Word: canyoneering
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...respectability; it is accentuated by his pudgy figure, his middle-aged stoop, his brownish hair and open countenance. Back in 1935, as a result, he had little difficulty in selling acres & acres of steep, arid, brush-covered land in the barren hills above Los Angeles County's Placerita Canyon. The tract looked like a rest home for Gila monsters, but he got $1,950 an acre for it-just $1,900 more than he had paid...
...system was simple. He erected a corrugated-tin "clubhouse" on land (which he leased but did not own) in the oak-shaded canyon bottom. Then he lured aging citizens 34 miles from Los Angeles by offering free bus rides and free lunches. From the clubhouse he allowed them to catch sight of four broken-down old oil derricks which stood near by. Before they left, most of his prospects were convinced that 1) Yant's land was in the grassy canyon bottom and 2) an ocean of oil gurgled just below the surface...
...customers was a wealthy Spanish cattleman named Ramon Samovia; Yant confided to Samovia that oil had just been discovered near some property he owned in Placerita Canyon-he would be rich as soon as he dug up enough money to sink a well himself. Samovia bought into his scheme...
Yant dutifully sank a well, not near the canyon bottom as Samovia had expected, but high on his own hilly acres. To every one's amazement he hit oil: 2,000 barrels a day. He sank four more wells, brought in a producer every time...
...Thousand Men. A wild boom began as a horde of lease-hungry oil speculators and scores of Yant's once disgruntled suckers (many of whom had never filed their deeds) converged on the canyon. The results were spectacular. Amid angry litigation set off by the rush, the California" superior court reversed a law which allowed but one well to the acre, and oil derricks began to rise on Yant's old subdivision like quills on a porcupine's back. In less than a week, 44 drilling rigs were trucked up the single road to the field...