Oscar Barkley of Jefferson.
Oscar Barkley was a member of the Mexican Senate from the state of Jefferson.
Barkley's election to the Senate in 1863 coincided with the discovery of petroleum in the state's Tiempo de Dios area. Barkley owed his Senate seat to the financial support of Jeffersonian businessman Monte Benedict. Benedict took an early interest in the Jefferson petroleum industry, and as it boomed in the 1860s, he became the wealthiest man in the state. Barkley, as Benedict's man in the Senate, correspondingly gained power in the Continentalist Party caucus, becoming the Senate Majority Leader in 1866.
As Majority Leader, Barkley joined together with Senator Omar Kinkaid of California to oppose President Arthur Conroy's reform agenda during the last three years of his second term. Unlike Barkley, Kinkaid was able to avoid gaining a reputation as an obstructionist, and this led to Kinkaid's choice as the party's presidential nominee at the Continentalist convention in July 1869.
Sobel makes no further mention of Barkley after Kinkaid's victory in the 1869 Mexican elections, but he presumably remained the Senate Majority Leader, and may have retained that office throughout the Kinkaid and Vining administrations, and into the dictatorship of Chief of State Benito Hermión.
Sobel's sources for the political career of Oscar Barkley are Mortimer Dow's The Giants of Mexico: The Political Manueverings of Kramer and Benedict in the Industrial Era (Mexico City, 1950); Thomas Mason's The Jefferson-California Axis of 1899-1876 (London, 1968); and Herbert Brinkerhoff's The Price of a Man: Oil and Produce in Mexican Politics (Mexico City, 1970).