Formative Years in Far West History of Standard Oil Company

by Gerald Taylor White

This book is an important addition to the group of scholarly business histories which in recent years have significantly deepened our understanding of the economic development of the United States.But Formative Years in the Far West is more than a business history. In relating the fascinating story of the early years of one of the world's greatest companies, Gerald White makes a valuable contribution to our knowledge of the American West. California history, especially as it relates to the discovery of gold, nearly always makes for absorbing reading. No less so does Dr. White's account of the venturesome pioneers who sought out California's black gold and struggled to establish an oil industry there. The story heretofore has been only lightly treated in the literature of the Far West.In vigorous and readable style, the author traces the leadership of the Standard Oil Company of California's predecessor companies, California Star and Pacific Coast Oil, during the difficult years of the late nineteenth century. He shows how they developed in Pico Canyon the State's first commercial oil field, set up refining operations and financed an imaginative marketing organization to meet the competition of Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, then only a marketer of petroleum products in the State. In luminous detail, the book covers the subsequent purchase in 1900 of Pacific Coast Oil by the great Rockefeller organization and the flow thereafter of capital and management resources which resulted in developing a large, integrate enterprise, redesignated the Standard Oil Company (California), to supply Standard's Far Western and Oriental markets. It describes the furor over the famed antitrust suit and the dissolution in 1911 of the Rockefeller empire, affording the California disaffiliate the welcome opportunity to strike out on its own in what, for almost a decade, had been the nation's leading oil State. Following independence, the Company experienced a period of extraordinary growth in an environment marked by increasingly vigorous competition. This volume carries the history of Standard of California to 1919⁠—a year which finds the Company eyeing new means and goals for growth and expansion, the ensuing attainment and surpassing of which have made it the great international enterprise it is today.This history, seven years in preparation, has been painstakingly researched and fully documented. It will appeal not only to the scholar and student of business history, but also to the general reader interested in a vital segment of the nation's past. The volume is illustrated with numerous charts, tables, maps and 32 pages of photographic illustrations.

694 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1962

About the author

A specialist in American business and economic history, Gerald T. White graduated from DePauw University in 1934 and earned his Ph.D. in history from the University of California, Berkeley in 1938. After service in World War II he taught at San Francisco State College and the University of California, Irvine.