La Brea's claim to fame

Usage examples of tarpits.

There went the gravel roads that gunshot' and ricocheted off the bottom of your car with pebble bullets as you ramshackled toward Oklahoma, there to hit the gumbo, the nice bright-red mud roads steering where Pierce-Arrows capsized and sank in tarpits of sludge, and Fords did swiveling dances from side to side of the slick dance-floor highways before they were seen no more, sinking like primeval beasts into the mud.

His eyes were black as tarpits, and his toffee-coloured skin thickly sown with the darker coin-like scars of smallpox, for his white ancestors had bestowed upon the tribe many of the other virtues of civilization: gunpowder, alcohol and more than one variety of the pox.

His eyes were sunken tarpits, his hair equally inky and pointed upward in such disarray that it might have been struck by lightning, his skin pale, his spade-jaw twice too long for his face and off-center.