to see whether human strength could solve such a problem. The lost bit, which roughnecks called the fish, was stuck at a depth of 245 feet.

  Mack stripped off his shirt. They tied a hemp line under his arms—he stuffed rags into his armpits first—and after lowering a lantern to be sure there was breathable air, he stepped into the narrow hole.

  Down he went in the dark, suspended on the sand line from the sand reel. The sand line normally lowered the bailer that brought out the slurry of rock broken up by the drilling tool, which worked on a separate line. Very shortly, Mack regretted volunteering. He could hardly move in the well, its diameter roughly 2 feet. About 150 feet of heavy sheet-iron casing had been put in, and it scraped his shoulders till they bled. The air grew heavy, rank, almost impossible to breathe. Down he went, and down, until the light above no longer revealed his own hands in front of his face. The sense of confinement, of being buried alive in a small grave, worsened every moment.

  Finally he was just above the jammed tool. He had no room to bend and reach it with his hands but could only draw his legs up slightly, then kick. He kicked for ten minutes, sweat pouring over his face. He thought he would die from lack of air. Finally he raised one hand to yank the line and signal the crew to pull him up. He didn’t like being defeated but it seemed impossible to free the tool. He vented his disgust in one last clumsy kick.

  The tool dislodged from the slate ridge where it had stuck. Mack gasped—he was ready to faint—and yanked hard on the line. The steam engine rewound the hemp line on the sand wheel. He was brought up into the sunlight a hero.

  The firm’s senior partner, Lyman Stewart, personally rewarded him with two tours off, at full pay; cable tool drills were expensive items.

  Stewart was about fifty, a small-boned, natty man with a beard, pince-nez, and the demeanor of a Presbyterian deacon. He walked among the foul-mouthed roughnecks like a schoolmaster among rowdy but promising pupils. Stewart was currently raising money to build a new chapel in Santa Paula.

  At the end of a little speech of commendation, Stewart said, “Be prudent with the extra money, Chance. To squander it on drinking or chewing is to play the Devil’s game.” A good Presbyterian, all right.

  Mack’s trip down the hole earned him a reputation in Santa Paula. Another wildcatter sought him out, a man with offices in a crude one-story wood box of a building located directly across the main street from the crude one-story wood box Stewart and his partner shared with Mission Transfer, a pipeline company.

  Jason Preston Danvers, a Pennsylvanian, headed Keystone Oil. The company had leases up in the foothills, but no producing wells so far. Danvers was a heavy man with large spectacles, a high pompadour, and an air of being oppressed, and depressed, by circumstance. Like Enrique Potter, he kept a photograph of his family on his desk. Mack counted eight children, the oldest but ten or eleven.

  “Thank you, Mr. Danvers, but I’ve got a job like that,” Mack said after he heard the man’s offer.

  Jace Danvers sighed. Another defeat. “What is it you want, then?”

  “To learn more about the business. I figure the only way I can do that is to move up to tool dresser.” A tool dresser was number two on a two-man drill crew, responsible for sharpening the tools to the required diameter and keeping them sharp at the derrick forge. A tool dresser also did whatever else the driller told him to do.

  “Oil is something that interests you? I mean, as more than temporary work?”

  Mack nodded. “But I’ve got to be honest. I don’t know much about petroleum geology.”

  “Hell, neither do nine tenths of the men punching holes around here. What good would it do? The surface signs, the standing pools, aren’t reliable. You’d think oil up above would mean oil right below, but no. The strata are tilted every which way. You can’t pierce them straight and clean, the way you can in Pennsylvani
a. Even if you get the crude out, it’s inferior. Paraffin content’s low …California lubricating oils and axle grease flow like water. The key is refining—better refining. I’ve discussed that with Stewart. He’s working on it.”

  “I appreciate that there are problems, but—”

  “You can’t imagine how many,” Danvers interrupted. “One of the biggest is the railroad.”

  “Then I’ll learn about those too, when I get the right kind of job.”

  He sat waiting, sensing that Danvers could be prodded. Presently Danvers shot him a look from under his dour brow.

  “I have a new driller working up in Salt Marsh Canyon. Derrick’s just being built. He might take you on.”

  “As a tool dresser? Four dollars a day? That’s standard—”

  “Chance, I’m hard-pressed for cash.”

  “If I do the work, I want the pay.”

  “All right, all right,” Danvers said wearily. “You’ve got a good reputation. I’ll hire you if the driller says yes. Go see him. I’ll write the directions.”

  He rummaged for paper on a desk overflowing with it, in the process knocking a stack off the edge. “God, sometimes I wonder why I stay in this rotten business.”

  Out in Salt Marsh Canyon, the derrick floor was down and the rig-building crew was dragging four peeled tree trunks from a wagon. The logs would be the lower legs of the derrick.

  “Where’s the boss?” Mack asked one of the rig men. He was referred to a tall, lank, homely fellow in his mid-to-late thirties, with a long, strong-looking jaw and crinkly hair already showing a lot of gray. He wore tooled boots, tight jeans, a work shirt cut off at the shoulders, and a large flowing yellow bandanna. Holstered on his left hip was a longer, more expensive version of Mack’s Peacemaker Colt.

  Mack went over to introduce himself. “Macklin Chance is my name.” He held out his hand. The older man didn’t shake. He was sunburned, his face as rough and full of gullies as the land roundabout, and his eyes were pale green, the color of new leaves on a cottonwood.