California Gold

by John Jakes

  They stared at each other through the slow-twisting smoke of Potter’s cigar. From the arched window came the bright sounds of children playing on the lawn, and the music of a bird warbling in the Sunday sunshine. California music…

  Mack didn’t hear.

  His spirits sank further in the following weeks. He quit his dishwashing job and hired on at a lumberyard, menial work again, but at least it kept him outdoors a good part of the time. One night in early October, he stopped for a drink at the El Dorado on lower Main Street. He settled at the bar next to a wiry, tough-looking citizen in his mid-thirties, with fair, lightly freckled skin, a thick mustache, and an enormous scar on his cheek. Mack noticed a Catholic medal around his neck and a pistol riding on his hip.

  After Mack ordered a lager, he saw the pistol toter showing a companion something in the day’s Tribune. “Excuse me,” Mack said. “Is there anything in there yet about the championship?”

  “Right here.” The man pointed to a dispatch from New Orleans.

  “By God, he won,” Mack exclaimed. He scanned the article for details. “A knockout in the twenty-first round.” It filled him with pride that his friend Gentleman Jim had defeated John L. Sullivan for the heavyweight title.

  “Yeah, and with gloves, in three-minute rounds. What do they call those new rules?”

  “Marquis of Queensbury.” Mack took a swallow of his beer. “Corbett’s a friend of mine—he taught me to box.”

  “That right?” The tough, shrewd eyes of the pistol toter swept him up and down, including the holstered Shopkeeper’s Colt. “You a Californian, then?”

  In spite of recent doubts Mack found it natural to say yes.

  “Know anything about the tar pits around here? Brea, asphaltum—whatever they call it?”

  “Matter of fact I do. Brea is a seep of oil that’s thickened in contact with air.”

  “My guess exactly. First day I got to town, I saw a wagon carrying a load of it. I asked some questions. The local people burn it.”

  “Instead of coal, because coal costs ten to fifteen dollars a ton in Los Angeles. Couple of hundred years ago, the Indians were waterproofing baskets and caulking canoes with brea.”

  “How do you know all this?”

  “I’ve worked in the oil business for two years.”

  “Charley, pay attention,” the pistol toter said, nudging his partner. Then he extended his hand. “My name’s Ed Doheny. This gentleman’s Charley Canfield.”

  “Macklin Chance. Call me Mack. Where are you from, Mr. Doheny?”

  “At the moment, right here. I was in New Mexico a while, gold prospecting. That’s no way to get rich.”

  “You interested in work?” Canfield asked. “We need one more man.”

  “To do what?”

  “Hunt for oil,” Doheny said. “With so many tar pits all over town, I figure we must be standing on top of a lake of oil.” Mack refrained from telling him that the surface signs were often deceiving. “I bought a lot and I’m going to sink a well.”

  “Where’s your lot?”

  “Not far. Out on Second Street. The area they call Westlake Park.”

  “You mean you’re going to drill in Los Angeles?”

  Doheny bristled. “I’m going to dig, my friend. The same kind of hole farmers put down for a water well in Wisconsin, where I grew up. I can’t afford fancy equipment, and I wouldn’t know how to run it if I could. Charley and I paid four hundred dollars for the lot. We’re almost dead broke. You want to swing a pick and shovel for a percentage, we can talk.”

  Mack drained his beer to give himself time to think. The idea of hunting oil in town, ludicrous at first, didn’t seem so after a little reflection. He’d seen the tar pits on his very first day in Los Angeles. Why couldn’t a well produce here as easily as in open country? What was California all about if not risk, and hope, and the fulfillment of crazy dreams? And what did he have to lose? Nothing.

  Maybe it was the beer, or Doheny’s cocksure toughness, but Mack’s confidence, so low at Potter’s dinner table, surged up for the first time in months.

  “Twenty percent.”

  Doheny fixed him with those hard eyes. “Ten.”

  “Fifteen.”

  “Charley?” Canfield nodded. “When can you start?”

  “Five minutes after I quit the lumberyard in the morning.”

  On November 4, 1892, a mile west of downtown, Ed Doheny, Charley Canfield, and Mack Chance started to dig a common miner’s shaft, four feet by six, with pick, shovel, and the expenditure of their own strength. Doheny hired a boy with a horse and cart to haul away the dirt and shale.

  After a few days, they attracted spectators, most of them joking at the expense of the three men sweating in the pit. It infuriated Doheny but somehow it only excited Mack.

  Seven feet below the ground, Mack suddenly saw a glistening ooze on the shaft wall. “Ed, Charley, get down here,” he shouted.

  As they clambered down the ladder, Mack swiped his fingers over the crumbly shale. They glistened black. “Oil seep,” he said, grinning.

  “It’s here,” Doheny breathed. “By God. I smell it—don’t you boys smell it?”

  “I smell money,” Mack said.

  The next night, after hours of exhausting work, Mack dragged himself off to prowl the neighborhood. As the days passed he went off alone at every opportunity, keeping his purpose to himself. A surging certainty told him that he and his partners were onto something incredible.

  Doheny and Canfield moved out of their hotel and into a tent on the lot. The following evening, Mack trudged back to his rented room to find his flint-faced landlady waiting for him. “You in some kind of trouble, young man? There was a process server here with a legal paper.”

  “Trouble?” Mack’s heart pounded. “Nothing that I know of, ma’am.”

  “Well, he’s coming back tomorrow. Meanwhile, I want next week’s rent—in advance.”

  “Yes, sure, I’ll get it first thing in the morning.”

  An hour later, with his few belongings in a bundle, he slid out the window of his second-floor room and dropped. The noise roused the landlady, who fired a shotgun, but luckily she missed him. He vaulted the high back fence and fled through the night. A few minutes before midnight, he moved in with his startled partners.

  A few nights later, they heard sounds near the well site. The three ran out to discover a man carrying off picks and shovels. Doheny raised his revolver and dropped the thief with a bullet through his left calf.

  “You’re good with that, Ed,” Mack said later, while Doheny cleaned the piece.

  “I’ve used it a considerable amount,” the Irishman said in that guarded way of his. “Used it on a mountain lion that attacked me down in New Mexico. Cat almost got me.” He touched the disfiguring scar. “Used it once on a man out to kill me.”

  “And?”

  Doheny snapped the hammer down and sighted along the barrel.

  “He didn’t,” he said.

  As November wore on the shaft deepened steadily and the shored-up walls began to exude a poisonous odor of gas. At around 150 feet, the odor grew so strong, Mack warned them off.

  “If there’s a spark we’ll all go sky-high. We can’t stay down here digging.”

  “Good, because I can’t breathe,” Canfield said, choking. “What do we do now?”

  “Drill.”

  “You know we can’t afford a string of tools,” Doheny exploded.

  Mack swiped his sweaty face with an oily forearm. “Then we drill with something else.”

  What they found was a fallen eucalyptus tree on a neighboring lot. They hauled it to the well, sharpened a point on it, rigged a supporting frame, hooked it to a donkey engine, and slammed it into the hole. Their new drill.

  Spectators continued to gather and jeer, but a plain, stoutly built woman turned up almost every day and watched their progress with avid interest. Mack was intrigued because the woman sat on a packing box for hours, peering into the well
with all the devotion of someone admiring a new lover. He drew her into conversation.

  “I’m Mrs. Emma Summers. I live just over there. I’m from Kentucky but I trained at the New England Conservatory, a piano teacher. I’ve never seen anything as exciting as this.”

  Mack joked with her. “There are plenty of tar pits around here. Maybe there’s oil in your own backyard.”

  Not smiling, she replied, “That’s exactly what I’m thinking, young man.”

  Mack increased the frequency of his nocturnal trips through the neighborhood, while keeping a wary eye out for the sheriff’s men, who might somehow stumble on him. He wrote notes on scraps of paper and soon had a pocket stuffed with them. The eucalyptus drill went up and down, up and down, with a persistent monotonous rhythm. Doheny constantly bombarded Mack with questions.

  “If we hit oil, how much will we get for it?”

  “About a dollar a barrel right now.”

  “The market’s pretty small, isn’t it?”

  “Not as big as it should be,” Mack agreed. He pointed at the tent’s kerosene lamp. The dull, dim flame sent a constant twist of dirty smoke up to the tent’s vent hole. “There’s one reason. Too much carbon in the crude. Better refining could fix that. But improving the kerosene won’t expand the market much.”

  “What will?”

  “Using oil for fuel. Mostly it’s poor people who use it now. But think of the SP. I don’t like those bastards, but suppose their locomotives burned oil instead of coal? The wells couldn’t pump fast enough.”

  They dug forty days and forty nights. On the forty-first day, a potent gush of gas was followed by a gurgle of oil in the bottom of the pit. In five minutes, the sharpened tip of the eucalyptus trunk was submerged.

  In ten minutes, the oil was fifteen feet deep.

  “We’re millionaires!” Doheny shouted, running down a bucket to bail some oil.

  “Millionaires!” Canfield echoed. “May I have this dance?” He caught Mack’s waist and they waltzed all over the vacant lot, singing and whooping. Doheny ran at them with a bucket of crude.

  “Merry Christmas!” he cried, and emptied it on them. Canfield spat and sputtered, while Mack collapsed with laughter, black crude plastering his hair, oozing into his ears, dripping off his nose, whitening his eyes in the middle of a minstrel-man face.

  They bailed all day and managed to draw off seven barrels. The well remained as full as before; the level kept rising in the shaft.

  Mack took the night’s last horsecar to the western suburbs and then walked from the end of the line. At half past two he pounded on Enrique Potter’s door.

  Potter answered with a lamp in one hand, shotgun in the other. “I thought it was a burglar. My God, you stink.”

  “I spent a dime for a bath. I can’t get rid of the smell.”

  “Where the hell have you been, Mack? I thought you’d died, or fled the state. I’ve been going crazy with the authorities. There’s a bench warrant out for you, and a lien against San Solaro—”

  “Enrique, Enrique, listen. It doesn’t make any difference. None of that makes any difference. We’ll settle with those people—all of them. Just get me a little more time.” He seized the lawyer’s shoulders and shook him. “Enrique, there’s oil in Los Angeles. Now let me in.”

  At the kitchen table, while Potter watched with sleepy displeasure and Elena’s distant voice quieted children awakened by the knocking, Mack sorted the wadded notes from his pocket.

  “There are building lots for sale in Westlake Park. Those are descriptions of five of them—lots with brea showing close by. None costs more than five hundred and seventy-five dollars. Tomorrow morning, I want you to buy them for me. All five. Put a mortgage on San Solaro.”

  “Are you joking? You can’t mortgage property that’s tied up in a court proceeding.”

  “Then take out a loan yourself. Your credit’s good, isn’t it? I’ll give you an IOU for two—no, three thousand dollars, to be paid as a bonus.”

  “From where, prison? I could wind up there if I’m not careful…my God, you’ve got nerve. I’m in awe.”

  “Enrique, I know this will work. I know it! You said you thought I’d amount to something—well, I will. But only if you help me.”

  “Wait, I don’t understand, you’re talking too fast.”

  Trying to control his giddy excitement, Mack spoke more slowly. He explained the events of the day to the lawyer, who knew nothing of his involvement with Doheny and his partner.

  Potter listened with increasing skepticism. “Are you going to sink wells on all those lots?”

  “No. I’m going to hold them sixty or ninety days and sell them to other people who want to sink wells.”

  “What if this well of yours is a fluke? What if it goes dry tomorrow?”

  “Then I lose my collateral.”

  “Mack, the risk’s too great. I advise against—”

  “Buy the lots, Enrique. I know I’m right.”

  Never be poor again…

  Enrique Potter gave him a long, speculative look. But he picked up the oil-stained notes one by one.

  Mack leaned back, his head spinning with a strange drunken exhilaration. Every sense seemed sharper. He heard night insects outside with an amazing clarity. The glint of lamplight on the beautifully painted tiles of the kitchen hearth made a picture he’d never forget. Potter’s old robe, scrawny chest, sleep-baggy eyes—those, too, he’d remember forever.

  This is the night, he thought, riding the wave of emotion. This is the night it begins. The night of the day I struck gold.

  27

  DOHENY’S WELL PRODUCED FORTY-FIVE to fifty barrels a day, and the Los Angeles oil boom exploded.

  Mack bought all five lots. By February 1893 he’d sold them all, the lowest for $1,850, the highest for $2,775. He repaid the Huttos and two other buyers, with ten percent interest to each, and Potter got the warrant voided and the charges against him dismissed. Mack inked a line through the three names on the master list of buyers, then with his remaining cash bought more lots and held them. Prices were escalating rapidly despite counterbalancing shocks from the national economy.

  On February 24, the great Philadelphia & Reading Railroad filed for bankruptcy. All through 1892 there had been faint drum taps warning of a panic and now they became a thousand kettledrums, beating doom. On March 4 Grover Cleveland took office as the nation’s twenty-fourth president, and he and his vice president, Adlai Stevenson, confronted a nation, and a world, on the brink of monetary chaos.

  Belmont, Morgan, and other financiers warned the new president of impending ruin, blaming the Sherman Silver Purchase Act of 1890, a friendly gesture to the nation’s mine owners that now threatened to push America off the stable gold standard. But the warnings came too late. When the World’s Columbian Exposition opened in Chicago on May 1, the crowds rushed in to forget what was going on outside: more railroads failing, brokerages closing, runs on banks, federal gold reserves dropping below $100 million, European investors dumping huge quantities of U.S. stocks and bonds.

  It was a full-fledged panic.

  Reacting to it, Los Angeles crude-oil prices dropped as low as 45 cents a barrel. But the rush to buy land and sink wells slowed only slightly.

  Mack set up a desk in a tiny room rented in the Chalmers Block. He bought and sold more lots, doubling the value of his original investment, then doubling it again. He also paid back nine more San Solaro buyers. Potter shook his head, admitted he’d been too cautious, and now executed Mack’s orders with alacrity and enthusiasm. In spite of economic disaster stalking across America like a cowled specter, Los Angeles boomed.

  Daily, in Westlake Park, Mack watched crews uprooting palm trees, digging up yards, tearing down cottages, and hauling away the rubble that derricks soon replaced. The smell of gas thickened on residential streets. An oily film quickly settled on hands, necks, and faces everywhere in the neighborhood.

  Wagons plowed up and down carrying pipe, drillin
g tools, lumber, their wheels chewing the streets to rutted ruins. Other wagons hauling out barrels of crude from the new wells dripped their poorly sealed contents into the same streets, softening horses’ hooves and filling ruts and holes that caught fire from careless sparks. Often half a dozen pools burned through the night, turning Westlake Park into a weird landscape of red-lit smoke. It was hell on earth in Southern California.

  The piano teacher, Mrs. Summers, bought lots and put up derricks. Farmers and storekeepers and pensioners put up derricks. There were nearly a hundred derricks by the end of 1893, polluting the eye with their rickety sprawl, the ear with their incessant noise. Some too timid to sink wells huddled in their cottages surrounded by derricks. Oil slicked the leaves of cabbages growing in garden plots, and anyone rash enough to hang out laundry found it polka-dotted with oil mist.

  The kind of people inevitably attracted by a boom soon showed up along Santa Monica Boulevard. They erected their shanties, boasting pool tables, faro banks, and tobacco counters, and their tents, where women sold themselves and didn’t object to oil on a man’s hands if the hands held cash.

  Mack sank no wells. The bankers all at once had confidence in him, and they treated him cordially, calling him by his first name when he walked in in a new suit to arrange a new deal. He paid off the remaining buyers, inked lines through every name on the list, paid Potter the promised bonus, and banked his remaining money, nearly $38,000 of it.

  One night almost a year after the start of digging on the Doheny well, Mack rode out to Westlake Park at dusk. He was mounted not on a horse but a smart new $18 contraption from Singer, the sewing-machine company. Like many other firms, Singer had started a new sideline in response to the craze for the bicycle. The wheel, Americans called it. Mack’s featured the new triangular safety frame and pneumatic rubber tires of equal size; gone were the hard rubber tires and the huge five-foot wheel in front. The improved design had touched off the craze.

  Mack liked riding his wheel, which was finished with bright yellow-gold paint. Pedaling strengthened his legs. He wore a townsman’s derby and spring clips on his trousers to keep them from tangling in the chain-and-sprocket drive.