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In light of the importance of oil and gas in California, perhaps
the discovery of gold there should be viewed as just a flash in the
pan. By 1938, the cumulative value of all the gold found in the
state stood at something more than two billion dollars, while the
cumulative value of the oil and gas produced was more than double
that sum--well over five billion dollars. The story of California
oil deserves to be told, and pictures tell it best.
The more than three hundred photographs in this book vividly
portray the development of California's rich and colorful petroleum
industry from the early exploration of the mid-nineteenth century
through the boom years of the first four decades of the twentieth.
Although Indians and Spanish explorers had known of and used local
oil seepages for centuries and the search for commercial production
had begun on several fronts in the 1850s, the actual birth date of
California's oil industry may be set as 1865, with the first
commercial sale of oil refined in the state (by the Stanford
brothers) from a well drilled in the state (on the Matthole River
in Humboldt County). The fascinating text and the impressive array
of photographs here assembled reveal the variety and vigor of the
development that ensued: from the "world's smallest producing
lease," on Signal Hill, to the derricks sharing Huntington Beach
with the bathers, to the millions of mice infesting the Taft oil
field in 1926-27; from the mounted patrols keeping livestock out of
the Coalinga fields to the blinking light on a fence warning
motorists of a well in the middle of a Los Angeles street.
First among the states in oil production in eighteen of the first
thirty years of the twentieth century, California experienced a
boom of immense proportions and extraordinary diversity. These
illustrations, along with contemporary descriptions by many of
those who worked the fields and a wealth of detail provided by the
authors, graphically portray the scenes and characters of
California's second great mineral rush. An epilogue takes the boom
up to the present, highlighting the shift in production to the
offshore leases and the controversy surrounding them.
During the oil-boom days of the early twentieth century, a few
lucky or shrewd individuals made millions of dollars virtually
overnight. It is a familiar theme in the romantic mythology that
sprang up about the era. But the people who produced those millions
are the real story, told in these word-for-word recollections of
early-day workers in the ""oil patch."" In vivid, often poignant
detail these men and women recall the grueling toil, primitive
living and working conditions, and ever-present danger in a time
when life was cheap and oil was gold. In the late 1930s employees
of the Federal Writers Project, a branch of the New Deal Workers
Progress Administration, recorded the voices of these pioneers as
they offered their memories, sometimes wryly humorous and sometimes
bitter, of the turmoil that was the daily lot of the oilfielders.
We meet colorful, tough-talking ""Manila Kate,"" who took over her
husband's drilling outfit after he died in an explosion. A welder
vividly recalls the death of his closest pal, a skilled hand who
loved to take chances. In an oil-field shantytown the support of
good-hearted neighbors assuages the pain of a bereaved and
impoverished family. A ""shooter"" recalls the deadly danger of the
""soup wagon"" the buckboard that delivered the nitroglycerin to
the well - or blew up on the way. While many of the individuals
witnessed bizarre accidents that became almost routine in the early
oil fields, their personal stories also show how uncertain job
security and wages could be, even before the Depression, when dry
holes and plummeting oil prices left thousands of workers broke and
homeless. Many of the interviewers provide valuable technical
details about early oilfield operations. Yet it is the stories of
the people, the workers themselves, that endure. The early oil
industry was built upon their toil, their pain, and their courage,
all of which are evident in every word recorded here.
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