ladies think nothing of going fifty or one hundred miles as a morning drive for a distant noon luncheon.
Doheny bought the Bell Ranch for $1,800,000 and turned it over to the Pan-American Company. Boston people previously had an option on two thousand acres of this property at $1666 per acre and forfeited on it. Doheny bought the whole for less than the previous price of a part. This was the largest untouched oil property in the State of California. Derricks are being erected here one thousand feet apart, or one derrick to twenty-five acres. There are known to be four thousand acres of oil lands in the property and oil has been proven the full width at one end. The balance has not yet been proven. The whole is two and a half to three miles wide and seven and a half to eight and a quarter miles long. The Union Oil Company is on the west, the Standard Oil Company on the east, and on the north the Palmer Union brought in a fifteen thousand-barrel gusher, for which, of course, they were unprepared, as gushers in California are not common. They shut it in and later found that it had departed as a gusher. Most of the California oil is obtained by pumping. It is expected that the wells here will do two hundred
