Black Gold, California Oil

In the spring of eighteen ninety-one, a self-taught prospector named Edward Doheny arrived in Los Angeles broke and desperate, having failed at mining in Arizona and New Mexico. He noticed a man on the street whose wagon wheels were caked with a dark substance. The man said it came from a seep on the west side of the city, in what is now the Westlake neighborhood near MacArthur Park.

Doheny and a partner leased a lot, dug with a sharpened eucalyptus trunk rather than a drill, and struck oil at one hundred sixty feet in November of eighteen ninety-two. Within a year, more than a hundred wells had been drilled in the same neighborhood. California was an oil state before Texas.

The great Kern River field near Bakersfield opened in eighteen ninety-nine. Summerland, near Santa Barbara, saw the first offshore oil piers in the world in the eighteen nineties, rigs built on pilings out over the Pacific. By nineteen ten, California was producing a large share of the entire nation's oil supply.

The industry shaped the state's geography in ways that are still legible. Refineries rose along the Richmond waterfront, in El Segundo, and in the Los Angeles Basin. The Union Oil blowout at Platform Alpha off Santa Barbara in January of nineteen sixty-nine, which spilled over three million gallons and fouled the beaches from Rincon to Goleta, became a founding event of the modern American environmental movement and drove the passage of the National Environmental Policy Act in nineteen sixty-nine and the first Earth Day in nineteen seventy.

Oil still flows under Los Angeles, under the Kern County fields, and offshore. The pumpjacks you pass in the agricultural towns of the southern San Joaquin Valley are not relics. They are still working.