First reports of oil greeted with skepticism

Filed:April 27, 1999

By BILL RINTOUL
Oil columnist

The rumor had it that oil had been discovered at Kern River. According to the story that reached the Bakersfield Daily Californian in May 1899, a couple of men had been poking around out on the Thomas Means place seven miles northeast of town and had found oil.

Wooden Rigs with Mule Team The Kern County Library

The two men were supposed to have dug a shaft by hand, using pick and shovel to take the hole down about 40 feet, employing a windlass and bucket to hoist the dirt out of the hole. They were said to have encountered a sand out of which black oil oozed.

The newspaper was inclined to take the story with a grain of salt. Tom Means had been claiming for years that there was oil on his 20-acre place, but no one had taken him seriously. It was true there were some strange phenomena out that way. For one, up on John Barker's place there was a spring from which natural gas escaped. Barker, in fact, had hung a trap, shaped somewhat like a bell, over the spring, collecting gas that he piped to his house. The quantity of gas thus obtained was sufficient for one jet.

Also, from time to time there would be a film of oil floating on the waters of the Kern River. And there was talk that years ago a sheepman had used oil from a small seep to mark his sheep.

But a little oil floating on a river and a few sheep running around with tar-stain brands, a bubbling spring and a small gas jet burning in a remote house were a far cry from proving there was an oil field out there.

The hole the men were supposed to have dug was said to be on the north side of the river, a short distance back from the water's edge. The road on that side of the river was hardly more than a couple of ruts, often impassable in wet weather and rough and dusty to negotiate in warmer weather. Altogether, the rumor sounded like another one of those wild tales that seemed always to originate in remote places and promise a big story which, on investigation, proved to be little more than the product of someone's vivid imagination.

The newspaper chose not to dignify the rumor by printing anything about the supposed oil discovery. In fact, the consensus of opinion was that it was just another shrewd promotion by speculators hoping to make a quick fortune selling stock in a dubious venture.

When the first samples of oil reached town, the newspaper's judgment seemed vindicated. The sluggish oil looked suspiciously like the oil that was being recovered from shallow wells over in the McKittrick district, 40 miles west of town, where various enterprising individuals had been attempting, without crowning success, to get an oil development started. It looked like someone might have salted the shaft at Kern River.

The newspaper continued to ignore the rumored oil discovery. The business of Bakersfield, population 5,000, was commerce. The city served as the county seat of Kern County. It was the trading center for the agricultural areas that surrounded it. The role of the newspaper was to inform its readers, not mislead them. In its columns that May, even as it ignored the oil discovery, the newspaper reported on the organization of a volunteer fire department in Bakersfield, the burglary and ransacking of three local residences by thieves who passed up silverware and jewelry to steal only cash, and of an amazing discovery by two professors at a Chicago clinical school of a means of circumventing old age through hypodermic injections of the lymphatic fluid of animals, particularly young goats.

Some three weeks after the first rumor of an oil discovery had reached town, a visitor showed up at the newspaper's office to offer a bit of advice. The visitor was Angus Crites, a well-known and respected oil man who had worked for Jewett & Blodget in the West Side oil development at Maricopa and could command some credibility as an informed observer. Crites said he had just come from the Kern River site. He said he had seen whiskey barrels full of oil and oil in milk cans, kerosene cans and beer kegs, among other containers. He had watched men take about four barrels of oil from the shaft with the level remaining the same.

The advice that he brought to his friends in the newspaper office was that they ought to hurry out to the river and buy up land to get in on the boom that was sure to come.

In its Friday, June 2, 1899, issue, the Daily Californian published the first news of the oil discovery in an account that filled some six inches of space in a front-page column. The one-column headline read, "It is of the Best Quality." Subheads added "Petroleum Struck on the Means Ranch" and "Will Refine Into Illuminating Oil — Only a Prospect But Experts Are Enthusiastic."

The article stated:

"Petroleum of the grade which refines into the best illuminating oil has been struck on the T. A. Means ranch up the river.

"For years it has been known that indications of oil were present along the banks of the river between the canyon and the edge of the plains, but no energetic development measures were undertaken until recently.

"Not long ago, J.H. Ellwood of Bakersfield discovered oil rising to the surface of the water in the bend of the river on the Means place and after a little prospecting he decided that he had made an important find. He sent for a number of relatives living in Visalia and Sanger and with them commenced a prospect shaft a short distance back from the brink of the bluff. At a depth of 45 feet they struck oil indications. When 52 feet had been dug, a two-inch auger hole was sunk a distance of 25 feet and it was found that the oil stratum extended down at least that far. The oil can be seen in the hole. In one night five gallons collected in the bottom of the shaft.

"This of course does not prove that oil in paying quantities exists, but Milton McWhorter and J.O.B. Treadwell, an expert of Summerland, pronounce the prospect better than any found in the McKittrick district on the westside which now gives such great promise. There are only two wells in the state producing as good quality as that uncovered by the Ellwood party.

"Practically all the land in the neighborhood is patented, and that which remains in the hands of the government has been located."

The boom was on.

Almost overnight more than 200 oil companies were formed to participate in the development of the Kern River field. Their names reflected everything from high hopes to pride in regional origins, including among them the Prosperity and the Blue Bird, the Pennsylvanian and the Hawkeye State, the Southern Cross and the Northern Light, the Sovereign and the Peerless, the Prince Edward and the Lord Roberts, the Apollo and the Aladdin, the American Eagle and the Uncle Sam.

The value of land shot up. Kern County's assessor announced that he would assess oil lands at an unheard of $1,000 an acre. Southern Pacific promoted a sightseeing excursion from San Francisco, enabling tourists for a round-trip fare of $10.60 to visit the Kern River oil field.