My American Diary

by Clare Sheridan

We started off in the morning in our riding clothes for a two days’ trip across the oil fields. There is no railway, and one might almost say there are no roads to take one over the 80 kilometers to the little “boom oil town” of Zacamixtle where the oil wells are.

Happily it was dry and hot when we started off, passing first of all through the camps and tanks of the Huesteca Oil Company, which is Doheny’s. Wherever the Huasteca has oil stations the roads in that vicinity are good, and the houses of the engineers and employees are well built and nicely situated, lawned and planted, in strong contrast to the surrounding jungle, and the Indian grass huts and their squalor.

Every twenty kilometers along the way, there is a camp, most of these are built by the Foundation Company, a firm that builds railways, that lays pipelines, or restores Cathedrals. There seems to be in fact no building job in the world that the Foundation Company does not take on!

At these camps there are steam heated coils to heat the oil and thin it so that it passes more readily through the pipe line and gigantic pumps to urge it along its course. All of which was a great surprise to me, as I thought the oil flowed by gravity from the wells to the tank ships! Our road displayed at intervals rows of pipes of various sizes, mostly belonging to separate companies, and the spirit of competition was in the atmosphere even of the jungle. Here and there where a pipe had leaked, a black oil pool had oozed through to the surface. In places, such a leakage had rotted the road and made it impassable, so that one had to drive in a detour through the shrub. We went through every kind of scenery, but the woods, of which there were miles and miles, were luxuriantly tropical. I never saw such a variety of flowers, and bush. There were gnarled tall trees on the stems of which scarlet orchids had seeded themselves, and from the branches of which dry grey moss hung down in long festoons. This moss is a particular industry for the peasants, who use it to stuff their mattresses. We lunched at Camp 80, in a wooden mosquito-protected building, where the primitive, hardworking Americans gave of their hospitality. The roads having been indescribable, and the car ill sprung, the day sweltering hot, we were tired and hungry. Dick humiliated me by complaining loudly that the omelette was only “skin” and had no inside. It certainly was not the omelette of a French chef, and I was surprised that Dick knew what an omelette should be like. He is shaping into the proverbial Englishman, who cares what he eats. After lunch I gave him a lecture on manners, and on the art of accepting hospitality, threatening as I did so not to take him with me on my next trip to Russia!

At 4:30 we dined, washed and rested before pushing onto Zacamixtle. This bit of the trip in the dark was the roughest of all. The roads were worse and wet. We got stuck in a village street, the mud being above the axle, and up hill. We had to be pulled out by another car.

For miles one could see the flaring sky and one expected to come upon the wells at the crest of each hill, yet ever there seemed to be another hill between us and the lighted sky. Finally, at a bend in the road, we came upon the full glory of it. Great flares 10 or 12 feet high rising from standards, where they have burned day and night for years. This being the method of disposing of the superfluous gases, which might so easily be put to a useful purpose. But with the wild scramble to make money out of the liquid “black gold” no one has time to think of utility or waste, or even of organization. There is no fraternity in “the fields,” no sense of comradeship, no co-operation, no idea of spending anything on the bit of land that has given so much. There prevails one idea, and that of making as much gold as possible in the shortest space of time, and getting away with it.

These hillsides in the dusk with their silhouettes of drilling towers, of palm trees and grass thatched bamboo huts, added to which the sickly smell of oil, have furnished palaces to men who once had nothing and diamond crowns to women, and given them the power of kings and queens. The mud and chaos, the breathless energy and human striving, have enriched men and women beyond all dream.

But today, the world being saturated in the blood of bankrupting war, the demand for oil has enormously subsided, nor can the price be paid. The golden liquid has sunk temporarily to an eighth of its value of eight months ago. Nevertheless there is no respite in the oil fields. The oil can be stored, the oil producers can afford to wait. So new towers grow up, new holes are bored. Down into the bowels of the earth 1800 feet below sea level the great metal shaft is drilled with the full force of its 4,000 pounds weight until it bores through into the illusive river of oil that flows way down. Albeit in the harbor a few ships only await its flow to carry it to the four corners of the earth, the oil is being caught and caged, forced, heated, pumped and rushed along as before. In fact, more pipe lines and more giant tanks are being hurriedly built, so that the oil can wait in store until the markets of the world have recovered. So they hurry, hurry, bore and build and store, for the “day” of oil will come again as surely as the sun rises over the mountains. Has not Lloyd George said what he will do to the British coal miners now on strike, when he has accumulated and organized oil for fuel as a coal substitute? The world needs oil, will always need oil, will need more and more oil, oil crude and oil refined. So get it, keep it, hold it,—hurry....

But how do the pipes, the boilers, the tanks and the camps, the provisions and the materials get to the fields? What is this super-human effort to achieve the seemingly impossible? Why is there not a pause for breath, a respite from the rush, why is there no co-operation among the companies? There is so much fraternity among workers, why not among employers? A very few months and just a little of this quickly made gold would suffice to achieve a common road for the common welfare, or to build a railway, and obviate this struggle of hired humans to extricate machinery from a bog. Here for instance, is a small stretch of road, called “private.” It can close its gates to a dozen cars that have struggled and bumped and sweated through miles of morass. It is called the Aguila, because that company built it, and when it rains they close the gate to preserve the roads’ condition. What then—? Aguila’s cars can get through, but the Corona, Dutch Shell, Mexican and others can well go back and struggle through a longer hellish way. It was ten o’clock of the night when we made Zacamixtle, and a room was given to us in the staff house. A little clean bare wooden room, with a thin screen partition between us and the noisy card playing party on the other side. Two beds, for Dick, Louise and myself. I left them and went out to see the town. I went in a car, escorted and protected. The town looked like the Chinese towns I have seen in pictures. Some wooden sheds, some open stores, thatched bamboo huts and in one street there was life,—the rest was dark. We looked into saloons whence came the sound of music. In one there was a gambling table and a crowd, we passed on. The other was more full of sound and movement. We went in, took the table that was offered us, and ordered drinks. In breeches and boots I was conspicuous, the other women being half naked half-castes. The men were tall, strong, clear-featured American boys, in big sombrero’s, blue shirts open at the throat, breeches, mud and oil bespattered, and revolver in belt. They danced a perfect fox trot, to music by four men on an instrument that looked like a spinet, but sounded like a xylophone. A man came up to our table and asked me if I was from Minneapolis. I was about to explain that I came from London, and had never seen Minneapolis when my protector intervened sharply with a rebuke that made the Minneapolis man apologize and retreat. I was rather resentful at his being so summarily snubbed, for after all he had, as he said, thought he had met me in Minneapolis. Another man at the next table, drinking his beer out of the bottle, tipped it up for the last dregs, and as he did so turned round to me and when the bottle was drained said “Hullo!” He wasn’t very sober and I disregarded him. Suddenly my protector went up to him threateningly and there were words. As the evening advanced the scene became indescribable. There were Mexicans and there were Chinese in the saloon, and fragments of the conversation are unrepeatable. The two best dressed women in the room became conspicuous. The one in scarlet chiffon, who leaning against the wall had slept, heavily drugged, woke up bad tempered, and took off her white slipper to beat the man on the head who spoke to her. The one in pink chiffon sang noisily as she sat on a man’s knee. There was a white cotton stocking kept up by a mauve garter, and a hiatus of brown skin between the stocking and the chiffon dress. All the women with white shoes were mud covered and trodden on. Our chauffeur sat at our table, and attached to himself a highly painted, cynical faced broad-bosomed dancer. She joined us and her conversation with him was translated to me in an undertone. At one o’clock there being scarce any one sober in the room, and the chiffon gowns having caught their prey and left, we left too.

My impression as I look back, in spite of all the dirt and drunkenness, is of young Americans of fine material, hard working and full of grit and infinitely superior to their conditions of life. These are the men and such are their surroundings, who give their best years for the benefit of the oil shareholders.