Los Angeles herald., 1906-07-29

and later I bought up thousands Of
acres of land near Whittier, Puente
and Fullerton. make It short.
because the successive steps would
take too long to tell about
Bought on Time
Sufficient to say. I bought the land
at about 50, so cents down, and that
the fields are now worth s2OOOO00O. At
a sale of the old Temple estate bought
] 1900 acres of land north of Brea canyon
| for $500, or about 66 cents an acre.
Eventually lost 1000 acres of 1t to the
Standard oil, but the 200 acres saved
1 eventually sold for 500 an acre to
/ Daniel Murphy, who has since made a
profit on 1t of $1,500,000
| Murphy sunk one well, his first, and
the immediate yield was 800 barrels
daily. He later secured a five-year
contract with the STANDARD Oil conf
pany to supply them with oil at $1.75
a barrel, and that well, after pumping
nineteen months, was still producing
500 barrels a day. He put more wells
in and finally had an output of $500 bar
rels day. The STANDARD Oil company
sunk forty or fifty wells on the 1000
acres they got away from me, and the
wells and land are now worth $4,000. 900
But l am getting ahead Of my story
At the time was selling oil in five
| B1llOIl CdHS u lIlC SlT6tI TdlWdyS W
grease their car tracks my only other
purchaser was Harper, Reynolds & Co,
who used some of my oil occasionally
| to dip water pipes. / was ten years
in getting the people interested. Event
ually I shipped oil to a water works
company in Los Angeles the Boders
Water company I think was the name,
and they were the first to try to use it
for fuel. They bought fifty barrels and
then refused to pay for it because it put
out their fires.
81 went back to selling the fve-gal-
| lon cans at 25 cents can. Later STILL
Harper, Reynolds & Co. began buying
a little oil, but very little. Finally
found myself unable to hold all my
land and lost great deal of it. I
went to the men who are now the rich
est men in the city and begged them to
take some of the land from me at 50 an
acre, with the provision that I was to
! hold half interest. They refused to a
| man.
Sold at Sacrifice
81 went along the best 1 could and
shipped some oil by railroad from Ana
helm, but it cost me 81 a barrel to do
! it. I had to haul it to Anaheim by
wagon distance of only seven miles.
1.-THE Santa Fe railroad were the first
| people to come and later the Southern
Pacifio. Then the men who scorned my
earlier offers flocked into the field. The
Southern Pacific and the Santa F'e are
| both now using millions of gallons
yearly as fuel for their engines.
81 got $1,000 for half of my Puente
holdings and the land is now worth
$2000,000. Simon Murphy of Port
| Huron bought my Whittier land for
| $11,000 and it is now worth more than
81. 100000 and he has a daily output of
oil of 2500 barrels. The land bought by
| the Santa Fe and Southern Pacific
which sold them for from $40 to $50 an
acre, is now worth millions.
"Scott and Lotus bought some land
and they now have an output of from
1000 to 1000 barrels day. Victor Hall,
J. M. Clapp of Pennsylvania and others
! also bought land. ]. M. Clapp came
to my rescue when the Los Angeles
business men hesitated and L sold him
land at from $3.50 to SO an acre.
II needed money to pay my debts and
had to do it. H. Jevne, w. H. Perry
John Bicknell, Slosson, Tom Hughes
and others then formed the Western
| Union and went into the business, with
the result that they have cleaned up
millions in the fields in the vicinity of
| Santa Barbara. The Standard Oil came
| in and accumulated thousands of acres
of land and sunk hundreds of wells.
To-day the industry which began
with five-gallon cans has grown TO
something worth about $75,000,0 900
year 20 the state. And that is a brief
! sketch of the story of oil in California"