Opening…

Introduction

Life is too short to compile a book that would cover the subject fully, hence this work is not a detailed history of the great petroleum development. Nor is it a mere collection of dry facts and figures, set forth to show that the oil business is a pretty big enterprise. But it is a sincere endeavor to print something regarding petroleum, based largely upon personal observation, which may be worth saving from oblivion. The purpose is to give the busy outside world, by anecdote and incident and brief narration, a glimpse of the grandest industry of the ages and of the men chiefly responsible for its origin and growth. Many of the portraits and illustrations, nearly all of them now presented for the first time, will be valuable mementoes of individuals and localities that have passed from mortal sight forever. If the reader shall find that “within is more of relish than of cost” the writer of these “Sketches” will be amply satisfied.

SECOND EDITION

The first edition of five-thousand copies having been exhausted, the second is now issued. The oil-development is progressive, hence numerous illustrations and much new matter are added. Hearty thanks are returned hosts of friends and the public generally for kindly appreciation of the work. Perhaps something not thanks may be due the lonely few who “care for none of these things.” This will likely end the pleasant task of reviewing petroleum’s wide field and “living the old days over again,” so it is fitting to pray, with Tiny Tim, “God bless us every one.”

“No man likes mustard by itself.”—BEN JONSON.

“He has carried every point who has mixed the useful with the agreeable.”—HORACE.

PAGES

CHAPTER I. THE STAR IN THE EAST 1-14 Petroleum in Ancient Times—Known from an Early Period in the World’s History—Mentioned in the Scriptures and by Primitive Writers—Solomon Sustained—Stumbling Upon the Greasy Staple in Various Lands—Incidents and Anecdotes of Different Sorts and Sizes—Over Asia, Africa and Europe.

CHAPTER II. A GLIMMER IN THE WEST 15-24 Numerous Indications of Oil on this Continent—Lake of Asphaltum—Petroleum Springs in New York and Pennsylvania—How History is Manufactured—Pioneers Dipping and Utilizing the Precious Fluid—Tombstone Literature—Pathetic Episode-Singular Strike—Geology Tries to Explain a Knotty Point.

CHAPTER III. NEARING THE DAWN 27-40 Salt-Water Helping Solve the Problem—Kier’s Important Experiments—Remarkable Shaft at Tarentum—West Virginia and Ohio to the Front—The Lantern Fiend—What an Old Map Showed—Kentucky Plays Trumps—The Father of Flowing Wells—Sundry Experiences and Observations at Various Points.

CHAPTER IV. WHERE THE BLUE-GRASS GROWS 43-58 Interesting Petroleum Developments in Kentucky and Tennessee—The Famous American Well—A Boston Company Takes Hold—Providential Escape—Regular Mountain Vendetta—A Sunday Lynching Party—Peculiar Phases of Piety—An Old Woman’s Welcome—Warm Reception—Stories of Rustic Simplicity.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

V. A HOLE IN THE GROUND 61-80

The First Well Drilled for Petroleum—The Men Who Started Oil on Its Triumphant March—Colonel Drake’s Operations—Setting History Right—How Titusville was Boomed and a Giant Industry Originated—Modest Beginning of the Greatest Enterprise on Earth—Side Droppings that Throw Light on an Important Subject.

CHAPTER VI. THE WORLD’S LUBRICANT 83-114 A Glance at a Pretty Settlement—Evans and His Wonderful Well—Heavy Oil at Franklin to Grease all the Wheels in Creation—Origin of a Popular Phrase—Operations on French Creek—Excitement at Fever Heat—Galena and Signal Oil-Works—Rise and Progress of a Great Industry—Crumbs Swept Up.

CHAPTER VII. THE VALLEY OF PETROLEUM 117-154 Wonderful Scenes on Oil Creek—Mud and Grease Galore—Rise and Fall of Phenomenal Towns—Shaffer, Pioneer and Petroleum Centre—Fortune’s Queer Vagaries—Wells Flowing Thousands of Barrels—Sherman, Delamater and “Coal-Oil Johnnie”—From Penury to Riches and Back—Recitals that Discount Fairy-Tales.

CHAPTER VIII. PICKING RIPE CHERRIES 157-170 Juicy Streaks Bordering Oil Creek—Famous Benninghoff Robbery—Close Call for a Fortune—City Set Upon a Hill—Allemagooselum to the Front—Cherry Run’s Whirligig—Romance of the Reed Well—Smith and McFate Farms—Pleasantville, Shamburg and Red Hot—Experiences Not Unworthy of the Arabian Nights.

CHAPTER IX. A GOURD IN THE NIGHT 173-188 The Meteoric City that Dazzled Mankind—From Nothing to Sixteen-Thousand Population in Three Months—First Wells and Fabulous Prices—Noted Organizations at Pithole—A Foretaste of Hades—Excitement and Collapse—Speculation Run Wild—Duplicity and Disappointment—The Wild Scramble for the Almighty Dollar.

CHAPTER X. UP THE WINDING RIVER 191-210 Along the Allegheny from Oil Creek—The First Petroleum Company’s Big Strike—Ruler of President—Fagundas, Tidioute and Triumph Hill—The Economites—Warren and Forest—Cherry Grove’s Bombshell—Scouts and Mystery Wells—Exciting Experiences in the Middle Field—Draining a Juicy Section of Oildom.

CHAPTER XI. A BEE-LINE FOR THE NORTH 213-230 The Great Bradford Region Looms Up—Miles of First-Class Territory—Leading Operators—John McKeown’s Millions—Many Lively Towns—Over the New-York Border—All Aboard for Richburg—Crossing into Canada—Shaw’s Strike—The Polar Region Plays a Strong Hand in the Game of Tapping Nature’s Laboratory.

CHAPTER XII. DOWN THE ZIG-ZAGGED STREAM 233-256 Where the Allegheny Flows—Reno Contributes a Generous Mite—Scrubgrass Has a Short Inning—Bullion Looms Up with Dusters and Gushers—A Peep Around Emlenton—Foxburg Falls into Line—Through the Clarion District—St. Petersburg, Antwerp, Turkey City and Dogtown—Edenburg Has a Hot Time—Parker on Deck.

CHAPTER XIII. ON THE SOUTHERN TRAIL 259-290 Butler’s Rich Pastures Unfold Their Oleaginous Treasures—The Cross-Belt Deals Trumps—Petrolia, Karns City and Millerstown—Thorn Creek Knocks the Persimmons for a Time—McDonald Mammoths Break All Records—Invasion of Washington—Green County Has Some Surprises—Gleanings of More or Less Interest.

CHAPTER XIV. MORE OYSTERS IN THE STEW 293-308 Ohio Calls the Turn at Mecca—Macksburg, Marietta, Lima and Findlay Heard From—West Virginia Not Left Out—Volcano’s Early Risers—Sistersville and Parkersburg Drop In—Hoosiers Come Out of Their Shell—Colorado, Kansas, Wyoming, Texas and California Help Flavor the Petroleum Tureen.

CHAPTER XV. FROM THE WELL TO THE LAMP 311-342 Transporting Crude-Oil by Wagons and Boats—Unfathomable Mud and Swearing Teamsters—Pond Freshets—Establishment of Pipe-Lines—National-Transit Company and Some of Its Officers—Speculation in Certificates—Exchanges at Prominent Points—The Product That Illumines the World at Various Stages of Progress.

CHAPTER XVI. THE LITERARY GUILD 345-380 Clever Journalists Who Have Catered to People of the Oil-Regions—Newspapers and the Men Who Made Them—Cultured Writers, Poets and Authors—Notable Characters Portrayed Briefly—Short Extracts from Many Sources—A Bright Galaxy of Talented Thinkers—Words and Phrases that Will Enrich the Language for all Time.

CHAPTER XVII. NITRO-GLYCERINE IN THIS 383-406 Explosives as Aids to the Production of Oil—The Roberts Torpedo Monopoly and Its Leaders—Unprecedented Litigation—Moonlighters at Work—Fatalities from the Deadly Compound—Portraits and Sketches of Victims—Men Blown to Fragments—Strange Escapes—The Loaded Porker—Stories to Accept or Reject.

CHAPTER XVIII. THE STANDARD OIL-COMPANY 409-426 Growth of a Great Corporation—Misunderstood and Misrepresented—Improvements in Treating and Transporting Petroleum—Why Many Refineries Collapsed—Real Meaning of the Trust—What a Combination of Brains and Capital has Accomplished—Men Who Built Up a Vast Enterprise that has no Equal in the World.

CHAPTER XIX. JUST ODDS AND ENDS 429-452 How Natural Gas Played Its Part—Fire and Water Much in Evidence—Changes in Methods and Appliances—Deserted Towns—Peculiar Coincidences and Fatalities—Railroad Episodes—Reminiscences of Bygone Scenes—Practical Jokers—Sad Tragedies—Lights and Shadows Intermingle and the Curtain Falls Forever.

PORTRAITS.

Name Page Abbott, William H. 320 Adams, Rev. Clarence A. 112 Albee, J. P. 187 Allen, Col. M. N. 344 Ames, Gov. Oliver 46 Anderson, George K. 116 Andrews, Charles J. 388 Andrews, Frank W. 116 Andrews, William H. 389 Angell, Cyrus D. 111 Archbold, John D. 420 Armor, William C. 374

Babcock, John 442 Barber, F. H. 373 Barnsdall, Theodore 217 Barnsdall, William 60 Bates, Joseph 32 Baum, William T. 82 Bayne, S. G. 9 Beatty, David 191 Beers, Henry I. 165 Bell, Edwin C. 368 Benninghoff, John 157 Bishop, Coleman E. 344 Bissell, George H. 60 Bleakley, Col. James 87 Bloss, Henry C. 344 Bloss, William W. 344 Boden, Frederick 218 Booth, J. Wilkes 104 Borland, James B. 349 Bowen, Frank W. 359 Bowman, J. H. 344 Boyle, Patrick C. 357 Brewer, Dr. F. B. 60 Brigham, Samuel P. 350 Brown, Samuel Q. 149 Brownson, Marcus 258 Buchanan, George 22

Cady, Daniel 70 Cain, Col. John H. 90 Campbell, John R. 323 Carnegie, Andrew 443 Carroll, Reuben 229 Carroll, R. W. 229 Carter, Col. John J. 222 Chambers, Wesley 150 Clapp, Edwin E. 194 Cochran, Alexander 102 Cochran, Robert L. 346 Colman, Moses J. 104 Cone, Andrew 354 Cone, Mrs. Andrew 354 Conver, Peter O. 351 Cornen, Peter P. 165 Crane, Rev. Ezra G. 112 Crawford, Dr. A. W. 240 Crawford, John P. 107

Name Page Crawford, William R. 82 Criswell, Robert W. 366 Crocker, Frederick 214 Crossley, David 60 Cummings, Capt. H. H. 266

Delamater, George W. 123 Delamater, George B. 42 Dennison, David D. 371 Densmore, Emmett 446 Densmore, James 446 Densmore, Joel D. 446 Densmore, William 446 Dewoody, J. Lowry 88 Dimick, George 261 Dodd, Levi 87 Dodd, Samuel C. T. 423 Dougall, David 259 Drake, Col. Edwin L. 60

Eaton, John 448 Eaton, Rev. S. J. M. 376 Egbert, Dr. A. G. 60 Egbert, Dr. M. C. 133 Emery, David 60 Emery, Lewis 217 Evans, James 82

Fassett, Col. L. H. 449 Fertig, John 127 Fertig, Samuel S. 121 Fisher, Frederick 317 Fisher, Henry 317 Fisher, John J. 317 Forman, George V. 326 Forst, Barney 285 Frew, William 32 Fox, William L. 243 Funk, Capt. A. B. 127

Galey, John H. 254 Galloway, John 180 Goe, Bateman 218 Grandin, Elijah B. 202 Grandin, John L. 202 Gray, Samuel H. 377 Greenlee, C. D. 285 Griffith, W. E. 283 Grimm, Daniel 82 Guffey, James M. 250 Guffey, Wesley S. 250

Haffey, Col. J. K. 371 Hanna, J. Lindsay 87 Harley, Henry 320 Harley, Stephen W. 368 Hasson, Capt. William 116 Henry, Col. James T. 344 Hess, Michael Edic 295 Heydrick, Jesse 191

Name Page Hoover, Col. James P. 82 Hopkins, Edward 323 Hughes, S. B. 196 Hulings, Marcus 246 Hunter, Jahu 266 Hunter, Dr. W. G. 36 Hyde, Charles 60

Irvin, Samuel P. 370

James, Henry F. 82 Janes, Heman 142 Jennings, Edward H. 293 Jennings, Richard 261 Johns, Walter R. 344 Johnston, Dr. Frank H. 377 Jones, Edward C. 373 Jones, Capt. J. T. 217

Kantner, H. Beecher 349 Karns, Stephen D. 261 Kern, Thomas A. 371 Kerr, J. Melville 379 Kier, Samuel M. 30 Kirk, David 217 Koch, George 448

Lambing, James M. 254 Leckey, Robert 218 Lee, John H. 246 Leonard, Charles C. 362 Lock, Jonathan 77 Lockhart, Charles 32 Longwell, W. H. 344

Mapes, George E. 366 Martin, Z. 79 Martindale, Thomas 440 Mather, John A. 175 Metcalfe, L. H. 344 Miller, Charles 96 Miller, T. Preston 447 Mitchell, Foster W. 149 Mitchell, John L. 149 Mitchell, J. Plumer 399 Moorhead, Joseph 373 Morton, Col. L. M. 344 Munson, William 391 Murray, F. F. 366 Muse, James B. 349 Myers, J. J. 239 McCalmont, S. P. 348 McCargo, David 443 McClintock, Homer 357 McCray, James S. 137 McCullagh, W. J. 357 McDonough, Col. Thos. 113 McDowell, Col. Alex. 20 McKeown, John 221 McKinney, J. Curtis 273

McKinney, John L. 273 McLaurin, John J. Front McMullan, W. S. 90 McMullen, Justus C. 374

Needle, George A. 368 Negley, John H. 369 Nesbitt, George H. 261 Neyhart, Adnah 202 Nicklin, James P. 84 Noble, Orange 42

O’Day, Daniel 323 Oesterlin, Dr. Charles 432 Osmer, James H. 236

Painter, William 88 Persons, Charles E. 371 Phillips, Isaac N. 135 Phillips, John T. 135 Phillips, Thomas M. 135 Phillips, Charles M. 135 Phillips, William 116 Phillips, Fulton 375 Phipps, Porter 166 Place, James M. 366 Post, A. G. 443 Plumer, Frederick 246 Plumer, Warren C. 344 Ponton, John 362 Pratt, Charles 421 Prentice, Frederic 109

Rattigan, P. A. 369 Raymond, Aaron W. 87 Reed, William 162 Reineman, Isaac 447 Reisinger, Col. J. W. H. 350

Reno, Gen. Jesse L. 234 Rial, Edward 88 Roberts, Col. E. A. L. 382 Roberts, Dr. Walter B. 382 Rockefeller, John D. 409 Rouse, Henry R. 116 Rowland, James W. 300 Rumsey, George 239

Satterfield, John 258 Seep, Joseph 335 Shamburg, Dr. G. 167 Shannon, Philip M. 198 Shaw, John 226 Sheakley, Gov. James 182 Sheasley, Jacob 82 Showalter, J. B. 445 Sibley, Edwin H. 377 Sibley, Joseph C. 96 Simonds, Joseph W. 104 Simpson, Robert 359 Siviter, William H. 357 Smiley, Alfred W. 181 Smiley, Edwin W. 347 Smiley, J. Howard 347 Smith, George P. 90 Smith, J. Harrison 347 Smith, William A. 61 Smithman, John B. 447 Snell, Alfred L. 374 Snowden, Rev. N. R. 20 Speechly, Samuel 432 Staley, W. H. 210 Stevens, William H. 442 Stewart, Samuel 169 Stone, Charles W. 206 Stuck, Col. Edward H. 357 Swan, B. E. 101

Tarbell, Franklin S. 116 Tarr, James S. 292 Taylor, Frank H. 357 Taylor, Hascal L. 258 Taylor, O. P. 223 Thompson. William A. 392 Thomson, Frank 442 Thropp, Miss Amelia 354 Titus, Jonathan 65 Truesdell, Frank W. 366 Tyson, James 362

Vanausdall, John 116 Vandergrift, Capt. J. J. 326 Vandergrift, T. J. 209

Watson, D. T. 446 Watson, Jonathan 60 Watson, Lewis F. 206 Welch, Philip C. 359 Wenk, Jacob 350 Wetter, Henry 252 Whitaker, Albert P. 346 Whitaker, William S. 346 White, Charles E. 357 Wicker, Charles C. 360 Williams, Samuel L. 364

Yewens, Rev. Harry L. 345 Young, Samuel 370 Young, W. J. 269 Youngson, A. B. 443 Youngson, J. J. 443

Zane, John P. 116 Zeigler, H. C. 300 Zeigler, Col. Jacob 370

--------------

ILLUSTRATIONS.

Page

Oil-Wells in India 6

View in Oil City, Pa., after 26 the flood, March 17, 1867

Baku, Russia and Bakany Views 14

Notable Wells on Oil Creek in 42 1861-2-3

Map of Venango County 59

Early Operators on Oil Creek 60

Group Picture—Maj. W. T. Baum, 82 Jacob Sheasley, Henry F. James, James Evans, W. R. Crawford, Daniel Grimm, Col. Jas. P. Hoover

Miller & Sibley’s Prospect 115 Hill Stock Farm, Franklin, Pa.

Group Picture—John Vanausdall, 116 G. K. Anderson, Wm. Phillips, F. S. Tarbell, F. W. Andrews, Capt. Wm. Hasson, Henry R. Rouse, John P. Zane. D. W. Kenney’s Allemagoozelum City Well No. 2

Petroleum Centre, 1894 131

Wells on Benninghoff Run, 156 Venango Co., Pa., in 1866

General View of Pithole in 172 August, 1895

Page

Parker Oil Exchange in 1874 190

Up the Allegheny River 212

Views at St. Petersburg, 232 Edenburg and Other Places

Karns City, Greece City, 258 Petrolia, 1873; Group of Hascal L. Taylor, Marcus Brownson and John Satterfield

Group Picture—Richard 261 Jennings, S. D. Karns, George Nesbit and George Dimick

Armstrong Well 281

Views on the Tarr Farm, Oil 292 Creek, in 1863-6. Refinery and Oil-Wells at Russia and Baku

Pond Freshet at Oil City, 310 March, ’63

A Cluster of Pioneer Editors 344

Group Picture—F. F. Murray, 366 Frank W. Truesdell, R. W. Criswell, James M. Place and George E. Mapes

Group Picture—Col. J. K. 371 Haffey, D. A. Dennison, Thomas A. Kern and Charles F. Persons

Well Flowing Oil After 382 Torpedoing

Standard Building, 26 408 Broadway, N.Y.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

I. THE STAR IN THE EAST

PETROLEUM IN ANCIENT TIMES—KNOWN FROM AN EARLY PERIOD IN THE WORLD’S HISTORY—MENTIONED IN THE SCRIPTURES AND BY PRIMITIVE WRITERS—SOLOMON SUSTAINED—STUMBLING UPON THE GREASY STAPLE IN VARIOUS LANDS—INCIDENTS AND ANECDOTES OF DIFFERENT SORTS AND SIZES—OVER ASIA, AFRICA AND EUROPE FOR THE STUFF.

----------

“The morning star in all its splendor was rising in the East.”—Felix Dahn.

“Alone in the increasing darkness * * * it is a beacon light.”—Disraeli.

“It were all one that I should love a bright particular star.”—Shakespeare.

“The years that are gone roll before me with their deeds.”—Ossian.

“Oil out of the flinty rock.”—Deuteronomy xxxii: 13.

“And the rock poured me out rivers of oil.”—Job xxix: 6.

“Will the Lord be pleased with * * * ten-thousands of rivers of oil?”—Micah vi: 7.

“I have myself seen pitch drawn out of the lake and from water in Zacynthus.”—Herodotus.

“The people of Agrigentum save oil in pits and burn it in lamps.”—Dioscorides.

“Can ye not discern the signs of the times?”—St. Matthew xvi: 3.

----------

Petroleum, a name to conjure with and weave romances around, helps out Solomon’s oft-misapplied declaration of “No new thing under the sun.” Possibly it filled no place in domestic economy when the race, if the Darwinian theory passes muster, sported as ring-tailed simians, yet the Scriptures and primitive writers mention the article repeatedly. Many intelligent persons, recalling the tallow-dip and lard-oil lamp of their youth, consider the entire petroleum-business of very recent date, whereas its history goes back to remotest antiquity. Naturally they are disappointed to find it, in various aspects, “the same thing over again.” Men and women in the prime of life have forgotten the flickering pine-knot, the sputtering candle or the smoky sconce hardly long enough to associate rock-oil with “the brave days of old.” This idea of newness the host of fresh industries created by oil-operations has tended to deepen in the popular mind. Enjoying the brilliant glow of a modern argand-burner, double-wicked, silk-shaded, onyx-mounted and altogether a genuine luxury, it seems hard to realize that the actual basis of this up-to-date elegance has existed from time immemorial. Of derricks, drilling-tools, tank-cars, refineries and pipe-lines our ancestors were blissfully ignorant; but petroleum itself, the foundation of the countless paraphernalia of the oil-trade of to-day, flourished “ere Noah’s flood had space to dry.” Although used to a limited extent in crude-form for thousands of years, it was reserved for the present age to introduce the grand illuminant to the world generally. After sixty centuries the game of “hide-and-seek” between Mother Earth and her children has terminated in favor of the latter. They have pierced nature’s internal laboratories, tapping the huge oil-tanks wherein the products of her quiet chemistry had accumulated “in bond,” and up came the unctuous fluid in volumes ample to fill all the lamps the universe could manufacture and to grease every axle on this revolving planet! The demon of darkness has been exorcised from the gloomy caverns of old to make room for the modern angel of light. Science, the rare alchemist which converts the tear of unpaid labor into a steam-giant that turns with tireless arm the countless wheels of toil, lays bare the deepest recesses of the past to bring forth treasures for the present.

The capital invested in petroleum in this country has increased from one-thousand dollars, raised in 1859 to drill the first well in Pennsylvania, to six-hundred-millions. It is just as easy to say six-hundred-million dollars as six-hundred-million grains of sand, but the possibilities of such a sum of money afford material for endless flights of the imagination. Thirty-thousand miles of pipe-lines handle the output most expeditiously, conveying it to the seaboard at less than teamsters used to receive for hauling it a half-mile. Ten-thousand tank-cars have been engaged in its transportation. Seventy-five bulk-steamers and fleets of sailing-vessels carry refined from Philadelphia and New York to the most distant ports in Europe, Africa and Asia. “Astral Oil” and “Standard White” have penetrated “wherever a wheel can roll or a camel’s foot be planted.” In Pennsylvania, South-eastern Ohio and West Virginia thirty-five-million barrels have been produced and eight-thousand wells drilled in a single year. Add to this the results of operations in North-eastern Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and California, and it must be acknowledged that petroleum is entitled to the chief seat in the synagogue. Edward Bellamy may, perhaps, be imitated profitably and pleasantly in this connection by “Looking-Backward.”

Looking forward is the proper kink, Smooth as skating in an icy rink, In one’s planning how to fill a chink At manifold times and places; But for winning in a thoughtful think, Past and present joining with a link Guaranteed to wash and never shrink, Looking backward holds four aces.

Precisely how, why, when, where and by whom petroleum was first discovered and utilized nobody living can, and nobody dead will, tell anxious inquirers. The information has “gone where the woodbine twineth,” to join the dodo, the megatherium, the ichthyosaurus and the “lost arts” Wendell Phillips embalmed in fadeless prose. An erratic Joe-Millerite has traced the stuff to the Garden of Eden in a fashion akin to the chopping logic of the Deacon’s “Wonderful One-Horse Shay.” Hear him:

“Adam had a fall?”

“Sure as death and taxes.”

“Why did he fall with such neatness and dispatch?”

“Maybe he took a spring to fall.”

“Naw! Because everything was greased for the occasion! Unquestionably the only lubricant on this footstool just then was the petroleum brewed in God’s own subterranean stills. Therefore, petroleum figured in Eden, which was to be demonstrated according to Hoyle. See?”

There is no “irrepressible conflict” between this reasoning, the version of the Pentateuch and the idea of Peck’s Bad Boy that “Adam clumb a appul-tree to put coal-oil onto it to kill the insecks, an’ he sawed a snaik, an’ the oil made the tree slippy, an’ he fell bumpety-bump!” What a heap of trouble would have been avoided if that pippin had been soaked in crude-oil, that Eve might turn up her nose at it and give the serpent the marble heart! As Miss Haney expresses it:

“O Eve, little Eve, if you only had guess’d Who it was that tempted you so, You’d have kept out of mischief, nor lost your nice home For the sake of an apple, I know.”

Other wags attribute the longevity of antediluvian veterans to their unstinted use of petroleum for internal and external ailments! Had medical almanacs, patent nostrums and circus-bill testimonials been evolved at that interesting period, the oleum-vender would have hit the bull’s-eye plump in the center. Guess at the value of recommendations like these, with the latest accompaniment of “before-and-after” pictures in the newspapers:

LAND OF NOD, _April 1, B. C. 5678.—This is to certify that I keep my strength up to blacksmith pitch by frequent applications of Petroleum Prophylactic and six big drinks of Benzine Bitters daily. Lifting an elephant, with one hand tied behind me, is my favorite trick.

SANDOW TUBAL-CAIN.

MT. ARARAT, _July 4, B. C. 4004.—Your medicine is out of sight in our family. It relieved papa of an overdose of fire-water, imbibed in honor of his boat distancing Dunraven’s barge on this glorious anniversary, and cured Ham of trichina yesterday. Mamma’s pug slid off the upper deck into the swim and was fished out in a comatose condition. A solitary whiff of your Pungent Petroleum Pastils revived him instantly, and he was able to howl all night.

SHEM & JAPHETH.

SOMEWHERE IN ASIA, _Dec. 21, B. C. 4019.—Your incomparable Petroleum Prophylactic, which I first learned about from a college chum, is a daisy-cutter. Thanks to its superlative virtues, I have lived to be a trifle older than the youngest ballet-girl in the “Black Crook.” I celebrated my nine-hundred-and-sixty-ninth birth-day by walking umsteen miles before luncheon, playing left-tackle with the Y. M. C. A. Foot-ball Team in the afternoon and witnessing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—two Topsys, two Markses, two Evas, two donkeys and four Siberian Bloodhounds—in the evening. Next morning’s paper flung this ticket to the breeze:

“For Mayor of Jeroosalum We nominate Methoosalum.”

By sticking faithfully and fearlessly to your unrivaled elixir I expect to round out my full thousand years and run for a second term. Refer silver-skeptics and gold-bug office-seekers to me for particulars as to the proper treatment.

GROVER LINGER LONGER METHUSELAH.

PLEASANT VALLEY, _Oct. 30, B. C. 5555.—I just want to shout “Eureka,” “Excelsior,” “Hail Columbia,” “E Pluribus Unum,” and give three cheers for your Kill-em-off Kerosene! Both my mothers in-law, who had bossed me seventy decades, tried a can of it on a sick fire this morning. Their funeral is billed for four o’clock p. m. to-morrow. Send me ten gallons more at once.

BRIGHAM YOUNG LAMECH.

ISLES OF GREECE.—I defy the Jersey Lighting to knock me out while your Benzine Bitters are in the ring. “A good thing; push it along.”

SULLIVAN AJAX.

Leaving the realm of conjecture, it is quite certain that the “pitch” which coated the ark and the “slime” of the builders of Babel were products of petroleum. Genesis affirms that “the vale of Siddim was full of slime-pits”—language too direct to be dismissed by hinting vaguely at “the mistakes of Moses.” Deuteronomy speaks of “oil out of the flinty rock” and Micah puts the pointed query: “Will the Lord be pleased with * * * ten thousands of rivers of oil?” To the three friends who condoled with him in his grievous visitation of boils the patriarch of Uz asserted: “And the rock poured me out rivers of oil.” Whatever his hearers might think of this apparent stretch of fancy, Job’s forecast of the oleaginous output was singularly felicitous. Evidently the Old-Testament writers, whose wise heads geology had not muddled, knew a good deal about the petroleum situation in their day.

A follower of Voltaire was accustomed to wind up his assaults on inspiration by criticising these oily quotations unmercifully. “Could anything be more absurd,” he would ask, “than to talk of ‘oil from a flinty rock’ and ‘rocks pouring forth rivers of oil?’ If anything were needed to prove the Bible a fool-book from start to finish, such utterances would settle the matter beyond dispute. Rocks yielding rivers of oil cap the climax of ridiculous nonsense! Next they’ll want folks to believe that Jonah swallowed the whale, hair and hide and breeches. Bah!”

Months and years passed away swiftly, as they have a habit of doing, and the sturdy agnostic continued arguing pluckily. At length tidings of oil-wells flowing thousands of barrels of crude reached him from William Penn’s broad heritage. He came, he saw and, unlike Julius Cæsar, he surrendered unconditionally. Remarking, “This beats the deuce!” the doubter doubted no more. He revised his opinions, humbly accepted the gospel and professed religion, openly and above-board. Hence the petroleum-development is entitled to the credit of one notable conversion, at least, and the balance is on the right side of the ledger, assuming that a human soul outweighs the terrestrial globe in the unerring scales of the Infinite.

Can they be wrong, who think the stingy soul That grudges honest toil its scanty dole Not worth its weight in slaty, sulphur coal?

Whether petroleum, which literally signifies “rock-oil,” be of mineral, vegetable or animal origin matters little to the producer or consumer, who views it from a commercial standpoint. In its natural state it is a variable mixture of numerous liquid hydro-carbons, holding in solution paraffine and solid bitumen, or asphaltum. The fountains of Is, on the Euphrates, were familiar to the founders of Babylon, who secured indestructible mortar for the walls of the city by pouring melted asphaltum between the blocks of stone. These famous springs attracted the attention of Alexander, Trajan and Julian. Even now asphaltum procured from them is sold in the adjacent villages. The commodity is skimmed off the saline and sulphurous waters and solidified by evaporation. The ancient Egyptians used another form of the same substance in preparing mummies, probably obtaining their supplies from a spring on the Island of Zante, described by Herodotus. It was flowing in his day, it is flowing to-day, and a citizen of Boston owns the property. Wells drilled near the Suez canal in 1885 found petroleum. So the gay world jogs on. Mummified Pharaohs are burned as fuel to drive locomotives over the Sahara, while the Zantean fount whose oil besmeared “the swathed and bandaged carcasses” is purchased by a Massachusetts bean-eater! Yet victims of “that tired feeling” turn to namby-pamby novels of the Laura-Jean-Libby brand for real romance!

“For truth is strange, stranger than fiction.”

Asphaltum is found in the Dead Sea, the supposed site of Sodom and Gomorrah, and on the surface of a chain of springs along its banks, far below the level of the ocean. Strabo referred to this remarkable feature two thousand years ago. The destruction of the two ill-fated cities may have been connected with, if not caused by, vast natural stores of this inflammable petroleum. The immense accumulations of hardened rock-oil in the center and on the banks of the sea were oxidized into rosin-like asphalt. Pieces picked up from the waters are frequently carved, in the convents of Jerusalem, into ornaments, which retain an oily flavor. Aristotle, Josephus and Pliny mention similar deposits at Albania, on the shores of the Adriatic. Dioscorides Pedanius, the Greek historian, tells how the citizens of Agrigentum, in Sicily, burned petroleum in rude lamps prior to the birth of Christ. For two centuries it lighted the streets of Genoa and Parma, in northern Italy. Plutarch describes a lake of blazing petroleum near Ecbatana. Persian wells have produced oil liberally for ages, under the name of “naphtha,” the descendants of Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes consuming the fluid for its light. The earliest records of China refer to petroleum and small quantities have been found in Thibet. An oil-fountain on one of the Ionian Islands has gushed steadily for over twenty centuries, without once going on a strike or taking a vacation. Austria and France likewise possess oil-springs of considerable importance. Thomas Shirley, in 1667, tested the contents of a shallow pit in Lancashire, England, which burned readily. Rev. John Clayton visited it and wrote in 1691:

“I saw a ditch where the water burned like brandy. Country-folk boil eggs and meat in it.”

Near Bitche, a small fort perched on the top of a peak, at the entrance of one of the defiles of Lorraine, opening into the Vosges Mountains-a fort which was of great embarrassment to the Prussians in their last French campaign—and in the valley guarded by this fortress stand the chateau and village of Walsbroun, so named from a strange spring in the forest behind it. In the middle ages this fountain was famous. Inscriptions, ancient coins and the relics of a Roman road attest that it had been celebrated even in earlier times. In the sixteenth century a basin and bath for sick people existed. No record of its abandonment has been preserved. In the last century it was rediscovered by a medical antiquarian, who found the naphtha, or white petroleum, almost exhausted.

Nine years ago Adolph Schreiner died in a Vienna hospital, destitute and alone. Yet he was the only son of a man known in Galicia as “the Petroleum King” and founder of the great industry of oil-refining. The father shared the lot of many inventors and benefactors, increasing the world’s wealth untold millions and poverty-stricken himself in his last days. Schreiner owned a piece of ground near Baryslaw from which he took a black, tarry muck the peasants used to heal wounds and grease cart-axles. He kneaded a ball from the slime, stuck a wick into it and a red flame burned until the substance exhausted. This was the first petroleum-lamp! Later Schreiner heard of distillation, filled a kettle with the black earth and placed it on the fire. The ooze boiled over and exploded, shivering the kettle and covering the zealous experimenter with deep scars. He improved his apparatus, produced the petroleum of commerce and sold bottles of the fluid to druggists in 1853. He drilled the first Galician oil-well in 1856 and built a real refinery, which fire destroyed in 1866. He rebuilt the works on a larger scale and fire blotted them out, ruining the owner. Gray hairs and feebleness had come, he ceased the struggle, drank to excess and died in misery. His son, from whom much was expected, failed as a merchant and peddled matches in Vienna from house to house, just as the aged brother of Signor Blitz, the world-famed conjuror, is doing in Harrisburg to-day. Dying at last in a public hospital, kindred nor friends followed the poor outcast to a pauper’s grave. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity and vexation of spirit.”

Life’s page holds each man’s autograph— Each has his time to cry or laugh, Each reaps his share of grain or chaff, But all at last the dregs must quaff— The tombstone holds their epitaph.

Around the volcanic isles of Cape Verde oil floats on the water and to the south of Vesuvius rises through the Mediterranean, exactly as when “the morning stars sang together.” Hanover, in Germany, boasts the most northerly of European “earth-oils.” The islands of the Ottoman Archipelago and Syria are richly endowed with the same product. Roumania is literally flowing with petroleum, which oozes from the Carpathians and pollutes the water-springs. Turkish domination has hindered the development of the Roumanian region. Southern Australia is blessed with bituminous shales, resembling those in Scotland, good for sixty gallons of petroleum to the ton. The New-Zealanders obtained a meager supply from the hill-sides, collecting carefully the droppings from the interior rocks, and several test-wells have resulted satisfactorily. The unsophisticated Sumatrans, whose straw-huts and squeaky music rendered the Javanese village at the Columbian Exposition a tip-top novelty, stick pipes in rocks and hills that trickle petroleum and let the liquid drop upon their heads until their bodies are sleek and slippery as an eel. Chauncey F. Lufkin, of Lima, Ohio, inventor of the “Disk Powers” that make oil-wells almost pump themselves, says it is funnier than a three-ringed circus to watch a group of half-clad girls and women, two-thirds of them carrying babies, taking turns at this operation. He has traveled through the oil-fields of Sumatra, India and Russia and his kodak has reproduced many odd scenes for the delectation of his friends. Two companies drilling in Java propose to find out all about its oil-resources as quickly as the tools can reach the decisive spot. Ultimately Java coffee may be tinged with an oily flavor that will tickle the palates of consumers and set them wondering how the new aroma escaped their notice so persistently. Verily, “no pent-up Utica confines” petroleum within the narrow compass of a nation or a continent. With John Wesley it may exultingly exclaim: “The whole earth is my parish,” or echo the Shakespearean refrain: “The world’s mine oyster.”

J. W. Stewart, of Clarion, has been in Africa drilling for oil. An English syndicate is behind the enterprise and test-wells are to be bored in the goldfields on the southern coast. Stewart, who returned lately, says it is amusing to see the monkeys climb up a derrick and watch the drillers at work. Just how amused they will be, if the Englishmen strike a spouter that drenches the monkeys and the derrick, each must diagram for himself until the result of carrying the petroleum-war into Africa is decided. C. E. Seavill, since 1874 mining-and-land agent at Kimberley, in the diamond-fields of South Africa, has organized a company with seventy-five-thousand dollars capital to operate at Ceres, eighty miles north of Cape Town. He has leased enormous tracts of land, which American experts pronounce likely to prove rich oil-territory, and the first well will be drilled at a spot selected by W. W. Van Ness, of New York, an authority on petroleum. Mr. Seavill spent years endeavoring to educate the people up to the notion that South Africa might be good for something besides gold and precious stones. A series of gushers in the Ceres district, big enough to discount yellow nuggets and sparkling gems, should be the fitting reward of his enterprise. Perhaps Heber’s missionary-hymn may yet start like this, when the Hottentots pose as oil-operators:

From Java’s spicy mountains, From Afric’s golden strand, Come tales of oily fountains Roll’d up by the third sand.

The Rangoon district of India long yielded four-hundred-thousand hogsheads annually, the Hindoos using the oil to heal diseases, to preserve timber and to cremate corpses. Birma has been supplied from this source for an unknown period. The liquid, which is of a greenish-brown color and resembles lubricating-oil in density, gathers in pits sunk twenty to ninety feet in beds of sandy clays, overlying slates and sandstones. Clumsy pots or buckets, operated by quaint windlasses, hoist the oil slowly to the mouth of the pits, whence it is often carried across the country in leathern bags, borne on men’s shoulders, or in earthern jars, packed into carts drawn by oxen. Major Michael Symes, ambassador to the Court of Ava in 1765, published a narrative of his sojourn, in which is this passage:

“We rode until two o’clock, at which hour we reached Yaynangheomn, or Petroleum Creek. * * * The smell of the oil is extremely offensive. It was nearly dark when we approached the pits. There seemed to be a great many pits within a small compass. Walking to the nearest, we found the aperture about four feet square and the sides lined, as far as we could see down, with timber. The oil is drawn up in an iron-pot, fastened to a rope passed over a wooden cylinder, which revolves on an axis supported by two upright posts. When the pot is filled, two men take hold of the rope by the end and run down a declivity, which is cut in the ground, to a distance equal to the depth of the well. When they reach the end of the track the pot is raised to its proper elevation; the contents, water and oil together, are discharged into a cistern, and the water is afterward drawn through a hole in the bottom. * * * When a pit yielded as much as came up to the waist of a man, it was deemed tolerably productive; if it reached his neck it was abundant, and that which reached no higher than his knee was accounted indifferent.”

Labor-saving machinery has not forged to the front to any great degree in the oil-fields of the East Indies. For the Burmese trade flat-boats ascend the Irrawaddy to Rainanghong, a town inhabited almost exclusively by the potters who make the earthen jars in which the oil is kept for this peculiar traffic. The methods of saving and handling the greasy staple have not changed one iota since John the Baptist wore his suit of camel’s-hair and curry-combed the Sadducees in the Judean wilderness. Progress cuts no ice beneath the shadows of the Himalayas, notwithstanding the missionary efforts of Xavier, Judson, Carey, Morrison and Duff.

Petroleum in India occurs in middle or lower tertiary rock. In the Rawalpindi district of the Panjab it is found at sixteen localities. At Gunda a well yielded eleven gallons a day for six months, from a boring eighty feet deep, and one two-hundred feet deep, at Makum, produced a hundred gallons an hour. The coast of Arakan and the adjacent islands have long been famed for mud-volcanoes caused by the eruption of hydrocarbon gases. Forty-thousand gallons a year of petroleum have been exported by the natives from Kyoukpyu. The oil is light and pure. In 1877 European enterprise was attracted to this industry and in 1879 work was undertaken by the Borongo Oil-Co. The company started on a large scale and in 1883 had twenty-four wells in operation, ranging from five-hundred to twelve-hundred feet in depth, one yielding for a few weeks one-thousand gallons daily. The total pumped from ten wells during the year was a quarter-million gallons; and in 1884 the company had to suspend payment. Large supplies of high-class petroleum might be obtained from this region, if suitable methods of working were employed.

Japan also takes a position in the oleiferous procession allied to that of the yellow dog under the band-wagon. At the base of Fuji-Yama, a mountain of respectable altitude, the thrifty subjects of the Mikado manage a cluster of oil-pits in the style practiced by their forefathers. The mirv holes, the creaking apparatus and the general surroundings are second editions of the Rangoon exhibits. Yum-Yum’s countrymen are clever students and they have much to learn concerning petroleum. Twenty-one years ago a Japanese nobleman inspected the Pennsylvania oil-fields, sent thither to report to the government all about the American system of operating the territory. His observations, embodied in an official statement, failed to amend the moss-grown processes of the Fuji-Yamans, who preferred to “fight it out on the old line if it took all summer.” Two others followed on a similar mission in 1897. Fifty wells, from one thousand to eighteen hundred feet deep, are producing in the Echigo province of Japan. The largest flowed five-hundred barrels the first day, declining to eight or ten, the customary average. The sand is white and the oil is of two grades, one amber of 38° gravity, the other much darker and of 310 gravity. The methods of refining and transporting are of the rudest, women carrying the crude from the wells on their backs as squaws in North America tote their papooses.

In 1874 S. G. Bayne, now president of the Seaboard Bank of New-York City, visited these oriental regions. The hard fate of the benighted heathen moved him to briny tears. They had never heard or read of “the annealed steel coupling,” “the Palm link,” the tubing, casing, engines and boilers the distinguished tourist had planted in every nook and corner of Oildom. With the spirit of a true philanthropist, Bayne determined to “set them on a higher plane.” His choicest Hindostanee persiflage was aired in detailing the advantages of the Pennsylvania plan of running the petroleum-machine. Tales of fortunes won on Oil Creek and the Allegheny River were garnished with scintillations of Irish wit that ought to have convulsed the listeners. Alas! the supine Asiatics were not built that way and the good seed fell upon barren soil. The story and, despite the finest lacquer and veneer embellishments, the experience were repeated in Japan. What better could be expected of pagans who wore skirts for full-dress, practiced hari-kari and knew not a syllable about Brian Boru? Their conduct was another convincing evidence of “the stern Calvinistic doctrine” of total depravity. The Japs voted to stay in their venerable rut and not monkey with the Yankee buzz-saw. “And the band played on.”

Years afterwards two cars of drilling-tools and well-machinery were shipped to Calcutta and a couple of complete rigs to Yeddo—“only this and nothing more.” The genial Bayne attempted to square the account by printing his eastern adventures and sending marked copies of translations to the Indo-Japanese press. Doubtless the waste-basket received what the office-cat spared of this unusual consignment. Mr. Bayne began his prosperous career as an oilman by striking a snug well in 1869, on Pine Creek, near Titusville. He has written a book on Astronomy which twinkles with gobs of astral science Copernicus, Herschell, Leverrier, Proctor or Maria Mitchell never dreamed of. His unique advertisements have spread his fame from the Atlantic to the Pacific. Digest these random samples of originality worthy of John J. Ingalls:

“We never make kite-track records; our speed takes in the full circle.”

“The graveyards of the enemy are the monuments of our success.”

“We never speak of our goods without glancing at the bust of George Washington which squats on the top of our annealed steel safe; a twenty-five cent plaster cast of George lends an atmosphere of veracity to a trade which in these days it sometimes needs.”

“Abdul Azis, the late Sultan of Morocco, bought a cheap boiler to drill a water-well. It bu’st and he is now Abdul Azwas.”

“We will never be buried with the ‘unknown dead’—we advertise.”

“Our patent coupling is the precipitated vapor of fermented progress.”

“The intellectual and æsthetic are provided for in consanguinity to their taste.”

“Our conversational soloists never descend to orthochromatic photography in their orphean flights; they hug the shore of plain Anglo-Saxon and scoop the doubting Thomas.”

“It will never do to shake a man because the lambrequins begin to appear on the bottom of his pants and he wears a ‘dickey’ with a sinker.”

“The Forget-me-nots of to-day are frequently found the Has-beens of to-morrow.”

“Credit is the flower that blooms in life’s buttonhole.”

“Many a man who now gives dinner-parties in a Queen-Anne front would be nibbling his Frankfurter in a Mary-Ann back had we not given him a helping hand at the right moment.”

The classic ground of Petroleum is the little peninsula of Okestra, jutting into the Caspian Sea. Extraordinary indications of oil and gas extend over a strip of country twenty-five miles long by a half-mile wide, in porous sandstone. Springs of heavier petroleum flow from hills of volcanic rocks in the vicinity. Open wells, in which the oil settles as it oozes from the rocks, are dug sixteen to twenty feet deep. For countless generations the simple natives dipped up the sticky fluid and carried it great distances on their backs, to burn in its crude state, besides sending a large amount yearly to the Shah’s dominions. It is a forbidding spot-rocky, desolate, without a stream or a sign of vegetation. The unfruitful soil is saturated with oil, which exudes from the neighboring hills and sometimes filters into receptacles hewn in the rock at a prehistoric epoch. On gala days it was part of the program to pour the oil into the Caspian and set it ablaze, until the sea and land and sky appeared one unbroken mass of vivid, lurid, roaring flame. The “pillar of fire” which guided the wandering Israelites by night could scarcely have presented a grander spectacle. The sight might well convey to awe-stricken beholders intensely realistic notions of the place of punishment Col. Ingersoll and Henry Ward Beecher have sought by tongue and pen to abolish. “Old Nick,” however, at last advices was still doing a wholesale business at the old stand!

Near Belegan, six miles from the chief village of the Baku district, the grandest of these superb exhibitions was given in 1817. A column of flame, six-hundred yards in diameter, broke out naturally, hurling rocks for days together and raising a mound nine-hundred feet high. The roar of steaming brine was terrific. Oil and gas rise wherever a hole is bored. The sides of the mountain are black with dark exudations, while a spring of white oil issues from the foot. A clay-pipe or hollow reed, steeped in lime water and set upright in the floor of a dwelling, serves as a sufficient gas-pipe. No wonder such a land as Baku, where in the fissures of the earth and rock the naphtha-vapors flicker into flame, where a boiling lake is covered with flame devoid of sensible heat, where after the autumn showers the surrounding country seems wrapped in fire, where the October moon lights up with an azure tint the entire west and Mount Paradise dons a robe of fiery red, where innumerable jets envelope the plains on moonless nights, where all the phenomena of distillation and combustion can be studied, should have aroused the religious sentiment of oriental mystics. The adoring Parsee and the cold-blooded chemist might worship cheek-by-jowl. Amidst this devouring element men live and love, are born and die, plant onions and raise sheep, as in more prosaic regions.

At the southern extremity of the peninsula oil and gas shot upward in a huge pyramid of light. Here was “the eternal fire of Aaku,” burning two-thousand-years as when Zoroaster reverently beheld it and flame became the symbol of Deity to the entranced Parsees. Here the poor Gheber gathered the fuel to feed the sacred fire which burned perpetually upon his altar. Hither devout pilgrims journeyed even from far-off Cathay, to do homage and bear away a few drops of the precious oil, before the wolf had suckled Romulus or Nebuchadnezzar had been turned out to pasture. The “Eternal Fire,” unquenched for twenty-five centuries, the digging of wells that tapped its supply of fuel put out a generation ago. Modern greed, respecting neither ancient association nor religious sentiment, drew too lavishly upon the bountiful stock that fed throughout the ages the grandest flame in history. At Lourakhanel, not far from Baku, is a temple built by the fire-worshipers. The sea in places has such quantities of gas that it can be lighted and burned on the surface of the water until extinguished by a strong wind. Strange destiny of petroleum, first and last, to be the panderer of idolatry—fire-worship in the olden time, mammon-worship in this era of the “Almighty Dollar!”

Developments from Baku to the region north of the Black Sea, seven-hundred miles westward, have revealed vast deposits of petroleum. Hundreds of wells have been drilled, some flowing one-hundred-thousand barrels a day! Nobel Brothers’ No. 50, which commenced to spout in 1886, kept a stream rising four-hundred feet into the air for seventeen months, yielding three million barrels. This would fill a ditch five feet wide, six feet deep, and a hundred miles long. These monsters eject tons of sand daily, which piles up in high mounds. Stones weighing forty pounds have been thrown out. The common way of obtaining the oil is to raise it by means of long metal-cylinders with trap-bottoms. Pumps are impossible on account of the fine sand coming up with the oil. These cylinders, which will hold from one to four barrels, on being raised to the surface are discharged into pipes or ditches. Each trip of the bucket or cylinder takes a minute-and-a-half and the well is worked day and night. The average daily yield of a Russian well is about two-hundred barrels.

Pipe-lines, refineries and railroads have been provided and the three big companies operating the whole field consolidated in 1893. The Rothschilds combined with the Nobels and a prohibitory tariff prevents the importation of foreign oils. Tank-steamers ply the Caspian Sea and the Volga, many of the railways use the crude-oil for fuel and the supply is practically unlimited. The petroleum-products are carried in these steamers to a point at the mouth of the Volga River called Davit Foot, about four-hundred miles north of Baku and ninety miles from Astrakhan, and transferred into barges. These are towed by small tug-boats to the various distributing points on the Volga, where tanks have been constructed for railway-shipments. The chief distributing point upon the Volga is Tsaritzin, but there is also tankage at Saratof, Kazan, and Nijni-Novgorod. From these points it is distributed all over Russia in tank-cars. Some is exported to Germany and to Austria. Russian refined may not be as good an illuminant as the American, but it is made to burn well enough for all purposes and emits no disagreeable odor. After taking from crude thirty per-cent. illuminating distillate, about fifteen per-cent. is taken from the residuum. It is called “solar oil” and the lubricating-oil distillate is next taken off. From this distillate a very good lubricant is obtained, affected neither by intense heat nor cold. The lubricating oil is made in Baku, but great quantities of the distillate are shipped to England, France, Belgium and Germany and there purified.

Russian competition was for years the chief danger that confronted American producers. Three partial cargoes of petroleum were sent to the United States as an experiment, netting a snug profit. Heaven favors the hustler from Hustlerville, who hoes his own row and doesn’t squat on a stump expecting the cow will walk up to be milked, and American oilmen are not easily downed. They have perfected such improvements in handling, transporting, refining and marketing their product that the major portion of Europe and Asia, outside of the czar’s dominions, is their customer. Nailing their colors to the mast and keeping their powder dry, the oil-interests of this glorious climate don’t propose to quit barking until the last dog is dead!

The early Persians and Tartars burned crude-oil for light in stoneware jugs, with a spout on one side to hold the flax-wick, that answered the purpose of lamps. In 1851 a chemist of Polish Austria exhibited a small quantity of distilled petroleum at the World’s Fair in London. The Austrian Emperor rewarded this step towards refining crude-oil by making the chemist a prince.

All these things prove conclusively that petroleum is a veritable antique, always known and prized by millions of people in Asia, Africa and Europe, and not a mushroom upstart. Indeed, its pedigree sizes up to the most exacting Philadelphia requirement. Mineralogists think it was quietly distilling “underneath the ground” when the majestic fiat went forth: “Let there be light!” Happily “age does not wither nor custom stale the infinite variety” of its admirable qualities. Neither is it a hot-house exotic, adapted merely to a single clime or limited to one favored section of any country. It is scattered widely throughout the two hemispheres, its range of usefulness is extending constantly and it is not put up in retail packages, that exhaust speedily. Alike in the tropics and the zones, beneath cloudless Italian skies and the bleak Russian firmament, amid the flowery vales of Cashmere and the snow-crowned heights of the Caucasus, by the banks of the turbid Ganges and the shores of the limpid Danube, this priceless boon has ever contributed to the comfort and convenience of mankind.

The Star in the East was crowding into line as the full orb of day.

A PETROLEUM IDYL.

A ragged street-Arab, taken to Sunday-school by a kind teacher, heard for the first time the story of Christ’s boundless love and sufferings. Big tears coursed down his grimy cheeks, until he could no longer restrain his feelings. Springing upon the seat, the excited urchin threw his tattered cap to the ceiling and screamed “Hurrah for Jesus!” It was an honest, sincere, reverent tribute, which the Recording Angel must have been delighted to note. In like manner, considering its wondrous past, its glowing present and its prospective future, men, women and children everywhere, while profoundly grateful to the Divine Benefactor for the transcendent gift, may fittingly join in a universal “Hurrah for Petroleum!”

Don’t make the mistake that Petroleum, Like the kodak, the bike, or linoleum, Is something decidedly new; Whereas it was known in the Garden When Eve, in fig-leaf Dolly Varden Gave Adam an apple to chew. Nor deem it a human invention, By reason of newspaper-mention Just lately commanding attention, Because it is Nature’s own brew.

Repeatedly named in the Bible, Let none its antiquity libel Or seek to explain it away. It garnish’d Methuselah’s table, Was used by the builders of Babel And pilgrims from distant Cathay; When Pharaoh and Moses were chummy It help’d preserve many a mummy, Still dreadfully life-like and gummy, In Egypt’s stone-tombs from decay!

At Baku Jove’s thunderbolts fir’d it, Devout Zoroaster admir’d it As Deity symbol’d in flame; Parsees from the realms of Darius, Unweariedly earnest and pious, Adoring and worshipping came. It cur’d Noah’s Ham of trichina, Greas’d babies and pig-tails in China, Heal’d Arabs from far-off Medina— The blind and the halt and the lame!

Herodotus saw it at Zante, It blazed in the visions of Dante And pyres of supine Hindostan; The tropics and zones have rich fountains, It bubbles ’mid snow cover’d mountains And flows in the pits of Japan. Confin’d to no country or nation, A blessing to God’s whole creation For light, heat and prime lubrication, All hail to this grand gift to man!

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

II. A GLIMMER IN THE WEST

NUMEROUS INDICATIONS OF OIL ON THIS CONTINENT—LAKE OF ASPHALTUM—PETROLEUM SPRINGS IN NEW YORK AND PENNSYLVANIA—HOW HISTORY IS MANUFACTURED—PIONEERS DIPPING AND UTILIZING THE PRECIOUS FLUID—TOMBSTONE LITERATURE—PATHETIC EPISODE—SINGULAR STRIKE—GEOLOGY TRIES TO EXPLAIN A KNOTTY POINT.

----------

“Thou who wouldst see where dawned the light at last must westward go.”—Edwin Arnold.

“America is the Lord’s darling.”—Dr. Talmage.

“Thee, hid the bowering vales amidst, I call.”—Euripides.

“A Mercury is not to be carved out of every wood.”—Latin Proverb.

“Never no duck wasn’t hatched by a drake.”—Hall Caine.

“Near the Niagara is an oil-spring known to the Indians.”—De la Roche D’Allion, A. D. 1629.

“There is a fountain at the head of the Ohio, the water of which is like oil, has a taste of iron and seems to appease pain.”—Captain de Joncaire, A. D. 1721.

“It is light bottled up for tens-of-thousands of years—light absorbed by plants and vegetables. * * * And now, after being buried long ages, that latent light is again brought forth and made to work for human purposes.”—Stephenson.

“It is not a farthing glim in a bedroom.”—Charles Reade.

“The west glimmers with some streaks of day.”—Shakespeare.

“Even the night shall be light about me.”—Psalms cxxxix: 11.

----------

The Land Columbus ran against, by anticipating Horace Greeley’s advice to “Go West,” was not neglected in the unstinted distribution of petroleum. It abounds in South America, in the West Indies, the United States and Canada. The most extensive and phenomenal natural fountain of petroleum ever known is on the Island of Trinidad. Hot bitumen has filled a basin four miles in circumference, three-quarters of a mile from the sea, estimated to contain the equivalent of ten-millions of barrels of crude-oil. The liquid boils up continually, observing no holidays or Sundays, seething and foaming at the center of the lake, cooling and thickening as it recedes, and finally becoming solid asphaltum. The bubbling, hissing, steaming caldron emits a sulphurous odor, perceptible for ten or twelve miles and decidedly suggestive of the orthodox Hades. Humboldt in 1799 reported his impressions of this spontaneous marvel, in producing which the puny hand of man had no share. From it is derived the dark, tough, semi-elastic material, first utilized in Switzerland for this purpose, which paves the streets of scores of cities. Few stop to reflect, as they glide over the noiseless surface on whirling bicycles or behind prancing steeds, that the smooth asphaltum pavements and the clear “water-white” in the piano-lamp have a common parentage. Yet bloomers and pantaloons, twin-creations of the tailor, or diamonds and coal, twin-links of carbon, are not related more closely.

“Even men and monkeys may be kin.”

The earliest printed reference to petroleum in America is by Joseph de la Roche D’Allion, a Franciscan missionary who crossed the Niagara river from Canada in 1629 and wrote of oil, in what is now New York, known to the Indians and by them given a name signifying “plenty there.” Likely this was the petroleum occupying cavities in fossils at Black Rock, below Buffalo, in sufficient abundance to be an object of commerce. Concerning the celebrated oil-spring of the Seneca Indians near Cuba, N. Y., which D’Allion may also have seen, Prof. Benjamin Silliman in 1833 said:

“This is situated in the western part of the county of Alleghany, in the state of New York. This county is the third from Lake Erie on the south line of the state, the counties of Cattaraugus and Chautauqua lying west and forming the southwestern termination of the state of New York. The spring is very near the line which divides Alleghany and Cattaraugus. * * * The country is rather mountainous, but the road running between the ridges is very good and leads through a cultivated region rich in soil and picturesque in scenery. Its geographical formation is the same as that which is known to prevail in the western region; a silicious sandstone with shale, and in some places limestone, is the immediate basis of the country. * * * The oil-spring or fountain rises in the midst of a marshy ground. It is a muddy, dirty pool of about eighteen feet in diameter and is nearly circular in form. There is no outlet above ground, no stream flowing from it, and it is, of course, a stagnant water, with no other circulation than than which springs from the changes in temperature and from the gas and petroleum that are constantly rising through the pool.

“We are told that the odor of petroleum is perceived at a distance in approaching the spring. This may be true in particular states of the wind, but we did not distinguish any peculiar smell until we arrived on the edge of the fountain. Here its peculiar character became very obvious. The water is covered with a thin layer of petroleum or mineral oil, as if coated with dirty molasses, having a yellowish-brown color.

“They collect the petroleum by skimming it like cream from a milk-pan. For this purpose they use a broad, flat board, made thin at one edge like a knife; it is moved flat upon and just under the surface of the water and is soon covered by a coating of petroleum, which is so thick and adhesive that it does not fall off, but is removed by scraping the instrument upon the lip of a cup. It has then a very foul appearance, but it is purified by heating and straining it while hot through flannel. It is used by the people of the vicinity for sprains and rheumatism and for sores on their horses.”

The “muddy, dirty pool” was included in an Indian reservation, one mile square, leased in 1860 by Allen, Bradley & Co., who drove a pipe into the bog. At thirty feet oil began to spout to the tune of a-barrel-an-hour, a rhythm not unpleasing to the owners of the venture. The flow continued several weeks and then “stopped short, never to go again.” Other wells followed to a greater depth, none of them proving sufficiently large to give the field an orchestra-chair in the petroleum-arena.

It is told of a jolly Cuban, wearing a skull innocent of garbage as Uncle Ned’s, who “had no wool on the top of his head in the place where the wool ought to grow,” that he applied oil from the “dirty pool” to an ugly swelling on the apex of his bare cranium. The treatment lasted a month, by which time a crop of brand-new hair had begun to sprout. The welcome growth meant business and eventually thatched the roof of the happy subject with a luxuriant vegetation that would have turned Paderewski, Absalom, or the most ambitious foot-ball kicker green with envy! Tittlebat Titmouse, over whose excruciating experiences with the “Cyanochaitanthropopoion” that dyed his locks a bright emerald readers of “Ten-Thousand a Year” have laughed consumedly, was “not in it” compared with the transformed denizen of the pretty village nestling amid the hills of the Empire State. Those inclined to pronounce this a bald-headed fabrication may see for themselves the precise spot the mud-hole furnishing the oil occupied prior to the advent of the prosaic, unsentimental driving-pipe.

Captain de Joncaire, a French officer in colonial days, who had charge of military operations on the Upper Ohio and its tributaries in 1721, reported “a fountain at the head of a branch of the Ohio, the water of which is like oil.” Undoubtedly this was the same “fountain” referred to in the Massachusetts Magazine for July, 1791, as follows:

“In the northern part of Pennsylvania is a creek called Oil Creek, which empties into the Allegheny river. It issues from a spring on which floats an oil similar to that called Barbadoes tar, and from which one may gather several gallons a day. The troops sent to guard the western posts halted at this spring, collected some of the oil and bathed their joints with it. This gave them great relief from the rheumatism, with which they were afflicted.”

The history of petroleum in America commences with the use the pioneer settlers found the red-men made of it for medicine and for painting their dusky bodies. The settlers adopted its medicinal use and retained for various affluents of the Allegheny the Indian name of Oil Creek. Both natives and whites collected the oil by spreading blankets on the marshy pools along the edges of the bottom-lands at the foot of steep hill-sides or of mountain-walls that hem in the valleys supporting coal-measures above. The remains of ancient pits on Oil Creek-the Oil Creek ordained to become a household word—lined with timbers and provided with notched logs for ladders, show how for generations the aborigines had valued and stored the product. Some of these queer reservoirs, choked with leaves and dirt accumulated during hundreds of years, bore trees two centuries old. Many of them, circular, square, oblong and oval, sunk in the earth fifteen to twenty feet and strongly cribbed, have been excavated. Their number and systematic arrangement attest that petroleum was saved in liberal quantities by a race possessing in some degree the elements of civilization. The oil has preserved the timbers from the ravages of decay, “to point a moral or adorn a tale,” and they are as sound to-day as when cut down by hands that crumbled into dust ages ago.

Scientists worry and perspire over “the mound-builders” and talk glibly about “a superior race anterior to the Indians,” while ignoring the relics of a tribe smart enough to construct enduring storehouses for petroleum. People who did such work and filled such receptacles with oil were not slouches who would sell their souls for whiskey and their forest-heritage for a string of glass-beads. Did they penetrate the rock for their supply of oil, or skim it drop by drop from the waters of the stream? Who were they, whence came they and whither have they vanished? Surely these are conundrums to tax the ingenuity of imaginative solvers of perplexing riddles. Shall Macaulay’s New-Zealand voyager, after viewing the ruins of London and flying across the Atlantic, gaze upon the deserted oil-wells of Venango county a thousand years hence and wonder what strange creatures, in the dim and musty past, could have bored post-holes so deep and so promiscuously? Rip Van Winkle was right in his plaintive wail: “How soon are we forgotten!”

The renowned “spring” which may have supplied these remarkable vats was located in the middle of Oil Creek, on the McClintock farm, three miles above Oil City and a short distance below Rouseville. Oil would escape from the rocks and gravel beneath the creek, appearing like air-bubbles until it reached the surface and spread a thin film reflecting all the colors of the rainbow. From shallow holes, dug and walled sometimes in the bed of the stream, the oil was skimmed and husbanded jealously. The demand was limited and the enterprise to meet it was correspondingly modest. Nathanael Cary, the first tailor in Franklin and owner of the tract adjoining the McClintock, peddled it about the townships early in the century, when the population was sparse and every good housewife laid by a bottle of “Seneca Oil” in case of accident or sickness. Cary would sling two jars or kegs across a faithful horse, belonging to the class of Don Quixote’s “Rosinante” and too sedate to scare at anything short of a knickerbockered feminine astride a rubber-tired wheel. Mounting this willing steed, which transported him steadily as “Jess” carried the self-denying physician of “Beside the Bonnie Brier-Bush.” the tailor-peddler went his rounds at irregular intervals. Occasionally he took a ten-gallon cargo to Pittsburg, riding with it eighty miles on horseback and trading the oil for cloth and groceries. His memory should be cherished as the first “shipper” of petroleum to “the Smoky City,” then a mere cluster of log and frame buildings in a patch of cleared ground surrounding Fort Pitt. “Things are different now.”

The Augusts, a family living in Cherrytree township and remembered only by a handful of old residents, followed Cary’s example. Their stock was procured from springs farther up Oil Creek, especially one near Titusville, which achieved immortality as the real source of the petroleum-development that has astounded the civilized world. They sold the oil for “a quarter-dollar a gill” to the inhabitants of neighboring townships. The consumption was extremely moderate, a pint usually sufficing a household for a twelvemonth. Nature’s own remedy, it was absolutely pure and unadulterated, a panacea for “the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to,” and positively refused to mix with water. If milk and water were equally unsocial, would not many a dispenser of the lacteal fluid train with Othello and “find his occupation gone?” Don’t “read the answer in the stars;” let the overworked pumps in thousands of barnyards reply!

No latter-day work on petroleum, no book, pamphlet, sketch or magazine article of any pretensions has failed to reproduce part of a letter purporting to have been sent in 1750 to General Montcalm, the French commander who perished at Quebec nine years later, by the commander of Fort Du Quesne, now Pittsburg. A sherry-cobbler minus the sherry would have been pronounced less insipid than any oil-publication omitting the favorite extract. It has been quoted as throwing light upon the religious character of the Indians and offered as evidence of their affinity with the fire-worshippers of the orient! Official reports printed and endorsed it, ministers embodied it in missionary sermons and it posed as infallible history. This is the paragraph:

“I would desire to assure you that this is a most delightful land. Some of the most astonishing natural wonders have been discovered by our people. While descending the Allegheny, fifteen leagues below the mouth of the Conewango and three above the Venango, we were invited by the chief of the Senecas to attend a religious ceremony of his tribe. We landed and drew up our canoes on a point where a small stream entered the river. The tribe appeared unusually solemn. We marched up the stream about half-a-league, where the company, a band, it appeared, had arrived some days before us. Gigantic hills begirt us on every side. The scene was really sublime. The great chief then recited the conquests and heroism of their ancestors. The surface of the stream was covered with a thick scum, which, upon applying a torch at a given signal, burst into a complete conflagration. At the sight of the flames the Indians gave forth the triumphant shout that made the hills and valleys re-echo again. Here, then, is revived the ancient fire-worship of the East; here, then, are the Children of the Sun.”

The style of this popular composition, in its adaptation to the occasion and circumstances, rivals Chatterton’s unsurpassed imitations of the antique. Montcalm was a gallant soldier who lost his life fighting the English under General Wolfe, the hero whose noble eulogy of the poet Gray—“I would rather be the author of the ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ than the captor of Quebec”—should alone crown him with unfading laurels. The commander of Fort Du Quesne also “lived and moved and had a being.” The Allegheny River meanders as of yore, the Conewango empties into it at Warren, the “Venango” is the French Creek which joins the Allegheny at Franklin. The “small stream” up which they marched “about half-a-league” was Oil Creek and the destination was the oil-spring of Joncaire and “Nat” Cary. The “gigantic hills” have not departed, although the “thick scum” is stored in iron tanks. But neither of the French commanders ever wrote or read or heard of the much-quoted correspondence, for the excellent reason that it had not been evolved during their sojourn on this mundane sphere!

Franklin, justly dubbed “The Nursery of Great Men,” gave birth to the pretty story. Sixty-six years ago a bright young man was admitted to the bar and opened a law-office in the attractive hamlet at the junction of the Allegheny River and French Creek. He soon ranked high in his profession and in 1839 was appointed judge of a special district-court, created to dispose of accumulated business in Venango, Crawford, Erie and Mercer counties. The same year a talented divinity-student was called to the pastorate of the Presbyterian church in Franklin. The youthful minister and the new judge became warm friends and cultivated their rare literary tastes by writing for the village-paper, a six-column weekly. Among others they prepared a series of fictitious articles, based upon the early settlement of Northwestern Pennsylvania, designed to whet the public appetite for historic and legendary lore. In one of these sketches the alleged letter to Montcalm was included. Average readers supposed the minute descriptions and bold narratives were rock-ribbed facts, an opinion the authors did not care to controvert, and at length the “French commander’s letter” began to be reprinted as actual, bona-fide, name-blown-in-the-bottle history!

One of the two writers who coined this interesting “fake” was Hon. James Thompson, the eminent jurist, who learned printing in Butler, practiced law in Venango county, served three terms—the last as speaker—in the Legislature and one in Congress, was district-judge six years and sat on the Supreme bench fifteen years, five of them as chief-justice of this state. Judge Thompson removed to Erie in 1842 and finally to Philadelphia. He married a daughter of Rev. Nathaniel R. Snowden, first pastor of the First Presbyterian church in Harrisburg, in 1794-1803, and afterwards master of a noted academy at Franklin. Mr. Snowden’s wife was the daughter of Dr. Gustine, a survivor of the frightful Wyoming massacre. Their son, an eminent Franklin physician of early times, was the father of the late Dr. S. Gustine Snowden and of Major-General George R. Snowden, of Philadelphia, commander of the National-Guard of Pennsylvania. The good minister died in Armstrong county, descending to the grave as a shock of wheat fully ripe for the harvest.

——“What is death To him that meets it with an upright heart? A quiet haven, where his shatter’d bark Harbors secure till the rough storm is past, After a passage overhung with clouds.”

Judge Thompson’s literary co-worker was the Rev. Cyrus Dickson, D. D., who resigned his first charge in 1848, settled in the east and gained distinction in the pulpit and as a forcible writer. How thoroughly these kindred spirits, now happily reunited “beyond the smiling and the weeping,” must have enjoyed the overwhelming success of their ingenious plot and laughed at the easy credulity which accepted every line of their contributions as gospel-truth! They could not fail to relish the efforts, prompted mainly by their fanciful scene on Oil Creek, to identify as Children of the Sun the savage braves in buckskin and moccasins whose noblest conception of heaven was an eternal surfeit of dog-sausage!

The Indian may be superstitious, His tastes may be wholly pernicious; But he bitterly spurns—can we blame him?— The cranks who are ready to claim him And with a white pedigree shame him.

Signs of petroleum in the Keystone State were not confined to Oil-Creek. Ten miles westward, in water-wells and in the bed and near the mouth of French Creek, the indications were numerous and unmistakable. The first white man to turn them to account was Marcus Hulings, of Franklin, the original Charon of Venango county. Each summer he would skim a quart or two of “earth-oil” from a tiny pond, formed by damming a bit of the creek, the fluid serving as a liniment and medicine. This was the small beginning of one whose relative and namesake, two generations later, was to rank as a leading oil-millionaire. Hulings “ferried” passengers across the unbridged stream in a bark-canoe and plied a keel-boat to Pittsburg, the round-trip frequently requiring four weeks. Passengers were “few and far between,” consequently a book-keeper and a treasurer were not engaged to take care of the receipts. The proprietor of the canoe-ferry cleared a number of acres, raised corn and potatoes and lived in a log-cabin, not far from the site of the brush-factory, which stood for fifty years after his death. Probably he was buried in the north-west corner of the old graveyard, beside his wife and son, of whom two sunken headstones record:

In memory of Michael Hulings who departed this life: the 9th of August, 1797. Aged 27 years, 1 month & 14 days.

Massar, wife of Marcus Hulings Died Feb. 9. 1813. Aged 67 yrs, 2 ms and 22 ds.

The once hallowed resting-place of many worthy pioneers sadly needs the kindly ministrations of some “Old Mortality” to replace broken slabs, restore illegible inscriptions and brush away the obnoxious weeds. Quaint spelling and lettering and curious epitaphs are not uncommon. Observe these examples:

In memory of James and Catherine Ha nne Ho departed this life July 3 1830 JAMES AGED TWO years one months, ten days CETHERIN E AGED two months and 14 days.

JANE consort of DAVID KING who departed this life. April 14 1829 aged 31 years O may I see thy tribes rejoic and aid their triumphs with my voice this all. my Glory Lord to be joined to thy saints and near to. thee

In memory of Samuel Riddle, Esq. Born Aug. 4, 1821 At Scrubgrass. Died May 28, 1853, At Franklin, Venango County, Pa. Here lies an honest lawyer, Honored and respected living, Lamented and mourned dead.

Trains on the Lake-Shore Railroad thunder past the lower end of the quiet “God’s Acre,” close to the mounds of the McDowells, the Broadfoots, the Bowmans, the Hales and other early settlers, but the peaceful repose of the dead can be disturbed only by the blast of Gabriel’s trumpet on the resurrection morning.

The venerable William Whitman, familiarly called “Doctor,” over whose grave the snows of twenty-five long years have drifted, often told me how, when a youngster, he carried water to the masons building Colonel Alexander McDowell’s stone house, on Elk street. He hemmed in a pool on the edge of French Creek, soaked up the greasy scum with a piece of flannel, wrung out the cloth and filled several bottles with dark-looking oil. The masons would swallow doses of it, rub it on their bruised hands and declare it a sovereign internal and external remedy. In early manhood Mr. Whitman settled in Canal township, eleven miles northwest of Franklin, cultivated a farm and reared a large family. It was the dream of his old age to see oil taken from his own land. In 1866 two wells were drilled on the Williams tract, across the road from Whitman’s, with encouraging prospects. Depressed prices retarded operations and these wells remained idle. Four years later my uncle, George Buchanan, and myself drilled on the Whitman farm. The patriarch watched the progress of the work with feverish interest, spending hours daily about the rig. A string of driving-pipe, up to that time said to be the longest—153 feet—ever needed in an oil-well, had to be forced down. Three feet farther a vein of sparkling water, tinged with sulphur, spouted above the pipe and it has flowed uninterruptedly since. The heavy tools pierced the rock rapidly and the delight of the “Doctor” was unbounded. He felt confident a paying well would result and waited impatiently for the decisive test. A boy longing for Christmas or his first pair of boots could not be more keenly expectant. His fondest wish was not to be gratified. He took sick and died, after a very short illness, in 1870, four days before the well was through the sand and pumping at the rate of fifty barrels per diem!

This singular well merits a brief notice. From the first sand, not a trace of which was met in the two wells on the other side of the road, oil and gas arose through the water so freely that drilling was stopped and tubing inserted. In twenty-four hours the well yielded fifty-eight barrels of the blackest lubricant in America, 28° gravity, the hue of a stack of ebony cats and with plenty of gas to illuminate the neighborhood. Subsiding quickly, the tubing was drawn and the hole drilled in quest of the third sand, the rock which furnished the lighter petroleum on Oil Creek. Eight feet were found seven-hundred feet towards the antipodes, a torpedo was exploded, the tubing was put back and the well produced two barrels a day for a year, divided between the sands about equally, the green and black oils coming out of the pipe side-by-side and positively declining to merge into one. Other wells were drilled years afterwards close by, without finding the jugular. Mr. Whitman sleeps in the Baptist churchyard near Hannaville, the sleep that shall have no awakening until the Judgment Day. Mr. Buchanan, who operated at Rouseville, Scrubgrass, Franklin and Bradford, left the oil-regions nine years ago for the Black Hills and died in South Dakota on March twenty-eighth, 1897. He was a man of sterling attributes, nobly considerate and unselfish. No truer, braver heart e’er beat in human breast.

“Yes, we must follow soon, will glad obey When a few suns have rolled their cares away; Tired with vain life, will close the weary eye— ’Tis the great birthright of mankind to die.”

Excavating for the Franklin canal in 1832, on the north bank of French Creek, opposite “the infant industry” of Hulings forty years previously, the workmen were annoyed by a persistent seepage of petroleum, execrating it as a nuisance. A well dug on the flats ten years later, for water, encountered such a glut of oil that the disgusted wielder of the spade threw up his job and threw his besmeared clothes into the creek! When the oil-excitement invaded the county-seat the greasy well was drilled to the customary depth and proved hopelessly dry! At Slippery Rock, in Beaver county, oil exuded abundantly from the sandy banks and bed of the creek, failing to pan out when wells were put down. Something of the same sort occurred in portions of Lawrence county and on the banks of many streams in different sections of the country. A geological expert endeavors to make it as clear as mud in this manner:

“‘Surface shows’ have been the fascination of many. The places of most copious escape to the surface were regarded as the favored spots where ‘the drainage from the coal measures, in defiance of the laws of gravity and hydro-dynamics, had obligingly deposited itself. Such shows’ were always illusory. A great ‘surface show’ is a great waste; where nature plays the spendthrift she retains little treasure in her coffers. The production of petroleum in quantities of economical importance has always been from reservoirs in which nature has been hoarding it up, instead of making a superficial and deceptive display of her wealth.”

Applying this method, the place to find petroleum is where not a symptom of it is visible! An honest Hibernian, asked his opinion of a notorious falsifier, answered that “he must be chock-full ov truth, fur bedad he niver lets any ov it git out!” The above explanation is of this stripe. “Flee to the mountains of Hepsidam” rather than attempt to bore for oil in localities having “shows” of the very thing you are after! These dreadfully deceptive “shows” show that the oil has got out and emptied the “reservoirs in which nature had been hoarding it up!” This is a pretty rough joke on poor deluded nature! How could these “surface shows” have strayed off anyhow, unless connected with reservoirs of genuine petroleum at the outset? The first wells on Oil Creek and at Franklin were drilled beside “surface shows” which revealed the existence of petroleum and supplied Cary, August, McClintock and Hulings with the coveted oil. These wells produced petroleum “in quantities of economical importance,” demonstrating that “such shows were not always illusory.” Is nature buncoing petroleum-seekers by hanging out a Will-o’-the-Wisp signal where there is “little treasure in her coffers?” The failures at Slippery Rock and divers other places resulted from the fact that the seepages had traveled considerable distances to find breaks in the rocks that would permit of the “most copious escape.”

Central and South America are fairly stocked with petroleum-indications. In the early days of the Panama Railroad and during the construction of the ill-fated canal numerous efforts were made to explore the coal-regions of the Atlantic, in proximity to the ports of Colon and Panama. These researches led to the discovery of bituminous shales and lignite near the port of Boca del Toro, on the Caribbean Sea. The map of Colombia shows a great indenture on the Atlantic Coast of the department of Cauca, formed by the Gulfo de Uraba, or Darian del Nord. Into this gulf flow the Atrato, Arboletes, Punta de Piedra and many small streams. Explorations on the Gulf of Uraba and its tributaries disclosed extensive strata of “oil-rock” and “oil-springs” near the Rio Arboletes. The largest of forty of these springs has a twelve-inch crater, which gushes oil sufficient to fill a six-inch pipe. Near this Brobdignagian spring is a petroleum-pond sixty feet in diameter and from three to ten feet deep. The flow of these oil-springs deserves the attention of geologists and investors. They lie at a distance of one to three miles from the shores of the gulf. The oil is remarkably pure, passing through a bed of coral, which seems to act as a filter and refiner. A proper survey of the oil-region of the Uraba would be interesting from a scientific and an industrial standpoint. The proper development of its possibilities might result in the control of the petroleum-market of South America. The climate is too sultry for the display of seal sacques and fur-overcoats, a palm-hat constituting the ordinary garb of the average citizen. This providential dispensation eliminates dudes and tailor-made girls, stand-up collars and bifurcated skirts from the domestic economy of the happy Isthmians.

In the canton of Santa Elena, Ecuador, embracing the entire area of country between the hot springs of San Vicinte and the Pacific coast, petroleum is found in abundance. It is of a black color, its density varies, it is considered superior to the Pennsylvania product and is entirely free from offensive odor. Little has been done towards working these wells. The people are unacquainted with the proper method of sinking them and no well has exceeded a few feet in depth. Geologists think, when the strata of alumina and rock are pierced, reservoirs will be found in the huge cavities formed by volcanic convulsions of the Andes. Venezuela is in the same boat.

From the Chira to the Fumbes river, a desert waste one-hundred-and-eighty miles in length and fifteen miles in width, lying along the coast between the Pacific ocean and the Andes, the oil-field of Peru is believed to extend. For two centuries oil has been gathered in shallow pits and stored in vats, precisely as in Pennsylvania. The burning sun evaporated the lighter parts, leaving a glutinous substance, which was purified and thickened to the consistency of sealing-wax by boiling. It was shipped to southern ports in boxes and used as glazing for the inside of Aguardiente jars. The Spanish government monopolized the trade until 1830, when M. Lama purchased the land. In 1869 Blanchard C. Dean and Rollin Thorne, Americans, “denounced” the mine, won a lawsuit brought by Lama and drilled four wells two-hundred-and-thirty feet deep, a short distance from the beach. Each well yielded six to ten barrels a day, which deeper drilling in 1871-2 augmented largely. Frederic Prentice, the enterprising Pennsylvania operator, secured an enormous grant in 1870, bored several wells—one a thousand-barreler—erected a refinery, supplied the city of Lima with kerosene and exported considerable quantities to England and Australia. The war with Chili compelled a cessation of operations for some years. Dr. Tweddle, who had established a refinery at Franklin, tried to revive the Peruvian fields in 1887-8. He drilled a number of wells, refined the output, enlisted New-York capital and shipped cargoes of the product to San Francisco. Hon. Wallace L. Hardison, who represented Clarion in the Legislature and operated at Bradford and in California, is now exploring the Peruvian field for flowing oil-wells and gold-nuggets. Qualified judges have no doubt that, “in the sweet-bye-and-bye,” the oleaginous goose may hang altitudinum in Peru.

A larger percentage of the oil-product of the United States is sent abroad than of any other except cotton, while nearly every home in the land is blessed with petroleum’s beneficent light. America has toed the mark so grandly that the petroleum-industry is the one circus bigger inside the canvas than on the posters. Beginning with 1866, the exports of illuminating oils were doubled in 1868, again in 1871, again in 1877 and again in 1891. The average exports per week in 1894 were as much as for the entire year 1864. Not less impressive is the marvelous reduction in the price of refined, so that it has found a welcome everywhere. Export-oil averaged, in 1861, 61½ cents per gallon; in 1871, 23⅝ cents per gallon; in 1881, 8 cents per gallon; in 1891, 6⅞ cents per gallon; in 1892, 6 cents per gallon; in 1894, 5⅙ cents per gallon, or one-twentieth that in 1861. But this decrease, great as it is, does not represent the real reduction in the price of oil, as the cost of the barrel is included in these prices. A gallon of bulk-oil cost in 1861 not less than 58 cents; in 1894, not more than 3½ cents, or hardly one-seventeenth. In January, 1871, the price was 75 cents; in January, 1894, one-twenty-fifth that of thirty-three years before. Consumers have received the benefit of constant improvements and reductions in prices, while thirteen-hundred-million dollars have come from abroad to this country for petroleum.

The glimmer has broadened and deepened into noon-day brightness.

THE BABY HAS GROWN.

PRODUCTION AND PRICES OF CRUDE PETROLEUM IN PENNSYLVANIA, WEST VIRGINIA AND SOUTH-EASTERN OHIO, QUANTITY AND VALUE OF OIL (REFINED REDUCED TO CRUDE EQUIVALENT) EXPORTED FROM THE UNITED STATES, WELLS COMPLETED, AND AVERAGE YEARLY PRICE OF REFINED AT NEW YORK, FROM SEPTEMBER 1ST, 1859, TO DECEMBER 31ST, 1896.

----------

If needs be, petroleum may well be defiant; The baby has grown to be earth’s greatest giant.

TOTAL LOWEST HIGHEST YEARLY TOTAL TOTAL TOTAL REFINED BARRELS MONTHLY AVERAGE WELLS GALLONS VALUE AT PER GAL. YEARS. PRODUCED. AVERAGE PRICE. PRICE. DRILLED. EXPORTED. NEW YORK. NEW YORK. 1859 1,873 $20 00 $20 00 $20 00 4 1860 547,439 2 75 19 25 9 60 175 1,300 $850 1861 2,119,045 10 1 00 49 340 12,700 5,800 $0 61½ 1862 3,153,183 10 2 25 1 05 425 400,000 146,000 36⅜ 1863 2,667,543 2 25 3 37½ 3 15 514 1,000,000 450,000 44¾ 1864 2,215,150 4 00 12 12½ 9 87½ 937 22,210,369 10,782,689 65 1865 2,560,200 4 62½ 8 25 6 59 890 25,496,849 16,563,413 58¾ 1866 3,385,105 2 12½ 4 50 3 74 830 50,987,341 24,830,887 42½ 1867 3,458,113 1 75 3 55 41 876 70,255,581 24,407,642 28⅜ 1868 3,540,670 1 95 5 12½ 3 62½ 1,055 79,456,888 21,810,676 29½ 1869 4,186,475 4 95 6 95 5 63¾ 1,149 100,636,684 31,127,433 32¾ 1870 5,308,046 3 15 4 52½ 3 89 1,653 113,735,294 32,668,960 26⅜ 1871 5,278,072 3 82½ 4 82½ 4 34 1,392 149,892,691 36,894,810 24¼ 1872 6,505,774 3 15 4 92½ 3 64 1,183 145,171,583 34,058,390 23⅝ 1873 9,849,508 1 00 2 60 1 83 1,263 187,815,187 42,050,756 17⅞ 1874 11,102,114 55 1 90 1 17 1,317 247,806,483 41,245,815 13 1875 8,948,749 1 03 1 75 1 35 2,398 221,955,308 30,078,568 13 1876 9,142,940 1 80 3 81 2 56¼ 2,920 243,650,152 32,915,786 19⅛ 1877 13,230,330 1 80 3 53¼ 2 42 3,939 309,198,914 61,789,438 15½ 1878 15,272,491 82½ 1 65¼ 1 19 3,064 338,841,303 46,574,974 10¾ 1879 19,835,903 67⅛ 1 18⅛ 85⅞ 3,048 378,310,010 40,305,249 08⅛ 1880 26,027,631 80 1 10¼ 94½ 4,217 423,964,699 36,208,625 09 1881 27,376,509 81¼ 95½ 85¼ 3,880 397,660,262 40,315,609 08 1882 30,053,500 54½ 1 27⅛ 78⅝ 3,304 559,954,590 51,232,706 07⅜ 1883 23,128,389 92½ 1 16⅞ 1 06¾ 2,847 505,931,622 44,913,079 08 1884 23,772,209 63¾ 1 11¼ 83¾ 2,265 513,660,092 47,103,248 08⅛ 1885 20,776,041 70⅞ 1 05½ 88½ 2,761 574,628,180 50,257,747 08 1886 25,798,000 62⅛ 88¾ 71¼ 3,478 577,781,752 50,199,844 07⅛ 1887 21,478,883 59¼ 80 66⅝ 1,660 592,803,267 46,824,933 06¾ 1888 16,488,668 76 93¾ 87 1,515 578,351,638 47,042,409 07½ 1889 21,487,435 83¼ 1 08⅛ 94 5,434 616,195,459 49,913,677 07⅛ 1890 30,065,867 68⅞ 1 05 86½ 6,435 664,491,498 51,403,089 07⅜ 1891 35,742,152 59 77¾ 66¾ 3,390 710,124,077 52,026,734 06⅞ 1892 33,332,306 52 64⅛ 55⅛ 1,954 715,471,979 44,805,992 06 1893 31,362,890 53½ 78⅜ 64 1,980 804,337,168 42,142,058 05¼ 1894 29,597,614 80 91⅜ 84 3,756 908,281,968 41,499,806 05⅙ 1895 31,147,235 95⅝ 1 79⅝ 1 35¼ 7,138 853,126,180 56,223,425 07⅓ 1896 33,298,437 1 40 1 50 1 19 7,811 927,431,959 62,132,432 06⅞ —————————— —————-————— —————————— ————————— Totals 593,232,488 93,197 13,110,140,927 $6,332,963,049 WELLS BARRELS STOCKS OPERATIONS IN 1896. DRILLED. PRODUCED. DEC. 31. Pennsylvania, West Virginia, South-eastern Ohio 7,811 33,298,437 9,550,582 North-eastern Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming, California 5,895 22,491,500 23,985,000 ———— ————— ————— TOTALS 13,706 55,789,937 33,535,582

----------

Breadstuffs and cotton, iron and coal All have been distanc’d; oil has the pole.

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

III. NEARING THE DAWN

SALT-WATER HELPING SOLVE THE PROBLEM—KIER’S IMPORTANT EXPERIMENTS—REMARKABLE SHAFT AT TARENTUM—WEST VIRGINIA AND OHIO TO THE FRONT—THE LANTERN FIEND—WHAT AN OLD MAP SHOWED—KENTUCKY PLAYS TRUMPS—THE FATHER OF FLOWING WELLS—SUNDRY EXPERIENCES AND OBSERVATIONS AT VARIOUS POINTS.

----------

“Just now the golden-sandaled dawn.”—Sappho.

“The first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into the full, clear light.”—Newton.

“Let there be light.”—Genesis i: 3.

“Come into the bright light beyond.”—Wilson Barrett.

“Watchman, what of the night? The morning cometh.”—Isaiah xxi: 11-12.

“The for’ard light’s shining bright and all’s well.”—Richard Harding Davis.

“A salt-well dug in 1814, to the depth of four-hundred feet, near Marietta, discharged oil periodically at intervals of two to four days.”—Dr. Hildreth, A. D. 1819.

“Nearly all the Kanawha salt-wells contained more or less petroleum.”—Dr. Hale, A. D. 1825.

“There are numerous springs of this mineral-oil in various regions of the West and South.”—Prof. B. Silliman, A. D. 1833.

“The morning star was turning golden-white, like cream in a violet sky.”—S. R. Crockett.

“Dawn on our darkness and lend us thine aid.”—Bishop Heber.

“As dawn and twilight meet in northern clime.”—Lowell.

“I waited underneath the dawning hills.”—Tennyson.

“She saw herself * * * cleaning the Kerosene-lamp.”—Tasma.

“Even the night shall be light about me.”—Psalms cxxxi: 11.

----------

While cannel-coal in the western end of Pennsylvania and other sections of the country, bitumen and shales from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake Huron, chapapote or mineral pitch in Cuba and San Domingo, oozings in Peru and Ecuador, asphaltum in Canada and oil-springs in Columbia and a half-dozen states of the Union from California to New York denoted the presence of petroleum over the greater part of this hemisphere, wells bored for salt were leading factors in bringing about its full development. Scores of these wells pumped more or less oil long before it “entered into the mind of man” to utilize the unwelcome intruder. Indeed, so often were brine and petroleum found in the same geological formation that scientists ascribed to them a kindred origin. The first borings to establish this peculiarity were on the Kanawha River, in West Virginia, a state destined to play an important part in oleaginous affairs. Dr. J. P. Hale, a reputable authority, claims oil caused much annoyance in Ruffner Brothers’ salt-well, begun in 1806, bored sixty feet with an iron-rod and two-inch chisel-bit attached by a rope to a spring-pole, completed in 1808 and memorable as the first artesian-well on this continent. The fluid came from the territory once famous as the “Kanawha Salines,” reputed to produce an unsurpassed table-salt. Before the advent of the white man the Indians made salt from the saline springs a short distance above the site of Charleston. There Daniel Boone had a log-cabin and George Washington, as long ago as 1775, for military services was awarded lands containing a “burning spring.” Fired by the tidings of the saline springs, Joseph Ruffner sold his possessions in the Shenandoah Valley and journeyed beyond the mountains in 1794 to establish salt-works on the Kanawha. He leased the salt-interest to Elisha Brooks, who took brine from the shallow quicksands. Joseph Ruffner dying, his sons, Joseph and David, acquired his lands and salt-springs and resolved to try some better plan of procuring the brine. A section of a hollow sycamore-tree, sunk into the quicksands, suggested the idea of wooden casing and the wisdom of boring a little way from the spring. A piece of oak, bored from end to end as log-pumps used to be, was set in the hole. The ingenious brothers devised a chisel-like drill to pierce the rock, fastened it to a rope fixed to a spring-pole and bounced the tools briskly. To shut out the weak brine above from the strong brine beneath they put in tin-tubing, around which they tied a leather-bag filled with flax-seed. Thus, three generations ago, Joseph and David Ruffner, aided later by William Morris and his invention of “jars” in drilling-tools, stumbled upon the basis of casing, seed-bagging and boring oil-wells. All honor to the memory of these worthy pioneers, groping in the dark to clear the road for the great petroleum-boom! Dr. Hale continues:

“Nearly all the Kanawha salt-wells have contained more or less petroleum, and some of the deeper wells a considerable flow. Many persons now think, trusting to their recollections, that some of the wells afforded as much as twenty-five to fifty barrels per day. This was allowed to flow over from the top of the salt-cisterns to the river, where, from its specific gravity, it spread over a large surface, and by its beautiful iridescent hues and not very savory odor could be traced for many miles down the stream. It was from this that the river received the nickname of ‘Old Greasy,’ by which it was long known by Kanawha boatmen and others.”

At the mouth of Hawkinberry Run, three miles north of Fairmount, in Marion county, a well for salt was put down in 1829 to the depth of six-hundred feet. “A stinking substance gave great trouble,” an owner reported, “forming three or four inches on the salt-water tank, which was four feet wide and sixteen feet long.” They discovered the stuff would burn, dipped it off with buckets and consumed it for fuel under the salt-pan. J. J. Burns in 1865 leased the farm, drilled the abandoned well deeper, stuck the tools in the hole and had to quit after penetrating sixty feet of “a fine grit oil-rock.” Mr. Burns wrote in 1871:

“The second well put down in this county was about the year 1835, on the West Fork River, just below what is now known as the Gaston mines. The well was sunk by a Mr. Hill, of Armstrong county, Pa., who found salt-water of the purest quality and in a great quantity, same as in the first well. He died just after the well was finished, so nothing was done with it. About the time this well was completed one was drilled in the Morgan settlement, just below Rivesville. Salt-water was found with great quantities of gas. Twenty-five years since the farmers on Little Bingamon Creek formed a company and drilled a well—I think to a depth of eight-hundred feet—in which they claimed to have found oil in paying quantities. You can go to it to-day and get oil out of it. The president told me he saw oil spout out of the tubing forty or fifty feet, just as they started the pump to test it. The company got to quarreling among themselves, some of the stockholders died and part of the stock got into the hands of minor heirs, so nothing more was done.”

Similar results attended other salt-wells in West Virginia. The first oil-speculators were Bosworth, Wells & Co., of Marietta, Ohio, who as early as 1843 bought shipments of two to five barrels of crude from Virginians who secured it on the Hughes River, a tributary of the Little Kanawha. This was sold for medical purposes in Pittsburg, Baltimore, New York and Philadelphia.

Notable instances of this kind occurred on the Allegheny River, opposite Tarentum, twenty miles above Pittsburg, as early as 1800. Wells sunk for brine to supply the salt-works were troubled with what the owners called “odd, mysterious grease.” Samuel M. Kier, a Pittsburg druggist, whose father worked some of these wells, conceived the idea of saving the “grease,” which for years had run waste, and in 1846 he bottled it as a medicine. He knew it had commercial and medicinal value and spared no exertions to introduce it widely. He believed implicitly in the greenish fluid taken from his salt-wells, at first as a healing agent and farther on as an illuminant. A bottle of the oil, corked and labeled by Kier’s own hands, lies on my desk at this moment, in a wrapper dingy with age and redolent of crude. A four-page circular inside recites the good qualities of the specific in gorgeous language P. T. Barnum himself would not have scorned to father. For example:

“Kier’s Petroleum, or Rock Oil, Celebrated for its Wonderful Curative Powers. A Natural Remedy! Procured from a Well in Allegheny Co., Pa., Four-Hundred Feet below the Earth’s Surface. Put up and Sold by Samuel M. Kier, 363 Liberty Street, Pittsburgh, Pa.

“The healthful balm, from Nature’s secret spring, The bloom of health and life to man will bring; As from her depths this magic liquid flows To calm our sufferings and assuage our woes.

“The Petroleum has been fully tested! It was placed before the public as A REMEDY OF WONDERFUL EFFICACY. Every one not acquainted with its virtues doubted its healing qualities. The cry of humbug was raised against it. It had some friends—those who were cured through its wonderful agency. Those spoke in its favor. The lame through its instrumentality were made to walk—the blind to see. Those who had suffered for years under the torturing pains of RHEUMATISM, GOUT AND NEURALGIA were restored to health and usefulness. Several who were blind were made to see. If you still have doubts, go and ask those who have been cured! * * * We have the witnesses, crowds of them, who will testify in terms stronger than we can write them to the efficacy of this remedy; cases abandoned by physicians of unquestionable celebrity have been made to exclaim, “THIS IS THE MOST WONDERFUL REMEDY YET DISCOVERED!” * * * Its transcendent power to heal MUST and WILL become known and appreciated. * * * The Petroleum is a Natural Remedy; it is put up as it flows from the bosom of the earth, without anything being added to or taken from it. It gets its ingredients from the beds of substances which it passes over in its secret channel. They are blended together in such a way as to defy all human competition. * * * Petroleum will continue to be used and applied as a Remedy as long as man continues to be afflicted with disease. Its discovery is a new era in medicine.”

A host of certificates of astonishing cases of curable and incurable ailments, from blindness to colic, followed this preliminary announcement. The “remedy” was trundled about by agents in vehicles elaborately gilt and painted with representations of the Good Samaritan ministering to a wounded Hebrew writhing in agony under a palm-tree. Two barrels of oil a day were sold at fifty cents a half-pint. The expense of bottling and peddling it consumed the bulk of the profits. Kier experimented with it for light, about 1848, burning it at his wells and racking his fertile brain for some means to get rid of the offensive smoke and odor. To be entirely successful the oil must have some other than this crude form. The tireless experimenter went to Philadelphia to consult a chemist, who advised distillation, without a hint as to the necessary apparatus. Fitting a kettle with a cover and a worm, the first outcome of the embryo refiner’s one-barrel still was a dark substance little superior to the crude. Learning to manage the fires so as not to send the oil over too rapidly, by twice distilling he produced an article the color of cider, which had a horrible smell, as he knew nothing of the treatment with acids that has revolutionized the light of the world and brought petroleum to the front.

Slight changes in the camphene-lamp enabled him to burn the distillate without smoke. Improvements in the lamp, especially the addition of the “Virna burner,” and in the quality of the fluid brought the “carbon-oil,” as it was usually termed, to a goodly measure of perfection. One lot of oil used in these experiments was a purchase of three barrels in April, 1853, from Charles Lockhart, now an officer of the Standard Oil-Company in Pittsburg. It came from the Huff well, a mile down the river from Tarentum. “Carbon-oil” sold readily for a dollar-fifty per gallon and provided a market for all the petroleum the salt-wells in the vicinity could produce. The day was dawning and the great light of the nineteenth century had been foreshadowed in the broad commonwealth that was to send it forth on its shining mission to all mankind.

Samuel M. Kier slumbers in Allegheny cemetery, resting in peace “after life’s fitful fever.” He was the first to appreciate the value of petroleum and to purify it by ordinary refining. His product was in brisk demand for illuminating purposes. He invented a lamp with a four-pronged burner, arranged to admit air and give a steady light. If he failed to reap the highest advantage from his researches, to patent his process and to sink wells for petroleum alone, he paved the way for others, enlarged the field of the product’s usefulness and by his labors suggested its extensive development. Has not he earned a monument more enduring than brass or marble?

“As in a building Stone rests on stone, and wanting the foundation All would be wanting, so in human life Each action rests on the foregoing event That made it possible, but is forgotten And buried in the earth.”

These operations at Tarentum and Pittsburg led to an extraordinary attempt to fathom the petroleum-basin by digging to the oil-bearing rock! Through Kier’s experiments the crude had become worth from fifty cents to one dollar a gallon. Among the owners of Tarentum’s salt-wells was Thomas Donnelly, who sold his well on the Humes farm to Peterson & Irwin. The senior partner, ex-Mayor Louis Peterson, of Allegheny, lived until recently to recount his interesting experiences with the coming light. He thought the Donnelly well, which produced salt-water only, if enlarged and pumped vigorously, would produce oil. Humes received twenty-thousand dollars for his farm. The hole was reamed out and yielded five barrels of petroleum a day. This was in 1856. A specimen sent to Baltimore was used successfully in oiling wool at the carding-mills and the total production was shipped to that city for eight years. Eastern capitalists bought the farm and well in 1864, organized “The Tarentum Salt-and-Oil-Company” and determined to dig a shaft down to the source of supply! The wells were four-hundred to five-hundred feet deep. The officers of the company argued that it was feasible to reach that far into the bowels of the earth with pick and shovel and discover a monstrous cave of brine and oil! They picked a spot twenty rods from the Donnelly well, sent to England for skilled miners and started a shaft about eight feet square. Over two years were employed and forty-thousand dollars spent in sinking this shaft. Heavy timbers walled the upper portion, the hard rock below needing none. The water was pumped through iron-pipes, nine men formed each shift and the work progressed merrily to the depth of four-hundred feet. Then the salt-water in the Donnelly well was affected by the fresh-water in the shaft, losing half its strength whenever the latter was let stand a few hours, showing their intimate connection by veins or crevices. Mr. Peterson said of it:

“The digging of the shaft was finally abandoned in the darkest period of the war, from the necessities of the time. A New Yorker named Ferris, and Wm. McKeown, of Pittsburg, bought the property, shaft and all. The daring piece of engineering was neglected and finally commenced to fill up with cinders and dirt, until at last it was level again with the surface of the ground. You may walk over it to-day and I could point it out to you if I was up there. Dig it out and you will find those iron pipes and timbers still there, just as they were originally put in.”

Dyed-in-the-wool Tarentumites insist that natural gas caused the suspension of work, flowing into the shaft at such a gait that the miners refused to risk the chances of a speedy trip to Kingdom Come by suffocation or the ignition of the subtile vapor. This was the case with two shafts at Tidioute and Petroleum Centre, neither of them nearly the depth of “the daring piece of engineering” which “set the pace” for enterprises of this novel brand. The New-York Enterprise-and-Mining-Company projected the former, intending to sink a shaft eight feet by twelve to the third sand and tunnel the rock for petroleum by wholesale. The shaft reached oil-producing sand at one-hundred-and-sixty feet. The miners worked in squads, eight-hour turns. Holes had been drilled into the rock at various angles and a lot of conglomerate brought to the surface. Once a short delay occurred in changing squads, during which the air-pump, employed to exhaust the gases from the pit and supply pure ozone from above, was let stand idle. Mr. Hart was seated on a timber across the shaft when the men were ready to go down. As was the custom, a man dropped a taper into the opening to test the air. Natural gas had filled the shaft and it ignited from the burning torch, causing a terrific explosion. The workmen were thrown in all directions and lay stunned and burned. When they regained consciousness Hart was nowhere to be seen and flames rose from the mouth of the pit to the tree-tops. Hart’s body was eventually recovered from the bottom of the shaft, horribly mangled and charred. Work was abandoned and the hole was partly filled up and covered, none caring to pry farther into the petroleum-secrets of nature. Were meddlers who seek to poke their noses into the secrets of other people dealt with thus summarily, what a thinning out of the population there would be!

Peterson & Irwin’s treatment of the Donnelly well brings out clearly that the sole object was to procure oil. This is important, in view of the claim that the first well drilled exclusively for petroleum was put down in 1859. Practically the two Pittsburgers anticipated this by three years, a circumstance to remember when considering the varied events which led up to the petroleum development.

“We do homage to the claims of the ancients and neglect those of later date.”

Charles Lockhart, still an honored resident of Pittsburg, may fairly claim to be the oldest oil-operator in the United States. His first transaction in petroleum was the purchase, in April of 1853, of three barrels of crude from Isaac Huff, who brought the stuff in a skiff from a salt-well at Tarentum. Huff sold the lot at thirty-two cents a gallon to his friend Lockhart, then connected with a leading mercantile house, and agreed to furnish him all the well produced during the year at the same price. The contract might seem like an elephant on his hands, but Lockhart’s faith in the new industry was not a plant too delicate to stand alone. Shrewd and far-seeing, the young dealer did not need a Lick telescope with a Peate lens to discern that this “mysterious grease” must soon be utilized for the general benefit. Believing a grand future was about to dawn upon petroleum, he disposed of the Huff oil and contract at a handsome profit to Samuel M. Kier, who had a small refinery on Seventh Avenue and the old Canal, and at once secured control of the Tarentum salt-works. From that date to the present—1853 to 1897—a period of forty-four years, Charles Lockhart has been an oil-producer, active in furthering the best interests of the business, a leader in improvements to foster its growth and never lacking the pluck and enterprise essential to the highest success.

In the fall of 1859 he formed a partnership with William Frew, William Phillips, John Vanausdall and A. V. Kipp to lease lands and put down oil-wells in Venango County. The five partners drilled on the Tarr Farm and the east bank of the Allegheny River. The Crystal Palace, an old keel-boat that cost them twenty-five dollars, horses towed to Oil City with their machinery and provisions. Accommodations were decidedly scarce in the settlement, just sprouting at the mouth of Oil Creek, and the boat served the workmen as a lodging and boarding-place. They cooked their own meals, of which pork and beans, coffee and molasses were prime constituents, washed their own clothes and not seldom carried flour three miles into the country to have a farmer’s wife bake it into digestible bread. The hardy fellows could navigate the Ohio or the Allegheny, brave the terrors of a Chilkoot Pass, punch a hole hundreds of feet into the rock, fry bacon to a turn and dish up a savory meal, but baking real loaves stumped them every time. The first well—the Albion, across the river—yielded forty barrels a day. From it, in March of 1860, the owners shipped sixty barrels of crude, per the steamboat Venango, Captain Reynolds commanding, the first oil boated to Pittsburg from the Pennsylvania oil-fields. It was hauled to the store of J. McCully & Co., on Wood street, near Liberty—Lockhart and Frew were junior members of the firm—and rolled upon the pavement. Much excitement followed the landing of the barrels, to which thick layers of Venago’s mud stuck wickedly. Hundreds of curious Pittsburgers viewed the importation with extreme interest, curling their noses upwards as the petroleum-aroma assailed them with an odor resembling liquid Limburger rather than brut wine. Bungs were taken out to let visitors inspect the fluid, inhale the unmixed odor and wonder what “in the name of Sam Hill” people wanted with “the nasty stuff.” A small refinery on the Fifth-Avenue extension of the city paid thirty-four cents a gallon for the oil. Such was the humble beginning of a traffic fated to outstrip coal, iron and cotton and give even breadstuffs a stiff run for first money.

“Perfection is made up of trifles, but perfection is no trifle.”

The quintette drilled numerous wells, one of them the largest on Oil Creek, and prospered greatly. Phillips, Vanausdall and Kipp sold out to their partners, who organized as Lockhart & Frew. It was an ideal union of capacity and capital, not a mismating of cut-glass aspiration with tin-cup attainment, and its wheel of fortune did not travel with a punctured tire. The new firm shipped extensively, built the Brilliant Refinery in 1861 and speedily stepped to the front in handling the greasy staple. In May of 1860 Mr. Lockhart went to Europe with samples of crude and refined-distillate to establish a market in England. These were the first samples of crude-petroleum and its products ever carried across the Atlantic. The mission was most successful, a large foreign demand springing up quickly. Lockhart & Frew exerted vast influence in the petroleum-trade, opened branch-agencies throughout the oil-regions and eventually combined with the Standard Oil-Company. Major Frew, a man of rare sagacity and broad ideas, died in March of 1880. He disliked ostentation, was quiet in his tastes and habits, managed the accounts and office-work of the firm with scrupulous exactness, was always kindly and genial, helped the needy, served as treasurer of the Christian Commission and left a fine estate. Time has dealt gently with Mr. Lockhart, who is young in heart and sympathy and good-fellowship. His compliments have the juiciness of the peach, his pleasant jokes are spiced with originality, his years sit upon him lightly and his old friends are not forgotten. He is happy in his social and business relations, in recalling the past and awaiting the future, in wealth gained worthily and enjoyed wisely and in a life crowded with usefulness and blessing.

“A bough from an oak, not from a willow.”

The late Joseph Bates was closely associated with the early shippers of petroleum on the Allegheny River. He held the confidence of Lockhart & Frew and was esteemed everywhere for probity and enterprise. Coming to the oil-regions in the sixties, he resided at Oil City many years and operated in different sections of the field. With his friends he was ever jaunty, jolly and perfectly at home. Judging by the French standard, that a man is only as old as he feels, he had to the very end of his sixty years few juniors at Oil City, Parker, Petrolia or Pittsburg. He was never ill-natured nor uncompanionable, whether his wells proved unexpectedly large or disappointingly small. His sunny composition bore no “thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice” to repel and chill those with whom he came in contact. His steadfast friend, Samuel B. Harper, who has had charge of the books from about the commencement of Lockhart & Frew’s partnership, is in Mr. Lockhart’s office to-day. A record so honorable to all concerned, with its long performance of duty and unwavering appreciation, is deserving of special remark in these days of lightning-changes, impaired confidence and devil-may-care recklessness generally.

On an old map of the United States, printed in England in 1787, the word “petroleum” is marked twice, indicating that the “surface-shows” of oil had attracted the notice of the earliest explorers of Southern Ohio and Northwestern Pennsylvania a century ago. In one instance it is placed at the mouth of the stream since famed the world over as Oil Creek, where Oil City is situated; in the other on a stream represented as emptying into the Ohio River, close to the site of what is now the village of Macksburg. When that section of Ohio was first settled, various symptoms of greasiness were detected, thin films of oil floating on the waters of Duck Creek and its tributaries, globules rising in different springs and seepings occurring frequently in the same manner as in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Thirty miles north of Marietta, on Duck Creek, a salt-well sunk by Mr. McKee, in 1814, to the depth of four-hundred-and-seventy-five feet, discharged “periodically, at intervals of from two to four days and from three to six hours’ duration, thirty to sixty gallons of petroleum at each inception.” Eighteen years afterwards the discharges were less frequent and the yield of oil diminished to one barrel a week, finally ceasing altogether. Once thirty or forty barrels stored in a cistern took fire from the gas at the well having been ignited by a workman carrying a light. The burning oil ran into the creek, blazed to the tops of the trees and exhibited for hours to the amazed settlers the novelty of a rivulet on fire. Ten miles above McConnellsville, on the Muskingum River, results almost identical attended the boring of salt-wells in 1819. Dr. S. P. Hildreth, of Marietta, in an account of the region, written that year, says of the borings for salt-water:

“They have sunk two wells more than four-hundred feet; one of them affords a strong and pure water, but not in great quantity; the other discharges such vast quantities of petroleum, or as it is vulgarly called “Seneca Oil,” and besides is subject to such tremendous explosions of gas * * * that they make little or no salt. Nevertheless, the petroleum affords considerable profit and is beginning to be in demand for workshops and manufactories. It affords a clear, brisk light, when burned in this way, and will be a valuable article for lighting the street-lamps in the future cities of Ohio.”

The last sentence bears the force of a prophecy. Writing about the year 1832 the same observant author directs attention to another peculiar feature:

“Since the first settlement of the regions west of the Appalachian range the hunters and pioneers have been acquainted with this oil. Rising in a hidden and mysterious manner from the bowels of the earth, it soon arrested their attention and acquired great value in the eyes of the simple sons of the forest. * * * From its success in rheumatism, burns, coughs, sprains etc., it was justly entitled to its celebrity. * * * It is also well adapted to prevent friction in machinery, for, being free of gluten, so common to animal and vegetable oils, it preserves the parts to which it is applied for a long time in free motion; where a heavy vertical shaft runs in a socket it is preferable to all or any other articles. This oil rises in greater or less abundance in most of the salt-wells and, collecting where it rises, is removed from time to time with a ladle.”

Is it not strange that, with the sources of supply thus pointed out in different counties and states and the useful applications of petroleum fairly understood, its real value should have remained unappreciated and unrecognized for more than thirty years and be at last determined through experiments upon the distillation of bituminous shales and coals? Wells sunk hundreds of feet for salt water produced oil in abundance, yet it occurred to no one that, if bored expressly for petroleum, it could be found in paying quantity! Hamilton McClintock, owner of the “oil-spring” famed in history and romance, when somebody ventured to suggest that he should dig into the rock a short distance, instead of skimming the petroleum with a flannel-cloth, retorted hotly: “I’m no blanked fool to dig a hole for the oil to get away through the bottom!”

If West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio played trumps in the exciting game of Brine vs. Oil, Kentucky held the bowers. The home of James Harrod and Daniel Boone, Henry Clay and George D. Prentice was noted for other things besides backwoods fighters, statesmanship, sparkling journalism, thoroughbred horses, superb women and moonshine-whiskey. Off in the southeast corner of Wayne county, near the northeast corner of a six-thousand-acre tract of wild land, David Beatty bored a well for salt about the year 1818. The land extended four miles westward from the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River, its eastern boundary, and three miles down the Fork from Tennessee, its southern line. The well was located on a strip of flat ground between the stream and a rocky bluff, streaked with veins of coal and limestone. Five yards from the water a hole nine feet square was dug ten feet to the rock and timbered. The well, barely three inches in diameter, was punched one-hundred-and-seventy feet by manual labor, steam-engines not having penetrated the trackless forests of Wayne at that period. To the intense disgust of the workmen a black, sticky, viscid liquid persisted in coming up with the salt-water and a new location was chosen two miles farther down the creek. Extra care not to drill too deep averted an influx of the disagreeable fluid which spoiled the first venture. Salt-works were established and flourished for years, a simon-pure oasis in the interminable wilderness.

Beatty was elected to Congress, serving his constituents faithfully and illustrating the Mulberry-Sellers policy of “the old flag and an appropriation.” He secured a liberal grant for a road to his property on the South Fork and constructed a passable thoroughfare. Traces of deep cuttings, log-culverts and blasted rocks, still discernible amid the underbrush that well-nigh hides them from view, are convincing evidences of the magnitude and difficulty of the task. “The rocky road to Dublin” was a mere bagatelle in comparison with this long-deserted pathway. “Jordan is a hard road to travel,” says an old song, and the sentiment would fit equally well in this case. At one rugged point holes were cut in a rock as steep as the roof of a house, to afford footing for the mules engaged in drawing salt from the works! Considering the roughness of the country, the height of the hills, the depth of the chasms and the scanty facilities available, Beatty’s road was quite as remarkable a feat as Bonaparte’s passage across the Alps or Ben Butler’s “Dutch-Gap Canal.” Its spirited projector lived and died at Monticello, the county-seat, where his descendants resided until recently.

The abandoned well did not propose to be snuffed out unceremoniously or to enact the role of “Leah the Forsaken.” In its bright lexicon the word fail was not to be inserted merely because it was too fresh to participate in the salt-trade. Far from retiring permanently, it spouted petroleum at a Nancy-Hanks quickstep, filling the pit, running into the Fork and covering mile after mile of the water with a top-dressing of oil. Somehow the floating mass caught fire and mammoth pyrotechnics ensued. The stream blazed and boiled and sizzled from the well to the Cumberland River, thirty-five miles northward, calcining rocks and licking up babbling brooks on its fiery march! Trees on its banks burned and blistered and charred to their deepest roots. Iron-pans at the salt-wells got red-hot, shriveled, warped, twisted and joined the junk-pile! Was not that a sweet revenge for plucky No. 1, the well its owner “had no use for” and devoutly wished at the bottom of the sea?

The Chicago fire “couldn’t hold a candle” to this rural conflagration, which originated the expressive phrase of “hell with the lid off,” applied sixty years afterwards by James Parton to the flaming furnaces at Pittsburg. Unluckily, the region was populated so sparsely that few spectators had front seats at “the greatest show on earth.” The deluge of oil ceased eventually, the fire following suit. Anon the salt industry began to languish and the works were dismantled. No more the forest-road echoed the sharp crack of the teamster’s whip or heard his lusty oaths. The district along the South Fork was left as silent as “the harp that once through Tara’s halls the soul of music shed,” ready to be labeled “Ichabod,” and tradition alone preserved the name and record of the “Beatty Well,” THE FIRST OIL-SPOUTER IN AMERICA!

To future generations tell The story of the Beatty Well, The father of oil-spouters! In spite of quips and jibes and sneers Of arrant cranks and doubters, Whose forte is flinging wretched jeers, It richly merits hearty cheers From true petroleum-shouters.

Accompanied by Dr. W. G. Hunter, and a native as guide, it was my good fortune to visit this memorable locality in 1877. The start was from Burksville, Cumberland county, the doctor’s home and my headquarters for a twelvemonth. At Albany, Clinton county, sure-footed mules, the only animals that could be ridden safely through the rough country, took the place of our horses. Soon the last signs of civilization disappeared and we plunged into the thick woods, a crooked, tortuous trail pointing the way. Hills, rocks, ravines, fallen trees and mountain-streams by turns impeded our progress, as we rode in Indian file for thirty miles. Birds twittered and snakes hissed at the invasion of their solitudes. Several times the path touched the line of Beatty’s forgotten road and once a ruined cabin, with three grave-like mounds in a corner of the small clearing, met our gaze. The guide explained how, twenty years before, the poor family tenanting the wretched hovel had been poisoned by eating some kind of berries, the parents and their only child dying alone and unattended. No human eye beheld their struggles, no soft hand cooled the fevered brows of the sufferers whose lives went out in that desolate waste.

“Oh God! How hard it is to die alone!”

Provisions in our saddle-bags, a clear brook and evergreen boughs supplied us with food, drink and an open-air bed. Next morning we traversed a broad plateau, ending abruptly at the top of a precipitous bluff a hundred feet high. Beneath us lay a stretch of bottom-land, with the Big South Fork on its east side and the Cumberland Mountains rearing their bold crests five miles away. In the center of a patch of cleared ground stood a shanty, built of poles and roofed with split slabs of oak. From an open space in one end smoke escaped freely, showing that the place was inhabited. Tethering the mules and throwing the saddles upon the grass, we crawled down a slope formed by the collapse of a portion of the bluff. A shot from my revolver—everybody carried a pistol—shattered the atmosphere and brought the inmates to the side of the dwelling. The father, mother, a child in arms and two boys entering their teens watched our approach. As we drew nigh they scampered into the shanty and took refuge under a queer structure of rails, straw and blankets that did duty as a bed for the household! A blanket hung over the space cut for a door. Drawing this aside, the frightened family could be seen crouching on the bare soil, for the abode had neither door, window, floor nor chinking between the logs. It was quite unfit to shelter a decent porker. Not a chair, table, stove, looking-glass, bureau or any of the articles of furniture deemed necessary for modern comfort was in sight! A bench hewn out of timber with an axe, two metal-pots, some tin-dishes and knives and forks composed the domestic outfit! Yet it was “home” to the squalid beings huddled in the dark, damp, musty angle farthest from the intruders who had dropped in upon them as unexpectedly as a Peary meteor.

Calling them to come out and speak with us a moment, the woman appeared, bearing the inevitable baby. She was truly a revelation, with unkempt brindle-hair and sallow skin to match. Her raiment consisted of a single jean-garment, dirty and tattered beyond description, too narrow to encircle her waist and too short to reach within a dozen inches of her naked feet. Compared with the flimsy toilet of “a living picture,” this costume was simplicity itself. The poor creature smoked a cob-pipe viciously. A request to see her husband evoked the command: “Old man, I reckon you best git out hyer!” The “old man” heeded this summons and emerged from his hiding-place, trembling violently. His attire was in harmony with his wife’s, threadbare jean-pants and shirt comprising it. Head and feet were bare. His trembling ceased the instant he saw our guide, whom he knew and greeted cordially. Introductions followed and we asked if he could show us the way to the Beatty Well. He answered in perfect English, with the grace of a Chesterfield: “It will be the greatest pleasure I have known for many a day.”

A brisk walk brought us to the well. Dirt and leaves had filled the pit nearly level, forming a depression which one might pass without special notice. Scraping away the rubbish, blackened fragments of the timbered walls appeared. But not a drop of oil had issued from the veteran-well for scores of years. One man alone survived of those who had gazed upon the flow of petroleum previous to the fire which checked the greasian tide forever. He lived ten miles northwest and his short story was learned on the return-trip by another route. The scattered rustics were accustomed to go to the well once or twice a year and dip enough oil to medicate and lubricate whoever or whatever needed it. The fluid was dark and heavy and for years rose to within a few feet of the surface. At length the well clogged up and was almost obliterated. The dim eyes of the aged narrator sparkled as he recalled the big blaze, concluding with the emphatic words: “It jes’ looked ez if the devil had hitched up the hull bottomless pit fur a torch-light percession!”

Except the squatter on the tract of land, which Dr. Hunter and myself had secured the winter of our visit, the nearest settler lived five miles distant! The Cincinnati-Southern Railroad, now the Queen & Crescent route, had not crossed the meandering Kentucky River and the country was practically inaccessible. Men and women grew up without ever hearing of a church, a school, a book, a newspaper, a preacher, a doctor, a wheeled vehicle or a lucifer-match! The heathen of Bariaboola-Gha were as well informed concerning God and a future state. They herded in miserable cabins, lived on “corn-dodgers and sow-belly,” drank home-made whiskey and never wandered ten miles from their own fireside. Of the great outside world, of moral obligations, of religious conviction and of current events they were profoundly ignorant. Think of people fifty, sixty, seventy years old, born and reared in the United States, who never saw a loaf of wheat-bread, a wagon, a cart or a baby-carriage, to say nothing of a plum-pudding, railway-coach, a trolley-car or a tandem-bicycle! It seems incredible, in this advanced age and bang-up nation, that such conditions should be possible, yet they existed in Southeastern Kentucky. And the American eagle flaps his wings, while Americans boast of their culture and send barrels of cold cash to buy flannel-shirts for perspiring Hottentots and goody-goody tracts for jolly cannibals!

“Consistency’s a jewel.”

Small need of barbed-wire fences to shut out the cattle and chickens of neighbors five miles apart! Their children did not quarrel and sulk and yell “You can’t play in our yard!” Our host, who took us over the property and told us all he knew about it, had not seen a strange face for twenty-nine weary months! Then the neighbor five miles off had come in the vain search of a cruse of oil from the old well to rub on an afflicted hog! Three years had rolled by since his last expedition to the cross-roads, fourteen miles away, to trade “coon-skins” for jeans and groceries. Could isolation be more complete? Was Alexander Selkirk less blessed with companionship on his secluded island? Had Coleridge’s Ancient Mariner, “on a wide, wide sea,” greater cause for an attack of the blues?

The steel-track and the iron-horse are prime civilizers and eighteen years have wrought a wondrous change in the section bordering upon the Cumberland Mountains. The schoolmaster has come in with the railroad and improvement is the prevailing order. Farmers have turned their forests into cultivated fields and bought the latest implements. Their boys read the papers, yearn for the city, smoke cigarettes, dabble in politics and dream of unbounded wealth. The girls, no longer content with homespun frocks and sunbonnets, dress in silk and velvet, wear stylish hats, devour French novels, sport high-heeled shoes and balloon-sleeves, play Beethoven and Chopin, waltz divinely and are altogether lovable!

An apparition muttering “I am thy father’s ghost” would not have surprised us so much as the politeness of our half-clad, barefooted, bareheaded pilot to the neglected well. His manners and his language were faultless. Not a coarse word or grammatical error marred his fluent speech. At noon he invited us to share his humble dinner, apologizing with royal dignity for the poverty of his surroundings. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I regret that parched corn and fat bacon are all I can offer, but I beg you to honor me with your presence at my table!” Remembering the cabin and its presiding divinity, we felt obliged to decline and requested him to lunch with us. It was a positive pleasure to see with what relish he ate the baked chicken, biscuit and good things Mrs. Hunter had packed in our saddle-bags. After the meal we prepared to depart. The end of a Louisville paper under the flap of my saddle attracted the old man’s attention.

“Is that a newspaper?” he inquired.

“Yes, do you want it?”

“Oh, thank you a thousand times! It is fifteen years since I have seen a paper and this will be such a treat!”

He seized the sheet eagerly, dropped upon the grass and glanced over the printed page. In an instant he jumped to his feet and tears coursed down his wrinkled cheeks.

“I did not mean to be rude,” he said earnestly, “but you cannot imagine how my feelings mastered me, after so many years of separation from the world, at sight of a paper from the city of my birth!”

The next moment the good-byes were uttered and we had left the hermit of South Fork, to meet no more this side of eternity. He stood peering after us until the woods shut us from his wistful gaze. Six years later death, the grim detective no vigilance can elude, claimed the guardian of the Beatty Well. His family removed to parts unknown. He rests in an unmarked grave, beneath a spreading oak, near the murmuring stream. The lonely exile has reached home at last!

Who on earth was this educated, courteous, gentlemanly personage, and how did he drift into such a place? This perplexing problem beat the fifteen-puzzle, “Pigs in Clover,” or the confusing dogma of Freewill and Predestination. Our guide enlightened us. The old man was reared in Louisville, graduated from college and entered an office to study law. In a bar-room row one night a young man, with whom he had some trouble, was stabbed fatally. Fearing he would be accused of the deed, the student fled to the woods. For years he shunned mankind, subsisting on game and fruit and sleeping in a cave. Every rustling leaf or snapping twig terrified him with the idea that officers were at his heels. Ultimately he gained courage and sought the acquaintance of the few settlers in his vicinity. Striving to forget the past, he cohabited with the woman he called his wife, erected a shanty and brought up three children. Fire destroyed his hut and its contents, leaving him destitute, and he located where we met him. The fear of arrest could not be shaken off and he supposed we had come to take him a prisoner, after twenty-five years of hiding, for a crime of which he was innocent. This explained his retreat under the bed and violent trembling. He carried his secret in his own bosom until 1873, when he was believed to be dying and disclosed it to a friend, our guide, with a sealed letter giving his true name. He recovered, the letter was handed back unopened and the fugitive’s identity was never revealed. What an existence for a man of refinement and collegiate training! What volumes of unwritten, unsuspected tragedies environ us, could we but pierce the outward mask and read the tablets of the heart!

Eight or ten years ago J. O. Marshall, a Pennsylvania oil-operator, cleaned out the Beatty Well and drilled another a half-mile north. Neither yielded any oil, although the second was put down nine-hundred feet. Mr. Marshall leased a great deal of land in Wayne and adjacent counties, expecting to operate extensively, but he died without seeing his purposes accomplished. He was a genial, enterprising, whole-souled fellow, whose faith in Kentucky as an oil-field never faltered.

Dr. Hunter, my esteemed associate on many a delightful trip, was practicing at Newcastle, Pa., when the civil war broke out. He sold his drug-store, offered his services to the Government and was placed in charge of a medical department, where he made a first-class record. He amputated the leg of General James A. Beaver, subsequently Governor of Pennsylvania. At the close of the war he settled in Cumberland county, married a prominent young lady, built up an immense practice and acquired a competence. He served with signal ability and credit in the Legislature and in Congress, elected time and again in a district overwhelmingly against his party. He was chairman of the Republican State-Committee, and ought to be the successor of Blackburn in the United-States Senate.

Seventy years ago William Morris, a practical driller, whose name oilmen should perpetuate, invented the contrivance that culminated in “jars” for drilling-tools. This contrivance, which enabled the Ruffners and other salt-borers to go a thousand feet or more for brine, renders it possible to drill a mile for oil, if ambitious operators desire to get so far towards the antipodes. The manner in which the oil-resources of West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky were thrown away by the early pioneers is a surprising feature in the history of human affairs. Fifty years before Pennsylvania oil-wells had been heard of the Kanawha salt-seekers were drilling what to-day would be paying oil-wells. Instead of saving the oil, which is enriching West Virginia operators now, they wasted it and saved the salt-water. They wasted the natural gas, the best fuel of the century, and boiled their salt-water with wood, the most expensive and least satisfactory fuel of the valley. That is often the way humanity gropes in the dark. The men who rushed to California drove their ox-wagons past the big bonanzas of the Comstock lode, while the men who later went to the Comstock went past the rich carbonates of Leadville, just as later prospectors ran over the Cripple-Creek silver and gold-leads in the search for things farther distant and the crowds hurrying to Alaska ignored the teeming ledges of the Black Hills. The Kanawha salt-men scorned the oil, yet drilled the first oil-wells, and in doing it invented the methods which have come into use throughout the entire oil-territory. If Joseph and David Ruffner and William Morris had displayed half the wisdom in utilizing the oil they manifested in inventing tools to find salt-water, theirs would be the familiar names in Oildom down to the end of time.

“Fellow-citizens,” shouted a free-silver orator to a host of starving coal-miners three months after the last Presidential inauguration, “they tell us Major McKinley is the advance-agent of prosperity, but, if so, he seems to be a deuce of a way ahead of the show!” In like fashion the Ruffners were a long way ahead of the petroleum-development, but the show got there at last, heralded by salt-wells that pointed unerringly towards the dawn.

THEY NOTICED IT.

Writing of several Jesuits who, about 1642, penetrated the territory of the Eries, probably near what is now Cuba, N. Y., Charlevoix says:

“They found a thick, oily, stagnant matter which would burn like brandy.”

The map of the Missionaries Dollier and Galinèe, printed in 1670, has a hint of the presence of petroleum in the north-western part of New York. Near the spot which was to become the site of Cuba these words are marked:

“Fonteaine de Bitume.”

In 1700 the Earl of Bellmont, Governor of New York, thus instructed Engineer Wolfgang W. Romer to visit the Five Nations:

“You are to go and view a well or spring which is eight miles beyond the Seneks’ farthest castle, which they told me blazes up in a flame when a lighted coal or firebrand is put into it. You will do well to taste the said water and * * * bring with you some of it.”

Sir William Johnson, who visited Niagara in 1767, in his journal says with reference to the spring at Cuba:

“Arcushan came in with a quantity of curious oyl, taken at the top of the water of some very small lake near the village he belongs to.”

David Leisberger, the Moravian Missionary, went up the Allegheny River in 1767, established a mission near the mouth of Tionesta Creek and in 1770 removed to Butler county. His manuscript records:

“I have seen three kinds of oil-springs—such as have an outlet, such as have none and such as rise from the bottom of the creeks. From the first water and oil flow out together, the oil impregnating the grass and soil; in the second it gathers on the surface of the water to the depth of the thickness of a finger; from the third it rises to the surface and flows with the current of the creek. The Indians prefer wells without an outlet. From such they first dip the oil that has accumulated, then stir the well and, when the water has settled, fill their kettles with fresh oil, which they purify by boiling. It is used medicinally, as an ointment for toothache, headache, swellings, rheumatism and sprains. Sometimes it is taken internally. It is of a brown color and can also be used in lamps. It burns well.”

Dr. John David Schopf, a surgeon in the British service, visited Pittsburg in 1783 and in an account of his journey remarked:

“Petroleum was found at several places up the Allegheny, particularly at a spring and a creek, which were covered with this floating substance.”

General William Irvine, in a letter to John Dickinson, dated “Carlisle, August 17, 1785,” tells of exploring the western part of Pennsylvania. He says:

“Oil Creek takes its name from an oily or bituminous matter being found floating on its surface. Many cures are attributed to this oil. * * * It rises in the bed of the creek at very low water. In a dry season I am told it is found without any mixture of water and is pure oil. It rises when the creek is high from the bottom in small globules.”

George Henry Loskiel, in his “Geschichte der Mission der Evangelischen Bruder unter der Indianen in Nordamerika,” published in 1789, noted:

“One of the most favorite medicines used by the Indians is Fossil-oil exuding from the earth, commonly with water * * * This oil is of a brown color and smells like tar. * * * They use it chiefly in external complaints. Some take it inwardly and it has not been found to do harm. It will burn in a lamp. The Indians sometimes sell it to the white people at four guineas a quart.”

An officer of the United States Army, who descended the Ohio River in 1811, wrote a book of travels in which he remarks:

“Not far from the mouth of the Little Beaver a spring has been found, said to rise from the bottom of the river, from which issues an oil which is highly inflammable and is called Seneca oil. It resembles Barbadoes tar and is used as a remedy for rheumatic pains.”

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us

IV. WHERE THE BLUE-GRASS GROWS

INTERESTING PETROLEUM DEVELOPMENTS IN KENTUCKY AND TENNESSEE—THE FAMOUS AMERICAN WELL—A BOSTON COMPANY TAKES HOLD—PROVIDENTIAL ESCAPE—REGULAR MOUNTAIN VENDETTA—A SUNDAY LYNCHING PARTY—PECULIAR PHASES OF PIETY—AN OLD WOMAN’S WELCOME—WARM RECEPTION—STORIES OF RUSTIC SIMPLICITY.

----------

“He who would search for pearls must dive below.”—Dryden.

“Often do the spirits of great events stride on before the events.”—Coleridge.

“Coming events cast their shadows before.”—Thomas Campbell.

“In Cumberland county, Kentucky, a run of pure oil was struck.”—Niles’ Register, A. D. 1829.

“Indications of oil are plentiful at Chattanooga, Tennessee.”—Robert B. Roosevelt, A. D. 1863.

“Ever since the first settlement of the country oil has been gathered and used for medicinal purposes.”—Cattlesburg, Ky., Letter, A. D. 1884.

“Everythink has changed, everythink except human natur’.”—Eugene Field.

“To all appearance it was chiefly by Accident and the grace of Nature.”—Carlyle.

----------

Interesting and unexpected results from borings for salt-water in Kentucky were not exhausted by the initial experiment on South Fork. Special peculiarities invest that venture with a romantic halo essentially its own, but “there are others.” Wayne county was not to monopolize the petroleum-feature of salt-wells by a large majority. “Westward the star of empire takes its way” affirmed Bishop Berkeley two-hundred years ago, with the instinct of a born prophet, and it was so with the petroleum-star of Kentucky, however it might be with brilliant Henri Watterson’s “star-eyed goddess of Reform.”

The storm-center next shifted to Cumberland county, the second west of Wayne, Clinton separating them. Hardy breadwinners, braving the hardships and privations of pioneer-life in the backwoods, early in this century settled much of the country along the Cumberland River. Upon one section of irregular shape, its southern end bordered by Tennessee, the state of Davy Crockett and Andrew Jackson, the name of the winding river intersecting it was appropriately bestowed. A central location, between the west bank of the Cumberland and the foot of a lordly hill, was selected for the county-seat and christened Burksville, in honor of a respected citizen who owned the site of the embryo hamlet. From a cross-roads tavern and blacksmith-shop the place expanded gradually into an inviting village of one-thousand population. It has fine stores, good churches and schools, a brick court-house, and for years it boasted the only college in Kentucky for the education of girls.

Burksville pursued “the even tenor of its way” slowly and surely. Forty miles from a railroad or a telegraph-wire, its principal outlet is the river during the season of navigation. The Cumberland retains the fashion of rising sixty to eighty feet above its summer-level when the winter rains set in and dwindling to a mere brooklet in the dry, hot months. Old-timers speak of “the flood of 1826” as the greatest in the history of the community. The rampant waters overflowed fields and streets, invaded the ground-floors of houses and did a lot of unpleasant things, the memory of which tradition has kept green. In January of 1877 the moist experience was repeated almost to high-water mark. Saw-logs floated into kitchens and parlors and improvised skiffs navigated back-yards and gardens. Seldom has the town cut a wide swath in the metropolitan press, because it avoided gross scandals and attended strictly to home-affairs. The chief dissipation is a trip by boat to Nashville or Point-Burnside, or a drive overland to Glasgow, the terminus of a branch of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad.

The first great event to stir the hearts of the good people of Cumberland county occurred in 1829. A half-mile from the mouth of Rennix Creek, a minor stream that empties into the Cumberland two miles north of the county-town, a well was sunk one-hundred-and-eighty feet for salt-water. Niles’ Register, published the same year, told the tale succinctly:

“Some months since, in the act of boring for salt-water on the land of Mr. Lemuel Stockton, situated in the county of Cumberland, Kentucky, a run of pure oil was struck, from which it is almost incredible what quantities of the substance issued. The discharges were by floods, at intervals of from two to five minutes, at each flow vomiting forth many barrels of pure oil. I witnessed myself, on a shaft that stood upright by the aperture in the rock from which it issued, marks of oil 25 or 30 feet perpendicularly above the rock. These floods continued for three or four weeks, when they subsided to a constant stream, affording many thousand gallons per day. This well is between a quarter and a half-mile from the bank of the Cumberland River, on a small rill (creek) down which it runs to the Cumberland. It was traced as far down the Cumberland as Gallatin, in Sumner county, Tennessee, nearly a hundred miles. For many miles it covered the whole surface of the river and its marks are now found on the rocks on each bank.

“About two miles below the point on which it touched the river, it was set on fire by a boy, and the effect was grand beyond description. An old gentleman who witnessed it says he has seen several cities on fire, but that he never beheld anything like the flames which rose from the bosom of the Cumberland to touch the very clouds.”

This was the beginning of what was afterwards known from the equator to the poles as the “American Well.” The flow of oil spoiled the well for salt and the owners quitted it in disgust, sinking another with better success in an adjacent field. For years it remained forsaken, an object of more or less curiosity to travelers who passed close by on their way to or from Burksville. It was very near the edge of the creek, on flat ground most of which has been washed away. Neighboring farmers dipped oil occasionally for medicine, for axle-grease and—“tell it not in Gath, publish it not in Askelon”—to kill vermin on swine!

Job Moses, a resident of Buffalo, N. Y., visited the locality about the year 1848. He had read of the oil-springs in New York, Pennsylvania, West Virginia and Ohio and he decided that the hole on Rennix Creek ought to be a prize-package. His moderate offer for the well was accepted by the Bakers, into whose hands the Stockton tract had come. He drilled the well to four-hundred feet and erected a pumping-rig. The five or six barrels a day of greenish-amber fluid, 42° gravity, he put up in half-pint bottles, labeled “American Rock Oil” and sold at fifty cents, commending it as a specific for numberless complaints. He reaped a harvest for several years, until trade languished and the well was abandoned.

With the proceeds of his enterprise Moses bought a large block of land at Limestone, N. Y., adjoining the northern boundary of McKean county, Pa., and built a mansion big enough for a castle. He farmed extensively, raised herds of cattle, employed legions of laborers and dispensed a bountiful hospitality. In 1862-3 he drilled three wells near his dwelling, finding a trifling amount of gas and oil. Had he drilled deeper he would inevitably have opened up the phenomenal Bradford field a dozen years in advance of its actual development. Wells twelve-hundred to three-thousand feet deep had not been dreamt of in petroleum-philosophy at that date, else Job Moses might have diverted the whole current of oil-operations northward and postponed indefinitely the advent of the Clarion and Butler districts! Boring a four-inch hole a few hundred feet farther would have done it!

On what small causes great effects sometimes depend! Believing a snake-story induced our first parents to sample “the fruit of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought sin into our world and all our woe.” Ambition to be a boss precipitated Lucifer “from the battlements of heaven to the nethermost abyss.” A dream released Joseph from prison to be “ruler over Egypt.” The smiles of a wanton plunged Greece into war and wiped Troy from the face of the earth. A prod on the heel slew Achilles, a nail—driven by a woman at that—finished Sisera and a pebble ended Goliath. The cackling of a goose saved Rome from the barbarous hordes of Brennus. A cobweb across the mouth of the cave secreting him preserved Mahomet from his pursuers and gave Arabia and Turkey a new religion. The scorching of a cake in a goatherd’s hut aroused King Alfred and restored the Saxon monarchy in England. The movements of a spider inspired Robert Bruce to renewed exertions and secured the independence of Scotland. An infected rag in a bundle of Asiatic goods scourged Europe with the plague. The fall of an apple from a tree resulted in Sir Isaac Newton’s sublime theory of gravitation. The vibrations of a tea-kettle lid suggested to the Marquis of Worcester the first conception of the steam-engine. A woman’s chance-remark led Eli Whitney to invent the cotton-gin. The twitching of a frog’s muscles revealed galvanism. A diamond-necklace hastened the French Revolution and consigned Marie Antoinette to the guillotine. Hacking a cherry-tree with a hatchet earned George Washington greater glory than the victory of Monmouth or the overthrow of Cornwallis. A headache helped cost Napoleon the battle of Waterloo and change the destiny of twenty kingdoms. An affront to an ambassador drove Germany to arms, exiled Louis Napoleon and made France a republic. Mrs. O’Leary’s kicking cow laid Chicago in ashes and burst up no end of insurance-companies. An alliterative phrase defeated James G. Blaine for President of the United States. An epigram, a couplet or a line has been known to confer immortality. A new bonnet has disrupted a sewing-society, split a congregation and put devout members on the toboggan in their hurry to backslide. An onion-breath has severed doting lovers, cheated parsons of their wedding-fees and played hob with Cupid’s calculations. Statistics fail to disclose the awful havoc wrought in millions of homes by such observations, on the part of thoughtless young husbands, as “this isn’t the way mother baked,” or “mother’s coffee didn’t taste like this!”

Moses lived to produce oil from his farms and to witness, five miles south of Limestone, the grandest petroleum-development of any age or nation. He was built on the broad-gauge plan, physically and mentally, and “the light went out” peacefully at last. The Kentucky well was never revived. The rig decayed and disappeared, a timber or two lingering until carried off by the flood in 1877.

In the autumn of 1876 Frederic Prentice, a leading operator, engaged me to go to Kentucky to lease and purchase lands for oil-purposes. Shortly before Christmas he wished me to meet him in New York and go from there to Boston, to give information to parties he expected to associate with him in his Kentucky projects. Together we journeyed to the city of culture and baked-beans and met the gentlemen in the office of the Union-Pacific Railroad-Company. The gathering was quite notable. Besides Mr. Prentice, who had long been prominent in petroleum affairs, Stephen Weld, Oliver Ames, Sen., Oliver Ames, Jun., Frederick Ames, F. Gordon Dexter and one or two others were present. Mr. Weld was the richest citizen of New England, his estate at his death inventorying twenty-two millions. The elder Oliver Ames, head of the giant shovel-manufacturing firm of Oliver Ames & Sons, was a brother of Oakes Ames, the creator of the Pacific Railroads, whom the Credit-Mobilier engulfed in its ruthless destruction of statesmen and politicians. His nephew and namesake was a son of Oakes Ames and Governor of Massachusetts in 1887-8-9. He began his career in the shovel-works, learning the trade as an employé, and at thirty-five had amassed a fortune of ten-millions. He occupied the finest house in Boston, entertained lavishly, spent immense sums for paintings and bric-a-brac and died in October of 1895. Frederick Ames, son of the senior Oliver, has inherited his father’s executive talent and he maintains the family’s reputation for sagacity and the acquisition of wealth. F. Gordon Dexter is a multi-millionaire, a power in the railroad-world and a resident of Beacon street, the swell avenue of the Hub.

Such were the men who heard the reports concerning Kentucky. They did not squirm and hesitate and wonder where they were at. Thirty-five minutes after entering the room the “Boston Oil Company” was organized, the capital was paid in, officers were elected, a lawyer had started to get the charter and authority was given me to draw at sight for whatever cash was needed up to one-hundred-thousand dollars! This record-breaking achievement was about as expeditious as the Chicago grocer, who closed his store one forenoon and pasted on the door a placard inscribed in bold characters: “At my wife’s funeral—back in twenty minutes!”

Oliver Ames, the future governor, invited the party to lunch at the Parker House, Boston’s noted hostelry. An hour sped quickly. My return-trip had been arranged by way of Buffalo and the Lake-Shore Road to Franklin. The time to start arrived, the sleigh to take me to the depot was at the door, the good-byes were said, the driver tucked in the robes and grasped the lines. At that instant Oliver Ames, Sen., called: “Please come into the hotel one moment; I want to jot down something you told us about the American Well.” The other gentlemen looked on, the explanation was penciled rapidly, my seat in the sleigh was resumed and Mr. Dexter jokingly said to the Jehu: “You’ll have to hustle, or your fare will miss his train!”

Through the narrow, twisted, crowded streets the horses trotted briskly. Rushing into the station, the train was pulling out and the ticket-examiner was shutting the iron-gates. He refused to let me attempt to catch the rear car and my disappointment was extreme. A train for New York and Pittsburg left in fifteen minutes. It bore me, an unwilling passenger, safely and satisfactorily to the “Smoky City.” There the news reached me of the frightful railway-disaster at Ashtabula, in which P. P. Bliss and fourscore fellow-mortals, filled with fond anticipations of New-Year reunions, perished in the icy waters ninety feet beneath the treacherous bridge that dropped them into the yawning chasm! The doomed train was the same that would have borne me to Ashtabula and—to death, had not Mr. Ames detained me to make the entry in his memorandum-book! Call it Providence, Luck, Chance, what you will, an incident of this stamp is apt to beget “a heap of tall thinking.”

“There’s a divinity that shapes our ends.”

Returning to Burksville in January, the work of leasing went ahead merrily. The lands around the American Well were taken at one-eighth royalty. Forty rods northeast of the American, in a small ravine, a well was drilled eight-hundred feet. At two-hundred feet some gas and oil appeared, but the well proved a failure. While it was under way the gas in a deserted salt-well twenty rods northwest of the American burst forth violently, sending frozen earth, water and pieces of rock high into the air. The derrick at the Boston Well, rising to the height of seventy-two feet, was a perennial delight to the natives. Youths, boys and old men ascended the ladder to the topmost round to enjoy the beautiful view. Pretty girls longed to try the experiment and it was whispered that six of them, one night when only the man in the moon was peeping, performed the perilous feat. Certain it is that a winsome teacher at the college, who climbed the celestial stair years ago, succeeded in the effort and wrecked her dress on the way back to solid ground. A dining-room girl at Petrolia, in 1873, stood on top of a derrick, to win a pair of shoes banteringly offered by a jovial oilman to the first fair maiden entitled to the prize. Lovely woman and Banquo’s ghost will not “down!”

Three miles northeast of the American Well, at the mouth of Crocus Creek, C. H. English drilled eight shallow wells in 1865. They were bunched closely and one flowed nine-hundred barrels a day. Transportation was lacking, the product could not be marketed and the promising field was deserted. Twelve years later the Boston Oil-Company drilled in the midst of English’s cluster, to discover the quality of the strata, and could not exhaust the surface-water by the most incessant pumping. The company also drilled on the Gilreath farm, across the Cumberland from Burksville, where Captain Phelps found heavy oil in paying quantity back in the sixties. The well produced nicely and would have paid handsomely had a railroad or a pipe-line been within reach. A well two miles west of the American, drilled in 1891, had plenty of sand and showed for a fifty-barreler.

Six miles south-west of Burksville, at Cloyd’s Landing, J. W. Sherman, of Oil-Creek celebrity, drilled a well in 1865 which spouted a thousand barrels of 40° gravity oil in twenty-four hours. He loaded a barge with oil in bulk, intending to ship it to Nashville. The ill-fated craft struck a rock in the river and the oil floated off on its own hook. Sherman threw up the sponge and returned to Pennsylvania. Three others on the Cloyd tract started finely, but the wonderful excitement at Pithole was breaking out and operations elsewhere received a cold chill. Dr. Hunter purchased the Cloyd farm and leased it in 1877 to Peter Christie, of Petrolia, who did not operate on any of the lands he secured in Kentucky and Tennessee. Micawber-like, Cumberland county is “waiting for something to turn up” in the shape of facilities for handling oil. When these are assured the music of the walking-beam will tickle the ears of expectant believers in Kentucky as the coming oil-field.

Wayne and Cumberland had been heard from and Clinton county was the third to have its inning. On the west bank of Otter Creek, a sparkling tributary of Beaver Creek, a well bored for salt fifty or more years ago yielded considerable oil. Instead of giving up the job, the owners pumped the water and oil into a tank, over the side of which the lighter fluid was permitted to empty at its leisure. The salt-works came to a full stop eventually and the well relapsed into “innocuous desuetude.” L. D. Carter, of Aurora, Ill., sojourning temporarily in Clinton for his health, saw the old well in 1864. He dipped a jugful of oil, took it to Aurora, tested it on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, found it a good lubricant and concluded to give the well a square trial. The railroad-company agreed to buy the oil at a fair price. Carter pumped six or eight barrels a day, hauled it in wagons over the hills to the Cumberland River and saved money. He granted Mr. Prentice an option on the property in 1877. The day the option expired J. O. Marshall bought the well, farm and ten-thousand acres of leases conditionally, for a Butler operator who “didn’t have the price,” and the deal fell through.

The well stood idle until 1892, when J. Hovey, an ex-broker from New York and relative of a late Governor of Indiana, drilled a short distance down the creek. The result was a strike which produced twenty-four hundred barrels of dark, heavy, lubricating oil in fifty days. It was shut down for want of tankage and means to transport the product to market. The Carter again yielded nicely, as did three more wells in this neighborhood. In 1895 the Standard Oil-Company was given a refusal of the Hovey and surrounding interests, in order to test the territory fully and lay a pipe-line to Glasgow or Louisville, should the production warrant the expenditure. Wells have been sunk east of the Carter nearly to Monticello, eighteen miles off, finding gas and indications of oil. Every true Clintonite is positive an ocean of petroleum underlies his particular neck of woods, impatient to be relieved and burden landholders and operators alike with excessive wealth!

A hard-headed youth, out walking with his best girl in the dog-days, told her a fairy-story of the dire effects of ice-cream upon the feminine constitution. “I knew a girl,” he declared, “who ate six plates of the dreadful stuff and died next day!” The shrewd damsel exclaimed rapturously: “Oh, wouldn’t it be sweet to die that way? Let us begin on six plates now!” And wouldn’t it be nice to be loaded with riches, not gained by freezing out some other fellow, by looting a bank, by wedding an unloved bride, by grinding the poor, by manipulating stocks, by cornering grain or by practices that make the angels weep, but by bringing oil honestly from the bowels of the earth?

About the year 1839 a salt-well in Lincoln county, eight miles from the pretty town of Stanford, struck a vein of oil unexpectedly. The inflammable liquid gushed out with great force, took fire and burned furiously for weeks. The owner was a grim joker in his way and he aptly remarked, upon viewing the conflagration: “I reckon I’ve got a little hell of my own!” Four more wells were drilled farther up the stream, two getting a show of oil. One was plugged and the other, put down by the late Marcus Hulings, the wealthy Pennsylvania operator, proved dry. Surface indications in many quarters gave rise to the belief that oil would be found over a wide area, and in 1861 a well was bored at Glasgow, Barren county, one-hundred-and-ten miles below Louisville. It was a success and a hundred have followed since, most of which are producing moderately. Col. J. C. Adams, formerly of Tidioute, Pa., was the principal operator for twenty years. A suburban town, happily termed Oil City, is “flourishing like a green bay-horse.” The oil, dark and ill-flavored, smelling worse than “the thousand odors of Cologne,” is refined at Glasgow and Louisville. It can be deodorized and converted into respectable kerosene. Sixteen miles south of Glasgow, on Green River, four shallow wells were bored thirty years ago, one flowing at the rate of six-hundred barrels, so that Barren county is by no means barren of interest to the oil-fraternity.

At Bowling Green a well was sunk two-hundred feet, a few gallons of green-oil bowling to the surface. Torpedoing was unknown, or the fate of many Kentucky wells might have been reversed. John Jackson, of Mercer, Pa., in 1866 drilled a well in Edmonson county, twenty-five miles north-west of Glasgow. The tools dropped through a crevice of the Mammoth Cave, but neither eyeless fish nor slippery petroleum repaid the outlay of muscle and greenbacks. As if to add insult to injury, the well hatched a mammoth cave that buried the tools eight-hundred feet out of sight!

Loyal to his early training and hungry for appetizing slapjacks, Jackson once imported a sack of the flour from Louisville and asked the obliging landlady of his boarding-house to have buckwheat-cakes for breakfast. He was on hand in the morning, ready to do justice to the savory dish. The “cakes” were brought in smoking hot, baked into biscuit, heavy as lead and irredeemably unpalatable! The sack of flour went to fatten the denizens of a neighbor’s pig-pen. Jackson was a pioneer in the Bradford region, head of the firm of Jackson & Walker, clever and generous. The grass and the flowers have grown on his grave for ten years, “the insatiate archer” striking him down in the prime of vigorous manhood.

Sandy Valley, in the north-eastern section of the state, contributed its quota to the stock of Kentucky petroleum. From the first settlement of Boyd, Greenup, Carter, Johnson and Lawrence counties oil had been gathered for medical purposes by skimming it from the streams. About 1855 Cummings & Dixon collected a half-dozen barrels from Paint Creek and treated it at their coal-oil refinery in Cincinnati, with results similar to those attained by Kier in Pittsburg. They continued to collect oil from Paint Creek and Oil-Spring Fork until the war, at times saving a hundred barrels a month. In 1861 they drilled a well three-hundred feet on Mud Lick, a branch of Paint Creek, penetrating shale and sandstone and getting light shows of oil and gas. Surface-oil was found on the Big-Sandy River, from its source to its mouth, and in considerable quantities on Paint, Blaine, Abbott, Middle, John’s and Wolf Creeks. Large springs on Oil-Spring Fork, a feeder of Paint Creek, yielded a barrel a day. At the mouth of the Fork, in 1860, Lyon & Co. drilled a well two-hundred feet, tapping three veins of heavy oil and retiring from the scene when “the late unpleasantness” began to shake up the country. The same year a well was sunk one-hundred-and-seventy feet, on the headwaters of Licking River, near the Great Burning Spring. Gas and oil burst out for days, but the low price of crude and the impending conflict prevented further work. What an innumerable array of nice calculations this cruel war nipped in the bud!

J. Hinkley bored two-hundred feet in 1860, on Paint Creek, eight miles above Paintville, meeting a six-inch crevice of heavy-oil, for which there was no demand, and the capacity of the well was not tested. Salt-borers on a multitude of streams had much difficulty, fifty or sixty years ago, in getting rid of oil that persisted in coming to the surface. These old wells have been filled with dirt, although in some the oil works to the top and can be seen during the dry seasons. The Paint-Creek region had a severe attack of oil-fever in 1864-5. Hundreds of wells were drilled, boats were crowded, the hotels were thronged and the one subject of conversation was “oil—oil—oil!” Various causes, especially the extraordinary developments in Pennsylvania, compelled the plucky operators to abandon the district, notwithstanding encouraging symptoms of an important field. Indeed, so common was it to find petroleum in ten or fifteen counties of Kentucky that land-owners ran a serious risk in selling their farms before boring them full of holes, lest they should unawares part with prospective oil-territory at corn-fodder prices!

Tennessee did not draw a blank in the awards of petroleum-indications. Along Spring Creek many wells, located in 1864-5 because of “surface-shows,” responded nobly, at a depth comparatively shallow, to the magic touch of the drill. The product was lighter in color and gravity than the Kentucky brand. Twelve miles above Nashville, on the Cumberland River, wells have been pumped at a profit. Around Gallatin, Sumner county, decisive tests demonstrated the presence of petroleum in liberal measure. On Obey Creek, Fentress county, sufficient drilling has been done to justify the expectation of a rich district. Near Chattanooga, on the southern border of the state, oil seepages are “too numerous to mention.” The Lacy Well, eighteen miles south of the Beatty, drilled in 1893, is good for thirty barrels every day in the week. The oil is of superior quality, but the cost of marketing it is too great. A dozen wells are going down in Fentress, Overton, Scott and Putnam. Some fine day the tidal wave of development will sweep over the Cumberland-River region, with improved appliances and complete equipment, and give the country a rattling “show for its white alley!” Surely all these spouting-wells, oil-springs and greasy oozings mean something. To quote a practical oilman, who knows both states from a to z: “Twenty counties in Kentucky and Tennessee are sweating petroleum!”

“Jes’ nail dat mink to de stable do’— De niggahs’ll dance when de oil-wells flo!”

Picking up a million acres of supposed oil-lands in the Blue-Grass and Volunteer States had its serio-comic features. The ignorant squatters in remote latitudes were suspicious of strangers, imagining them to be revenue-officers on the trail of “moonshiners,” as makers of untaxed whisky were generally called. More than one northern oilman narrowly escaped premature death on this conjecture. J. A. Satterfield, the successful Butler operator, went to Kentucky in the winter of 1877 to superintend the leasing of territory for his firm, between which and the Prentice combination a lively scramble had been inaugurated. Somebody thought he must be a Government agent and passed the word to the lawless mountaineers. The second night of his stay a shower of bullets riddled the window, two lodging in the bed in which Satterfield lay asleep! Daylight saw him galloping to the railroad at a pace eclipsing Sheridan’s ride to Winchester, eager to “get back to God’s country.” “Once was enough for him” to figure as the target of shooters who seldom failed to score “a hit, a palpable hit.” The grim archer didn’t miss him in 1894.

Arriving late one Saturday at Mt. Vernon, the county-seat of Rockcastle, the colored waiter on Sunday morning inquired: “Hes yo done gone an’ seen em?” Asking what he meant, he informed me that three men were dangling from a tree in the court-house yard, lynched by an infuriated mob during the night on suspicion of horse-stealing, “the unpardonable sin” in Kentucky. A party of citizens had started for the cabin of a notorious outlaw, observed skulking homeward under cover of darkness, intending to string him up. The desperado was alert. He fired one shot, which killed a man and stampeded the assailants. They returned to the village, broke into the jail, dragged out three cowering wretches and hanged them in short metre! The bodies swung in the air all day, a significant warning to whoever might think of “walkin’ off with a hoss critter.”

On that trip to Rockcastle county the train stopped at a wayside-station bearing the pretentious epithet of Chicago. A tall, gaunt, unshaven, uncombed man, with gnarled hands that appealed perpetually for soap and water, high cheekbones, imperfect teeth and homespun-clothes of the toughest description, stood on the platform in a pool of tobacco-juice. A rustic behind me stuck his head through the car-window and addressed the hard-looking citizen as “Jedge.” Honors are easy in Kentucky, where “colonels,” “majors” and “judges” are “thick as leaves in Vallambrosa,” but the title in this instance seemed too absurd to pass unheeded. When the train started, in reply to my question whether the man on the platform was a real judge, his friendly acquaintance took the pains to say: “Wal, I can’t swar es he’s zackly, but las’ year he wuz jedge ov a chicken-fight down ter Si Mason’s an’ we calls ’im jedge ever sence!”

Kentucky vendettas have often figured in thrilling narratives. Business took me to the upper end of Laurel county one week. Litigants, witnesses and hangers-on crowded the village, for a suit of unusual interest was pending before the “’squar.” The principals were farmers from the hilly region, whose fathers and grandfathers had been at loggerheads and transmitted the quarrel to their posterity. Blood had been shed and hatred reigned supreme. The important case was about to begin. Two shots rang out so closely together as to be almost simultaneous, followed by a regular fusilade. Everybody ran into the street, where four men lay dead, a fifth was gasping his last breath and two others had ugly wounds. The tragedy was soon explained. The two parties to the suit had met on their way to the justice’s house. Both were armed, both drew pistols and both dropped in their tracks, one a corpse and the second ready for the coroner in a few moments. Relatives and adherents continued the dreadful work and five lives paid the penalty of ungovernable passion. The dead were wrapped in horse-blankets and carted home. The case was not called. It had been “settled out of court.”

The spectators of this dreadful scene manifested no uncommon concern. “It’s what might be expected,” echoed the local oracle; “when them mountain fellers gets whiskey inside them they don’t care fur nuthin’!” Within an hour of the shooting a young man stopped me on the street-corner, where stood a wagon containing two bodies. “Kunnel,” he went on to say, “I’ve h’ard es yo’s th’ man es got our farm fur oil. Dad an’ Cousin Bill’s ’n that ar wagon, an’ I want yo ter giv’ me a job haulin’ wood agin yo starts work up our way.” He mounted the vehicle and drove off with his ghastly freight without a quiver of emotion.

At Crab Orchard, one beautiful Sunday, the clerk chatted with me on the hotel-porch. A stalwart individual approached and my companion ejaculated: “Thar’s a bigger man ’n Gen’ral Grant!” Next instant Col. Kennedy was added to my list of Kentucky acquaintances. He was very affable, wished oil-operations in the neighborhood success and, with characteristic Southern hospitality, invited me to visit him. After he left us the clerk, in answer to my desire to learn the basis of Kennedy’s greatness, naively said: “Why, he’s killed eight men!”

“Some have greatness thrust upon them.”

Politics and religion were staple wares, the susceptible negroes inclining strongly to the latter. Their spasms of piety were extremely inconvenient at times. News of a “bush meetin’” would be circulated and swarms of darkeys would flock to the appointed place, taking provisions for a protracted siege. No matter if it were the middle of harvest and rain threatening, they dropped everything and went to the meeting. “Doant ’magine dis niggah’s gwine ter lose his ’mo’tal soul fer no load uv cow-feed” was the conclusive rejoinder of a colored hand to his employer, who besought him to stay and finish the haying.

“In de Lawd’s gahden ebery cullud gentleman has got ter line his hoe.”

Rev. George O. Barnes, the gifted evangelist, who resigned a five-thousand-dollar Presbyterian pastorate in Chicago to assist Moody, was reared in Kentucky and lived near Stanford. He would traverse the country to hold revivals, staying three to six weeks in a place. His personal magnetism, rare eloquence, apostolic zeal, fine education, intense fervor and catholic spirit made him a wonderful power. Converts he numbered by thousands. He preferred Calvary to Sinai, the gentle pleadings of infinite mercy to the harsh threats of endless torment. His daughter Marie, with the voice of a Nilsson and the face of a Madonna, accompanied her father in his wanderings, singing gospel-hymns in a manner that distanced Sankey and Philip Phillips. Her rendering of “Too Late,” “Almost Persuaded,” and “Only a Step to Jesus,” electrified and thrilled the auditors as no stage-song could have done. Raymon Moore’s hackneyed verses had not been written, yet the boys called Miss Barnes “Sweet Marie” and thronged to the penitent-bench. The evangelist and his daughter tried to convert New York, but the Tammany stronghold refused to budge an inch. They invaded England and enrolled hosts of recruits for Zion. The Prince of Wales is said to have attended one of their meetings in the suburbs of London. Mr. Barnes finally proposed to cure diseases by “anointing with oil and laying on of hands.” His pink cottage became a refuge for cranks and cripples and patients, until a mortgage on the premises was foreclosed and the queer aggregation scattered to the winds.

Albany, the county-seat of Clinton, experienced a Barnes revival of the tip-top order. Business with Major Brentz, the company’s attorney, landed me in the cosy town on a bright March forenoon. Not a person was visible. Stores were shut and comer-loungers absent. What could have happened? Halting my team in front of the hotel, nobody appeared. Ringing the quaint, old-fashioned bell attached to a post near the pump, a lame, bent colored man shuffled out of the barn.

“Pow’ful glad ter see yer, Massa,” he mumbled, “a’l put up de hosses.”

“Where is the landlord?”

“Done gone ter meetin’.”

“Will dinner soon be ready?”

“Soon the folkses gits back frum meetin’.”

“All right, take good care of the horses and I’ll go over to the court-house.”

“No good gwine dar, dey’s at the meetin’.”

It was true. Mr. Barnes was holding three services a day and the village emptied itself to get within sound of his voice. For five weeks this kept up. Lawyers quit their desks, merchants locked their stores, woman deserted their houses and young and old thought only of the meetings. Hardly a sinner was left to work upon, even the village-editor and the disciples of Blackstone joining the hallelujah band! No wonder Satan’s imps wailed sadly:

“And the blow almost killed father!”

An African congregation at Stanford had a preacher black as the ace of spades and wholly illiterate, whom many whites liked to hear. “Brudders an’ sistahs, niggahs and white folks,” he closed an exhortation by saying, “dar’s no use ’temptin’ to sneak outen de wah ’tween de good Lawd an’ de black debbil, ’cos dar’s on’y two armies in dis worl’ an’ bofe am a-fitin’ eberlastingly! So ’list en de army ob light, ef yer want ter gib ole Satan er black eye an’ not roast fureber an’ eber in de burnin’ lake whar watah-millions on ice am nebber se’ved for dinnah!” Could the most astute theological hair-splitter have presented the issue more concisely and forcibly to the hearers of the sable Demosthenes?

The first and only circus that exhibited at Burksville produced an immense sensation. It was “Bartholomew’s Equescurriculum,” with gymnastics and ring exercises to round out the bill. Barns, shops and trees for miles bore gorgeous posters. Nast’s cartoons, which the most ignorant voters could understand, did more to overthrow Boss Tweed than the masterly editorials of the New-York Times. The flaming pictures aroused the Cumberlanders, hundreds of whom could not read, to the highest pitch of expectation. Monday was the day set for the show. On Saturday evening country-patrons began to camp in the woods outside the village. A couple from Overton county, Tennessee, and their four children rode twenty-eight miles on two mules, bringing food for three days and lodging under the trees! A Burksville character of the stripe Miss Ophelia styled “shiftless” sold his cooking-stove for four dollars to get funds to attend! “Alf,” the ebony-hued choreman at Alexander College, who built my fires and blacked my shoes, was worked up to fever-heat. “Befo’ de Lawd,” he sobbed, “dis chile’s er gone coon, ’less yer len’ er helpin’ han’! Mah wife’s axed her mudder an’ sister ter th’ ci’cus an’ dar’s no munny ter take ’em an’ mah sister!” Giving him the currency for admission dried the mourner’s tears and “pushed them clouds away.”

At noon on Sunday the circus arrived by boat from Nashville. Service was in progress in one church, when an unearthly sound startled the worshippers. The wail of a lost soul could not be more alarming. Simon Legree, scared out of his boots by the mocking shriek of the wind blowing through the bottle-neck Cassy fixed in the garret knot-hole, had numerous imitators. Again and again the ozone was rent and cracked and shivered. The congregation broke for the door, the minister jerking out a sawed-off benediction and retreating with the rest. A half-mile down the river a boat was rounding the bend. A steam-calliope, distracting, discordant and unlovely, belched forth a torrent of paralyzing notes. The whole population was on the bank by the time the boat stopped. The crowd watched the landing of the animals and belongings of the circus with unflinching eagerness. Few of the surging mass had seen a theatre, a circus, or a show of any sort except the Sunday-school Christmas performance. They were bound to take in every detail and that Sunday was badly splintered in the peaceful, orderly settlement.

With the earliest streak of dawn the excitement was renewed. Groups of adults and children, of all ages and sizes and complexions, were on hand to see the tents put up. By eleven o’clock the town was packed. A merry-go-round, the first Burksville ever saw, raked in a bushel of nickels. The college domestics skipped, leaving the breakfast-dishes on the table and the dinner to shift for itself. A party of friends went with me to enjoy the fun. Beside a gap in the fence, to let wagons into the field, sat “Alf,” the image of despair. Four weeping females—his wife, sister, mother-in-law and sister-in-law—crouched at his feet. As our party drew near he beckoned to us and unfolded his tale of woe. “Dem fool-wimmin,” he exclaimed bitterly, “hes done spended de free dollars yer guv me on de flyin’-hosses! Dey woodn’t stay off nohow an’ now dey caint see de ci’cus! Oh, Lawd! Oh, Lawd!” The purchase of tickets poured oil on the troubled waters. The Niobes wiped their eyes on their jean-aprons and “Richard was himself again.” How the antics of the clowns and the tricks of the ponies pleased the motley assemblage! Buck Fanshaw’s funeral did not arouse half the enthusiasm in Virginia City the first circus did in Burksville.

It was necessary for me to visit Williamsburg, the county-seat of Whitley, to record a stack of leases. Somerset was then the nearest railway-point and the trip of fifty miles on horseback required a guide. The arrival of a Northerner raised a regular commotion in the well-nigh inaccessible settlement of four-hundred population. The landlord of the public-house slaughtered his fattest chickens and set up a bed in the front parlor to be sure of my comfort. The jailer’s fair daughter, who was to be wedded that evening, kindly sent me an invitation to attend the nuptials. By nine o’clock at night nearly every business-man and official in the place had called to bid me welcome. Before noon next day seventeen farmers, whose lands had been leased, rode into town to greet me and learn when drilling would likely begin. Each insisted upon my staying with him a week, “or es much longer es yo kin,” and fourteen of them brought gallon-jugs of apple-jack, their own straight goods, for my acceptance! Such a reception a king might envy, because it was entirely unselfish, hearty and spontaneous. Williamsburg has got out of swaddling-clothes, the railway putting it in touch with the balance of creation.

Thirteen miles of land, in an unbroken line, on a meandering stream, had been tied-up, with the exception of a single farm. The owner was obdurate and refused to lease on any terms. Often lands not regarded favorably as oil territory were taken to secure the right-of-way for pipe-lines, as the leases conveyed this privilege. Driving past the stubborn farmer’s homestead one afternoon, he was chopping wood in the yard and strode to the gate to talk. His bright-eyed daughter of four summers endeavored to clamber into the buggy. Handing the cute fairy in coarse jeans a new silver-dollar, fresh from the Philadelphia mint, the father caught sight of the shining coin.

“Hev yo mo’ ov ’em ’ar dollars about yo?” he asked.

“Plenty more.”

“Make out leases fur my three farms an’ me an’ the old woman’ll sign ’em! I want three ov ’em kines, for they be th’ slickest Demmycratic money my eyes hes sot onto sence I fit with John Morgan!”

The documents were filled up, signed, sealed and delivered in fifteen minutes. The chain of leased lands along Fanny Creek was intact, with the “missing link” missing at last.

The simplicity of these dwellers in the wilderness was equaled only by their apathy to the world beyond and around them. Parents loved their children and husbands loved their wives in a quiet, unobtrusive fashion. “She wuz a hard-workin’ woman,” moaned a middle-aged widower in Fentress county, telling me of his deceased spouse, “an’ she allers wore a frock five year, an’ she bed ’leven chil’ren, an’ she died right in corn-shuckin’!” He was not stony-hearted, but twenty-five years of married companionship meant to him just so many days’ work, so many cheap frocks, child-bearing, corn-cake and bacon always ready on time. Among these people woman was a drudge, who knew nothing of the higher relations of life. Children were huddled into the hills to track game, to follow the plough or to drop corn over many a weary acre. Reading and writing were unknown accomplishments. Jackson, “the great tradition of the uninformed American mind,” and Lincoln, whose name the tumult of a mighty struggle had rendered familiar, were the only Presidents they had ever heard of. “Where ignorance is bliss ’tis folly to be wise” may be a sound poetical sentiment, but it was decidedly overdone in South-eastern Kentucky and North-eastern Tennessee so recently as the year of the Philadelphia Centennial.

Opposite the Hovey and Carter wells in Clinton county lives a portly farmer who “is a good man and weighs two-hundred-and-fifty pounds.” He is known far and wide as “Uncle John” and his wife, a pleasant-faced little matron, is affectionately called “Aunt Rachel.” A log-church a mile from “Uncle John’s” is situated on a pretty hill. There the young folks are married, the children are baptized and the dead are buried. The “June meetin’,” when services are held for a week, is the grand incident of the year to the people for a score of miles. In December of 1893 Dr. Phillips, of Monticello, drove me to the wells. We stopped at “Uncle John’s.” As we neared the house a dog barked and the hospitable farmer came out to meet us. Behind him walked a man who greeted the Doctor cordially. He glanced at me, recognition was mutual and we clasped hands warmly. He was Alfred Murray, formerly connected with the Pennsylvania-Consolidated Land-and-Petroleum-Company in Butler and at Bradford. Fourteen years had glided away since we met and there were many questions to ask and answer. He had been in the neighborhood a twelvemonth, keeping tab on oil movements and indications, hoping, longing and praying for the speedy advent of the petroleum-millenium. We pumped the Hovey Well one hour, rambled over the hills and talked until midnight about persons and things in Pennsylvania. Meeting in so dreary a place, under such circumstances, was as thorough a surprise as Stanley’s discovery of Livingstone in Darkest Africa. During our conversation regarding the roughest portion of the county, bleak, sterile and altogether repellant, selected by a hermit as his lonely retreat, my friend remarked: “I have heard that the poor devil was troubled with remorse and, as a sort of penance, vowed to live as near Sheol as possible until he died!”

The stage that bore me from Monticello to Point Burnside on my homeward journey stopped half-way to take up a countryman and an aged woman. Room was found inside for the latter, a stout, motherly old creature, into whose beaming face it did jaded mortals good to look. She said “howdy” to the three passengers, a local trader, a farmer’s young wife and myself, sat down solidly and fixed her gaze upon me intently. It was evident the dear soul was fairly bursting with impatience to find out about the stranger. Not a word was spoken until she could restrain her inquisitive impulse no longer.

“Yo don’t liv’ eroun’ these air parts?” she interrogated.

“No, madam, my home is in Pennsylvania.”

“Land sakes! Be yo one ov ’em air ile-fellers?”

“Yes.”

“Wal, I be orful glad ter see yo!” and she stretched out her hand and shook mine vigorously. “Hope yo’re right peart, but yo’ be a long way from home! Did yo see ’em wells over thar by Aunt Rachel’s?”

“Oh, yes, I saw the wells and stayed at Aunt Rachel’s all night.”

“I ain’t seed Aunt Rachel for nigh a year an’ a half. My old man bed roomatiz and we couldn’t get ter meetin’ this summer. He sez thar’s ile onto our farm. I be seventy-four an’ him on the ruf be my son’n-law. Yo see he married, Jess did, my darter Sally an’ tha moved ter a place tha call Kansas. Tha’s bin thar seventeen year an’ hes six chil’ren. Jess he cum back las’ week ter see his fokeses an’ he be takin’ me ter Kansas ter see Sally an’ the babies. I never seed ’em things Jess calls cyars, an’ he sez tha ain’t drord by no hoss nuther! I wuz bo’n eight mile down hyar an’ never wuz from home more’n eighteen mile, when we goes ter June meetin’. But I be ter Monticeller six times.”

Truly this was a natural specimen, bubbling over with kindness, unspoiled by fashion and envy and frivolity and superficial pretense. Here was the counterpart of Cowper’s humble heroine, who “knew, and knew no more, her Bible true.” The wheezy stage was brighter for her presence. She told of her family, her cows, her pigs, her spinning and her neighbors. She lived four miles from the Cumberland River, yet never went to see a steamboat! When we alighted at the Burnside station and the train dashed up she looked sorely perplexed. “Jess” helped her up the steps and the “cyars” started. The whistle screeched, daylight vanished and the train had entered the tunnel below the depot. A fearful scream pierced the ears of the passengers. The good woman seventy-four years old, who “never seed ’em things” before, was terribly frightened. We tried to reassure her, but she begged to be let off. How “Jess” managed to get her to Kansas safely may be imagined. But what a story she would have to tell about the “cyars” and “Sally an’ the babies” when she returned to her quiet home after such a trip! Bless her old heart!

Although the broad hills and sweeping streams which grouped many sweet panoramas might be dull and meaningless to the average Kentuckian of former days, through some brains glowing visions flitted. Two miles south of Columbia, Adair county, on the road to Burksville, a heap of stones and pieces of rotting timber may still be seen. Fifty-five years ago the man who owned the farm constructed a huge wheel, loaded with rocks of different weights on its strong arms. Neighbors jeered and ridiculed, just as scoffers laughed at Noah’s ark and thought it wouldn’t be much of a shower anyway. The hour to start the wheel arrived and its builder stood by. A rock on an arm of the structure slipped off and struck him a fatal blow, felling him lifeless to the earth! He was a victim of the craze to solve the problem of Perpetual Motion. Who can tell what dreams and plans and fancies and struggles beset this obscure genius, cut off at the moment he anticipated a triumph? The wheel was permitted to crumble and decay, no human hand touching it more. The heap of stones is a pathetic memento of a sad tragedy. Not far from the spot Mark Twain was born and John Fitch whittled out the rough model of the first steamboat.

Riding in Scott county, Tennessee, at full gallop on a rainy afternoon, a cadaverous man emerged from a miserable hut and hailed me. The dialogue was not prolonged unduly.

“Gen’ral,” he queried, “air yo th’ oilman frum Pennsylvany?”

“Yes, what can I do for you?”

“I jes’ wanted ter ax ef yo know’d my cousin Jim!”

“Who is your cousin Jim?”

“Law, Jim Sickles! I tho’t ez how ev’rybody know’d Jim! He went up No’th arter th’ wah an’ ain’t cum back yit. Ef yo see ’im tell ’im yo seed me!”

A promise to look out for “Jim” satisfied the verdant backwoodsman, who probably had never been ten miles from his shanty and deemed “up No’th” a place about the size of a Tennessee hunting-ground!

The South-Penn and the Forest Oil-Companies, branches of the Standard, have drilled considerably in Kentucky and Tennessee, sometimes finding oil in regular strata and occasionally encountering irregular formations. More operating is required to determine precisely what place to assign these pebbles on the beach as sources of oil-production.

Fair women, pure Bourbon and men extra plucky, No wonder blue-grass folks esteem themselves lucky— But wait till the oil-boom gets down to Kentucky!

Let Fortune assume forms and fancies Protean, No matter for that, there will rise a loud pæan So long as oil gladdens the proud Tennesseean!

Spotted a typo or a problem in this chapter? Tell us