Edward L. Doheny
Edward Laurence Doheny (/doʊˈhiːni/; August 10, 1856 – September 8, 1935) was an American oil tycoon who, in 1892, drilled the first successful oil well in the Los Angeles City Oil Field. His success set off a petroleum boom in Southern California, and made him a fortune when, in 1902, he sold his properties.
For the baseball pitcher whose full name is Edwin Richard Doheny, see Ed Doheny.
Edward L. Doheny
September 8, 1935 (aged 79)
- Miner
- prospector
- driller
- businessman
- philanthropist
- Carrie Louella Wilkins
- Carrie Estelle Betzold
2
He then began highly profitable oil operations in Tampico, Mexico's "golden belt", drilling the first well in the nation in 1901. He expanded operations during the Mexican Revolution, and opened large new oil fields in Lake Maracaibo (Venezuela). His holdings developed as the Pan American Petroleum & Transport Company, one of the largest oil companies in the world in the 1920s.
In the 1920s, Doheny was implicated in the Teapot Dome scandal and accused of offering a $100,000 bribe to United States Secretary of the Interior Albert Fall.[1] Doheny was twice acquitted of offering the bribe, but Fall was convicted of accepting it. Doheny and his second wife and widow, Carrie Estelle, were noted philanthropists in Los Angeles, especially regarding Catholic schools, churches and charities. The character J. Arnold Ross in Upton Sinclair's 1926-27 novel Oil! (the inspiration for the 2007 film There Will Be Blood) is loosely based on Doheny.
Youth[edit]
Edward L. Doheny was born in 1856 in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin,[1] to Patrick "Pat" and Eleanor Elizabeth "Ellen" (née Quigley) Doheny. The family was Irish Catholic. His father was born in Ireland, and fled Tipperary in the wake of the Great Famine. Patrick tried whaling after reaching Labrador.[2] His mother was born in St. John's, Newfoundland, and was a school teacher.[3] After Patrick and Ellen married and moved to Wisconsin, Doheny's father became a construction laborer and gardener.[4] As a young fellow, Doheny was known to have consumed alcohol before attending the Peachtree Dance with a local girl he had been courting.[5]
Doheny graduated from high school in his fifteenth year, and was named the valedictorian of his class.[6] Following his father's death several months after his graduation, Doheny was employed by the U.S. Geological Survey. In 1873 he was sent to Kansas with a party to survey and subdivide the Kiowa-Comanche lands. The following year he left the Geological Survey to pursue his fortune prospecting, first in the Black Hills of South Dakota,[1] and then in Arizona Territory and New Mexico Territory.
Early career[edit]
Doheny is listed in the 1880 United States Census as a painter living in Prescott, Arizona.[7] Later in 1880, he was in the Black Range in western Sierra County of south-western New Mexico Territory, living in the rough silver-mining town of Kingston (about 10 miles (16 km) west of Hillsboro), prospecting, mining, and buying and trading mining claims. He worked in the famed Iron King mine, just north of Kingston, which drew men to the area. In Kingston, he met two men who later played important roles in his life: Albert Fall, the future Secretary of the Interior, and Charles A. Canfield, who became his business partner.[8]
Doheny and Canfield together worked the former's Mount Chief Mine with little success.[8] In 1883, in the Black Mountains town of Kingston in the New Mexico Territory, Doheny met and married his first wife, Carrie Louella Wilkins, on August 7.[5] In 1886, Canfield prospected further in the Kingston area, leasing and developing with great success the Comstock Mine (not to be confused with the Comstock Lode of Virginia City, Nevada). Doheny declined to join him in this venture, but Canfield made a small fortune from it. Doheny's daughter, Eileen, was born in December 1885.[5] Doheny was eventually reduced to doing odd jobs (including painting) to support his family.[9]
In the Spring of 1891, Doheny left New Mexico and moved to Los Angeles, California, attracted by Canfield's success in real estate there. Canfield had previously left New Mexico with $110,000 in cash from his Comstock Mine venture, which he parlayed into extensive real estate holdings during the Los Angeles boom of the later 1880s. With the collapse of the speculative fever, Canfield lost his wealth and land holdings and, by the time Doheny arrived in Los Angeles in 1891, he was deeply in debt.[10]
The two men briefly tried prospecting in the San Diego County area of Southern California, forming the Pacific Gold and Silver Extracting Company there—but without achieving success, they soon returned to Los Angeles.[10] By 1892, Doheny was so poor he could not afford to pay for his boarding room.[11]
Doheny's daughter Eileen was a frail child and died at age seven on December 14, 1892. Her death was caused by heart disease stemming from rheumatic fever, as well as a lung infection.[12] Edward and Carrie's marriage was fragile, owing mostly to the harsh reality of mining life and their many financial problems.[13] Eileen's death further strained the marriage. Nearly a year after Eileen's death, on November 6, 1893, Carrie gave birth to their only son Edward Jr., known as Ned.[14]
Oil wells and success[edit]
While in Los Angeles, Doheny found out that there were local reserves of natural asphalt, which in places came to the surface—notably at the La Brea Tar Pits. Doheny obtained a lease near downtown with $400 in financing from Canfield, who had made some money from the mining industry. In the fall of 1892, Doheny dug a well with picks, shovels, and a windlass, looking for asphalt, from which oil could be refined. When the well (6 by 4 feet (1.8 m × 1.2 m) wide) reached 155 feet (47 m), Doheny devised a drilling system involving a eucalyptus tree trunk.[11] When completed in 1893, the well reached 225 feet (69 m) and produced 40 barrels per day (6.4 m3/d). (The discovery of this well appears in John Jakes's novel California Gold,—as do Doheny and Canfield, as partners with the novel's fictional protagonist, Mack Chance.)
Edward and Carrie Doheny divorced in 1899, when Ned was six years old.[15] Edward gained custody of their son, and remarried. Unable to cope with her losses, the following year Carrie Doheny committed suicide.[16] Doheny married his second wife, Carrie "Estelle" Betzold, inside the private Pullman car of Santa Fe Railway executive Almon Porter Maginnis ("Car 214").[17] It was held on the siding in New Mexico Territory on August 22, 1900.[18] Though she bore no children, Carrie raised Ned.[19]
The first well dug in Los Angeles was in 1863, on Hoover Street between Seventh Street and Wilshire Boulevard, by a man named Baker. However, in his book Petroleum in California: A Concise and Reliable History of the Oil Industry of the State, Lionel V. Redpath says the Los Angeles oil industry began with the Doheny and Canfield well at the corner of Patton and West State streets. The well was a small producer, but it pumped steadily for three years, and during that time Doheny and others sunk about three hundred more wells.[20] Doheny and Canfield soon made a fortune by drilling in the area and selling the oil to nearby factories. Later, they helped spur the California oil boom of the early 1900s by persuading railroads to switch from coal to oil to power their locomotives.[11]
Doheny was also a pioneering oil producer in Mexico. In Tampico his company drilled the first well in Mexico in 1901. He expanded operations during the Mexican Revolution, and opened large new oil fields in Mexico's "golden belt" inland from Tampico. It also drilled Cerro Azul No. 4 well—which, in February 1916, became the world's largest-producing well, pumping 260,000 barrels per day (B.P.D.). When the well—drilled by Herbert Wylie—came in, the sound could be heard 16 miles (26 km) away in Casiano, and it shot a stream of oil 598 feet (182 m) into the air, sending oil in a two-mile (three-kilometre) radius. Over the next fourteen years, the well produced over fifty-seven million barrels.[21]
Death[edit]
Edward L. Doheny died at his Beverly Hills townhouse on September 8, 1935, of natural causes, a month after his seventy-ninth birthday.[1] His funeral was in St. Vincent's Church in Los Angeles.[41] That year Carrie Estelle Doheny, Doheny's widow, burned hundreds of letters and business documents, what biographer Margaret Leslie Davis describes as the "written remnants of Edward Doheny's life" (p. 4).[36]
Philanthropy[edit]
Doheny contributed money to foundations. He helped fund the construction of St. Vincent de Paul Church. After the shooting death of his son, Edward Jr., he donated $1.1 million in 1932 to University of Southern California (USC) to build the Edward L. Doheny Jr. Memorial Library.[42]
Doheny Sr., meanwhile, lived in his own mansion, which he had purchased in 1901.[43] It was part of Chester Place, a gated community of Victorian mansions, and by his death in 1935, Doheny ended up owning most of the houses, as well as the street.[33] Built in 1899 in the French Gothic architectural style, this three-story, twenty-two-room residence was damaged in the 1933 earthquake but was repaired. It is within Mount Saint Mary's University's Doheny campus, where it houses college departments, runs docent tours, and hosts chamber music concerts by The Da Camera Society.
The Dohenys also owned a great deal of coastal land in Dana Point, California, which they donated to the State of California for Doheny State Beach as a memorial to Edward's murdered son Ned. They also donated the funds for the construction of St. Edward the Confessor Roman Catholic Church at its original site. It has since moved to a bluff-top location overlooking Doheny State Beach. The original building is now home to San Felipe de Jesus Roman Catholic Church.
After he began basing his Mexican oil operations near Tampico, Tamaulipas in 1902, Doheny donated much money toward the construction and maintenance of the Cathedral of Tampico there. Also known as The Temple of the Immaculate Conception, it is located in Plaza de Armas in the city. The Doheny Estate has donated money to Loyola Marymount University for the construction of buildings and residence halls, and the land for one of the campuses of Mount St. Mary's College south of downtown Los Angeles.
Doheny took his yacht, the Casiana (named after his first major producing oil well in Mexico, the Casiana No. 7), to Martinique to pick up a friend's brother who worked as a farmer on the island and who was seriously ill. Doheny brought him back to New York City; the steam yacht made the trip in only five days.
In 1944, his widow Carrie Estelle Doheny suffered a hemorrhage that left her partially blind. Realizing the value of good vision, she created and funded the Doheny Eye Institute,[44] which has become a world leader in vision research. She became a major cultural philanthropist in Los Angeles, California as well. When commissioning new buildings for these civic projects, she often chose the renowned Southern California architect Wallace Neff. On her death, she left antiquities and funds to St. John's (Roman Catholic) Seminary located in Camarillo, in Ventura County.
In 1954, Estelle Doheny provided funds and "a quantity of her precious collections in the library building" at St. Mary's of the Barrens seminary in Perryville, Missouri.[45] By November 11, 2000, the Vincentian Fathers signed a contract with Southeast Missouri State University to use the library building. So, "the Doheny treasures were sold."[45]
Family[edit]
Doheny and his first wife, Carrie Louella, had a daughter, Eileen, who died in childhood. Their son, Edward L. ("Ned") Doheny Jr., was the owner of Greystone Mansion and the namesake of Doheny Library at the University of Southern California.
Through Ned's children, Doheny is the great-grandfather of science fiction writer Larry Niven[46] and singer-songwriter Ned Doheny.[47]
Numerous place names in Southern California are named for him: