The number of the house was 5746 Los Robles Boulevard, and you would have had to know this land of hope in order to realize that it stood in a cabbage field.

Los robles means “the oaks”; and two or three miles away, where this boulevard started, in the heart of Beach City, there were four live oak trees. But out here a bare slope of hill, quite steep, yet not too steep to be plowed and trenched and covered with cabbages, with sugar beets down on the flat. The eye of hope, aided by surveyors’ instruments, had determined that someday a broad boulevard would run on this line; and so there was a dirt road, and at every corner white posts set up, with a wing north and a wing east—los robles blvd.–palomitas ave., los robles blvd.–el centro ave., and so on.

Two years ago the “subdividers” had been here, with their outfit of little red and yellow flags; there had been full-page advertisements in the newspapers, and free auto rides from Beach City, and a free lunch consisting of hot-dog sandwiches, a slice of apple pie, and a cup of coffee. At that time the fields had been cleared of cabbages, and graded, and the lots had blossomed with little signs: sold. This was supposed to refer to the lot, but in time it came to refer to the purchaser. The company had undertaken to put in curbs and sidewalks, water and gas and sewers; but somebody made off with the money, and the enterprise went into bankruptcy, and presently new signs began to appear: for sale by owner, or bargain: see smith and headmutton, real estate. And when these signs brought no reply, the owners sighed and reflected that someday, when little Willie grew up, he would make a profit out of that investment. Meantime, they would accept the proposition of Japanese truck-gardeners to farm the land for one-third of the crop.

But three or four months earlier something unexpected had happened. A man who owned an acre or two of land on the top of the hill had caused a couple of motortrucks to come toiling up the slope, loaded with large square timbers of Oregon pine; carpenters had begun to work on these, and the neighborhood had stared, wondering what strange kind of house it could be. Suddenly the news had spread, in an explosion of excitement: an oil derrick!

A deputation called upon the owner to find out what it meant. It was pure wildcatting, he assured them; he happened to have a hundred thousand dollars to play with, and this was his idea of play. Nevertheless, the bargain signs came down from the cabbage fields, and were replaced by oil lot for sale. Speculators began to look up the names and addresses of owners, and offers were made—there were rumors that some had got as high as a thousand dollars, nearly twice the original price of the lots. Motorcars took to bumping out over the dirt roads, up and down the lanes, and on Saturday and Sunday afternoons there would be a crowd staring at the derrick.

The drilling began, and went on, monotonously and uneventfully. The local newspapers reported the results: the D.H. Culver Prospect No. 1 was at 1,478 feet, in hard sandstone formation and no signs of oil. It was the same at 2,000, and at 3,000; and then for weeks the rig was “fishing” for a broken drill, and everybody lost interest; it was nothing but a “dry hole,” and people who had refused double prices for their lots began to curse themselves for fools. Wildcatting was nothing but gambling anyhow—­quite different from conservative investments in town lots. Then the papers reported that D.H. Culver Prospect No. 1 was drilling again; it was at 3,059 feet, but the owners had not yet given up hope of striking something.

Then a strange thing happened. There came trucks, heavily loaded with stuff, carefully covered with canvas. Everybody connected with the enterprise had been warned or bribed into silence; but small boys peered under the canvas while the trucks were toiling up the hill with roaring motors, and they reported big sheets of curved metal, with holes along the edges for bolts. That could be only one thing—tanks. And at the same time came rumors that D.H. Culver had purchased another tract of land on the hill. The meaning of all this was obvious: Prospect No. 1 had got into oil sands!

The whole hill began to blossom with advertisements, and real estate agents swarmed to the “field.” A magic word now—no longer cabbage field or sugar beet field, but the field! Speculators set themselves up in tents or did business from automobiles drawn up by the roadside, with canvas signs on them. There was coming and going all day long, and crowds of people gathered to stare up at the derrick and listen to the monotonous grinding of the heavy drill that went around and around all day—ump-um—ump-um—ump-um—ump-um—varied by the puff-puff of the engine. keep out—this means you! declared a conspicuous sign; Mr. D.H. Culver and his employees had somehow lost all their good breeding.

But suddenly there was no possibility of secrecy; literally all the world knew—for telegraph and cable carried the news to the farthest corners of civilization. The greatest oil strike in the history of Southern California, the Prospect Hill field! The inside of the earth seemed to burst out through that hole; a roaring and rushing, as Niagara, and a black column shot up into the air, two hundred feet, two hundred and fifty—no one could say for sure—and came thundering down to earth as a mass of thick, black, slimy, slippery fluid. It hurled tools and other heavy objects this way and that, so the men had to run for their lives. It filled the sump hole, and poured over, like a saucepan boiling too fast, and went streaming down the hillside. Carried by the wind, a curtain of black mist, it sprayed the Culver homestead, turning it black and sending the women of the household flying across the cabbage fields. Afterward it was told with Homeric laughter how these women had been heard to lament the destruction of their clothing and their window curtains by this million-dollar flood of “black gold”!

Word spread by telephone to Beach City; the newspapers bulletined it, the crowds shouted it on the street, and before long the roads leading to Prospect Hill were black with a solid line of motorcars. The news reached Angel City, the papers there put out extras, and before nightfall the Beach City boulevard was crowded with cars, a double line, all coming one way. Fifty thousand people stood in a solid ring at what they considered a safe distance from the gusher, with emergency policemen trying to drive them farther back and shouting: “Lights out! Lights out!” All night those words were chanted in a chorus; everybody realized the danger—some one fool might forget and light a cigarette, and the whole hillside would leap into flame; a nail in your shoe might do it, striking on a stone; or a motortruck, with its steel-rimmed tires. Quite frequently these gushers caught fire at the first moment.

But still the crowds gathered; men put down the tops of their automobiles and stood up in the seats and conducted auction rooms by the light of the stars. Lots were offered for sale at fabulous prices, and some of them were bought; leases were offered; companies were started and shares sold—the traders would push their way out of the crowd to a safe distance on the windward side, where they could strike a match, and see one another’s faces, and scrawl a memorandum of what they agreed. Such trading went on most of the night, and in the morning came big tents that had been built for revival meetings, and the cabbage fields became gay with red and black signs: beach cooperative no. 1 and skite syndicate, no. 1, ten thousand units, $10.

Meantime, the workmen were toiling like mad to stop the flow of the well; they staggered here and there, half-blinded by the black spray—and with no place to brace themselves, nothing they could hold on to, because everything was greased, streaming with grease. You worked in darkness, groping about, with nothing but the roar of the monster, his blows upon your body, his spitting in your face, to tell you where he was. You worked at high tension, for there were bonuses offered—fifty dollars for each man if you stopped the flow before midnight, a hundred dollars if you stopped it before ten o’clock. No one could figure how much wealth that monster was wasting, but it must be thousands of dollars every minute. Mr. Culver himself pitched in to help, and in his reckless efforts lost both of his eardrums. “Tried to stop the flow with his head,” said a workman, unsympathetically. In addition, the owner discovered, in the course of ensuing weeks, that he had accumulated a total of forty-two suits for damages to houses, clothing, chickens, goats, cows, cabbages, sugar beets, and automobiles that had skidded into ditches on too-well-greased roads.

Contributor

Upton Sinclair

From Oil! “Just what do you think you have accomplished in your long lifetime?” a reader once asked Sinclair. In his autobiography, he responded, “Our ‘mourning parade’ before the offices of Standard Oil in New York not merely ended slavery in the mining camps in the Rocky Mountains but also changed the life course of the Rockefeller family.” Sinclair also helped organize the American Civil Liberties Union in New York and started a Southern California chapter in 1923, four years before the publication of Oil!, a novel based in part on the Teapot Dome Scandal.

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