# The Mexican Problem (1917)/Doheny Lord Of Oil

CHAPTER XII
DOHENY — LORD OF OIL
More than sixty years ago two boys were born about twenty miles and three years apart in the State of Wisconsin. They were destined to be thoroughly American boys, but the parents of both were born in Ireland. One became Lord Shaughnessy, the head of the Canadian Pacific, and the greatest power for good to-day, both in war and peace, in the northern half of the North American continent. The other was Edward L. Doheny, lord of oil in the southwest of North America. Shaughnessy and Doheny, although born in the same State and so near each other, and of parents from the Emerald Isle, never met until within a year. Yet for many years Shaughnessy had watched Doheny's progess in the Southwest, for Shaughnessy wants oil in the future for one hundred Canadian Pacific ships.
I pen these lines in absolute independence of both, for if they had any power over me or any knowledge that I am writing this, the full limit of censorship against any personal encomiums ​would be placed upon me. I asked Doheny in Mexico what I might say concerning the situation, and he replied: "Nothing about me or especially about my properties. We can take care of ourselves, but help the people of Mexico if you can."
DEVELOPED BY THE PLAINS AND THE HILLS
Edward L. Doheny is of public interest because he spans in his life and activities the western pioneer, bivouacking on the prairies and seeking the development of wealth from the mountains and the plains, and the new era of heat, light, and power which is coming from mineral oil.
When Doheny graduated from the high school in Wisconsin, he knew his botany and his mineralogy like the American youth of advanced education; but to-day he knows it as do few people in the world. His life on the plains taught him to know the sage brush of the desert for its roots holding the sands against the winds and its blossom yielding up to the bees the most delicious honey. He knows all the flowers of the hills and the mountain side and he knows the rocks and the minerals they cover as do few men. He knows how these minerals were deposited, their ​dips, the sedimentary deposits, shales, and sands, and the basaltic and volcanic upheavals.
He dwells in a garden with one of the largest collections of palms that any man ever gathered. He knows every palm whether he sees it in his garden or on the desert. Somehow he respects the botanical names of more than a hundred palms, probably because they have no common names, but he manifests a contempt for the geological names as applied to minerals. He declares that geological names never yet found minerals or oil, nor have the geological professors been very successful in directing any one how to find them.
INDEPENDENT OF MAN OR BEAST
For many years Doheny slept on the plains and in the mountains with his rifle by his side, and he always knew exactly where his boots were, where every piece of his pack lay and what were his resources and the journey before him. He never carried water or timber if he knew where to find it. But he carried the tools in his kit that could cut or file a piece of steel, mend a rifle, and insure him independence of any man or beast on top of Mother Earth.
He believes that the minerals were originally ​deposited almost universally on the earth's surface and were then ploughed by glaciers and torn by upheavals and leached and redeposited into cracks or deposits of various forms; yet you get them where you find them. But when you reach the end of the deposit, don't gamble too much money in looking for a continuation of that deposit or for the next one. He says that when you dig a well and get water, you won't find oil, and when water comes in, that is the end of your oil.
Frank A. Vanderlip, of the National City Bank, about a year ago paid a million and a half, or one hundred dollars an acre, for fifteen thousand acres covering the San Pedro mountain, an ocean point on the Pacific not far from Los Angeles. It has beautiful views from the hilltop into valleys both sides and out over the ocean. But Doheny had first looked at it for several days and paid one thousand dollars a day for the privilege. He found there were some oil seepages on the property, but the district did not indicate to his practiced eye that he could get his money back with a profit from either oil or land sales. But Doheny could slip over the mountains to the northeast and buy the beautiful Ferndale Ranch for another summer home for Mrs. Doheny, with its running waters, palms and orange groves, ​and consider it a good investment because it was worth it without regard to the oil derricks looming on the hillside in the distance.
SUPREME FAITH IN OIL
Between the Ferndale Ranch and Sulphur Mountain we rested for a few moments to note the oil-bearing shale on the face of both mountains at the head of Ojai Valley; one dipping south and the other dipping north. Some of the party looked for trout in the brook, but Doheny noted a ten-inch curl of black oil ooze out from the spring by the brookside and flow down stream.
"Look at that," he shouted. "That is worth more than all the trout in all the springs and streams in America. You can put trout in the stream, but you can't put oil in the ground."
​The main ranch or home farm of Doheny is ten miles out of Los Angeles, eight hundred acres on the mountain side, and still it is not the extensive gardens, orange groves, fish hatchery, duck ponds, cemented driveway up the mountain, or his developed underground river, or the beautiful blue lilac bushes, that interest Doheny to the greatest extent; nor yet the opportunity here for a vigorous outing, a seven o'clock breakfast, and a beautiful view across the valley. It is the little seepage of oil in the sidewalk that indicates that again Doheny sits atop of wealth that he can sometime at his good pleasure mint into gold and human uses.
YOUTH AND ENTHUSIASM STILL WITH HIM
Doheny is an enthusiast. When he goes into a thing, he is in all over, hands and feet. He will travel longest with the swiftest and the strongest, swim or ride with the youngest, and sleep more or less in any part of the twenty-four hours. He will absorb more and his interest and his sympathies will be of the broadest because his studies and his sympathies reach from the stars of heaven to the lowest mineral deposits and his interest is all the while in humanity and its onward progress.
In the forenoon, over on the side of Sulphur Mountain, he dipped his fingers in the thirty-four gravity oil oozing from well Number 36 and exclaimed enthusiastically: "Isn't that fine? Is n't it better than soup or something to eat? Just smell it! It is a soft, lubricating oil with no asphaltum." And he dipped up a pan of it and we all had to note it, smell it, and admire it. Then he took a wisp of oil waste from the automobile and wiped his hands as clean as those of a woman and was off in the motor to dip into another oil well and note its color, its thickness, and its gravity.
As I write this in the East, comes the report ​from that Number 36 oil well that its flow has increased to twenty-five barrels a day; and it is just what Doheny said it was, — pure, lubricating oil, with no asphaltum, but a little higher grade at thirty-seven gravity.
EARLY IN BUSINESS
At seventeen years of age Doheny was with a United States government surveying party in the Indian Territory. As a side line, he took to trapping wild animals. Many a wolf-skin he cashed in at the trading-post, but he early showed his independence. When trapping one winter with a friendly Indian, one of Doheny's pelts was claimed as taken from a wolf nearest the Indian's trap. Doheny protested. He said the hunting law might well be that a dead animal belonged to the nearest trap, but snow on the ground showed that that animal came from his, Doheny's, trap.
The Indian stood by the law and Doheny stood by the fact and they separated. Doheny declared that no rule of the hunt could give his kill to another trap when it was clearly shown by the snow tracks it did not belong there.
Doheny was soon again in business for himself. With a partner he bought at auction over ​seventy head of government horses for about five dollars each and drove them into Kansas; and all through the summer months he was breaking in the horses and selling them to farmers at twenty-five dollars a head. Doheny and his partner felt sure they had done the greatest stroke of their lives. Each then thought that if he could get an income of one thousand dollars a year he would be rich.
But the lure of the mines followed the lure of the forest, and Doheny was soon up north prospecting for gold, and for many years he mined and prospected through the Rocky Mountains, especially in New Mexico and Arizona. He was running a good sized mine in New Mexico and making ten dollars a ton when the McKinley tariff put him out of business.
His ore had a value of about fifteen dollars a ton, and he could smelt it at El Paso at five dollars a ton and get ten dollars a ton profit. The McKinley tariff put a duty on lead ores and made Monterey in Mexico the greatest smelting center in the world. The El Paso people could not get their lead flux except at heavy duty and therefore had to charge Doheny fifteen dollars a ton.
This sent Doheny to southern California. His ​quick eye detected some black stuff being hauled over the streets to a furnace. He made investigation, and soon he and Canfield had leased ground and with shovel and hand windlass were opening the Los Angeles oil field. It was hard work and there was a long fight ahead of them, but they won out and the Los Angeles oil field proved up exactly what Doheny had declared it would yield; and many of Doheny 's old Los Angeles wells are still automatically pumping.
INTO OIL
This was Doheny's first venture in oil, and oil has been in his blood and bone ever since.
Doheny is distinctively a prospector and not a gambler. He would not play a game of cards for a ten-cent piece. He never took a drink in his life, and he never smokes. But as a prospector he will hit the rock and do his drilling to the end of the lead; but when he reaches the end, the prospect is determined and no blind gambling or groping in the dark follows he quits.
NO GAMBLING
I could take you to one place in California where the Standard Oil Company has spent ​$2,500,000 with not a cent to show for it. Doheny was previously in that district and it cost him just $8000 to put down his well and learn that any further expense would be gambling. He had paid his $8000 and gotten his information. The Standard Oil Company put $2,500,000 in the same district later and still has no further information.
But just afterwards Doheny heard of a promising piece of oil land offered for option. He inquired and learned that an adjoining property was known to be better. He took a third observation and learned that the cream of the district was held for $2,250,000, while the poorer part could be had for one or two hundred thousand dollars. He promptly took the option on the best part, paid down his ten per cent, drove his wells and paid the balance, $2,000,000, out of the product from the wells. He quit that district $8,000,000 to the good.
Then he opened another district and took out another $8,000,000. He was the pioneer in the Bakersfield district, drilling the first well and selling the first product from the district. In the early days of Bakersfield he was selling oil at $1.25 a barrel to twenty-one other drilling outfits. With the two oil fields he is now opening up ​for the Pan-American, Mr. Doheny will have opened up eight oil fields in California.
STANDING BY
From the Fullerton and other districts in California he got the money to make his start in Mexico, where at the beginning he had only an eight per cent interest, but assessments of $750,000 from 1902 to 1905 did not trouble him. When the Texas oil gushers made Mexican oil practically worthless for a few months, Doheny stood by, just as Rockefeller did in Cleveland, and bought when nobody else would buy, believing that the future would demonstrate the values. Doheny's Mexican Petroleum interest went up to nearly forty per cent as his associates sold out.
Doheny has always stood by. In the panic of 1907 he kept millions on deposit that his properties might be protected against any accident. Five years ago he disposed of some properties for more than $10,000,000, and half of the money went into Mexican Petroleum. I don't think that he values his Mexican interests financially as high as his California interests, but the social problem in Mexico interests him more and takes greatest hold upon his sympathies. ​Tampico was a cattle shipping point with less than twenty thousand people when he began operations there. To-day it has a population of fifty thousand, and wages that were twelve and one-half cents are now one dollar for ordinary labor and three dollars and fifty cents gold for skilled labor. When in June, 1916, nine hundred refugees were taken from Tampico on two tank steamers and the yacht Casiana, the expense was sixty-seven thousand dollars and the American government offered to repay, but Doheny refused to accept. From October 14, 1915, until April 15, 1916, there was famine in that land for the native population. The warring forces had taken all the food out of the country and sent it to Vera Cruz, whence it had been shipped to Texas and sold for war supplies.
Doheny bought it in Texas and shipped it back in the same packages to Tampico and fed the native Mexicans with it so far as the American consul certified they had need for food.
​can carry a train from New York to the Pacific Coast and back to New York without refueling. Of course the expected railroad development in the oil line cannot take place during the war time, when the American oil reserves are being drawn down two million barrels a month. Nevertheless, oil-burning locomotives are operating in twenty-one States on fifty-three roads, and on thirty-two thousand miles of road, and consuming forty-two million barrels of oil per annum.
STUDIES PAST, PRESENT, AND FUTURE
It is not only oil in the future and the man in the future that interest Doheny, but the oil of the past, the man of the past, and the animal and mineral life of the past.
Five years ago Doheny and Canfield used to note deposits of bones in asphalt about eight miles out from Los Angeles, whence tons of asphalt had been taken for road making. "What a fool rancher to lose so many sheep in tar beds," they said; "why did n't he fence out the sheep?" Then somebody noted that there was not a sheep bone in the lot. In came the scientists to solve the riddle.
Now bones of the elephant, the ground sloth, ​the mastodon, the bison, the horse, the camel, the bear, the coyote, and the giant wolf are mounted or are being mounted for the Museum of History, Science and Art in the Exposition Park of Los Angeles, and there are fifteen thousand boxes of bones still unassorted. As many as thirty skulls of the saber-tooth tiger or cat, together with fifty skulls of the giant wolf, were found in a space of less than four cubic yards.
Mother Earth here hermetically sealed up the animal life of many hundred years ago, and the museum and the ranch La Brea, of twenty-five acres, now the property of the State, will be of interest to the scientist and the student for many hundred years to come. From this place came the skull and skeleton of a woman eight thousand years old. Many animal contests must have occurred about this water and tar hole, for animal bones are found chewed, and some partially healed.
To Doheny, the man of the plain and the mountain, deep and broad delver in Mother Earth, these bones, the life of the past they reveal for man, beast and vegetable life, have the deepest interest; for Doheny seems to have the genius's insight into the history of the past, ​the meaning of the present, and the hope of the future.
Yet Doheny does not work altogether by eyesight. His associates note that he will not make important moves on the chessboard of business until the time or something within him seems to be right, and then he moves swiftly, surely, and independently. But until the spirit moves within him, nothing can stir him.
WATCHMAN! WHAT OF THE NIGHT?
Working within his soul at the present time is the question of the future of Mexico. He cannot see it clearly. He can see Los Angeles, in the center of the uncounted wealth of southern California, reaching toward a million population, and note the meaning of an automobile to every five people in the town. He can rejoice as telegrams come from Tampico reporting that the dredging and the river current in the three months this spring have deepened the bar channel from seventeen feet to over twenty-six feet. He is pleased that men of Tampico are now getting more than ten times the wages per day they received before he went there. He is happy to note that every one of them was so well cared for at the Mexican Petroleum ​Company terminal that, when in April the I.W.W. workers stirred up revolt in four oil refineries at Tampico, there was not a whisper of trouble among his men. They told me at the Tampico terminal that under proper direction, with good food and care, the Mexican workers could be relied upon for anything, and in an emergency would work thirty-six hours or forty-eight hours on a stretch with their meals brought to them, and that, they were loyal and true.
What troubles Doheny is how these good people of Mexico, speaking one hundred and fifty-three tongues, can be merged into a nation, with soul life, prosperity, and family and national happiness.
That is the Doheny problem! That is the United States problem! That is the Mexican problem!
THE END