Rules to live by: Never eat anything bigger than your head. Never shoot pool at a place called Pop’s. Never eat food at a place called Mom’s. To that list let me add: Never, ever, trust a doodlebug.
During the first half of the 20th century, pretty much everyone knew a doodlebug was a fellow who had a device that could supposedly find oil underground (it's also been the name for a motorscooter, a go kart-type midget race car and several different insects). Sometimes it was what they called the contraption instead, making the operator a doodlebugger.
Gentle Reader has already met a doodlebug: John W. Frank, the General Manager of the 1908-1910 attempts to strike oil near Petaluma. We don't know whether he tried to use an oil-finding gizmo here but after Frank left Sonoma County he went to Canada, where he said he had invented just such a device. A 1913 British Columbia mining newsletter described how he scammed two different groups of investors and then found himself pushed out when rival grifters made a better sales pitch...
The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.
- Jeff Elliott
His name was James Dalzell Brown. Should you dig up your great-grandparents (and please do not do that simply on my account) and asked them who the "bank wrecker" was, they would not have hesitated to spit out his name. Had they lived in Petaluma around 1910, there might have been some cussing along with the spit.
Before plunging forward, a short prologue and apology: This is part II of the previous article, "DREAMS OF AN EMPIRE OF OIL" which covered Petaluma's ill-fated oil and gas boom through part of 1910. Players introduced there are discussed in greater depth below, so Gentle Reader might wish to review it before continuing (the article's not that long).
This article, however, is very long and I do apologize for that. But this is an incredible story which has never been told, even though Brown was a criminal with plans extraordinaire. (Honestly, I don't understand why there hasn't been a book, movie or documentary mini-series about this guy and his gang of pirates.) To make this easier to read in more than one sitting there's an option of hopping past the Petaluma oil saga and going directly to the part about Brown's crazy schemes.
The takeaway from this story should be that Petaluma was lucky it didn't become the West Coast hub for oil and natural gas in 1909. Undoubtedly Brown and his boys would have exploited the town and anyone who mistakenly trusted them - and we know they would've done so because a pair of them did manage to scam a few Petaluma residents, as you'll discover at the end of this article.
And let's note Petalumans of a vintage age might also recall there were indeed productive oil wells operated by Shell Oil east of Petaluma. Those projects began several years after the events described here and did not involve any of the same companies or people. Researchers interested in exploring that history should seek out references to the Ansonia Oil Co. between 1921 and 1928.
So let's now pick up where part I ended: In 1910 Petaluma's elation over striking oil began to crumple in September after the town's papers printed a letter from the State Mining Bureau. Cassius Webb, acting as the attorney for Ramona Oil, asked them how much the oil field was worth so Consolidated Oil could start paying dividends within a couple of months.
The Bureau's response was brutal. First, it was their view there was "little or no chance" of hitting large quantities of oil. Some of the company's expectations were "entirely ridiculous" and "it would require considerable time to put the property in paying condition." Webb's claims seemed "intended to deceive the most ignorant" and it was the Bureau's opinion the project had "all the earmarks of deliberate fraud."
The rest of this article can be read at the SantaRosaHistory.com website. Because of recurring problems with the Blogger platform, I am no longer wasting my time formatting and posting complete articles here. I will continue to create stubs for the sake of continuity, but will be publishing full articles only at SantaRosaHistory.com.
- Jeff Elliott