History of Fresno County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present, Volume I, Part 41

Author: Vandor, Paul E., 1858-
Publication date: 1919
Publisher: Los Angeles, Calif., Historic Record Company
Number of Pages: 1362

USA > California > Fresno County > History of Fresno County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present, Volume I > Part 41

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There is in Indiana a town called Shelbyville, and it may have given title-name to the scheme. The printed deeds that floated in were indorsed "Dan'l of Shelby," probably some theatrical character name. The scheme was a gold mine for the speculator, who had bought the land for a song very likely, and turned the title deed on a subdivision principle loose among gullible patrons who attended his show anyhow. The name of the enter- prising showman was Guy Webber, who described himself as of Jersey City, Hudson County, N. Y. Earlier deeds were made in his name as grantor. After a time, they were in the name of one Hoytt, and lastly in that of one W. H. Whetstone. Webber was not long in the enjoyment of his monopoly for a similar theatrical swindle was operated in connection with the mythical town of Sam'l of Posen in some part of California. As to title, Webber could read that clear. He bought and paid for it, and had the deed recorded, but as to the value that is quite another story.

The townsite was in view from the Jameson depot of the Southern Pacific, one-half mile northeast of it, and between the depot and the San Joaquin River, covering four sections or 2,560 acres, less half a section immediately contiguous to the depot. It was described as the purest alkali land, on which not even a mortgage or salt grass could be raised, and not unlike the country around the Dead Sea in Palestine, where the birds fly high in passing over it. West and south of Jameson station, there is good land, within half a mile of the depot, but Shelbyville was in a class of its own. Value it had once as grazing land, but with the bringing of water for irrigation the alkali in the subsoil was forced to the top and not a blade of grass was on the land. The leanest and hungriest coyote or jack-rabbit that crossed the plain to the wheat ranches beyond made detour rather than shortcut across inhospitable and desert Shelbyville.

By the time that lot and lottery victims became acquainted with Whet- stone in the scheme, the panic of 1902 was on. Of the hundreds of non- resident lot owners, few kept up tax payments and in large part the town- site was sold to the state for the unpaid taxes. Indeed so valueless were the lots that the assessor has not listed them for years. The recorder has at times been deluged with inquiries as to the cash value of them, and ex- pressing readiness to part with them for anything from fifty dollars to $5,000. Most of the inquiries came in from 1892 to 1894, but every now and then one bobs up serenely. Assessed once at four dollars per lot, it was pay taxes with the back claims or quit. They quit, and this is why the state came in and why the site is sacred to the cuckoo owl, the coyote and the nomadic and rattle-headed jack rabbit. It was a wide spread and successful swindle, and its promoters probably justified themselves by plead- ing that no one really suffered much. Those that attended the show had their entertainment for their money, some drew lots in Shelbyville and were out only two dollars with about as much more for a deed to a piece of land surely worth that much. Very much like the ancient justification

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of fox hunting-the huntsmen liked it, the hounds like it also, and it has never been proved that the fox entertained other views.

It is a noteworthy circumstance that until Fresno City took the step after several preliminary failures in that direction, there was no incorporated town in the county from 1856 to 1885. Millerton, though county seat, never assumed that dignity, never had a board of councilmen with chairman as ex-officio mayor, and never any town governmental supervision save such as the county supervisors chose to bestow upon it. Fresno followed Miller- ton's example for thirteen years until it incorporated. Millerton could not assert to have had a townsite in which anyone owned a foot of earth, because it was on unsurveyed government land and holdings were no more secure or substantial than possessory claims. The county was a notorious trespasser when it erected the courthouse on Uncle Sam's domain without as much as by your leave.

Which recalls the discovery in the examinations of filings in the data preparation for this history that the earliest recorded townsite in the county is that of June 14, 1865, by George Rivercombe of Georgetown, of thirteen lots on Jones' Flat west of Big Dry Creek. Discovery was made in the record book of mining claims. Lots one to seven, each fifty by 100, ran back to the hills, and eight to thirteen to the creek, lots located on both sides of a central street. The ink sketched townsite notes the existence of a "China house" on lot eleven, and south of townsite and at right angles with it marks out a 400-foot wide mill lot. The lot owning locators were; J. D. Woodworth, Henry Burroughs, Ira McCray, Dr. Lewis Leach, William Faymonville, and Rivercombe. It was probably a mining camp, but the old- est Dry Creek pioneer has no recollection of it and the record might not have come to light but for an accidental discovery.

Only a few years ago, a mild craze followed the publication and circu- lation of a government bulletin telling of the money possibilities in a commercialization of the eucalyptus. Stock corporations were formed. Land was bought on option agreements or long term contracts. Eucalypti groves were planted. Craze died ont. Corporations disincorporated or forfeited charters. Shareholders relinquished stock rather than pay more promotion assessments. Some of the scattered groves are still in existence, trees un- cared for and growing wild and rank. No factories were erected to manufac- ture the highly polished eucalypt veneer, the beautifully grained hardwood for furniture, pianos, organs and the like, the axe, hatchet, hammer and other tool handles, the imperishable ties and whiffle-trees and all the other things that were to have been made from the eucalypt tree.

The short lived craze benefitted no one save the stock sellers and the corporation promotion agents. It was a craze that ran its brief day as did the later one for the cultivation of the cactus after the loudly heralded an- nouncement that Luther A. Burbank, the plant wizard of Santa Rosa, had evolved a spineless species: For a time public attention was diverted by pro- moters to the fortunes to be made from the growing of the cactus as a forage plant and from the commercial fibre to be extracted from it. This craze also had its brief run. The location of one of these eucalypti groves and the association of a cactus plantation with that location on the river recalled another well nigh forgotten town swindle on the banks of the San Joaquin, very prettily and appropriately named Riverview and harking back to the memorable boom period of 1887. The map of Riverview is a record in the county archives. And that is all that there is of it, or ever was.

The town was actually staked out with the lots and the avenues on the ground ten miles north of Fresno on the river. There was the announcement November 4, 1887, by Fleming & Waterman that the sale of lots in their new town would take place on the Tuesday after and the sale was conducted by a picturesque character, who was known as "Cactus Ed" Fleming. He was one of the creations of the boom days as was many another character

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of the day. The two days' sales of Riverview lots resulted in disposing of 632 on the first and of 427 on the second day, and among the buyers were men whose business sanity was considered to rate normal. After Fresno was given ground-floor favors, Riverview lot sales were transferred to San Francisco, Stockton and Sacramento with varied results and "Cactus Ed" disappeared from public view for a time. Incidental mention was made of him in a local publication of December 2, 1887, as follows:

"'Cactus Ed' Fleming is home again, but it is not the 'Cactus Ed' of vore, he who wore the broad sombrero and who, with pants in boots and in short sleeves laid out the town of Riverview. The 'Cactus Ed' that re- turned yesterday is dressed in the height of fashion, wears a silk tile and gives other indications of being a bloated bondholder or a capitalist. The transformation is due entirely to Riverview, for since his departure from this city a few weeks since, he has been selling lots in his town at an astonishing rate, and reports that the building up of the town is not a question of years, but of months."

Years have elapsed and never any Riverview. It was an iridescent dream of the speculator, based, if it had any basis ever, on a gamble on the coming of a side line railroad in the direction of the river. There have been other railroad building reports in connection with this particular locality on the river where the Southern Pacific and the Santa Fe cross it. Sycamore and Herndon were in their day dreamed of towns following rail- road building reports for speculative purposes. Sycamore, Herndon and Riverview are in the same category as myths, save only that Riverview was a swindle and Herndon never anything more than a switching station.

How much foundation there was for the Riverview railroad side line report time proved when a line was built out of Fresno due east to the rail- road fostered town of Sanger and there turning abruptly southward and through Reedley ran out of the county southward to Porterville in Tulare County. And Riverview was on the river north of Fresno. Did the singed moth return to flirt with the flame?

It did when one Marcus Pollasky appeared on the horizon as a secret agent, cut a wide swath as a railroad promoter and worked the moth for rights of way concessions and bonus subscriptions and saddled upon the city a right of way grant for a jerk-water line to a new town of Pollasky on the San Joaquin below Millerton, and there ended what was held out might be a transcontinental line across the Sierras tapping the mountain region. And what of Pollasky or Friant as it was afterward named? Mori- bund a settlement almost as Millerton, Riverview is found as a spot on the map only because the Fresno Traction Company runs an occasional car to the river picnic ground there and the spot has been dignified with the name of "Fresno Beach" for the swimming in the river during the sultry summers.

The nickname of "Cactus Ed" recalls Fleming's boom time exploitation of the cactus hedge business in association with J. M. Statham and William Wilkenson with dissolution of copartnership in April, 1887. He was a voluble fellow who took up this short lived fad as a "get rich quick" scheme and the name stuck to him. The cactus was a round, spiny species with stem not much thicker than a pencil, full of thorns and when grown and interlaced was represented as making a hedge or fence well calculated to pre- vent stock attempting to break through or over it. In the summer of 1876, Fleming planted a demonstration hedge at the Mariposa Street entrance of the courthouse park and county officials and other citizens signed a pub- lished testimonial certifying that the cactus hedge would be the coming fence of California and representing Fleming in that testimonial as a bene- factor and the agent in saving thousands of dollars in the cost of fencing. The cactus hedge enterprise was abandoned for the Riverview town lot scheme as promising of greater and quicker returns. And it was. No more was heard of the cactus hedge.

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CHAPTER XLIX

COALINGA OIL FIELD IS THE LARGEST PRODUCER IN THE STATE. AN- OTHER INTERESTING CHAPTER IN THE HISTORY OF A WONDERFUL COUNTY. A GREAT INDUSTRY ESTABLISHED IN A WASTE SHEEP- GRAZING REGION. COALINGA IN INFANT DAYS TYPICAL OF THE WESTERN MINING CAMP. FIRST OIL EXCITEMENT OF 1865 IS RECALLED. CALIFORNIA'S PETROLEUM POSSIBILITIES FIRST RECOGNIZED ABOUT 1900. COAL DEPOSITS HAD PROVEN INADE- QUATE TO MEET THE DEMAND FOR A FUEL SUPPLY. WITH 1907 THE PETROLEUM OUTPUT EXCEEDED THE VALUE OF THE GOLD IN CALIFORNIA.

According to the Standard Oil Bulletin, there has been a production of crude oil in California since the beginning of the industry to and including the year 1917 of 1,040,350,164 barrels. Industry dates from the reported 1876 product year of the Newhall and Ventura County field. It was until 1894 the sole producing field with a reported output of 175,000 barrels prior to 1876.

There are today eleven recognized producing and proven oil fields in the state. Besides, there are smaller producing localities with an output since 1897 of 964,721 barrels. The named field is the oldest. The next two are Los Angeles and Salt Lake and the Summerfield of 1894. The fourth is the Fresno Coalinga of 1896. It is the third largest producer with 196,- 872,731 barrels of lighter gravity fluid. The Coalinga field is another of the great resources of this wonderful county. It has added much to the county's wealth. It has brought into existence a new crop of millionaires. It has impoverished perhaps more than it has enriched. It has written in one of the most interesting chapters to the history of the county.

Discovery and development of field established an industry in a waste section of the county where there would have been and had been nothing save sheep grazing. It located in this isolated nook a modern and enterpris- ing little city, the wealthiest with the exception of Selma and the larger county seat. Oil field as with so many other things in the county can only be treated in superlative terms.

An enthusiastic write up in 1910 likened to a fairy story the tale of the growth of the little city of Coalinga in the foothills bordering on the semi- arid sage brush plains. A few years before, name stood for a wretched vil- lage in the crudest stage, little more than a hurried thrown together mining settlement. surrounded by black oil "rigs," many on land of doubtful pro- ductive value, settlement overrun with wreckless men and worse women, gambling resorts, saloons or deadfalls rather, wild with money excitement and the smell of petroleum all pervading. In 1910 there was a rich proven oil field and there had blossomed a modernized city of 5,500 people, a bustling business community supported by one of the greatest and latest proven oil fields in the world, a city the abode of substantial well to do people and one marked by modern steel buildings, banks and business ventures of mag- nitude and everyone prosperous and content.

Its history as a place of habitation may be traced to M. L. Curtiss' homestead entry of 1882 covering the site of the city, with his cabin relic still standing on C Street a few years before the birth of the city. District was included in the original land grant to the Southern Pacific with an apology of a railroad completed to Huron in 1877. Curtiss came before the rails were laid to Coalinga ten years later. Coalinga's early history is bar-

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ren of picturesque incident. It was first the home of the homesteader, living in rude cabin and eking out an existence on blue beans, bacon and jack rabbit flesh. Then came the railroad and next the saloon as "the inevitable harbinger of civilizing influences."

In that early history is mentioned the name of Frederick Tibbits. He landed a grub stake, opened a saloon and after a lucky turn at cards bank- rupted the miners of Robinson & Rollins, Englishmen interested in an in- different coal mine in the nearby hills at Alcalde. Next comes Louis O'Neil with a store. Coalinga became a trading place for a cattle and sheep com- munity, for the coal mining colony whence its name, and for grain farmers in propitious seasons which were dependent on rainy winters and this was not often. Its advance was retarded by remoteness of location, lack of a water supply, wretched transportation facilities, lack of faith in oil field and all in all unpromising business conditions in that desert location. In 1900 it was a collection of about twenty houses scattered along Front Street, "Whiskey Row" as it was long after known. It was from near Coalinga that the output of the Robinson-Rollins coal mine was shipped out on a little railroad to Hanford, as the nearest accessible point, much nearer and more accessible than Fresno. Output was meager. The market for it also. Louis Einstein was interested in the coal mine. The enterprise was aban- doned. When the price of steel went up, rails were torn up and some of them were brought to Fresno for the building of the horse car lines. Drilling for oil progressed in the meanwhile in an experimental way. The progress was slow, even after Chanslor & Canfield had proven the field workable. First companies met with discouragement.

There was little about the place or its surroundings to attract. Water to drink was brought from Hanford in rail tanks and for years was sold by the bucket or barrel. Oil supplies were brought from Los Angeles or San Francisco. Oil transportation was by horse or mule to railroad shipping point and until the coming of the railroad cut deeply into the profits. Thus things pothered along until 1902. They improved then slightly. Three years later the boom was on. In 1907 oil rose from eighteen and twenty to forty cents a barrel. The rush came on with advances to sixty and in the fall of 1908 to sixty-two and one-half cents and in 1909 the oil fever was on in the county. It is said that "the town grew by leaps and bounds over night," a collection of shack houses at first, "because busy people were too busy to build better.'

People with beer appetites indulged in champagne. Along Whiskey Row congregated the fortune seekers. The faro table was never idle. The hum of the roulette was incessant; twenty-dollar pieces were stacked up as the stakes. Money came easily. It went more easily. Coalinga was the typical western mining camp-instead of gold or silver it was oil. The saloon was as much of a fortune as the "gusher." Did not Edward M. Scott sell his saloon business in October, 1909, for $15,000 to devote time to im- proving his city properties and give attention to his oil interests? The spirit of the gold epoch of '49 hovered over the mushroom settlement in the sage brush desert waste following the oil strikes, the first comers the same ad- venturous spirits that rushed to the Klondike in frozen Alaska and the later gold fields of Goldfield and Tonopah in Nevada.

With the greater profits of 1907-09 came also a greater stability. Throughout the days of the fever, substantial men and corporations had been at work. Development of the field had proven it. Its possibilities were demonstrated. Then the permanent improvements in the city began. Better homes were established. Neat cottages were erected. Substantial blocks were constructed. Whiskey Row went up in fire. The shack era passed away. A city of brick, steel and concrete buildings, with cement sidewalks and paved or oiled streets, pretty homes and social, sanitary and public utility demands followed. Population of town and fields in 1907 was 2,400.

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In 1910 it was estimated at about 10,000. Buildings in 1900 numbered a score. In 1910 it was 1,000 with 600 in July, 1909, year of great improve- ments.

The district bonded itself later for $100,000 for schools. City has a bonded indebtedness of some $20,000 to complete a municipal water system. It is the largest city in California supported alone by the oil industry. Its elementary schools are as good as the best in the county. Its high school holds high rank. The school houses are overcrowded. It was the first and only community in the county to organize a library on the union district plan. The seven elementary schools in the high school district have bonded themselves for an intermediate school and to build a larger high school. Churches are not lacking when at incorporation as a city there was only one minister of the gospel and death overtook him while participating in the public exercises in celebration of city incorporation, the last appeal from his lips a reform in social conditions in the closing of the saloons. The rough mining town with the saloon as a dominant industry, with all the other side issues of a wild western frontier camp, its most prominent high- way facing the railroad euphoniously designated even unto this day "Whis- key Row" voted itself "dry" April 8, 1918. by a majority of eighty-eight in a total vote of 1,304.

The first recorded oil excitement in the county was in February, 1865. Springs and seepages were discovered on the eastern slope of the Coast Range near Vallecito Canyon, some two miles from the Griswold and An- derson ranch. They were the outcroppings of the subterranean oil reservoir that is the basis of the wealth foundation of the Coalinga field. Credit seems to have been given for the discovery to Frank Dusy and John Clark of Bear Valley. At any rate, they took up 160 acres in December, 1864. Others did likewise and Dusy, Clark and W. A. Porter as a third associate assigned their claims to the San Joaquin Petroleum Company, the first of the hun- dreds of stable as well as wild cat organizations to follow in time and the crop of which has not yet been exhausted.

A word or two in passing concerning this man, Dusy, whose name was perpetuated until late years by a son in the Selma drug firm of Dusy & Sawrie. Here was a man who was a pioneer at almost everything. He was a discoverer of things. An early comer to the county, yet a much later one than many. Pioneer photographer of Millerton was he. Shipper of the first freight from the new Fresno railroad station. It was wool, because he was one of the big sheep men in the county at the time. He was one of the number that founded the first Republican newspaper. He was one of the original lot of Republicans in a county that was a seething stronghold of war time Southern Democrats. He was a pioneer explorer of the mountains in seeking ranges for his sheep. He discovered the grove of big trees above Dinkey Creek. He named the creek for a pet dog that a bear had devoured. He gave the name to Tunemah Pass and to many other locations and land marks in the Sierras that have been perpetuated in the government's quad- rangle maps. He pioneered from Selma the first exodus from the county to the Klondike. The rear steps of the courthouse were his gift to advertize his granite quarry at Academy. It would seem that almost everything had to bear the trade mark of Dusy.

The 1865 petroleum excitement in Fresno County proved a veritable craze for a time. As an ancient record had it, it assumed "from day to day a more firm, fixed, undeniable, self-evident reality." Locations were recorded by the scores. The Elkhorn mining district was organized. Gallons in sam- ples of the precious fluid were hawked about in Millerton by dusty and wild- eyed locators and prospectors, who like Col. Mulberry Sellers perceived "millions in it." The newspaper record has it that the excitement "has al- ready become a furore and will ere long terminate in a mania." Companies for working the springs were formed, and "there never was such a hurrying

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to and fro ; everybody is busy, wild and in fact nearly crazy." The craze even extended to San Francisco.

Its start was in the sale by Talleyrand & Choisier and two others of their claim in Tulare County for $20,000 in greenbacks to a New York company. By May, 1865, 2,000 acres of waste barren land, the same as it is today superficially, had been located as possessory claims, besides thou- sands of feet in this county held under mining locations of the Elkhorn min- ing district formed at the Chidester ranch on the San Joaquin River with M. T. Brady as chairman with associated others, the only remembered names being those of Galen Clark, so long state guardian of the Yosemite Valley, and of Cuthbert Burrell.

Money and effort were expended in superficial development. Great was the confidence in the richness of the field, but the usual quarrels and wrangles attendant upon new and rich mining discoveries. followed. There was the usual "jumping of claims." No one was safe or protected in his holdings. Filings were made in Millerton on holdings that were in another's possession or actually being worked. The county government was a careless and loose one. The location of the oil seepings a remote one and difficult of access. The oil was there but it was another problem to get at it and having gotten it to transport to a market, even if there was one and a demand for fuel oil or other purpose. Ill smelling petroleum was not a medium of circulation as was the clean gold dust: Gradually the excitement subsided. It ended in nothing.

While it lasted, correspondents in the field filled the papers with accounts of the "glorious prospects of boundless wealth." They fired the excited brain with accounts of "the rich springs that in their natural undeveloped state yield a thousand gallons daily of their precious fluid." They drew mental pictures of "the subterranean ocean of petroleum that is now known beyond a doubt to exist in this region." Basis there was for all this verbal description. It was not "the vague, uncertain and chimerical speculations of some deluded prospector," nor "the fantastic hallucination of some crack- brained philosophical alchemist." It was quite true, but it was not to enrich the pioneer discoverers. A later generation was to be the beneficiary.

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History of Fresno County, California, with biographical sketches of the leading men and women of the county who have been identified with its growth and development from the early days to the present, Volume I, Part 41

Author: Vandor, Paul E., 1858- Publication date: 1919 Publisher: Los Angeles, Calif., Historic Record Company Number of Pages: 1362

Author: Vandor, Paul E., 1858-
Publication date: 1919
Publisher: Los Angeles, Calif., Historic Record Company
Number of Pages: 1362