Edward Laurence Doheny (; 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.
In 1902, he sold his properties, then began highly profitable oil operations in Tampico, Mexico, drilling the first well in the nation in 1901. He developed Mexico's "golden belt" there, 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. Doheny was twice acquitted of offering the bribe, but Fall was convicted of accepting it.
Doheny and his second wife and widow, Carrie Estelle Betzold, 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! (itself the inspiration for the 2007 film There Will Be Blood) is loosely based on Doheny.
Background Edward L. Doheny was born in 1856 in Fond du Lac, Wisconsin, to Patrick "Pat" and Eleanor Elizabeth "Ellen" ( Quigley) Doheny. The family was Irish Catholic. His father and a young brother Michael Doheny Jr were born in County Tipperary Ireland and later immigrated to Canada with the onset of the Great Famine and rising civil unrest. Their father, Michael Doheny Sr was, by Doheny's own account, embroiled in the Irish rebellion of 1803.
His father Patrick tried whaling after reaching Labrador and later became a seal-fisher in Baffin's Bay for a decade.Margaret Leslie Davis, Dark Side of Fortune: Triumph and Scandal in the Life of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny (1998), p. 8. His mother was born in St. John's, Newfoundland, and was a school teacher.Davis. - p. 196. After Patrick and Ellen married and moved to Wisconsin in 1831, Doheny's father became a construction laborer and gardener.Davis. - p. 9.The National Archives, Washington, DC. Passport Applications, January 2, 1906–March 31, 1925. Record Group 59, General Records of the Department of State, 1763–2002. NARA Series M1490, Roll 682. NAI Arc Identifier 583830; MLR No. A1 534. His uncle Michael became a successful land developer in British Columbia, Ontario. Quebec and the State of New York.Margaret Leslie Davis, Dark Side of Fortune: Triumph and Scandal in the Life of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny (1998).
Doheny graduated from high school at age 15, and was named the valedictorian of his class.Davis, Margaret L. (1998). Dark Side of Fortune: Triumph and Scandal in the Life of Oil Tycoon Edward L. Doheny. 1998. Following his father's death several months afterward, 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, and then in Arizona Territory and New Mexico Territory.
Early career Doheny is listed in the 1880 United States census as a painter living in Prescott, Arizona.Prescott, Yavapai, Arizona. 1880 United States census. United States Census Bureau. page.462B. 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 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.Davis. - p. 11, 14.
Doheny and Canfield together worked the former's Mount Chief Mine with little success. In 1883, Doheny met and married his first wife, Carrie Louella Wilkins, in Kingston on August 7.Davis. - p. 13. 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. Doheny was eventually reduced to doing odd jobs (including painting again) to support his family.Davis. - pp. 18-19.
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 later in 1891, he was deeply in debt.Davis. - p. 20.
The two men briefly tried prospecting in the San Diego County area of Southern California, forming the Pacific Gold and Silver Extracting Company there. Failing to find success, they soon returned to Los Angeles. By 1892, Doheny was so poor he could not afford to pay for his boarding room.
Doheny's daughter Eileen was a frail child and died at age seven on December 14, 1892, from heart disease stemming from rheumatic fever and a lung infection.Davis. - p. 24. Edward and Carrie's marriage was fragile, owing mostly to the harsh mining life and chronic, often severe, financial problems.Davis. pp. 16-21. 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.Davis. - p. 29.
Oil wells and success 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. 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 ( wide) reached , Doheny devised a drilling system involving a eucalyptus tree trunk. When completed in 1893, the well reached and produced .
Edward and Carrie Doheny divorced in 1899, when Ned was six years old.Davis. - p. 33. Edward gained custody of their son, and remarried. Unable to cope with her losses, the following year Carrie Doheny committed suicide.Davis. - p. 41. Doheny married his second wife, Carrie "Estelle" Betzold, inside the private Pullman car of Santa Fe Railway executive Almon Porter Maginnis ("Car 214").Bonino. - p. 28. It was held on the siding in New Mexico Territory on August 22, 1900.Davis. - p. 40. Though she bore no children, Carrie raised Ned.Doheny Foundation .
The first oil 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. 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.
Doheny was also a pioneering oil producer in Mexico. His company drilled the country's first well, in Tampico, in 1901. It 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-producer, pumping 260,000 barrels per day (B.P.D.). When the well—drilled by Herbert Wylie—came in, the sound could be heard away in Casiano, and it shot a stream of oil 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.Davis. - pp. 107-109.
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. The company owned of land worth about $50,000,000 and secured an additional in Mexico in October 1919.
In 1919 the Colombian Petroleum Company, a P.A.T. subsidiary, bought a 75% interest in the Barco oil concession in Colombia. Doheny was also interested in plans to develop the oil industry in Venezuela, and in building a pipeline from Colombia to Venezuela to make it more economical to export the Barco oil from the west coast of Lake Maracaibo. In 1920 Pan American was the largest oil company in the United States, ahead of Sinclair Consolidated Oil Corporation and 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 $100 million ($ in dollars), more at the time than John D. Rockefeller.
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.
Doheny's reputation was somewhat tainted by a bribe he evidently paid to Fall in 1921. He made the "gift" of $100,000 in connection with obtaining a lease of of government-owned land used for the Elk Hills Naval Petroleum Reserve near Taft, California. The resulting scandal broke soon after that, over similar bribes Fall accepted for leasing 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. Nevertheless, Fall was convicted of accepting the bribe.
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.Davis. - p. 186.