An Old Iron Man
This history is excerpted from a great little book entitled Old Town Orcutt: A Small Califormia Oil Town Remembered by Bob Nelson and produced by the Orcutt Historical Committee. Copies can be purchased at the Old Orcutt Revitatalization Office next to Union 76 in Orld Orcutt or at the Santa Maria Valley Historical Society Museum at 614 S. Broadway, in Santa Maria next to the Chamber of Commerce.
WILLIAM WARREN ORCUTT was a man of firsts. Member of the first class of Stanford University, he was the first person to employ geology in oil exploration. His pioneering studies led to the first great oil discoveries in California - discoveries that helped make oil the dominant fuel of the 20th century. He was also the first to recognize the significance of the fossils at the now-famous La Brea Tar Pits.
When he died he was eulogized as the epitomy of the Western Man: tall and strong and at home in the wilderness; quiet, unassuming and good-natured; most of all, scrupulously honest and respectful of the rights of others.
Much of the following material is taken from those memorials and tributes ...
Born in Dodge County, Minnesota, on February 14, 1869, Orcutt came from Puritan and Virginia stock - some of his ancestors arrived in America on the Mayflower. His home and church training in old New England standards gave him a foundation based on dignity, modesty and honesty.
He arrived in Santa Paula, California, at age 12. His boyhood love of hunting, fishing and exploring in the surrounding hills and streams brought him into contact with oil seepages, rock exposures, oil pits, tunnels and oil wells that had been producing in that area since 1865. His interest in the mechanics of the fledgling oil industry led him to the study of engineering and geology.
When Stanford University opened in 1891, Orcutt was a member of the "Pioneer Class" and roomed with one Herbert Hoover, later to become president of the United States. By the time he graduated in 1895 with a degree in civil engineering, Orcutt was a physical specimen who had been rated among 1,200 fellow students as "No.1 and 100 percent physically perfect."
Back in Santa Paula, Orcutt worked for a spell as an independent civil engineer and surveyor. His office was in the same building that housed the headquarters of the small Union Oil Company of California. Union's president, Lyman Stewart, knew of Orcutt as a boyhood friend of his son; he was also familiar with Orcutt's recent surveying work. In 1898 Stewart hired the young man as superintendent of the firm's San Joaquin Valley Division - the start of a 42-year career with Union Oil.
In 1900 Orcutt organized the company's geology department, a first for the industry and a step that led to historic oil discoveries. At that time, petroleum geology was practically unknown in the oil business. Early oil hunters made easy finds by "smelling for oil in gopher holes" - as one prospector reportedly had done - or by drilling near oil seepages, brea (tar) beds and outcroppings of bituminous sand. As the first wells played out there appeared "doodlebugs" who practiced an unscientific (and some said fraudulent) form of oil exploration. For a fee, a doodlebug armed with a willow wand, welding rod or other witching implement tipped with oil would wander your land until the witching tool shook enough to reveal the doodlebug claimed - the presence of oil.
No early oil man tried to locate fields by observing and plotting out the structural formation of the terrain. But that is what Orcutt set out to do. He tirelessly explored huge tracts of Santa Barbara, Ventura, Los Angeles, Orange and other counties, traveling by buckboard, spring wagon, on horseback or on foot. His geological studies and maps of the hills in northern Santa Barbara County allowed Union Oil to select the most promising properties. By 1904, when highly productive wells like Old Maud in the Orcutt hills came in, confidence in his pioneering approach and judgment was firmly established.
While plotting the northern Santa Barbara County hills in 1901 and 1902, Orcutt confidently laid out a town to serve as a supply base in what he felt would someday be a massive oil field. His men installed a water and sewer system, oil and gas pipelines, storage tanks and equipment for loading oil at railroad sidings. Within the company - and over the geologist's objections - the town became known as "Orcutt."
In 1901 Orcutt made a detailed study of the old Hancock ranch property near the western limits of Los Angeles. He realized there was scientific value in the large accumulation of fossil bones of animals and birds that had become trapped in the brea millions of years before. Quietly he brought the find to the attention of paleontologists at the University of California. Some of the most remarkable prehistoric animal remains in the world were subsequently taken from the La Brea Tar Pits: complete skeletons of sabertoothed tigers, bisons, mastodons, camels and an assortment of birds. In appreciation, scientists appended the name "Orcutt" to the scientific names of several fossils.
To the oil industry Orcutt was a Christopher Columbus, his nose for oil leading to the discovery of more of California's early oil fields than by any other individual. And he did not confine his explorations to California. During the 1920s he was active in the discovery and development of fields in the Rocky Mountains. In his honor an oil town in Colorado was also named "Orcutt."
The search for new oil fields in the first two decades of this century often taxed Orcutt's great physical strength and endurance to their limits. On these trips his dinner companions ranged from Basque shepherds to the president of Mexico. On an exploratory trip to southern Mexico, he traveled several hundred miles on horseback through jungles so dense that the natives had to cut a passage for him with machetes. He returned from this trip with a severe case of malaria. In South America he found the jungle so impenetrable that he walked in streams until his shoes fell apart. He returned to civilization wearing native shoes of woven grass.
His explorations extended not only to the tropical South but also to the frigid North, where once after sleeping on the ground he awoke with his hat frozen to his head. .
To fortitude and endurance he added stoicism in 1934 when he quickly adapted to the loss of his left arm in a motor accident. A Union Oil associate explained: "In the early days of the oil business we had wooden derricks and iron men; now we have iron derricks and wooden men. Bill is one of the old iron men.
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