AFTER THE LAST rally of the long-beards and the end of the war, Burnham fidgeted at La Cuesta, the family ranch on the western slope of the Sierras near Sequoia National Park. He was rattling around, with no focus for his still robust energies. Many men he admired had died during the war years: his brother Howard, Leander Starr Jameson, Lord Roberts. Frederick Selous had been killed by a sniper in German East Africa. Johan Colenbrander had drowned while trying to cross a flooded South African river for his role in a movie called The Symbol of Sacrifice. Roosevelt had died suddenly in January 1919.
He was fifty-eight. It was exasperating that some people saw him as a relic, too old to fight or compete, when he knew he could still easily outdo most men. His optimism about the future was undiminished. As always, he simply had to create it, and his drive to do so remained inexhaustible.
In early July 1919, on a business trip to New York to see John Hays Hammond, he pushed the investor to revive the Yaqui project. He needed action and was short of cash again, borrowing $500 from Hammond’s son Harris. But he was sure that things would soon improve. Hammond had just helped him take advantage of a blip in the market to sell Howard Burnham’s shares in International Petroleum, one of Hammond’s companies, for $50,400. Howard had earned the shares by discovering lucrative oil fields for the company in eastern Mexico, but until recently the stock had been nearly worthless because of the ongoing Mexican Revolution. Now Standard Oil and another large company were sniffing around International Petroleum, so there were offers to buy I.P. shares. The money erased the financial worries of Howard’s widow Constance, and also allowed her to comfortably repay the $5,000 loan, an unexpected windfall for Burnham.
He too owned I.P. shares, but despite his need for money he decided to hang on to them in hopes of a bigger payoff in the future. “So why worry?” he wrote to Blanche. “I have never let you go quite naked or starve to death.” Meanwhile, he needed to stay in the East and tend to possibilities.
By mid-July he was at Lookout Hill, Hammond’s coastal summer estate in Gloucester, Massachusetts. He spent nearly three weeks there discussing opportunities with Hammond on the golf course at the Myopia Hunt Club, or with Harry Payne Whitney on his yacht. Hammond was commuting to New York, working on an oil deal for International Petroleum. If it went through, Burnham could get $30,000 for his shares within a few months, or double that in a couple of years. For Hammond the deal would be worth $20 million.
These were giddy prospects, and they spilled glitter onto the Yaqui project. Hammond was optimistic about it again. He thought President Wilson would have to do something soon about Mexico, partly because of the continuing violence and partly because influential congressmen such as Henry Cabot Lodge were pressuring him to occupy the country. Hammond imagined Yaqui as his life’s crowning work, and the oil deal could give him the capital to realize it, if the situation in Mexico permitted.
The possibility elated Burnham. Aside from his California ranches, his life savings had been wagered on the Yaqui Valley. If the project revived, so did his fortunes. “Gee I wish you were here,” he wrote to Blanche on August 1. “I feel a little of my old joy and enthusiasm of things doing every day.”
Burnham had always been a hard-rock prospector, but the recent months of excited talk had altered his focus. The twentieth century would require the new specialty metals, but the extractive industry of the future was oil. When Hammond offered to form a small oil syndicate with Burnham as a scout, he eagerly agreed. He would make only $100 a month at first, but also a percentage of any profits. They named the syndicate Burnham Exploration.
“I may make a splash yet,” Burnham wrote to Blanche, “even if I am gray headed and fat.” (He now weighed 148, ten pounds heavier than in his scouting days in Africa.) He told Blanche to start looking for a place to rent in Los Angeles, and joked that since they had lived at six different addresses in recent years, she might get arrested for vagrancy.
Hammond’s oil deal went through in early September. Burnham could glimpse a payday just ahead. It felt like old times in southern Africa, with possibilities everywhere. Hammond was now turning his attention back to Yaqui, Burnham wrote to Blanche, “and I am in on Yaqui big in every way. So fix up your diet and health. There is lots to do and see and live for yet. I am going to hit the pace now for a while and you will need roller skates to keep up.”
He hoped his energetic confidence would cheer her up. Her knees bothered her, probably arthritis, and she sometimes had to use a wheelchair to get around. She had bouts of neuritis. A dentist had recently yanked many of her teeth. These physical troubles were worsened by the gray loneliness that often draped her when Burnham was away for long stretches. He had been home for a couple of weeks after the formation of Burnham Exploration, but left again in mid-October.
A week later he sent a letter from New York assuring her that she was not “going on the rocks,” and that “Nerves are very largely mental” and can be controlled. He asked her to cut back on social obligations, to think before answering the phone or promising to meet someone, to move slowly, take a sea bath, relax. And don’t worry about finances, he instructed, because “it is all coming right.” When he returned they would go soak on the beach at San Juan Capistrano and drive their new car to Agua Caliente and Lake Arrowhead, “and just trek when we want to and stop as long as we please, and I will love you just as ever and always, and you will get well.”
In New York, the “little syndicate” that Hammond had started for Burnham was turning into something bigger. Burnham had recommended drilling on some patches of promising ground, and Hammond’s expert had agreed. Drilling was expensive, so Hammond decided to raise $300,000 to capitalize Burnham Exploration. His longtime friends Harry Payne Whitney and Ogden Mills joined the syndicate as his partners. If just one drill struck oil, Burnham’s shares would be worth a tidy fortune. Blanche got all this good news with the less welcome information that he had to go to Washington, D.C., then Texas and Louisiana, and didn’t know when he would get home.
Shreveport, Louisiana, reminded him of Johannesburg in 1893—crowded, wide open, pulsing with energy and hustlers. “There are thousands of highbinders here from every oil field in the world.” It was almost impossible to find a bed. He felt lucky to get a cot in a room with seven other men at the Hotel Youree, a mile outside town. He slept little because his roommates stayed up until the wee hours playing cards, smoking, spitting, and jabbering about oil and politics.
Gushers were being reported every week, and properties were trading hands quickly. To scout the oil patches, he rode local trains and then hired jitneys with chains on the tires to churn through the deep red mud. He bought one three-year lease on forty-five acres for $562 and a one-eighth share, “a good little bet.” He had his eye on another $15,000 worth of leases, but he couldn’t get the go-ahead from Hammond because wires weren’t getting through to New York. Mail was almost impossible, too—heaps of it lay undelivered at the post office, and he wasn’t getting letters from Blanche, a silence that always jarred him.
After a couple of weeks in Shreveport he was eager to exit and report to New York. “If I am long delayed in N.Y.,” he wrote to Blanche on November 30, “it sure looks as if we ought to be divorced. I have not seen you for years and years and fear you must have changed a lot and maybe have forgotten me.”
Blanche had recovered some of her health and good spirits by then. She had been writing to him, and felt bad that he hadn’t heard from her; she knew how much he needed their connection. When he had left for New York in July, they never expected him to be away for so long, and now he had been gone for another seven weeks. But she also sounded her old notes of faith in him and the prospect of togetherness in the future. “I feel sure we are going to strike oil,” she wrote, “and if we do I am going everywhere with you. We will not be separated for a single night.”
By April 1920 Burnham Exploration had bet more than $80,000 on ten oil prospects. The investors were so pleased with their scout’s work that they raised his salary to $400 per month. To finance more bets, and to avoid diluting the stock by adding investors, they needed at least one property to spurt oil. Burnham was sanguine, his confidence intact. The main thing was to have prospects in play. Just as important to him was Blanche’s admiration of his enduring boldness. “I am still proving to you I am not a mollusk or a fixed star,” he wrote to her. “I am a comet, maybe and liable to go up in smoke at any time.”
The Yaqui project, however, remained on hold because of ongoing turmoil in Mexico. Between 1910 and 1920, the Mixed Claims Commission, formed by Mexico and the United States to consider claims against either government, took complaints from more than 3,200 American citizens and companies about losses due to violence. During the same period, more than 270 American miners had been killed. Yaqui Indians were still murdering people—poor publicity for land sales. Only about ten stubborn settlers remained.
President Wilson, in his final year of office, clearly intended to maintain his policy of nonintervention. Hammond and Burnham had a flicker of hope that things would somehow work out, but Harry Payne Whitney, who owned a third of the project, refused to sink another dollar into it. Whitney suspected that his $500,000 investment, like Hammond’s, was as good as gone.
He was right. The new Mexican constitution essentially made it impossible for foreigners to own land. Hammond and the Richardsons sold their holdings to the government in 1926 for $6 million. In coming years the Yaqui Valley would become Mexico’s agricultural heartland, just as Burnham had predicted. Another fortune lost.
In the old pueblo of Los Angeles everyone knew La Brea, named for the oily tar that seeped from the ground there. Burnham had discovered the pits one hot summer day while riding for Western Union, when his horse stepped into the goo and almost didn’t get out. The tarred boy and his horse staggered to an adobe house on Rancho La Brea, where Greek George Caralambo helped them clean off. Soon after, the fugitive bandit Tiburcio Vásquez was captured in a shoot-out at Greek George’s.
Now, fifty years later, oil derricks had sprouted all over La Brea and hundreds of other sites around Los Angeles. Oil had been discovered not far from the pits in 1890 by a gold prospector named Edward Doheny, who drilled and found fortune. His success drew other companies. Before the end of the century, more than 500 wells were pumping oil in the vicinity, and derricks were visible from any hill in Los Angeles.
By 1920 every parcel of promising ground near the city had been studied and probed by oil company geologists. So when Burnham told Hammond there was oil under Dominguez Hill, just twelve miles south of downtown Los Angeles, Hammond shook his head. The hill was named after the family who had owned a huge hacienda there since 1784, Rancho San Pedro. Several large companies, including Standard Oil, had drilled test wells to 3,650 feet at Dominguez as recently as 1916. All were abandoned as worthless.
Roderick had told his father that Dominguez deserved another look. Burnham knew every crease and slope in this landscape. As a boy, he had often ridden up Dominguez Hill. On the surface, Dominguez showed no seeps or other signs of oil, but Burnham’s knowledge of the Los Angeles Basin, plus his prospector’s instincts, told him that oil must be pooling beneath the old hacienda’s vantage point. He also had faith in Roderick. Hammond scoffed. “That country had been gone over again and again by the biggest oil companies,” he said later, “and it was impossible to believe they had missed something that was any good at all.” Burnham insisted that Hammond come take a look with a geologist he trusted.
To Hammond’s surprise, the geologist strongly recommended drilling. That would require another $300,000. Hammond’s partners, Whitney and Mills, balked, reluctant to throw money at something already explored and scrapped by other companies. It was Hammond’s turn to insist. He also supplied the first $100,000. The other two reluctantly ponied up. Burnham Exploration signed a lease on 902 acres in May 1922. A month later, to assure financing, the company sold a 50 percent interest to Union Oil. By fall they were spudding in the first well. In March 1923, they hit oil, and in September the first well went on-line, followed quickly by many more.
Dominguez turned out to be one of the most productive oil fields in California. By January 1925 forty-two wells were pumping 1,780,000 barrels a month from a formation estimated to contain many more millions. The three partners of Burnham Exploration had invested about a million dollars. Just fifteen months after the first well began producing, half of that was retired, followed three months later by the second half. The company expanded, drilling wells in Texas, Wyoming, and Canada.
The circle had closed. After seeking his fortune in rough spots all over the globe, Burnham had found his bonanza at age sixty-four in the golden place he had galloped over as a boy, dreaming of Africa and adventure.