Edward L. Doheny

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
For the baseball pitcher whose full name is Edwin Richard Doheny, see Ed Doheny.
Edward L. Doheny
philanthropist
Spouses
  • Carrie Louella Wilkins
  • Carrie Estelle Betzold
Children2

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.

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

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

Edward L. Doheny was born in 1856 in

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 had 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.

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

Doheny is listed in the

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

While in Los Angeles, Doheny found out that there were local reserves of natural

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.

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.

locomotives.[11]

Doheny was also a pioneering oil producer 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]

Big business and Teapot Dome scandal

Doheny formed the Pan American Petroleum and Transport Company (P.A.T.)—part of which later became the Mexican Petroleum Company (Pemex)—to hold his two Mexican companies (Mexican Petroleum and Huasteca), his Atlantic and Gulf Coasts facilities in the United States, and his California holdings.[21] The company owned 600,000 acres (240,000 ha) of land worth about $50,000,000 and secured an additional 800,000 acres (320,000 ha) in Mexico in October 1919.

In 1919 the Colombian Petroleum Company, a P.A.T. subsidiary, bought a 75% interest in the

Standard Oil Company of Indiana. Automobile production was booming and oil prices were high. The Mexican Petroleum Company was the largest in Mexico, and Mexico was the largest oil producer in the world. By 1925, Doheny's net worth was $100 million ($1.74 billion in 2023 dollars), more at the time than John D. Rockefeller.[24]

Edward L. Doheny poses with his lawyer Frank J. Hogan in this 1924 photo

In 1922 Albert B. Fall, U.S. Secretary of the Interior, leased the oil field at Elk Hills, California, to the Pan American Petroleum & Transport Company. Around the same time, the Teapot Dome Field in Wyoming was leased to Sinclair Consolidated Oil Corporation. Both oilfields were part of the US Navy's petroleum reserves. Neither lease was subject to competitive bidding. In 1924 rumors about corruption in the deals escalated into the Teapot Dome scandal.[25]

Doheny's reputation was somewhat tainted by a

Teapot Dome in Wyoming. Doheny was charged with bribing Fall but, in 1930, was acquitted. His son, Ned, who had delivered the money, and assistant Hugh Plunkett were also charged, but died before they could be tried.[26] Nevertheless, Fall was convicted of accepting the bribe.[27]

See also: Teapot Dome scandal
Edward L. Doheny and his granddaughter, Lucy Estelle, c. 1928

Doheny sold a majority of the family's shares in Pan American Petroleum & Transport to

Standard Oil of Indiana, in April 1925, but retained all California assets, which he formed into a new company, Pan American Western Petroleum Company. Pan American Eastern Petroleum (the Mexico holdings, the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts holdings in the U.S., refineries, pipelines, and thirty-one tankers), which held the non-California assets, was sold to Standard. Pan American Western returned to its roots as an "upstream" exploration and production company.[28]

At the end of 1925, in order to exploit the oilfields in Lake Maracaibo Pan American Western gained control of Lago Petroleum Corporation from C. Ledyard Blair's Blair & Co.[29] The transaction became the subject of a stockholder action in 1933, which alleged that the bankers, who were represented on the Pan American board, conspired to make excessive profits.[30] In 1926, Venezuelan Eastern Petroleum Corporation reorganized as a subsidiary of Pan American Eastern to buy and develop Venezuelan oil properties.[31]

In the midst of the

Gordon B. Kaufmann after a design competition) to his son, Edward (Ned) L. Doheny Jr., and his wife Lucy Marceline Smith (the couple married on June 10, 1914).[32] He built the 46,000-square-foot (4,300 m2) house in 1928, at a cost of $3,188,000, and sold the property and accompanying 400-acre (1.6 km2) ranch to his son for $10.[33]

When a second criminal trial for bribery began to loom for Doheny and Fall in 1929, the pressure on all parties reached a breaking point. The Dohenys tried to persuade Hugh Plunkett to be committed to a mental institute so that he could not then be made to testify against them. On February 16 an argument broke out at about 10pm between Ned and Plunkett, Ned shot Plunkett and then himself.

Albert Fall—as Ned (accompanied by Plunkett) had delivered the money. They had already gone through some trials.[36]

Raymond Chandler, a former oil man, included a thinly veiled account of this event in one chapter of his novel The High Window, presenting it as a bygone, hushed-up case. He had started work for the Dabney Oil Syndicate in 1922 as a bookkeeper and auditor, but was fired a decade later.[37]

Beset by shareholder lawsuits in the wake of Teapot Dome, and the death of Ned, Doheny became a recluse and invalid.[38] When she realized her husband needed an undisturbed home away for a while after the Teapot Dome travails and Ned's death, Carrie Estelle asked architect Wallace Neff to design and build the Ferndale Ranch complex on their Ojai, California property.[39] Hundreds of workers completed the 9,000 square feet (840 m2) house in less than six weeks, including Neff's blueprints, by working day and night.[33][40]

Death

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

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

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.[citation needed
]

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.[citation needed]

After he began basing his Mexican oil operations near

Mount St. Mary's College south of downtown Los Angeles.[citation needed
]

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.[citation needed]

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,

Ventura County.[citation needed
]

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

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]

Legacy

Numerous place names in Southern California are named for him:

In popular culture

  • Doheny's payment to Albert Fall and the scandal inspired Upton Sinclair's novel, Oil!, based in part on Doheny's life.[11]
  • Reference to Doheny Beach, in the
    Surfin' USA". Lyrical verse "...all over Manhattan and down Doheny way, everybody's gone surfin', surfin' USA."[48]
  • In the movie There Will Be Blood, an adaptation of the novel Oil!, the character of Daniel Plainview portrayed by Daniel Day-Lewis is loosely based on Doheny.
  • In the 1964 Jan and Dean hit song, "Dead Man's Curve", the lyrics read, "He passed me at Doheny, then I started to swerve...."[49]
  • Lydell McCutcheon, a character in "Perry Mason" (season two), is loosely based on Doheny.[50]

References

Bibliography

Notes

  1. ^
    Newspapers.com. Open access icon
  2. ^ Margaret Leslie Davis, Dark Side of Fortune: Triumph and Scandal in the Life of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny (1998), p. 8.
  3. ^ Davis. - p. 196.
  4. ^ Davis. - p. 9.
  5. ^ a b c Davis. - p. 13.
  6. ^ Davis, Margaret L. (1998). Dark Side of Fortune: Triumph and Scandal in the Life of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny. 1998.
  7. 1880 United States Census. United States Census Bureau
    . page.462B.
  8. ^ a b Davis. - p. 11, 14.
  9. ^ Davis. - pp. 18-19.
  10. ^ a b Davis. - p. 20.
  11. ^ a b c d Yewell, John (December 13, 2007). "Black gold gave state its glitter". The Monterey County Herald.
  12. ^ Davis. - p. 24.
  13. ^ Davis. pp. 16-21.
  14. ^ Davis. - p. 29.
  15. ^ Davis. - p. 33.
  16. ^ Davis. - p. 41.
  17. ^ Bonino. - p. 28.
  18. ^ Davis. - p. 40.
  19. ^ Doheny Foundation Archived 2010-04-19 at the Wayback Machine.
  20. ^ Redpath, Lionel V. (1900). Petroleum in California: A Concise and Reliable History of the Oil Industry of the State. pp. 37–38.
  21. ^ a b Davis. - pp. 107-109.
  22. ISBN 978-0-8108-7066-6
    . Retrieved 2013-07-24.
  23. ISBN 978-0-521-89218-6
    . Retrieved 2013-07-24.
  24. ^ "West Adams Heritage Association | in Historic West Adams, Los Angeles, California".
  25. ^ Gross & Gross 1998, p. 78-79.
  26. ^ "Teapot Dome Scandal". 2 May 2023.
  27. ^ Bennett, Leslie E. (1999). "One Lesson From History: Appointment of Special Counsel and the Investigation of the Teapot Dome Scandal". The Brookings Institution. academic.brooklyn.cuny.edu. Retrieved 26 April 2016.
  28. ^ Davis. - p. 186.
  29. ^ Swaine 1946, p. 433.
  30. ^ Swaine 1946, p. 677.
  31. ^ Swaine 1946, p. 434.
  32. ^ Davis. - pp. 212-213.
  33. ^
    ISBN 0-7385-4687-9
  34. ^ Richard Rayner, John Creel, Anson Lisk. West of Eden by Jean Stein, published by Jonathan Cape 2016.
  35. ^ Gayle Chelgren, Patrick 'Ned' Doheny, West of Eden by Jean Stein pub. Jonathan Cape 2016
  36. ^ a b Philip G. Payne, "The Other Side of the Scandal: Review of 'Dark Side of Fortune'", H-Net Review, November 2001, accessed 10 December 2014
  37. ISBN 9781400063161
    .
  38. ^ West Adams Heritage Society, biographical sketch of Edward L. Doheny.
  39. ^ Davis. - pp. 247-248, 270-272.
  40. ^ Davis. - p. 247.
  41. ^ Davis. - p. 274.
  42. ^ Edward Doheny Archived 2005-11-29 at the Wayback Machine. University of Southern California (USC).
  43. ISBN 978-0-9816422-0-8
    .
  44. ^ History Archived 2015-02-15 at the Wayback Machine. Doheny.org.
  45. ^ a b Southeast Missouri State University. "St. Mary's of the Barrens--Perryville, Missouri". Website. Southeast Missouri State University. Retrieved 5 December 2013.
  46. ^ "The Niven File" in 'Writers for Relief: An Anthology to Benefit the Survivors of Katrina' .
  47. L.A. Weekly
    . Retrieved 4 March 2019.
  48. ^ Song Meanings
  49. ^ Jan and Dean Lyrics
  50. ^ "The Real Los Angeles History Behind Perry Mason Season Two"

External links

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Edward L. Doheny.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Edward_L._Doheny&oldid=1214930524"