California Gold (39 page)

“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.

D
OHENY’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, drilling 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.

He pedaled along through the bedlam of thudding tool strings, pumping engines, cursing roughnecks, children playing, Mrs. Summers giving piano lessons. The cratered streets were afloat with standing oil and the usual noxious haze clouded the air. The derricks loomed dimly against the stars like crouching beasts from prehistory. Several times Mack nearly fell off his wheel. The streets were unfit for bicycles. Wheelmen all across the nation were demanding better pavements, in town and countryside.

When he reached the site of the original well, he discovered that Doheny had a new crew working, men he didn’t know. Doheny himself had moved on to other wells. He and Mack had parted friends, and Mack’s royalty was deposited every week in a special account he kept for that purpose at Los Angeles National. He parked his yellow-gold wheel and visited with the new men for ten minutes. All was going well.

He was striding back to his wheel when a voice out of the dark said, “Hey.”

He spun around, surprised and alarmed. There at the edge of the lot was a tall man, standing still.
Strap Vigory—

Even as he shot his hand under the tail of his coat, he thought,
No
,
absurd.
That was fortunate; there was no holster riding on his hip. He didn’t carry the Shopkeeper’s Colt when he dressed like a businessman.

The man in the dark stepped forward. He wore a black hat and long frock coat the same color with a brilliant green bandanna streaming out in the hot night wind. Lanterns on the well illuminated his face.

“Johnson. God almighty. Don’t sneak up on a man that way.”

“That’s the way I come and go. Quick. Saves trouble with sheriffs an’ jealous husbands.”

“You scared me. For a minute you looked like the Reaper himself standing there—”

“Sorry,” Hugh Johnson said; it was his entire apology. “Potter told me you was out here. I hear you’re doin’ good.”

“Doing fine.”

“I wore out Kern County. I could use a square meal. Nobody cooks as good as you.”

Mack smiled. “You back to stay?”

“Till the itch to drift comes again. I’m ready to go partners if you are.”

“San Solaro?”

“San Solaro.”

“Yes, sir!” Mack said, breaking into a grin. “Let’s have a drink and talk about it. Got a horse?”

“ ’Course I got a horse. You don’t think I’d ride a sissy thing like that, d’you? My God, you’re gettin’ as crazy for new gadgets as the rest of these Californians.”

Mack packed away his city clothes and put on dungarees, strapped on his pistol, and together with Johnson rode over the mountains to Bakersfield. Johnson had seen a secondhand water-well rig in storage at the Harron-Rickard Supply Company. They bought it and hauled it back to San Solaro.

At the Newhall lumberyard they put in their order for rig timber, having decided to save money by building the derrick themselves. They located two thousand feet of drilling cable and sand line in Los Angeles and a supply of casing pipe in several sizes at an iron merchant’s. Then, with Mack’s cash almost depleted, they called at the Vines Coal Company.

Vines, a rabbit-toothed man with a defensive air, showed them a price sheet. “Right there, same for everybody. In town here, twenty-two dollars and fifty cents a ton. Delivered to your site it’s thirty-two dollars.”

“Jesus J. Christ,” Johnson said, smacking the price sheet on the counter. “Is this here a coal yard or the headquarters of road agents?”

Offended, Vines said, “It’s the freight charges. You don’t think the SP will cart to Newhall for nothing, do you?”

Mack said, “I don’t know a lot about your business, but I know your price is too high. You’ve got more in the freight than you do in the coal.”

“Is that a surprise?” Vines said with a sneer. “You run a big company, the SP gives you preferential rates. Small operations like this”—he tapped the price sheet—“the customer pays.”

Johnson picked a fleck of tobacco from the corner of his mouth, then wiped his hand on his long sea-blue bandanna. He had a whole rainbow wardrobe of them, Mack had discovered; it was Johnson’s only vanity.

“What y’think?” Johnson asked.

Mack figured in his head. “We can afford two, maybe three loads.” To Vines: “We’ll haul from here and save the extra. We have a wagon.”

“Loading hopper’s out back.”

The partners left the office. Mack thought of C. P. Huntington dining in the opulence of his Palace suite. He thought of Leland Stanford’s vast ranch; it had passed to his widow when he died in June. He thought of Walter Fairbanks’s fine clothes and fine airs. All of it infuriated him all over again.

“You know,” he said as they climbed up opposite front wheels of the wagon, “I calculate that over the next couple of months, three big loads of coal will run us clean out of cash. My royalties don’t mount up fast enough to cover big outlays.”

“Potter’ll advance you something, won’t he?”

“Potter carried me once. I don’t want to ask again.”

“The banks—”

“The panic’s dried up loan money. Especially loans for wild-catting. I went to Los Angeles National last week. Went to Security Loan too. They weren’t so friendly. When we burn the last load of coal, there won’t be any more.”

“Somebody ought to fix those railroad gougers.”

“One of these days we will. Drive.”

In the light of a cool misty morning—January 1, 1894—they finished nailing down the derrick floor and framed in the belt house. They had sited the well at the bottom of a hill where a ten-foot pool of
brea
showed. Lumber, pipe, coils of line, and the tarp-covered coal wagon littered the work area. Johnson sawed a board and Mack painted the black letters.

CHANCE-JOHNSON NO. 1

They nailed it to a post and stood back. Winter sun pierced the mist and brightened the steep hillsides of the dead, silent valley. Most of the lot markers had rotted or blown away and except for the distant depot where they lived, there was no sign of human habitation.

“Mighty impressive,” Johnson said of the sign. “Name has a fine, proper ring to it.”

Mack grinned. “That it does. Since it’s New Year’s Day, I suggest we open a jug, fry up some oysters, and celebrate. We won’t be taking holidays once we start spudding in.”

“One thing I feel bad about,” Johnson said as they walked toward the depot. “I ain’t putting much into this deal.”

“Your experience. Your sweat. Your company. You don’t think I’d stay out here and do all this alone, do you?”

“Listen, just so’s you understand—I’ll take wages if we hit, but I don’t expect anything more.”

“I don’t care what you expect, you get one third of anything the oil company earns. I’m a big man with percentages. That’s how I got this place, on percentage.”

“You’re a crazy bastard. Maybe that’s why I like you.”

This time Mack kept the logbook.

Jan. 9—8 5/8” casing—down 88ft.

Winter rain streamed over the page and blurred the words as fast as he wrote them. He crouched in the lee of the belt house, eyed the turbulent sky, and shivered.

Jan. 22—376 ft. cased—hard drilling—many crooked holes.

Hours dissolved into days, days into weeks, darkness into daylight, sunshine into cloud and back to sun again. Unspoken between the partners was the need for a roughneck to spell them, but they couldn’t afford an extra man, so instead of quitting at the end of a tour, they worked until their eyelids fell shut, or their muscles burned with blowtorch pain, or they began to forget details and stagger into things when they walked. Many a night they never returned to the depot, simply fell under a blanket on the derrick floor and snored.

Feb. 13—1,338 ft. —through the oil rock—sulfur water showing.

The little steam engine broke down; Johnson repaired it.

Feb. 27—pumping 5th day. Still sulfur water but also 2 bbls. oil.

At 1,672 feet, Southern California’s unpredictable geology undid them again. They drilled into another black slate layer, punched on through 100 feet of it, 200 feet, 300—The cable broke, the tool disappearing into the depths. After three days of fishing, they snarled and yelled at each other for half an hour, walked off in opposite directions to sulk, walked back when they calmed down, offered awkward apologies, and thought about what to do next.

March 10, 1894. Chance-Johnson 1 abandoned.

Filthy with grease and mud, the partners manhandled a suspended bit over a new hole, Chance-Johnson No. 2, half a mile from the first site. It had taken two weeks to salvage timber and erect a new derrick. Then some muscle in Mack’s back seized up. Working now, he was in constant, exquisite pain.