XVII. NITRO-GLYCERINE IN THIS
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 AS IMPULSE PROMPTS.
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“There is no distinguished Genius altogether exempt from some infusion of Madness.”—Aristotle.
“Genius must be born and never can be taught.”—Dryden.
“Labor with what zeal we will, something still remains undone.”—Longfellow.
“Come, bright improvement, on the car of Time.”—Campbell.
“Revenge, at first though sweet, bitter ere long, back on itself recoils.”—Milton.
“Only these fragments and nothing more! Can naught to our arms the lost restore?”—Anonymous.
“Death itself is less painful when it comes upon us unawares.”—Pascal.
“Dead? did you say he was dead? or is it only my brain? He went away an hour ago; will he never come again?”—_Tamar Kermode._
“There is no armor against fate.”—Shirley.
“Dreadful is their doom * * * like yonder blasted bough by thunder riven.”—Beattie.
“By forms unseen their dirge is sung.”—Collins.
“Death, a necessary evil, will come when it will come.”—Shakespeare.
“Where is the reed on which I leant?”—Tennyson.
“To-morrow is with God alone. And man hath but to-day.”—Whittier.
“Who so shall telle a tale after a man moste reherse everich word.”—Chaucer.
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When in 1846 a patient European chemist hit upon a new compound by mixing fuming nitric-acid, sulphuric-acid and glycerine in certain proportions, he didn’t know it was loaded. Glycerine is a harmless substance and its very name signifies sweetness. Combining it with the two acids changed the three ingredients materially. The action of the acids caused the glycerine to lose hydrogen and take up nitrogen and oxygen. The product, which the discoverer baptized Nitro-Glycerine, appeared meek and innocent as Mary’s little lamb and was readily mistaken for lard-oil. It burned in lamps, consuming quietly and emitting a gentle light. But concussion proved the oily-looking liquid to be a terrible explosive, more powerful than gun-cotton, gunpowder or dynamite. For twenty years it was not applied to any useful purpose in the arts. Strangely enough, it was first put up as a homœopathic remedy for headache, because a few drops rubbed on any portion of the body pained the head acutely. James G. Blaine was given doses of it on his death-bed. An energetic poison, fatalities resulted from imbibing it for whisky, which it resembles in taste. After a time attention was directed unexpectedly to its explosive qualities. A small consignment, sent to this country as a specimen, accidentally exploded in a New-York street. This set the newspapers and the public talking about it and wondering what caused the stuff to go off. Investigation solved the mystery and revealed the latent power of the compound, which had previously figured only as a rare chemical in a half-score foreign laboratories. Miners and contractors gradually learned its value for blasting masses of rock. Five pounds, placed in a stone-jar and suspended against the iron-side of the steamer Scotland, sunk off Sandy Hook, cut a fissure twelve feet long in the vessel. A steamship at Aspinwall was torn to atoms and people stood in mortal terror of the destructive agent. Girls threw away the glycerine prescribed for chapped lips, lest it should burst up and distribute them piecemeal over the next county. Their cotton-padding or charcoal-dentifrice was as dangerous as the glycerine alone, which is an excellent application for the skin. A flame or a spark would not explode Nitro-Glycerine readily, but the chap who struck it a hard rap might as well avoid trouble among his heirs by having had his will written and a cigar-box ordered to hold such fragments as his weeping relatives could pick from the surrounding district. Such was the introduction to mankind of a compound that was to fill a niche in connection with the production of petroleum.
Paraffine is the unrelenting foe of oil-wells. It clogged and choked some of the largest wells on Oil Creek and diminished the yield of others in every quarter of the field. It incrusts the veins of the rock and the pipes, just as lime in the water coats the tubes of a steam-boiler or the inside of a tea-kettle. How to overcome its ill effects was a question as serious as the extermination of the potato-bug or the army-worm. Operators steamed their wells, often with good results, the hot vapor melting the paraffine, and drenched them with benzine to accomplish the same object. A genius patented a liquid that would boil and fizz and discourage all the paraffine it touched, cleaning the tubing and the seams in the sand much as caustic-soda scours the waste-pipe of a sink or closet. These methods were very limited in their scope, the steam condensing, the benzine mixing with the oil and the burning fluid cooling off before penetrating the crevices in the strata any considerable distance. Exploding powder in holes drilled at the bottom of water-wells had increased the quantity of fluid or opened new veins and the idea of trying the experiment in oil-wells suggested itself to various operators. In 1860 Henry H. Dennis, who drilled and stuck the tools in the first well at Tidioute, procured three feet of two-inch copper-pipe, plugged one end, filled it with rifle-powder, inserted a fuse-cord and exploded the charge in presence of six men. The hole was full of water, oil and bits of rock were blown into the air and “the smell of oil was so much stronger that people coming up the hollow noticed it.” The same year John F. Harper endeavored to explode five pounds of powder in A. W. Raymond’s well, at Franklin. The tin-case holding the powder collapsed under the pressure of the water and the fuse had gone out. William Reed assisted Raymond and W. Ayers Brashear, who had expected James Barry—he put up the first telegraph-line between Pittsburg and Franklin—to fire the charge by electricity. Reed developed the idea and invented the “Reed Torpedo,” which he used in a number of wells. A large crowd in 1866 witnessed the torpedoing of John C. Ford’s well, on the Widow Fleming farm, four miles south of Titusville. Five pounds of powder in an earthen bottle, attached to a string of gas-pipe, were exploded at two-hundred-and-fifty feet by dropping a red-hot iron through the pipe. The shock threw the water out of the hole, threw out the pipe with such force as to knock down the walking-beam and samson-post, agitated the water in Oil Creek and “sent out oil.” Tubing was put in, the old horse worked the pump until tired out and the result encouraged Ford to buy machinery to keep the well going constantly. This was the first successful torpedoing of an oil-well! The Watson well, near by, was similarly treated by Harper, who had brought four bottles of the powder from Franklin and was devoting his time to “blasting wells.” For his services at the Ford well he received twenty dollars. Harper, William Skinner and a man named Potter formed a partnership for this purpose. They torpedoed the Adams well, on the Stackpole farm, below the Fleming, putting the powder in a glass-bottle. The territory was dry and no oil followed the explosion. In the fall of 1860 they shot Gideon B. Walker’s well at Tidioute. Five torpedoes were exploded in 1860 at Franklin, Tidioute and on Oil Creek. Business was disturbed over the grave political outlook, oil was becoming too plentiful, the price was merely nominal and the torpedo-industry languished.
William F. Kingsbury advertised in 1860 that he would “put blasts in oil-wells to increase their production.” He torpedoed a well in 1861 on the island at Tidioute, using a can of powder and a fuse, which ignited perfectly. Mark Wilson and L. G. Merrill lectured on electricity in 1860-61, traveling over the country and exhibiting the principle of “Colt’s Submarine Battery,” by which “the rock at any distance beneath the surface of the earth may be rent asunder, thereby enabling the oil to flow to the well.” Frederick Crocker in 1864 arranged a torpedo to be dropped into a well and fired by a pistol-cartridge inserted in the bottom of the tin-shell. About thirty torpedoes were exploded from 1860 to 1865, all of them in wells filled with water, which served as tamping. Erastus Jones, James K. Jones and David Card exploded them in wells at Liverpool, Ohio. Joseph Chandler handled two or three at Pioneer and George Koch fired one of his own construction in May of 1864. Mr. Beardslee—he struck a vein of water by drilling a hole five feet and exploding a case of powder at the bottom of a well in 1844, near Rochester, N. Y.—came to the oil-region and put in a score of shots in 1865. As long ago as 1808 the yield of water in a well at Fort Regent was doubled by drilling a small hole and firing a quantity of powder. A flowing-well on the lease beside the Crocker stopped when the latter was torpedoed and was rigged for pumping. It pumped “black powder-water,” showing that the torpedo had opened an underground connection between the two wells, the effects of the explosion reaching from the Crocker to its neighbor. William Reed made a can strong enough to resist the pressure of the water, let it down the Criswell well on Cherry Run in 1863, failed to discharge it by electricity and exploded it by sliding a hollow weight down a string to strike a percussion-cap.
Notwithstanding these facts, which demonstrated that the yield of oil and water had been increased by exploding powder hundreds of feet under water, in November of 1864 Col. E. A. L. Roberts applied for a patent for “a process of increasing the productiveness of oil-wells by causing an explosion of gunpowder or its equivalent at or near the oil-bearing point, in connection with superincumbent fluid-tamping.” He claimed that the action of a shell at Fredericksburg in 1862, which exploded in a mill-race, suggested to him the idea of bombarding oil-wells. However this may be—it has been said he was not at Fredericksburg at the date specified in his papers—the Colonel furnished no drawings and presented no application for Letters Patent for over two years. He constructed six of his torpedoes and arrived with them at Titusville in January of 1865. Captain Mills permitted him to test his process in the Ladies’ well, near Titusville, on January twenty-first. Two torpedoes were exploded and the well flowed oil and paraffine. Reed, Harper and three or four others filed applications for patents and commenced proceedings for interference. The suits dragged two years, were decided in favor of Roberts and he secured the patent that was to become a grievous monopoly.
A company was organized in New York to construct torpedoes and carry on the business extensively. Operators were rather sceptical as to the advantages of the Roberts method, fearing the missiles would shatter the rock and destroy the wells. The Woodin well, a dry-hole on the Blood farm, received two injections and pumped eighty barrels a day in December of 1866. During 1867 the demand increased largely and many suits for infringements were entered. Roberts seemed to have the courts on his side and he obtained injunctions against the Reed Torpedo-Company and James Dickey for alleged infringements. Justices Strong and McKennan decided against Dickey in 1871. Producers subscribed fifty-thousand dollars to break down the Roberts patent and confidently expected a favorable issue. Judge Grier, of Philadelphia, mulcted the Reed Company in heavy damages. Nickerson and Hamar, ingenious, clever fellows, fared similarly. Roberts substituted Nitro-Glycerine for gunpowder and established a manufactory of the explosive near Titusville. The torpedo-war became general, determined and uncompromising. The monopoly charged exorbitant prices—two-hundred dollars for a medium shot—and an army of “moonlighters”—nervy men who put in torpedoes at night—sprang into existence. The “moonlighters” effected great improvements and first used the “go-devil drop-weight” in the Butler field in 1876. The Roberts crowd hired a legion of spies to report operators who patronized the nocturnal well-shooters. The country swarmed with these emissaries. You couldn’t spit in the street or near a well after dark without danger of hitting one of the crew. Unexampled litigation followed. About two-thousand prosecutions were threatened and most of them begun against producers accused of violating the law by engaging “moonlighters.” The array of counsel was most imposing. It included Bakewell & Christy, of Pittsburg, and George Harding, of Philadelphia, for the torpedo-company. Kellar & Blake, of New York, and General Benjamin F. Butler were retained by a number of defendants. Most of the individual suits were settled, the annoyance of trying them in Pittsburg, fees of lawyers and enormous costs inducing the operators to make such terms as they could. By this means the coffers of the company were filled to overflowing and the Roberts Brothers rolled up millions of dollars.
The late H. Bucher Swope, the brilliant district-attorney of Pittsburg, was especially active in behalf of Roberts. The bitter feeling engendered by convictions deemed unjust, awards of excessive damages and numerous imprisonments found expression in pointed newspaper paragraphs. Col. Roberts preserved in scrap-books every item regarding his business-methods, himself and his associates. One poetical squib, written by me and printed in the Oil-City Times, incensed him to the highest pitch and was quoted by Mr. Swope in an argument before Judge McKennan. The old Judge bristled with fury. Evidently he regretted that it was beyond his power to sentence somebody to the penitentiary for daring hint that law was not always justice. He had not traveled quite so far on the tyrannical road as some later wearers of the ermine, who, “dressed in a little brief authority, play such fantastic tricks before high heaven as make the angels weep” and consign workingmen to limbo for presuming to present the demands of organized labor to employers! It is not Eugene V. Debs or the mouthing anarchist, but the overbearing corporation-tool on the bench, who is guilty of “contempt of court.”
The Roberts patent re-issued in June of 1873, perpetuating the burdensome load upon oil-producers. In November of 1876 suit was brought in the Circuit Court against Peter Schreiber, of Oil City, charged with infringing the Roberts process. Schreiber’s torpedo duplicated the unpatented Crocker cartridge and Roberts wanted his scalp. The case was contested keenly four years, coming up for final argument in May of 1879. Henry Baldwin and James C. Boyce, of Oil City, and Hon. J. H. Osmer, of Franklin, were the defendant’s attorneys. Mr. Boyce collected a mass of testimony that seemed overwhelming. He spent years working up a masterly defense. By unimpeachable witnesses he proved that explosives had been used in water-wells and oil-wells, substantially in the manner patented by Roberts, years before the holder of the patent had been heard of as a torpedoist. But his masterly efforts were wasted upon Justices Strong and McKennan. They had sustained the monopoly in the previous suits and apparently would not reverse themselves, no matter how convincing the reasons. Mr. Schreiber, wearied by the law’s interminable delays and thirty-thousand dollars of expenditure, decided not to suffer the further annoyance of appealing to the United-States Supreme Court. The great body of producers, disgusted with the courts and despairing of fair-play, did not care to provide the funds to carry the case to the highest tribunal and lock it up for years awaiting a hearing. The flood of light thrown upon it by Boyce’s researches had the effect of preventing an extension of the patent and reducing the price of torpedoes, thus benefiting the oil-region greatly. Mr. Boyce is now practicing his profession in Pittsburg. He resided at Oil City for years and was noted for his bright wit, his incisive logic, his profound interest in education and his social accomplishments.
Col. Edward A. L. Roberts died at Titusville on Friday morning, March twenty-fifth, 1881, after a short illness. His demise was quite unexpected, as he continued in ordinary health until Tuesday night. Then he was seized with intermittent fever, which rapidly gained ground until it proved fatal. A moment before dissolution he asked Dr. Freeman, who was with him, for a glass of water. Drinking it and staring intently at the doctor, his eyes filled with tears and he said, “I am gone.” Pressing back upon the pillow, he expired almost instantly. Col. Roberts was born at Moreau, Saratoga county, New York, in 1829. At seventeen he enlisted as a private, served with commendable bravery in the Mexican war and was honorably discharged after a service of two years. Returning to his native place, he entered an academy and passed several years acquiring a higher education. Subsequently he entered the dental office of his brother at Poughkeepsie, N. Y. Still later he removed to the city and with his brother, W. B. Roberts, engaged in the manufacture of dental material. For his improvements in dental science and articles he was awarded several gold-medals by the American Institute. He patented various inventions that have been of great service and are now in general use. In the oil-region he was best known as the owner of the torpedo-patent bearing his name. He came to Titusville in January of 1865 and the same month exploded two shells in the Ladies’ well, increasing its yield largely. From that time to the present the use of torpedoes has continued. The litigation over the patent and infringements attracted widespread attention. The last week of his life Col. Roberts said he had expended a quarter-million dollars in torpedo-litigation. He was responsible for more lawsuits than any other man in the United States. A man of many eccentricities and strong feelings, he was always liberal and enterprising. He left a large fortune and one of the most profitable monopolies in the State. In 1869 he married Mrs. Chase, separated from her in 1877 and lived at the Brunswick Hotel. His widow and two children survived him. Col. Roberts did much to build up Titusville and his funeral was the largest the town has ever witnessed. He sleeps in the pretty cemetery and a peculiar monument, emblematic of the torpedo, marks the burial-plot.
On the palatial Hotel Brunswick, which he built and nurtured as the apple of his eye, Col. Roberts lavished part of his wealth. He decorated and furnished it gorgeously from cellar to roof. The appointments were luxurious throughout. If the landlords he engaged could not meet expenses, the Colonel paid the deficiency ungrudgingly and sawed wood. Finally the house was conducted in business-style and paid handsomely. For years it has been run by Charles J. Andrews, who was born with a talent for hotel-keeping. “Charlie” is well-known in every nook and corner of Pennsylvania as a “jolly good fellow,” keen politician and all-round thoroughbred. He has the rare faculty of winning friends and of engineering bills through the Legislature. He is head of the Liquor League, a tireless worker, a masterly joker and brimming over with pat-stories that do not strike back. He operates in oil and base-ball as a diversion, is a familiar figure in Philadelphia and Harrisburg and popular everywhere.
Dr. Walter B. Roberts, partner of his brother in the torpedo-company, clerked in an Albany bank, taught district-school, studied medicine and rose to eminence in dentistry. Visiting Nicaragua in 1853, he established a firm to ship deer-skins and cattle-hides to the United States and built up a large trade with Central America. Resuming his practice, he and E. A. L. Roberts opened dental-rooms in New York. His brother enlisted and upon returning from the war assigned the Doctor a half-interest in a torpedo for oil-wells he desired to patent. In 1865 Dr. Roberts organized the Roberts Torpedo-Company, was chosen its secretary in 1866 and its president in 1867. He visited Europe in 1867 and removed to Titusville in 1868, residing there until his death. In 1872 he was elected mayor, but his intense longing for a seat in Congress was never gratified. The oil-producers, whom the vexatious torpedo-suits made hot under the collar, opposed him resolutely. He had succeeded in his profession and his business and his crowning ambition was to go to Washington. The arrow of political disappointment pricked his temper at times, although to the last he supported the Republican party zealously. Dr. Roberts was a man of marked characteristics, tall, stoutly built and vigorous mentally. He did much to advance the interests of his adopted city and was respected for his courage, his earnestness and his benevolence to the poor.
Hon. William H. Andrews managed the campaign of Dr. Roberts, who fancied the adroitness, pluck and push of the coming leader and used his influence to elect him chairman of the Crawford-County Republican Committee. He performed the duties so capably that he served four terms, was secretary of the State Committee in 1887-8 and its chairman in 1890-1. Mr. Andrews was born in Warren county and at an early age entered upon a mercantile career. He established large dry-goods stores at Titusville, Franklin and Meadville, introduced modern ideas and did a tremendous business. He advertised by the page, ran excursion-trains at suitable periods and sold his wares at prices to attract multitudes of customers. Nobody ever heard of dull trade or hard times at any of the Andrews stores. Removing to Cincinnati, he opened the biggest store in the city and forced local merchants to crawl out of the old rut and hustle. But the aroma of petroleum, the motion of the walking-beam, the dash and spirit of oil-region life were lacking in Porkopolis and Andrews returned to Titusville. He engaged in politics with the ardor he had displayed in trade. His skill as an organizer saved the Congressional district from the Greenbackers and won him the chairmanship of the Republican State-Committee. He served two terms in the Legislature and was elected to the Senate in 1894. He is chairman of the senatorial committee appointed last session to “Lexow” Philadelphia and Pittsburg. His brother, W. R. Andrews, edited the Meadville Tribune and was secretary of the State Committee. Another, Charles J. Andrews, was proprietor of the Hotel Brunswick and an active politician. Senator Andrews rarely wastes his breath on long-winded speeches, wisely preferring to do effective work in committee. No member of the House or Senate is more influential, more ready to oblige his friends, more sought for favors and surer of carrying through a bill. He enjoys the confidence of Senator Quay and his next promotion may be to the United-States Senate as successor of Matthew S. himself. Mr. Andrews lives at Allegheny, has oil-wells on Church Run and a big farm in the suburbs of Titusville, is prominent in local industries and a representative citizen.
Gradually the quantity of explosive in a torpedo was increased, in order to shatter a wider area of oil-bearing rock. A hundred quarts of Nitro-Glycerine have been used for a single shot. In such instances it is lowered into the well in cans, one resting upon another at the bottom of the hole until the desired amount is in place. A cap is adjusted to the top of the last can, the cord that lowered the Nitro-Glycerine is pulled up, a weight is dropped upon the cap and an explosion equal to the force of a ton of gunpowder ensues. In a few seconds a shower of water, oil, mud and pebbles ascends, saturating the derrick and pelting broken stones in every direction. Frank H. Taylor graphically describes a scene at Thorn Creek:
“On October twenty-seventh, 1884, those who stood at the brick school-house and telegraph-offices in the Thorn Creek district and saw the Semple, Boyd & Armstrong No. 2 torpedoed, gazed upon the grandest scene ever witnessed in Oildom. When the shot took effect and the barren rock, as if smitten by the rod of Moses, poured forth its torrent of oil, it was such a magnificent and awful spectacle that no painter’s brush or poet’s pen could do it justice. Men familiar with the wonderful sights of the oil-country were struck dumb with astonishment, as they beheld the mighty display of Nature’s forces. There was no sudden reaction after the torpedo was exploded. A column of water rose eight or ten feet and fell back again, some time elapsed before the force of the explosion emptied the hole and the burnt glycerine, mud and sand rushed up in the derrick in a black stream. The blackness gradually changed to yellow; then, with a mighty roar, the gas burst forth with a deafening noise, like the thunderbolt set free. For a moment the cloud of gas hid the derrick from sight and then, as this cleared away, a solid golden column half-a-foot in diameter shot from the derrick-floor eighty feet through the air, till it broke in fragments on the crown-pulley and fell in a shower of yellow rain for rods around. For over an hour that grand column of oil, rushing swifter than any torrent and straight as a mountain pine, united derrick-floor and top. In a few moments the ground around the derrick was covered inches deep with petroleum. The branches of the oak-trees were like huge yellow plumes and a stream as large as a man’s body ran down the hill to the road. It filled the space beneath the small bridge and, continuing down the hill through the woods beyond, spread out upon the flats where the Johnson well is. In two hours these flats were covered with a flood of oil. The hill-side was as if a yellow freshet had passed over it. Heavy clouds of gas, almost obscuring the derrick, hung low in the woods, and still that mighty rush continued. Some of those who witnessed it estimated the well to be flowing five-hundred barrels per hour. Dams were built across the stream, that its production might be estimated; the dams overflowed and were swept away before they could be completed. People living along Thorn Creek packed up their household-goods and fled to the hill-sides. The pump-station, a mile-and-a-half down the creek, had to extinguish its fires that night on account of gas. All fires around the district were put out. It was literally a flood of oil. It was estimated that the production was ten-thousand barrels the first twenty-four hours. The foreman, endeavoring to get the tools into the well, was overcome by the gas and fell under the bull-wheels. He was rescued immediately and medical aid summoned. He remained unconscious two hours, but subsequently recovered fully. Several men volunteered to undertake the job of shutting in the largest well ever struck in the oil-region. The packer for the oil-saver was tied on the bull-wheel shaft, the tools were placed over the hole and run in. But the pressure of the solid stream of oil against it prevented its going lower, even with the suspended weight of the two-thousand-pound tools. One-thousand pounds additional weight were added before the cap was fitted and the well closed. A casing-connection and tubing-lines connected the well with a tank.”
Had the owners not torpedoed this well, which they believed to be dry, its value would never have been known. Its conceded failure would have chilled ambitious operators who held adjoining leases and changed the entire history of Thorn Creek.
Torpedoing wells is a hazardous business. A professional well-shooter must have nerves of iron, be temperate in his habits and keenly alive to the fact that a careless movement or a misstep may send him flying into space. James Sanders, a veteran employé of the Roberts Company, fired six-thousand torpedoes without the slightest accident and lived for years after his well-earned retirement. Nitro-Glycerine literally tears its victims into shreds. It is quick as lightning and can’t be dodged. The first fatality from its use in the oil-regions befell William Munson, in the summer of 1867, at Reno. He operated on Cherry Run, owning wells near the famous Reed and Wade. He was one of the earliest producers to use torpedoes and manufactured them under the Reed patent. A small building at the bend of the Allegheny below Reno served as his workshop and storehouse. For months the new industry went along quietly, its projector prospering as the result of his enterprise. Entering the building one morning in August, he was seen no more. How it occurred none could tell, but a frightful explosion shivered the building, tore a hole in the ground and annihilated Munson. Houses trembled to their foundations, dishes were thrown from the shelves, windows were shattered and about Oil City the horrible shock drove people frantically into the streets. Not a trace of Munson’s premises remained, while fragments of flesh and bone strewn over acres of ground too plainly revealed the dreadful fate of the proprietor. The mangled bits were carefully gathered up, put in a small box and sent to his former home in New York for interment. The tragedy aroused profound sympathy. Mentally, morally and physically William Munson was a fine specimen of manhood, thoroughly upright and trustworthy. He lived at Franklin and belonged to the Methodist church. His widow and two daughters survived the fond husband and father. Mrs. Munson first moved to California, then returned eastward and she is now practicing medicine at Toledo, the home of her daughters, the younger of whom married Frank Gleason.
The sensation produced by the first fatality had not entirely subsided when the second victim was added to a list that has since lengthened appallingly. To ensure comparative safety the deadly stuff was kept in magazines located in isolated places. In 1867 the Roberts Company built one of these receptacles two miles from Titusville, in the side of a hill excavated for the purpose. Thither Patrick Brophy, who had charge, went as usual one fine morning in July of 1868. An hour later a terrific explosion burst upon the surrounding country with indescribable violence. Horses and people on the streets of Titusville were thrown down, chimneys tumbled, windows dropped into atoms and for a time the panic was fearful. Then the thought suggested itself that the glycerine-magazine had blown up. At once thousands started for the spot. The site had been converted into a huge chasm, with tons of dirt scattered far and wide. Branches of trees were lopped off as though cut by a knife and hardly a particle could be found of what had so recently been a sentient being, instinct with life and feeling and fondly anticipating a happy career. The unfortunate youth bore an excellent character for sobriety and carefulness. He was a young Irishman, had been a brakeman on the Farmers’ Railroad and visited the magazine frequently to make experiments.
On Church Run, two miles back of Titusville, Colonel Davison established a torpedo-manufactory in 1868. A few months passed safely and then the tragedy came. With three workmen—Henry Todd, A. D. Griffin and William Bills—Colonel Davison went to the factory, as was his practice, one morning in September. A torpedo must have burst in course of filling, causing sad destruction. The building was knocked into splinters, burying the occupants beneath the ruins. All around the customary evidences of havoc were presented, although the sheltered position of the factory prevented much damage to Titusville. The mangled bodies of his companions were extricated from the wreck. while Colonel Davison still breathed. He did not regain consciousness and death closed the chapter during the afternoon. This dismal event produced a deep impression, the extinction of four lives investing it with peculiar interest to the people of Oildom, many of whom knew the victims and sincerely lamented their mournful exit.
Dr. Fowler, the seventh victim, met his doom at Franklin in 1869. He had erected a magazine on the hill above the Allegheny Valley depot, in which large quantities of explosives were stored. With his brother Charles the Doctor started for the storehouse one forenoon. At the river-bridge a friend detained Charles for a few moments in conversation, the Doctor proceeding alone. What happened prior to the shock will not be revealed until all secrets are laid bare, but before Charles reached the magazine a tremendous explosion launched his brother into eternity. A spectator first noticed the boards of the building flying through space, followed in a moment by a report that made the earth quiver. The nearest properties were wrecked and the jar was felt miles away. Careful search for the remains of the poor Doctor resulted in a small lot of broken bones and pieces of flesh, which were buried in the Franklin cemetery. It was supposed that the catastrophe originated from the Doctor’s boots coming in contact with some glycerine that may have leaked upon the floor. This is as plausible a reason as can be assigned for a tragedy that brought grief to many loving hearts. The Doctor was a genial, kindly gentleman and his cruel fate was universally deplored.
William A. Thompson, of Franklin, left home on Tuesday morning, August thirteenth, 1870, carrying in his buggy a torpedo to be exploded in a well on the Foster farm. John Quinn rode with him. At the farm he received two old torpedoes, which had been there five or six weeks, having failed to explode, to return to the factory. Quinn came up the river by rail. Thompson stopped at Samuel Graham’s, Bully Hill, got an apple and lighted a cigar. On leaving he said: “Good-bye, Sam, perhaps you’ll never see me again!” Five minutes later an explosion was heard on the Bully-Hill road, a mile from where Dr. Fowler had met his doom. Graham and others hurried to the spot. The body of Thompson, horribly mutilated, was lying fifty feet from the road, the left arm severed above the elbow and missing. The horse and the fore-wheels of the buggy were found a hundred yards off, the wounded animal struggling that distance before he fell. The body and hind-wheels of the vehicle were in splinters. One tire hung on a tree and a boot on another. The main charge of the torpedo had entered the victim’s left side above the hip and the face was scarcely disfigured. Mr. Thompson was widely known and esteemed for his social qualities and high character. He was born in Clearfield county, came to Franklin in 1853, married in 1855 and met his shocking fate at the age of thirty-nine. His widow and a daughter live at Franklin.
Thus far the losses of human life were occasioned by the explosion of great quantities of the messengers of death. The next instance demonstrated the amazing strength of Nitro-Glycerine in small parcels, a few drops ending the existence of a vigorous man at Scrubgrass, Venango county, in the summer of 1870. R. W. Redfield, agent of a torpedo-company, hid a can of glycerine in the bushes, expecting to return and use it the following day. While picking berries Mrs. George Fetterman saw the can and handed it to her husband. Thinking it was lard-oil, which Nitro-Glycerine in its fluid state resembles closely, Fetterman poured some into a vessel and sent it to his wells. It was used as a lubricant for several days. Noticing a heated journal one morning, Fetterman put a little of the supposed oil on the axle, with the engine in rapid motion. A furious explosion ensued, tearing the engine-house into splinters and partially stunning three men at work in the derrick. Poor Fetterman was found shockingly mangled, with one arm torn off and his head crushed into jelly. The mystery was not solved for hours, when it occurred to a neighbor to test the contents of the oil-can. Putting one drop on an anvil, he struck it a heavy blow and was hurled to the earth by the force of the concussion. The can was a common oiler, holding a half-pint, and probably not a dozen drops had touched the journal before the explosion took place. Fetterman was a man of remarkable physical power, weighing two-hundred-and-thirty pounds and looking the picture of health and vigor. Yet a quarter-spoonful of nitro-glycerine sufficed to usher him into the hereafter under circumstances particularly distressing.
In the fall a young man lost his life almost as singularly as Fetterman. He attended a well at Shamburg, seven miles south of Titusville. The well was torpedoed on a cold day. To thaw the glycerine a tub was filled with hot water, into which the cans were put. When sufficiently thawed they were taken out, the glycerine was poured into the shell and the torpedoing was done satisfactorily. The tubing was replaced in the well and the young pumper went to turn on the steam to start the engine, carrying a pair of tongs with him. He threw the tongs into the tub of water. In an instant the engine-house was demolished by a fierce explosion. The luckless youth was killed and his body mangled. A small amount of glycerine must have leaked from the cans while they were thawing, as the result of which a soul was hurried into the presence of its Maker with alarming suddenness.
In August of 1871 Charles Clarke started towards Enterprise, a small village in Warren county, ten miles east of Titusville, with a lot of glycerine in a vehicle drawn by one horse. The trip was destined never to be accomplished. By the side of a high hill a piece of very rough road had to be traveled. There the charge exploded. Likely some of the liquid had leaked over the buggy and springs and been too much jolted. The concussion was awful. Pieces of the woodwork and tires were carried hundreds of yards. Half of one wheel lodged near the top of a large tree and for many rods the forest was stripped of its foliage and branches. Part of the face, with the mustache and four teeth adhering, was the largest portion of the driver recovered from the debris. The horse was disemboweled and to numerous trees lots of flesh and clothing were sticking. From the ghastly spectacle the beholders turned away shuddering. The handful of remains was buried reverently at Titusville, crowds of people uniting in the last tribute of respect to “Charlie,” whose youth and intelligence had made him a general favorite.
A case similar to Thompson’s followed a few weeks after, near Rouseville. Descending a steep hill on his way from torpedoing a well on the Shaw farm, William Pine was sent out of the world unwarned. He had a torpedo-shell and some cans of glycerine in a light wagon drawn by two horses. No doubt, the extreme roughness of the road exploded the dangerous freight. The body of the driver was distributed in minute fragments over two acres and the buggy was destroyed, but the horses escaped with slight injury, probably because the force of the shock passed above them as they were going down the hill. Pine had a premonition of impending disaster. When leaving home he kissed his wife affectionately and told her he intended, should he return safely, to quit the torpedo-business forever next day. He was an industrious, competent young man, deserving of a better fate.
In October of the same year Charles Palmer was blown to pieces at the Roberts magazine, near Titusville, where Brophy died two years before. With Captain West, agent of the company, he was removing cans of glycerine from a wagon to the magazine. He handled the cans so recklessly that West warned him to be more careful. He made thirteen trips from the wagon and entered the magazine for the fourteenth time. Next instant the magazine disappeared in a cloud of dust and smoke, leaving hardly a trace of man or material. West happened to be beside the wagon and escaped unhurt. The horses galloped furiously through Titusville, the cans not taken out bounding around in the wagon. Why they did not explode is a mystery. Had they done so the city would have been leveled and thousands of lives lost. Palmer paid dearly for his carelessness, which was characteristic of the rollicking, light-hearted fellow whose existence terminated so shockingly.
This thrilling adventure decided Captain West, who lived at Oil City, to engage in pursuits more congenial to himself and agreeable to his devoted family. He was finely educated, past the meridian and streaks of gray tinged his dark hair and beard. In November he torpedoed a well for me on Cherry Run. The shell stuck, together we drew it up, the Captain adjusted the cap and it was then lowered and exploded successfully. At parting he shook my hand warmly and remarked: “This is the last torpedo I shall put in for you. My engagement with the company will end next week. Good-bye. Come and see me in Oil City.” Three days later he went to shoot a well at Reno, saying to his wife at starting: “This will wind up my work for the company.” Such proved to be the fact, although in a manner very different from what the speaker imagined. The shell was lowered into the well, but failed to explode and the Captain concluded to draw it up and examine the priming. Near the surface it exploded, instantly killing West, who was guiding the line attached to the torpedo. He was hurled into the air, striking the walking-beam and falling upon the derrick-floor a bruised and bleeding corpse. He had, indeed, put in his last torpedo. The main force of the explosion was spent in the well, otherwise the body and the derrick would have been blown to atoms. A tear from an old friend, as he recounts the tragic close of an honorable career, is due the memory of a man whose sterling qualities were universally admired.
Early in 1873 two young lives paid the penalty at Scrubgrass. On a bright February morning “Doc” Wright, the torpedo-agent, stopped at the station to send a despatch. The message sent, he invited the telegraph-operator, George Wolfe, to ride with him to the magazine, a mile up the river. The two set out in high spirits, two dogs following the sleigh. Hardly ten minutes elapsed when a dreadful report terrified the settlement. From the magazine on the river-bank a light smoke ascended. Two rods away stood the trembling horse, one eye torn from its socket and his side lacerated. Beside him one dog lay lifeless. Fragments of the cutter and the harness were strewn around promiscuously. Through the bushes a clean lane was cut and a large chestnut-tree uprooted. A deep gap alone remained of the magazine and scarcely a particle of the two men could be found. Dozens of splintered trees across the Allegheny indicated alike the force and general direction of the concussion. A boot containing part of a human foot was picked up fifty rods from the spot. Wright’s gold-watch, flattened and twisted, was fished out of the Allegheny, two-hundred yards down the stream, in May. The remains, which two cigar-boxes would have held, were interred close by. A marble shaft marks the grave, which Col. William Phillips, then president of the Allegheny-Valley Railroad, enclosed with a neat iron-railing. It is very near the railway-track and the bank of the river, a short distance above Kennerdell Station. The disaster was supposed to have resulted from Wright’s using a hatchet to loosen a can of glycerine from the ice that held it fast. A pet spaniel, which had a habit of rubbing against his legs and trying to jump into his arms, accompanied him from his boarding-house. The animal may have diverted his attention momentarily, causing him to miss the ice and strike the can. The horse lived for years, not much the worse except for the loss of one eye. Wright and Wolfe were lively and jocular and their sad fate was deeply regretted. Many a telegram George Wolfe sent for me when Scrubgrass was at full tide.
One morning in April of 1873 Dennis Run, a half-mile from Tidioute, experienced a fierce explosion, which vibrated buildings, upset dishes and broke windows long distances off. It occurred at a frame structure on the side of a hill, occupied by Andrew Dalrymple as a dwelling and engine-house. He was a “moonlighter,” putting in torpedoes at night to avoid detection by the Roberts spotters, and was probably filling a shell at the moment of the explosion. It knocked the tenement into toothpicks and killed Dalrymple, jamming his head and the upper portion of the trunk against an adjacent engine-house, the roof of which was smeared with blood and particles of flesh. One arm lay in the small creek four-hundred feet away, but not a vestige of the lower half of the body could be discovered. A feeble cry from the ruins of the building surprised the first persons to reach the place. Two feet beneath the rubbish a child twenty months old was found unhurt. Farther search revealed Mrs. Dalrymple, badly mangled and unconscious. She lingered two hours. The little orphan, too young to understand the calamity that deprived her of both parents, was adopted by a wealthy resident of Tidioute and grew to be a beautiful girl. Thousands viewed the sad spectacle and followed the double funeral to the cemetery. It has been my fortune to witness many sights of this description, but none comprised more distressing elements than the sudden summons of the doomed husband and wife. Mrs. Dalrymple was the only woman in the oil-region whom Nitro-Glycerine slaughtered.
Is there a sixth sense, an indefinable impression that prompts an action without an apparent reason? At Petrolia one forenoon something impelled me to go to Tidioute, a hundred miles north, and spend the night. Rising from breakfast at the Empire House next morning, a loud report, as though a battery of boilers had burst, hurried me to the street. Ten minutes later found me gazing upon the Dalrymple horror. Was the cause of the impulse that started me from Petrolia explained? An hour sufficed to help rescue the child from the debris, inspect the wreck, glean full particulars and board the train for Irvineton. Writing the account for the Oil-City Derrick at my leisure, Postmaster Evans was on hand with a report of the inquest when the evening-train reached Tidioute. The Tidioute Journal didn’t like the Derrick a little bit and the sight of a young man running from its office towards the train, with copies of the paper—not dry from the press—attracted my attention. Mr. Evans said two Titusville reporters had come over during the day. A newspaper-man clearly relishes a “scoop” and it struck me at once that the Journal was rushing the first sheets of its edition to the Titusville delegates. Squeezing through the jam, A. E. Fay, of the Courier, and “Charlie” Morse, of the Herald, were pocketing the copies handed them by the Journal youth. Fay laughed out loud and said: “Well, boys, I guess the Derrick’s left this time!” A pat on the shoulder and my hint to “guess again” fairly paralyzed the trio. The conductor shouted “all aboard” and the train moved off. Dropping into the seat in front of Fay, his annoyance could not be concealed. It relieved him to hear me tell of coming through from the north and ask why such a crowd had gathered at Tidioute. He told a fairy-story of a ball-game and his own and Morse’s visit to meet a friend! A wish for a glance at the Tidioute paper he parried by answering: “It’s yesterday’s issue!” Fay was a good fellow and his clumsy falsifying would have shamed Ananias. Keeping him on the rack was rare sport. Clearly he believed me ignorant of the torpedo-accident. The moment to undeceive him arrived. A big roll of manuscript held before his eyes, with a “scare-head” and minute details of the tragedy, prefaced the query: “Do you still think the Derrick is badly left?” Many friends have asked me: “In your travels through the oil-region what was the funniest thing you ever saw?” Here is the answer: The dazed look of Fay as he beheld that manuscript, turned red and white, clenched his fists, gritted his teeth and hissed, “Damn you!”
John Osborne, a youth well-known and well-liked, in July of 1874 drove a buckboard loaded with glycerine down Bear-Creek Valley, two miles below Parker. The cargo let go at a rough piece of road in a woody ravine, scattering Osborne, the horse and the vehicle over acres of tree-tops. The concussion was felt three miles. Venango, Crawford, Warren and Armstrong counties had furnished nearly a score of sacrifices and Butler was to supply the next. Alonzo Taylor, young and unmarried, went in the summer of 1875 to torpedo a well at Troutman. The drop-weight failed to explode the percussion-cap and Taylor drew up the shell, a process that had cost Captain West his life and was always risky. He got it out safely and bore the torpedo to a hill to examine the priming. An instant later a frightful explosion stunned the neighborhood. Taylor was not mangled beyond recognition, as the charge was giant-powder instead of Nitro-Glycerine. Nor was the damage to surrounding objects very great, owing to the tendency of the powder to expend its strength downward. This was the only torpedo-fatality of the year, the number of casualties having induced greater caution in handling explosives.
One of the first persons to reach the spot and gather the remains of William Pine was his friend James Barnum, who died in the same manner at St. Petersburg eighteen months later. Barnum was the Roberts agent in Clarion county. On February twenty-third, 1876, he drove to Edenburg for three-hundred pounds of glycerine, to store in the magazine a mile from St. Petersburg. A fearful concussion, which the writer can never forget, broke hundreds of windows and rocked houses to their foundations at six o’clock that evening. To the magazine, on a slope sheltered by trees, people hastened. A huge iron-safe, imbedded in a cave dug into the hill, was the repository of the explosives. Barnum had tied his team to a small tree and must have been taking the cans from the wagon to the safe. A yawning cavity indicated the site of the magazine. Both horses lay dead and disemboweled. The biggest piece of the luckless agent would not weigh two pounds. One of his ears was found next morning a half-mile away. The few remnants were collected in a box and buried at Franklin. A wife and several children mourned poor “Jim,” who was a lively, active young man and had often been warned not to be so careless with the deadly stuff. Mrs. Barnum heard the explosion, uttered a piercing shriek and ran wildly from her house towards the magazine, sure her husband had been killed.
W. H. Harper, who received a patent for improvements in torpedoes, went to his doom at Keating’s Furnace, two miles from St. Petersburg, in July of 1876. Drawing an unexploded shell from a well, precisely as West and Taylor had done, he stooped down to examine the priming. The contents exploded and drove pieces of the tin-shell deep into his flesh and through his body. How he survived nine days was a wonder to all who saw the dreadful wounds of the unlucky inventor.
McKean county supplied the next instance. Repeated attempts were made to rob a large magazine on the Curtis farm, two miles south of Bradford. Incredible as it may seem, the key-hole of the ponderous iron-safe in the hillside was several times stuffed with Nitro-Glycerine and a long fuse and a slow match applied to burst the door. None of these foolhardy attempts succeeding, on the night of September fifteenth, 1877, A. V. Pulser, J. B. Burkholder, Andrew P. Higgins and Charles S. Page, two of them “moonlighters,” it is supposed tried pounding the lock with a hammer. At any rate, they exploded the magazine and were blown to fragments, with all the gruesome accompaniments incident to such catastrophes. That men would imperil their lives to loot a safe of Nitro-Glycerine in the dark beats the old story of the thief who essayed to steal a red-hot stove. In this case retribution was swift and terrible, but a magazine at St. Petersburg was broken open and plundered successfully.
Seventeen days later J. T. Smith, of Titusville, who had charge of a magazine on Bolivar Run, four miles from Bradford, lost his life experimenting with glycerine. Col. E. A. L. Roberts and his nephew, Owen Roberts, stood fifty yards from the magazine as Smith was thrown into the air and frightfully mangled. They escaped with slight bruises, a lively shaking up and a hair-raising fright.
The summer of 1878 was a busy season in the northern field. Foster-Brook Valley was at the hey-day of activity, with hundreds of wells drilling and well-shooters very much in evidence. Among the most expert men in the employ of the Roberts Company was J. Bartlett, of Bradford. He went to Red Rock, an ephemeral oil-town six miles north-east of Bradford, to torpedo a well in rear of the McClure House, the principal hostelry. Although Bartlett’s recklessness was the source of uneasiness, he had never met with an accident and was considered extremely fortunate. It was a rule to explode the cans that had held the glycerine before pouring it into the shell. Bartlett torpedoed the well, piled wood around the empty cans and set it on fire. He and a party of friends waited at the hotel for the cans to explode. The fire had burned low and Bartlett proceeded to investigate. He lifted a can and turned it over, to see if it contained any glycerine. The act was followed by an explosion that shook every house in the town and shattered numberless windows. Bartlett’s companions were knocked senseless and the shooter was blown one-hundred feet. When picked up by several men, who hurried to the scene, he presented a horrible sight. His clothing was torn to ribbons and his body riddled by pieces of tin. The right arm was off close to the shoulder and the right leg was a pulp. He was removed to a boarding-house and died in great agony three hours after.
Stories of hapless “moonlighters” scattered to the four winds of heaven were recounted frequently. Their business, done largely under cover of darkness, was exceptionally dangerous. The “moonlighter” did not haul his load in a wagon openly by daylight. He would place two ten-quart cans of glycerine in a meal-sack, sling the bag over his shoulder and walk to the scene of his intended operations, generally at night. One evening in the spring of 1879 a “moonlighter” named Reed appeared at Red Rock, somewhat intoxicated and bearing two cans of glycerine in a bag. He handled the bag in a style that struck terror to the hearts of all onlookers, many of whom remembered poor Bartlett. It was unsafe to wrest it from him by force and the Red-Rockers heaved a sigh of relief when he started to climb the hill leading to Summit City. Scores watched him, expecting an accident. At a rough spot Reed stumbled and the cans fell to the ground. A terrific explosion shook the surrounding country. A deep hole, ten feet in diameter, was blown in the earth and houses in the vicinity were badly shaken. The explosion occurred directly under a tree. When an attempt was made to gather up Reed’s remains the greater portion of the body was in the tree, scraps of flesh of various sizes hanging from its branches. The concussion passed above Red Rock, hence the damage to property was small. Reed was dispersed over an acre of brush, a fearful illustration of the incompatibility of whisky and Nitro-Glycerine.
W. O. Gotham, John Fowler and Harry French went to their usual work at Gotham’s Nitro-Glycerine factory, near Petrolia, on the morning of October twenty-seventh, 1878. An explosion during the forenoon tore Fowler to shreds, mutilated French shockingly and landed Gotham’s dead body in the stream with hardly a sign of injury. Petrolia never witnessed a sadder funeral-procession than the long one that followed the unfortunate three to the tomb. Gotham had a family and was widely known; the others were strangers, far from home and loved ones.
On February twentieth, 1880, James Feeney and Leonard Tackett started in a sleigh with six cans under the seat to torpedo a well at Tram Hollow, eight miles east by north of Bradford. The sleigh slipped into a rut on a rough side-hill and capsized. The glycerine exploded, throwing Tackett high in the air and mangling him considerably. Feeney lay flat in the rut, the violence of the shock passing over him and covering him with snow and fence-rails. His face was scorched and his hearing destroyed, but he managed to crawl out, the first man who ever emerged alive from the jaws of a Nitro-Glycerine eruption. He is still a resident of Bradford. A dwelling close to the scene was wrecked, the falling timbers seriously injuring two of the inmates.
At two o’clock on the morning of December twenty-third, 1880, a powerful concussion startled the people of Bradford from their slumbers, caused by a glycerine-explosion just below the city-limits. Alvin Magee was standing over the deadly compound, which had been put in a tub of hot water to thaw. Usually the subtle stuff is stored in a cold place, to congeal or freeze until needed. Magee and the derrick were blown into space, only a few bits of flesh and bone and splintered wood remaining. His two companions were in the engine-house and got off with severe bruises and permanent deafness. Two men named Cushing and Leasure were killed the same way in January, at a well near Limestone. Cushing came to see the torpedo put into the well and was standing near the engine-house, into which Leasure had just gone, when the accident occurred. The glycerine was in hot water to thaw and a jet of steam turned on, with the effect of sending it off prematurely. Cushing’s body did not show a mark, his death probably resulting from concussion, while Leasure was torn to fragments.
E. M. Pearsall, of Oil City, died on July fourteenth, 1880, from the effect of burns a few hours before. In company with two other men he went to torpedo one of his wells on the Clapp farm. The tubing had been drawn out and a large amount of benzine poured into the hole. The torpedo was exploded, when the gas and benzine took fire and enveloped the men and rig in flames. The clothes of Pearsall, who was nearest to the derrick, caught fire and burned from his body. His limbs, face and breast were a fearful sight. His intense suffering he bore like a hero, made a will and calmly awaited death, which came to his relief at nine o’clock in the evening. Pearsall was dark-haired, dark-eyed, slender, wiry and fearless.
J. Plumer Mitchell—we called him “Plum”—worked for me on the Independent Press at Franklin in 1879-80. Everybody liked the bright, genial, capable young man who set type, read proof, wrote locals, solicited advertisements and won golden opinions. He married and was the proud father of two winsome children. Meeting me on the street one day shortly after quitting the Press, we chatted briefly.
“I am through with sticking type,” he said.
“What are you driving at now?”
“Torpedoing wells. I started on Monday.”
“Well, be sure you get good pay, for it’s risky business, and don’t furnish a thrilling paragraph for the obituary-column.”
“I shall do my best to steer clear of that. Good-bye.”
That was our last meeting. He met the fate that overtook West, Taylor and Harper, shooting a well at Galloway. The shattered frame rests in the cemetery and the widow and fatherless daughters of the lamented dead reside at Franklin. Poor “Plum!”
T. A. McClain, an employé of the Roberts Company, was hauling two-hundred quarts of glycerine in a sleigh from Davis Switch to Kinzua Junction, on February fourteenth, 1881. The horses frightened and ran off. The sleigh is supposed to have struck a stump and the cargo exploded. Hardly a trace of McClain could be found and a bit of the steel-shoeing was the only part of the sleigh recovered. Obliteration more complete it would be difficult to imagine.
The most destructive sacrifice of life followed on September seventh. Charles Rust, a Bradford shooter, drove to Sawyer City to torpedo a well on the Jane Schoonover farm. It is alleged that Rust had domestic trouble, wearied of life and told his wife when leaving that morning he would never return. A small crowd assembled to witness the operation. William Bunton, owner of several adjacent wells, Charles Crouse, known as “Big Charlie the Moonlighter,” James Thrasher, tool-dresser, and Rust were on the derrick-floor. Rust filled the first shell, fixed the firing-head and struck the cap two sharp blows with his left hand. There was a blinding flash, then a deafening report. Dust, smoke and missiles filled the air. The derrick was demolished and pieces of board flew hundreds of yards with the force of cannon-balls. One hit Crouse in the center of the forehead and passed through the skull. His face was terribly lacerated and the clothing stripped off his body. Bunton and Thrasher were not mangled beyond recognition, while Rust was thrown a hundred yards. His legs were missing, the face was battered out of the semblance of humanity and not a vestige of clothing was left on the mutilated trunk. Frederick Slatterly, a lad on his way to school, was hit by a piece of the derrick, which ripped his abdomen and caused death in three hours. Three boys walking behind young Slatterly were thrown down and hurt slightly. Mr. Bunton gasped when picked up and lived five minutes. He was an estimable citizen, an elder in the Presbyterian church, intelligent and broad-minded. Thrasher and Crouse were industrious workmen. Edward Wilson, a gauger, standing ten rods away, was perforated by slivers and pieces of tin, his injuries confining him to bed several months. Thomas Buton and John Sisley were at the side of the derrick, within six feet of Rust, yet escaped with trifling injuries. The tragedy produced a sensation, all the more fearful from the belief of some who witnessed it that Rust intended to commit suicide and in compassing his own death killed four innocent victims.
The Roberts magazine on the Hatfield farm, two miles south of Bradford, blew up on the night of October thirteenth, 1881. Nobody doubted it was the work of “moonlighters” attempting to steal the glycerine. Traces of blood and minute portions of flesh on the stones and ties indicated that two persons at least were engaged in the job. Who they were none ever learned.
John McCleary, a Roberts shooter, had a remarkable escape on December twenty-seventh, 1881. While filling the shell at a well near Haymaker, in the lower oil-field, the well flowed and McCleary left the derrick. The column of oil threw down the shell and the glycerine exploded promptly, wrecking the derrick and tossing the fleeing man violently to the ground. He rose to his feet as four cans on the derrick-floor cut loose. McCleary was borne fifty feet through the air, jagged splinters of tin and wood pierced his back and sides and he fell stunned and bleeding. He was not injured fatally. Like Feeney, Buton and Sisley, he survives to tell of his close call. Less fortunate was Henry W. McHenry, who had torpedoed hundreds of wells and was blown to atoms near Simpson Station, in the southern end of the Bradford region, on February fifth, 1883. His fate resembled West’s, Taylor’s, Harper’s and Mitchell’s.
In the summer of 1884 Lark Easton went to torpedo a well at Coleville, seven miles southeast of Bradford. He tied his team in the woods, carried some cans of glycerine to the well and left four in the wagon. A storm blew down a tree, which fell on the wagon and exploded the glycerine, demolishing the vehicle and killing one horse. It was a lucky escape, if not much of a lark, for Easton.
A peculiar case was that of “Doc” Haggerty, a teamster employed to haul Nitro-Glycerine to the magazine near Pleasantville. In December of 1888 he took fourteen-hundred pounds on his wagon and was seen at the magazine twenty minutes before a furious explosion occurred. Pieces of the horses and wagon were found, but not an atom of Haggerty. He had disappeared as completely as Elijah in the chariot of fire. An insurance-company, in which he held a five-thousand-dollar policy, resisted payment on the ground that, as no remains of the alleged dead man could be produced, he might be alive! Some pretexts for declining to pay a policy are pretty mean, but this certainly capped the climax. Experts believed the heat generated by the explosion was sufficient to cremate the body instantaneously, bones, clothes, boots and all.
James Woods and William Medeller, two experienced shooters, were ushered into eternity on December tenth, 1889, by the explosion of the Humes Torpedo-Company’s magazine at Bean Hollow, two miles south of Butler. They had gone for glycerine and that was the end of their mortal pilgrimage. Six years later, on December fourth, 1895, at the same place and in the same way, George Bester and Lewis Black lost their lives. Bester was blown to atoms and only a few threads of his clothing could be picked up. The lower part of Black’s face, the trunk and right arm remained together, while other portions of the body were strewn around. The left arm was in a tree three-hundred yards distant. Huge holes marked the site of the two Humes magazines, a hundred feet apart. The mangled horse lay between them, every bone in his carcass broken and the harness cut off clean. The buggy was in fragments, with one tire wrapped five times about a small tree. Not a board stayed on the boiler-house and the boiler was moved twenty feet and dismantled. The factory, two-hundred feet from the magazines, was utterly wrecked. The young men left Butler early in the morning, Black going for company. The supposition is that Bester was removing some of the cans from the shelf, intending to take them out, and that he dropped one of them. About seven-hundred pounds of glycerine were stored in one of the magazines and a less amount in the other. George Bester was twenty-eight and had a wife and two small children. He was industrious, steady and one of the best shooters in the business. Black was twenty and lived with his parents. The concussion jarred every house in Butler, broke windows and loosened plaster in the McKean school-building, causing a panic among the children.
W. N. Downing’s death, on January second, 1891, at the Victor Oil-Company’s well, in the Archer’s Forks oil-field, near Wheeling, West Virginia, was very singular. The glycerine used to torpedo the well the previous day had been thawed in a barrel of warm water. Next day two of the owners drove out to see the well and talk with Downing, who was foreman of the company. On their way back to Wheeling they heard an explosion, conjectured the boiler had burst and returned to the lease. Mr. Downing’s body lay near where the barrel of water had stood. The barrel had vanished and a large hole occupied its place. The victim’s head was cut off on a line with the eyes. The only explanation of the accident was that the glycerine had leaked into the barrel and a sudden jar had caused the stuff to explode. Beside the well, in the fence-corner, were twelve cans of glycerine not exploded. Downing lived at Siverlyville, above Oil City, whither his remains were brought for interment.
Letting a torpedo down a well at Bradford in September of 1877, a flow of oil jerked it out, hurled the shell against the tools, which were hanging in the derrick, and set off the nitro on the double quick. The shooter jumped and ran at the first symptoms of trouble, the derrick was sliced in the middle and set on fire. The rig burned and strenuous exertions alone saved neighboring wells. The fire was a novelty in the career of the explosive.
Occasionally Nitro-Glycerine goes off by spontaneous combustion without apparent provocation. On December fifth, 1881, two of the employés noticed a thin smoke rising from the top row of cans in the Roberts magazine at Kinzua Junction. They retreated, came back and removed eighty cans, observed the smoke increasing in density and volume and decided to watch further proceedings from a safe distance. Twelve-hundred quarts exploded with such vigor that the earth jarred for miles and a big hole was ploughed in the rock. In November of 1885 the Rock Glycerine-Company’s factory on Minard Run, four miles south of Bradford, was wrecked for the fourth time. O. Wood and A. Brown were running the mixture into “the drowning tank,” to divest it of the acid. The process generates much heat and acid escaping from a leak in the tank fired the wood-work. Wood and Brown and a carpenter in the building, knowing their deliverance depended upon their speed, took French leave. Samuel Barber, a teamster, was unloading a drum of acid in front of the building and joined the fugitives in their flight. The glycerine obligingly waited until the four men reached a safe spot and then reduced the factory to kindling-wood. Barber’s horses and wagon were not hurt mortally, the animals bleeding a little from the nose. Next evening Tucker’s factory at Corwin Centre, six miles north-east of Bradford, followed suit. Griffin Rathburn, who was making a run of the fluids, fled for his life as the mass emitted a flame. He saved himself, but the factory and a thousand pounds of the explosive went on an aërial excursion.
In November, 1896, at Pine Fork, West Virginia, William Conn drove a two-horse wagon to the magazine for glycerine to shoot a well. While Conn was inside two men drove up with two horses. That moment the magazine exploded with a report heard ten miles off. Only a piece of a man’s foot was ever found. Thus three human beings, two wagons and four horses were extinguished utterly.
On December twenty-third, 1896, a half-ton of glycerine blew up near Montpelier, Indiana. Two men and two teams were the victims. The forest was mowed down for hundreds of feet. Oak-trees three feet in diameter were cut off like mullein-stalks. A steel-tire from one wagon was coiled tightly around a small tree. One of the shooters was John Hickok, a giant in stature. He was unusually cheerful that morning. He kissed his wife and daughter good-bye and said, in answer to the query if he would be home to dinner, “You know, Jennie, we are never sure of coming back.”
By the explosion of a magazine at Shannopin, eighteen miles from Pittsburg, in January, 1897, two men and two girls were killed, one man was injured, buildings were shattered and part of the public-school was demolished. The concussion broke windows at Economy and Coraopolis and was felt thirty miles distant.
On February twenty-fifth, 1897, a similar accident at the magazine three miles west of Steubenville, Ohio, blew Louis Crary and Eugene Ralston into bits too small to be gathered up. Both were in the frame building containing the iron-safe that held the explosive when the whole thing went into the air. At Celina, on April second, Cornelius O’Donnell and John Baird perished, one finger alone remaining to prove they had ever existed.
Near Wellsville, New York, on March third, three tons of the stuff let go, probably from spontaneous combustion, leaving a yawning chasm where the magazine of the Rock Glycerine-Company had been erected. Nobody was near enough to be hurt. Next day John Pike and Lewis Washabaugh met their fate at Orchard Park. Washabaugh went to the magazine to examine its contents and the explosion occurred as he opened the door, tearing him to pieces. Pike, who stood a hundred yards away, was killed instantly. On March twenty-second, at the Farren farm, two miles from Wellsville, six-hundred quarts of the compound sent Henry H. Youngs to his death. His young wife heard the warning note and ran bareheaded through the deep mud to the scene. Doctor Clark and Thomas Myers were driving posts five hundred feet from the magazine when Youngs drove past for his load. Myers wanted to leave the spot, fearing an accident, but Clark laughed at him and they continued working. At nine o’clock Myers stood upon a saw-horse mauling away at a post. Suddenly he was thrown over and over, performing several somersaults. He soon realized that the terrible explosion he feared had taken place. With bloody face, bruised body and a limping gait he arose. Smoke ascended over the site of the magazine. Man and horses and wagon were gone. Clark was slowly rolling himself over the ground and groaning from an injury in the region of the stomach. Both men gasped for breath. Scraps of clothing and shreds of flesh were all that could be picked up.
C. N. Brown, manager of a torpedo-company, lost his life on April first while shooting a well near Evans City, in Butler county. He had placed part of the charge in the hole and was filling another shell on the derrick-floor. Face and limbs were blown to the four winds, a portion of skull dropping in the field. Brown was an expert shooter and a can probably slipped from his hands to the floor so forcibly as to explode. He expected to quit the business that week.
Within sight of Marietta, Ohio, on August third, a wagon loaded with nitro-glycerine dropped into a chuck hole in the road, setting off the cargo. The driver, John McCleary, and the horses were scattered far and wide. Half of a hoof was the largest fragment left of man or beast. Thomas Martin, working on the road a hundred yards away, was hit by a piece of the wagon and died instantly. John Williams, riding a horse three-hundred yards beyond Martin, was pitched from his saddle and painfully bruised.
Samuel Barber torpedoed George Grant’s well, in the middle of the town of Cygnet, on September seventh. A heavy flow of gas and a stream of oil followed. The gas caught fire from the boiler, a hundred yards back, filling the air with a sheet of solid flame. Men, women and children were burned badly in trying to escape. Barber, clad in oily clothing that burned furiously, ran until he fell and was burned fatally. A store and office were consumed and the multitude supposed all danger had passed. Forty quarts of the explosive had not been taken from the derrick. The terrific explosion killed five men outright, three others expired in a few hours, nine houses were wrecked and every pane of glass in town was broken. Eight months previously two men were killed at Cygnet by the explosion of a magazine.
Warren VanBuren, of Bolivar, a noted shooter, has exploded three-thousand torpedoes in oil-wells and is still in the business. Three years ago two of his brothers worked with him. One of them tripped on a gas-pipe and fell, while carrying a can of nitro-glycerine to his wagon, with the usual result. All that could be found of his body was placed in a cigar-box. The other brother retired from the business next day, bought a fruit-farm, returned to the oil-country lately and he is again pursuing his old vocation.
John Jeffersey, an Indian pilot, died at Tionesta in 1894. One dark night he plunged into the Allegheny, near Brady’s Bend, to grasp a skiff loaded with cans of glycerine that brushed past his raft. Jacob Barry and Richard Spooner jumped from the skiff as it touched the raft, believing an explosion inevitable, and sank beneath the waters. As “Indian John” caught the boat he yelled: “Me got it him! Me run it him and tie!” He guided the craft through the pitchy darkness and anchored it safely. Had it drifted down the river a sad accident might have been the sequel. Happily Americanite, quite as powerful and much safer, is displacing nitro-glycerine.
Andrew Dalrymple, who perished at Tidioute, was at his brother’s well ten minutes before the fatal explosion and said to the pumper: “I have five-hundred dollars in my trousers and next week I’m going west to settle on a farm.” Man and wife and money were blotted out ruthlessly and the trip west was a trip into eternity instead.
Frequently loads of explosives are hauled through the streets of towns in the oil-regions, despite stringent ordinances and lynx-eyed policemen. Once a well-known handler of glycerine was arrested and taken before the mayor of Oil City. He denied violating the law by carrying the stuff in his buggy. An officer bore a can at arm’s length and laid it tenderly on the floor. “Now, you won’t deny it?” interrogated the mayor. “No,” replied the prisoner, “there seems to be a lot of it.” Then he hit the can a vicious kick, sending it against the wall with a thud. The spectators fled and the mayor tried to climb through the back-window. The can didn’t explode, the agent put it to his lips, took a hearty quaff and remarked: “Mr. Mayor, try a nip; you’ll find this whisky goes right to the ticklish spot!”
Men in Ohio, West Virginia and Indiana have added to the dismal roll of those who, leaving home happy and buoyant in the morning, ere the sun set were dispersed over acres of territory. Yet all experiences with the dread compound have not been serious, for at intervals a comic incident brightens the page. Robert L. Wilson, a blacksmith on Cherry Run in 1869-70, was a first-class tool-manufacturer. Joining the Butler tide, he opened a shop at Modoc. A fellow of giant-build entered one day, bragged of his muscle as well as his stuttering tongue would permit and wanted work. Something about the fellow displeased Wilson, who was of medium size and thin as Job’s turkey, and he decided to have a little fun at the stranger’s expense. He asked the burly visitor whether he could strike the anvil a heavier blow than any other man in the shop. The chap responded yes and Wilson agreed to hire him if he proved his claim good. Wilson poured two or three drops of what looked like lard-oil on the anvil and the big ’un braced himself to bring down the sledge-hammer with the force of a pile-driver. He struck the exact spot. The sledge soared through the roof and the giant was pitched against the side of the building hard enough to knock off a half-dozen boards. When he extracted himself from the mess and regained breath he blurted out: “I t-t-told you I co-cou-could hi-hi-hit a he-he-hell of a b-bl-blow!” “Right,” said Wilson, “you can beat any of us; be on hand to-morrow morning to begin work.” The man worked faithfully and did not discover for months that the stuff on the anvil was Nitro-Glycerine.
The farm-house of Albert Jones, three miles from Auburn, Illinois, was demolished on a Sunday afternoon in November of 1885. Jones had procured some Nitro-Glycerine to remove stumps and set the can on the floor of the dining-room. After dinner the family visited a neighbor, locking up the house. About three o’clock a thundering detonation alarmed the Auburnites, who couldn’t understand the cause of the rumpus. A messenger from the country enlightened them. The Jones domicile had been wrecked mysteriously and the family must have perished. Excited people soon arrived and the Joneses put in an appearance. The house and furniture were scattered in tiny tidbits over an area of five-hundred yards. Half the original height of the four walls was standing, with a saw-tooth and splintered fringe all around the irregular top of the oblong. Two beds were found several hundred yards apart, in the road in front of the house. A sewing-machine was buried head-first in the flower-garden. Wearing-apparel and household-articles were strewn about the place. While Mr. Jones and a circle of friends were viewing the wreck and wondering how the Nitro-Glycerine exploded a faint cry was heard. A search resulted in finding the family-cat in the branches of a tree fifty feet from the dwelling. It was surmised the cat caused the disaster by pushing from the table some article sufficiently heavy to explode the glycerine on the floor. The New York Sun’s famous grimalkin should have retired to a back-fence and begun his final caterwauling over the superior performance of the Illinois feline. Jones and his friends unanimously endorsed the verdict: “It was the cat.”
The first statement coupling a hog and Nitro-Glycerine in one package was written by me in December of 1869, at Rouseville, and printed in the Oil-City Times. The item went the rounds of the press in America and Europe, many papers giving due credit and many localizing the narrative to palm it off as original. One of the latter was “Brick” Pomeroy’s La Crosse Democrat, which laid the scene in that neck of woods. The tale has often been resurrected and it was reported in a New-Orleans paper last month. The original version of “The Loaded Porker” read thus:
“Rouseville furnishes the latest unpatented novelty in connection with Nitro-Glycerine. A torpedo-man had taken a small parcel of the dangerous compound from the magazine and on his return dropped into an engine-house a few minutes, leaving the vessel beside the door. A rampant hog, in search of a rare Christmas dinner, discovered the tempting package and unceremoniously devoured the entire contents, just finishing the last atom as the torpedoist emerged from the building! Now everybody gives the greedy animal the widest latitude. It has full possession of the whole sidewalk whenever disposed to promenade. All the dogs in town have been placed in solitary confinement, for fear they might chase the loaded porker against a post. No one is sufficiently reckless to kick the critter, lest it should unexpectedly explode and send the town and its total belongings to everlasting smash! The matter is really becoming serious and how to dispose safely of a gormandizing swine that has imbibed two quarts of infernal glycerine is the grand conundrum of the hour. When he is killed and ground up into sausage and head-cheese a new terror will be added to the long list that boarding-houses possess already.”
Charles Foster, of the High-Explosive Company, had an adventure in March of 1896 that he would not repeat for a hatful of diamonds. He loaded five-hundred quarts of glycerine at the magazine near Kane City. On Rynd Hill the horses slipped and one fell. The driver jumped from his seat to hold the animal’s head that it might not struggle. He cut the other horse free from the harness, as the road skirted a precipice and the frightened beast’s rearing and plunging would almost certainly dump the wagon and outfit over the steep bank. Nobody was in sight, the driver had no chance to block the wheels and the wagon started down the hill backward. The vehicle, with its load of condensed destruction, kept the road a few yards and pitched over the hill, turning somersaults in its descent. It brought up standing on the tongue in a heap of stones. The covers were torn off the wagon and the cans of the explosive were widely scattered. Seven in one bunch were picked up ten yards below the road. A three-cornered hole had been jammed in the bottom of one of the eight-quart cans and the contents were escaping. Darkness came on before the glycerine could be removed to a place of safety. Foster secured a rig and drove home, after arranging to have the stuff taken to the factory next morning. How the explosive, although congealed, stood the shock of going over the hill and scattering about without soaring skyward is one of the unfathomed mysteries of the Nitro-Glycerine business.
A Polish resident of South Oil City carried home what he took to be an empty tomato-can. His wife chanced to upset it from a shelf in the kitchen. A few drops of glycerine must have adhered to the tin. The can burst with fearful violence, blowing out one side of the kitchen, destroying the woman’s eyes and nearly blinding her little daughter. A woman at Rouseville poured glycerine, mistaking it for lard-oil, into a frying-pan on the stove, just as her husband came into the kitchen. He snatched up the pan and landed it in a snow-bank so quickly the stuff didn’t burst the combination. The wife started to scold him, but fainted when he explained the situation.
The wonderful explosion at Hell-Gate in 1876, when General Newton fired two-hundred tons of dynamite and cleared a channel into New-York harbor for the largest steamships, brought to the front the men who always tell of something that beats the record. A group sat discussing Newton’s achievement at the Collins House, Oil City, as a Southerner with a military title entered. Catching the drift of the argument he said:
“Talk about sending rocks and water up in the air! I knew a case that knocked the socks clear off this little ripple at New York!”
“Tell us all about it, Colonel,” the party chorused.
“You see I used to live down in Tennessee. One day I met a farmer driving a mule that looked as innocent as a cherub. The farmer had a whip with a brad in the end of it. Just as I came up he gave the mule a prod. Next moment he was gone. It almost took my breath away to see a chap snuffed out so quick. The mule merely ducked his head and struck out behind. A crash, a cloud of splinters and the mule and I were alone, with not a trace of farmer or wagon in sight. Next day the papers had accounts of a shower of flesh over in Kentucky and I was the only person who could explain the phenomenon. No, gentlemen, the dynamite and Nitro-Glycerine at Hell-Gate couldn’t hold a candle to that Tennessee mule!”
The silence that followed this tale was as dense as a London fog and might have been cut with a cheese-knife. It was finally broken by a Derrick writer, who was a newspaper man and not easily taken down, extending an invitation to the crowd to drink to the health of Eli Perkins’s and Joe Mulhatten’s greatest rival.
William A. Meyers, whom every man and woman at Bradford knew and admired, handled tons of explosives and shot hundreds of wells. He had escapes that would stand a porcupine’s quills on end. To head off a lot of fellows who asked him for the thousandth time concerning one notable adventure, he concocted a new version of the affair. “It was a close call,” he said, “and no mistake. In the magazine I got some glycerine on my boots. Soon after coming out I stamped my heel on a stone and the first thing I knew I was sailing heavenward. When I alighted I struck squarely on my other heel and began a second ascension. Somehow I came down without much injury, except a bruised feeling that wore off in a week or two. You see the glycerine stuck to my boot-heels and when it hit a hard substance it went off quicker than Old Nick could singe a kiln-dried sinner. What’ll you take, boys?”
So the darkest chapter in petroleum history, a flood of litigation, a mass of deception, a black wave of treachery and a red streak of human blood, must be charged to the account of Nitro-Glycerine.
GRAINS OF THIRD SAND.
Many expressions coined in or about the oil-regions condense a page into a line. Not a few have the force of a catapult and the directness of a rifle-ball. Some may be quoted:
“A fat bank-account won’t fatten a lean soul.”—Charles Miller.
“The poorest man I know of is the man who has nothing but money.”—John D. Rockefeller.
“Don’t size up a man by the size of his wad.”—Peter O. Conver.
“Never be the mere echo of any man on God’s green earth.”—David Kirk.
“Take nobody’s dust in oil or politics.”—James M. Guffey.
“What’s oil to a man when his wife’s a widow.”—Edwin E. Clapp.
“Dad’s struck ile.”—Miss Anna Evans.
“The Standard is the octopus of the century.”—Col. J. A. Vera.
“It’s monopoly when you won’t divide with the other fellow.”—John D. Archbold.
“The Standard would swallow us without chewing.”—Samuel P. Boyer.
“Give us public officials who dare own their own souls.”—Lewis Emery.
“The man who won’t demand his rights should crawl off the earth.”—M. H. Butler.
“He’s only a corporation-convenience.”—James W. Lee.
“A railroad-pass is the price of some legislators.”—W. S. McMullan.
“I believe in a man who can say no at the right time.”—James H. Osmer.
“A sneer can kill more tender plants than a hard freeze.”—Edwin H. Sibley.
“Grease, grace and greenbacks are the boss combination.”—John P. Zane.
“Where are we now?”—Philip M. Shannon.
“Piety that won’t march all week isn’t worth parading on Sunday.”—Rev. Fred. Evans.
“A jimson-weed has more fragrance than some folks’ religion.”—Rev. John McCoy.
“The scythe of Time gathers no rust.”—Rev. N. S. McFetridge.
“Faith may see the fruit, but works knock the persimmons.”—Rev. J. Hawkins.
“Train your boy as carefully as your fifty-dollar pup.”—Frank W. Bowen.
“Who is the father of that child?”—Oil-City Derrick.
“Other curses are trifles compared with the curses that follow falling prices.”—J. C. Sibley.
“Hit the calamity-howler in the solar plexus.”—Patrick C. Boyle.
“Good character? A man doesn’t need a character to sell whisky.”—S. P. McCalmont.
“He thinks himself a little tin-godelmitey on wheels.”—Coleman E. Bishop.
“Just to be contrary he’d have a chill in Hades.”—David A. Dennison.
“That fellow’s so cold-blooded he sweats ice-water.”—John H. Galey.
“Think out your plan, then go and do it.”—Charles V. Culver.
“I pay for what I get.”—John McKeown.
“This Court will not be made a thumbscrew to squeeze any debtor.”—Judge Trunkey.
“A good many injunctions ought to be enjoined.”—Judge Taylor.
“We may safely assume that the Almighty knows all about it.”—James S. Myers.
“A flea may upset a mastiff.”—Stephen D. Karns.
“The city-water is as dirty as the dirty pool of politics.”—Samuel P. Brigham.
“Haven’t the producers played the fool long enough?”—George H. Nesbit.
“Tracts and missionaries are poor feed for the heathen.”—Alexander Cochran.
“Money is good only as it enables men to do good.”—J. J. Vandergrift.
“It takes dry-holes to test an operator’s moral fiber.”—Joseph T. Jones.
“I have tapped the mine.”—Edwin L. Drake.
“Give us dollar-oil and Klondyke can go to the devil.”—Chorus of Operators.
“That duffer is the ugliest bristle on the monopoly-hog.”—Peter Grace.
“I think more of my ‘belt-theory’ than of a thousand-barrel well.”—Cyrus D. Angell.
“First stop the drill, then you may pray for higher prices.”—T. T. Thompson.
“A cat in hell without claws is less helpless than the producers.”—Clarion Oilmen.
“Seventy-cent oil is a mustard-plaster that draws out all our vitality.”— Michael Murphy.
“The world is all right; it’s your liver that’s wrong.”—Roger Sherman.
“He washed his face and the disguise was perfect.”—Samuel L. Williams.
“I feel sorry for the poor fellow fifty-dollars; how sorry are you?”—Wesley Chambers.
“Hell is running over with souls lost for lack of sympathy on earth.”—Rev. J. Hart.
“Cigarettes and corsets kill off a good many fools.”—Albert P. Whitaker.
“Giving is a luxury no man can afford to miss.”—Dr. Albert G. Egbert.
“Lord, preserve our pastor, which is sailin’ on the ragin’ sea.”—Elder at Franklin.
“The best preparation for a good death is a good life.”—Rev. Thomas Carroll.
“Let me pipe the oil and I don’t care who drills the wells.”—Henry Harley.
“One well in the sand beats a hundred geological guesses.”—Wesley S. Guffey.
“Oil is the sap that keeps the tree of commerce in bloom.”—Marcus Hulings.
“Producers and oil-wells should have plenty of sand.”—Frederic Prentice.
“He hasn’t half the backbone of a printer’s towel.”—M. N. Allen.
“His ideas have the vigor of a mule’s hind legs.”—Robert L. Cochran.
“Damn a man who won’t stand up for a square deal.”—Robert B. Allen.
“He’s too big a mullet-head to say damn.”—John A. Steele.
“God has no use for the man a dry-hole knocks out.”—Daniel Cady.
“His good deeds are so far apart they die of loneliness.”—Charles Collins.
“He’s more kinds of a blamed fool than a whole lunatic asylum.”—David Armstrong.
“Too often the mean man is the man of means.”—Stephen W. Harley.
“If all Christians were like some Christians the church would be a rubbish-heap.”—Rev. Edwin T. Brown.
XVIII. THE STANDARD OIL-COMPANY
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.
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“Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate, Nor set down aught in malice.”—Shakespeare.
“Not to know me argues yourself unknown.”—Milton.
“The keen spirit seizes the prompt occasion.”—Hannah Moore.
“Genius is the faculty of growth.”—Coleridge.
“Success affords the means of securing additional success.”—Stanislaus.
“Fortune, success, position, are never gained but by determinedly, bravely striking, growing, living to a thing.”—Townsend.
“The goal of yesterday will be the starting-point of to-morrow.”—Voltaire.
“Where the judgment is weak the prejudice is strong.”—Kate O’Hara.
“Amongst the sons of men how few are known Who dare to be just to merit not their own.”—Churchill.
“Censure is the tax a man pays to the public for being eminent.”—Dean Swift.
“As though a rose should shut and be a bud again.”—John Keats.
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Compared with a petroleum-sketch which did not touch upon the Standard Oil-Company, in different respects the greatest corporation the world has ever known, Hamlet with “the melancholy Dane” left out would be a masterpiece of completeness. Perhaps no business-organization in this or any other country has been more misrepresented and misunderstood. To many well-meaning persons, who would not willfully harbor an unjust thought, it has suggested all that is vicious, grasping and oppressive in commercial affairs. They picture it as a cruel monster, wearing horns and cloven-hoofs and a forked-tail, grown rich and fat devouring the weak and the innocent. Its motives have been impugned, its methods condemned and its actions traduced. If a man in Oildom drilled a dry-hole, backed the wrong horse, lost at poker, dropped money speculating, stubbed his toe, ran an unprofitable refinery, missed a train or couldn’t maintain champagne-style on a lager-beer income, it was the fashion for him to pose as the victim of a gang of conspirators and curse the Standard as vigorously and vociferously as the fish-wife hurled invectives at Daniel O’Connell.
Some folks display most wonderful agility In their attempts to shift responsibility.
The reasons for this are as numerous as the sands of the sea. It is no new thing to shove upon other shoulders the burden that belongs properly to our own. In their fiery zeal to convict somebody people have been known to bark up the wrong tree, to charge the innocent with all sorts of offences and to get off their base entirely. Such people and such methods did not die out with the passing of the Salem witch-burners. The Standard was made the scape-goat of the evil deeds alleged to have been contemplated by the unsavory South-Improvement Company. That odious combine, which included a number of railroad-officials, oil-operators and refiners, disbanded without producing, refining, buying, selling or transporting a gallon of petroleum. “Politics makes strange bedfellows” and so does business. Among subscribers for South-Improvement stock were certain holders of Standard stock and also their bitterest opponents; among those most active in giving the job its death-blow were prominent members of the Standard Oil-Company. The projected spoliation died “unwept, unhonored and unsung,” but it was not a Standard scheme.
Envy is frequently the penalty of success. Whoever fails in any pursuit likes to blame somebody else for his misfortune. This trick is as old as the race. Adam started it in Eden, Eve tried to ring in the serpent and their posterity take good care not to let the game get rusty from disuse! Its aggregation of capital renders the Standard, in the opinion of those who have “fallen outside the breastworks,” directly responsible for their inability to keep up with the procession. Sympathizers with them deem this “confirmation strong as proof of Holy Writ” that the Standard is an unconscionable monopoly, fostered by crushing out competition. Such reasoning forgets that enterprise, energy, experience and capital are usually trump-cards. It forgets that “the race is to the swift,” the battle is to the mighty and that “Heaven is on the side with the heaviest artillery.” Carried to its logical conclusion, it means that improved methods, labor-saving appliances and new processes count for nothing. It means that the snail can travel with the antelope, that the locomotive must wait for the stage-coach, that the fittest shall not survive. In short, it is the double-distilled essence of absurdity.
Any advance in methods of business necessarily injures the poorest competitor. Is this a reason why advances should be held back? If so, the public could derive no benefit from competition. The fact that a man with meagre resources labors under a serious disadvantage is not an excuse for preventing stronger parties from entering the field. The grand mistake is in confounding combination with monopoly. By combination small capital can compete successfully with large capital. Every partnership or corporation is a combination, without which undertakings beyond individual reach would never be accomplished. Trunk railroads would not be built, unity of action would be destroyed, mankind would segregate as savages and the trade of the world would stagnate. Combinations should be regulated, not abolished. Rightful competition is not a fierce strife between persons to undersell each other, that the one enduring the longest may afterwards sell higher, but that which furnishes the public with the best products at the least cost. This is not done by selling below cost, but by diminishing in every way possible the cost of producing, manufacturing and transporting. The competition which does this, be it by an individual, a firm, a corporation, a trust or a combination, is a public benefactor. This kind of competition uses the best tools, discards the sickle for the cradle and the cradle for the reaper, abandons the flail for the threshing-machine and adopts the newest ideas wherever and whenever expenses can be lessened. To this end unrestricted combination and unrestricted competition must go hand-in-hand. A small profit on a large volume of business is better for the consumer than a large profit on a small business. The man who sells a million dollars’ worth of goods a year, at a profit of five per cent., will become rich, while he who sells only ten-thousand dollars’ worth can get a bare living. If the builder of a business of one-hundred-thousand dollars deserve praise, why should the builder of a business of millions be censured? Business that grows greater than people’s limited notions should not for that cause be fettered or suppressed. When business ceases to be local and has the world for its market, capital must be supplied to meet the increasing demand and combination is as essential as fresh air. Thus large establishments take the place of small ones and men acting in concert achieve what they would never attempt separately. The more perfect the power of association the greater the power of production and the larger the proportion of the product which falls to the laborer’s share. The magnitude of combinations must correspond with the magnitude of the business to be done, in order to secure the highest skill, to employ the latest devices, to pay the best wages, to invent new appliances, to improve facilities and to give the public a cheaper and finer product. This is as natural and legitimate as for water to run down hill or the fleet greyhound to distance the slow tortoise.
How has the Standard affected the consumer of petroleum-products? What has it done for the people who use illuminating oils? Has it advanced the price and impaired the quality? The early distillations of petroleum were unsatisfactory and often dangerous. The first refineries were exceedingly primitive and their processes simple. Much of the crude was wasted in refining, a business not financially successful as a rule until 1872, notwithstanding the high prices obtained. Methods of manufacture and transportation were expensive and inadequate. The product was of poor quality, emitting smoke and unpleasant odor and liable to explode on the slightest provocation. In 1870 a few persons, who had previously been partners in a refinery at Cleveland, organized the Standard Oil-Company of Ohio, with a capital of one-million dollars, increased subsequently to three-and-a-half millions. For years the history of refining had been mainly one of disaster and bankruptcy. A Standard Oil-Company had been organized at Pittsburg by other persons and was doing a large trade. The Cleveland Standard Refinery, the Pittsburg Standard Refinery, the Atlantic Refining Company of Philadelphia and Charles Pratt & Co. of New York were extensive concerns. Because of the hazardous nature and peculiar conditions of the refining industry, the need of improved methods and the manifold advantages of combination, they entered into an alliance for their mutual benefit. Refineries in the oil-regions had combined before, hence the association of these interests was not a novelty. The cost of transportation and packages had been important factors in crippling the industry. Crude was barreled at the wells and hauled in wagons to the railroads prior to the system of transporting it by pipes laid under ground. Railroad-rates were excessive and irregular. Refiners who combined and could throw a large volume of business to any particular road secured favorable rates. The rebate-system was universal, not confined to oil alone, and possibly this fact had much to do with the combination of refiners afterwards known as the Standard Oil-Company.
Very naturally the Standard endeavored to secure the lowest transportation-rates. Quite as naturally railroad-managers, in their eagerness to secure the traffic, vied with each other in offering inducements to large shippers of petroleum. The Standard furnished, loaded and unloaded its own tank-cars, thereby eliminating barrels and materially cheapening the freight-service. This reduction of expense reduced the price of refined in the east to a figure which greatly increased the demand and gave oil-operations a healthy stimulus. Still more important was the introduction of improvements in refining, which yielded a larger percentage of illuminating-oil and converted the residue into merchantable products. Chemical and mechanical experts, employed by the combined companies to conduct experiments in this direction, aided in devising processes which revolutionized refining. The highest quality of burning-oil was obtained and nearly every particle of crude was utilized. Substances of commercial value took the place of the waste that formerly emptied into the streams, polluting the waters and the atmosphere. In this way the cost was so lessened that kerosene became the light of the nations. Consumers, whose dime now will buy as much as a dollar would before the “octopus” was heard of, are correspondingly happy.
Since consumers have fared so well, how about refiners outside the Standard? That smaller concerns were unable to compete with the Standard under such circumstances was no reason why the public should be deprived of the advantages resulting from concentration of capital and effort. Many of these, realizing that small capital is restricted to poor methods and dear production, either sold to the Standard or entered the combination. In not a few cases wide-awake refiners took stock for part of the price of their properties and engaged with the company, adding their talents and experience to the common fund for the benefit of all concerned. Others, not strong enough to have their cars and provide all the latest improvements, made such changes as they could afford to meet the requirements of the local trade, letting the larger ones attend to distant markets. Some continued right along and they are still on deck as independent refiners, always a respectable factor in the trade and never more active than to-day. Those who would neither improve, nor sell, nor combine, sitting down placidly and believing they would be bought out later on their own terms, were soon left far behind, as they deserved to be. Let it be said positively that the Standard, in negotiating for the purchase or combination of refineries, treated the owners liberally and sought to keep the best men in the business. A number who put up works to sell at exorbitant prices, failing in their design, howled about “monopoly” and “freezing out” and tried to pass as martyrs. It is true hundreds of inferior refineries have been dismantled, not because they were frozen out by a crushing monopoly, but because they lacked requisite facilities. The refineries in vogue when the Standard was organized could not stay in business a week, if resurrected and revived. A team of pack-mules might as well try to compete with the New York Central Railroad as these early refineries to meet the requirements of the petroleum-trade at its present stage of perfection. They were “frozen out” just as stage-coaches were “frozen out” by the iron-horse or the sailing-vessel of our grandfathers’ time by the ocean-liner that crosses the Atlantic in six days. Every labor-saving invention and improvement in machinery throws worthy persons out of employment, but inventions and improvements do not stop for any such cause. Business is a question of profit and convenience, not a matter of sentiment. The manufacturer who, by an improved process, can save a fraction of a cent on the yard or pound or gallon of his output has an enormous advantage. Must he be deprived of it because other manufacturers cannot produce their wares as cheaply? Refining petroleum is no exception to the ordinary rule and a transformation in its methods and results was as inevitable as human progress and the changes of the seasons.
Over-production is justly chargeable with the low price of crude that wafted many producers into bankruptcy. Regardless of the inexorable laws of supply and demand, operators drilled in Bradford and Butler until forty-million barrels were above ground and the price fell to forty cents. Time and again the wisest producers sought to stem the tide by stopping the drill, which started with renewed energy after each brief respite. With the stocks bearing the market the dropping of crude to a price that meant ruin to owners of small wells was as certain as death and taxes. Gold-dollars would be as cheap as pebbles if they were as plentiful. Forty-million barrels of diamonds stored in South Africa would bring the glistening gems to the level of glass-beads. The Standard, through the National-Transit Company, erected thousands of tanks to husband the enormous surplus, which the world could not consume and would not have on any terms. Hosts of operators were kept out of the sheriff’s grasp by this provision for their relief, using their certificates as collateral during the period of extreme depression. The richest districts were drained at length, consumption increased and production declined, stocks were reduced and prices advanced. Then a number of oil-operators, foremost among whom were some of the men whom the Standard had carried over the grave crisis, thought the National-Transit was making too much money storing crude and tried to secure legislation that was hardly a shade removed from confiscation. The legislature refused to pass the bills, the company voluntarily reduced its charges and the agitation subsided. Thousands of producers sold or entered large companies, into whose hands a good share of the development has fallen, mainly because of the great expense of operating in deep territory and the wisdom of dividing the risk attendant upon seeking new fields. Operators who had to retire were “frozen out” by excessive drilling, nothing more and nothing less!
The highest efficiency in all fields of economical endeavor is obtained by the greatest degree of organization and specialization of effort. To attack large concerns as monopolies, simply because they represent millions of dollars under a single management, is as stupid and unjust as the narrow antagonism of ill-balanced capitalists to organized labor. If organized capital means better methods, greater facilities and improved processes, organized labor means better wages, greater recognition and improved industrial conditions. Hence both deserve to be encouraged and both should work in harmony. The Standard Oil-Company established agencies in different states for the sale of its products. As the business grew it organized corporations under the laws of these states, to carry on the industry under corporate agencies. Manufactories were located at the seaboard for the export-trade. It was easier and cheaper to pipe crude to the coast than to refine it at the sources of supply and ship the varied products. Thus the refining of export-oil was done at the seaboard, just as iron is manufactured at Pittsburg instead of at the ore-beds on Lake Superior. The company aimed to open markets for petroleum by reducing the cost of its transportation and manufacture and bettering its quality. It manufactured its own barrels, cans, paints, acids, glue and other materials, effecting a vast saving. On January second, 1882, the forty persons then associated in the Standard owned the entire capital of fifteen corporations and a part of the stock of a number of others. Nine of these forty controlled a majority of the stocks so held, and it was agreed on that date that all the stocks of the corporations should be placed in the hands of these nine as trustees. The trustees issued certificates showing the extent of each block of stock so surrendered, and agreed to conduct the business of the several corporations for the best interests of all concerned. This was the inception of the Standard Oil-Trust, the most abused and least understood business-organization in the history of the race.
The Standard Trust, which demagogues lay awake nights coining language to denounce, did not unite competing corporations. The corporations were contributory agencies to the same business, the stock owned by the individuals who had built up and carried on the business and held the voting power. These individuals had combined not to repress business, but to extend it legitimately, by allying various branches and various corporations. The organization of the Trust was designed to facilitate the business of these corporations by uniting them under the management of one Board of Trustees. This object was business-like and laudable. It had no taint of a scheme to “corner” a necessity of life and elevate the price at the expense of the masses. On the contrary, it was calculated to enlarge the demand and supply it at the minimum of profit. For ten years the Standard Trust continued in existence, dissolving finally in 1892. During this term its stockholders increased from forty to two thousand. Many of the most skillful refiners and experienced producers joined the combination and were retained to manage their properties. Each corporation was managed as though independent of every other in the Trust, except that the rivalry to show the best record stimulated them to constant improvement. Whatever economy one devised was adopted by all. The business was most systematic and admirably managed in every detail, running as harmoniously as the different parts of a watch. Clerks, agents and employés who could save a few hundred dollars purchased Trust Certificates and thus became interested in the business and gains. If it is desirable to multiply the number who enjoy the profits of production, how can it be done better than through ownership of stock in industrial associations? The problem of co-operation and profit-sharing can be solved in this way. The Standard Trust was a real object-lesson in economics, which illustrated in the fullest measure the benefits of an association in business that affected consumers and producers of a great staple alike favorably.
Misrepresentation is as hard to eradicate as the Canada thistle or the English sparrow. Once fairly set going, it travels rapidly. “A lie will travel seven leagues while Truth is pulling on its boots.” The Standard is the target at which invidious terms and bitter invective have been hurled remorselessly, often through downright ignorance. Although reputable editors might be misled, in the hurry and strain of daily journalism, to give currency to deliberate falsehoods against corporations or capitalists, reasonable fairness might be expected from the author of a pretentious book. Henry D. Lloyd, of Chicago, last year published “Wealth Against Commonwealth,” an elaborate work, which is devoted mainly to an assault upon the Standard Oil-Company. The book, notable for its distortion of facts and suppression of all points in favor of the corporation it assails, caters to the worst elements of socialism. The author views everything through anti-combination glasses and, like the child with the bogie-man, sees the monopoly-spook in every successful aggregation of capital. He confounds the South-Improvement Company with the Standard and charges to the latter all the offenses supposed to lie at the door of the organization that died at its birth. One thrilling story is cited to show that the Standard robbed a poor widow. The narrative is well calculated to arouse public resentment and encourage a lynching-bee. It has been repeated times without number. Within the past month two Harrisburg ministers have referred to it as a startling evidence of the unscrupulous tyranny of the Standard millionaires. To make the case imposing Mr. Lloyd informs mankind that the husband of this widow had been “a prominent member of the Presbyterian church, president of a Young Men’s Christian Association and active in all religious and benevolent enterprises.” After his death she continued the business until she was finally coerced into selling it to the Trust at a ruinously low price—a mere fraction of its actual value. Mr. Lloyd states her hopeless despair as follows:
“Indignant with these thoughts and the massacred troop of hopes and ambitions that her brave heart had given birth to, she threw the letter—a letter she had received from the Standard regarding the sale of her property—into the fire, where it curled up into flames like those from which a Dives once begged for a drop of water. She never reappeared in the world of business, where she had found no chivalry to help a woman save her home, her husband’s life-work and her children.”
Is this harrowing statement true? The widow continued the business four years after her husband’s death. Competition increased, prices tumbled, the margin of profit was constantly narrowing, new appliances simplified refining-processes and the widow’s plant was no longer adapted to the business. She sold for sixty-thousand dollars, the Standard paying twice the sum for which a refinery better suited to the purpose could be constructed. Foolish friends afterwards told her she had sold too low and the widow wrote a severe letter to the president of the Standard. The company had bought the property to oblige her and at once offered it back. She declined to take it, or sixty-thousand dollars in Standard stock, evidently realizing that the refinery had lost its profit-earning capacity and that even the new management might not be able to make it pay. This will serve to illustrate the unfairness of “Wealth Against Commonwealth,” which has been widely quoted because of its presumed reliability and the high standing of the publishers. Yet this story of imaginary wrong has been worked into speeches, sermons and editorials of the fiercest type! In its treatment of the widow the Standard was truly magnanimous. Few business-men would consent to undo a transaction and have their labor for naught, simply because the other party had become dissatisfied. Possibly Mr. Lloyd would not be as generous if there was any profit in the transaction. If the Standard cut prices to ruin the widow and other competitors, would not oil have gone up again when they were disposed of? No such upward movement occurred. The widow disappeared. Many small refineries disappeared. Monopoly railroad-contracts, if such ever existed, have disappeared, but the price of refined-oil has been falling steadily for twenty years, declining from an average of nineteen cents a gallon in 1876 to five cents in 1895. The potent fact in this connection is that the Standard has continued to make profits with the declining price of oil. This conclusively demonstrates that the decline was due to economic improvements in the productive methods and not to a malicious cut to ruin a widow or anybody else, as Mr. Lloyd assumes. Otherwise a profit accompanying the fall in price would have been impossible and the Standard would have been sold out by the sheriff long years ago.
All the dealers in slander from Lloyd down to the chronic kicker who has attempted to make money by annoying the Standard have played the Rice case as a trump-card. According to their version, Mr. Rice was an angelic Vermonter, whose success inspired the Standard with devilish enmity and it determined to compass his ruin. Rice had operated at Pithole and at Macksburg and owned a small refinery at Marietta. It was alleged that the Cleveland & Marietta Railroad discriminated against him, doubling his freight-charge and giving the Standard a drawback on all the oil that went over the road. This was an iniquitous arrangement, entered into by the receiver of the road and cancelled by the Standard whenever a report of what was done reached New York. Mr. Rice had paid two-hundred-and-fifty dollars wrongfully, the money was at once refunded and Mr. Rice did not harass the company into buying his twenty-thousand dollar refinery for half a million. This will serve as an example of the dishonest misstatements that had wrought lots of good people up to white heat. The sins of the trusts may be very scarlet and very numerous, but economic literature should not pollute the sources of information and the foundations of public opinion.
An oft-repeated story is that the Standard owes its success to railway-discriminations. In proof of this the testimony of A. J. Cassatt is quoted. The testimony, published in a congressional investigation-report, shows that granting rebates was then the custom of railway-companies. Largely the same rebates were granted to all who shipped over the railways. Special to the Standard was payment of a joint freight-rate over pipe-line and railroad. A large rebate was given for one summer to all shippers by rail to equalize low rates by canal, of which many shippers took advantage. The only discriminatory rebate received by the Standard was ten per cent. for equalizing its large shipments over three trunk-lines, shipping exclusively by rail, even when water-rates were cheaper, furnishing terminal facilities and exempting the roads from loss by fire or accident. Courts in England and this country have very properly held that railways have the right to carry for less rates under such circumstances. Many wise men are of the same opinion. Subsequently it was developed that, while the short-lived agreement existed, the Standard’s strongest competitors were getting lower rates of freight than it was paying! Why do the Lloyd brand of critics ignore this pointed fact?
Another favorite story is that some officers of the Standard were convicted of burning a rival refinery. As all know who ever took the trouble to investigate, they were indicted for conspiracy to injure a rival. The counts in the indictment embraced the enticing away of an employé, the bringing of suits to prevent infringement of patents and the serious charge of inciting an employé to burn the works. When all the evidence on the part of the State was in, the court directed the discharge of every person connected with the Standard. There was not a scintilla of evidence against them. Two of the indicted persons were convicted of conspiracy, but they were not connected with the Standard, and never owned a share of Standard stock. The majority of the jurymen made affidavits that they found the convicted persons guilty only of enticing away an employé. The employé thus enticed had first been enticed from the works of the convicted parties and induced to reveal the secret processes by which a valuable lubricating-oil was manufactured. The best citizens of Rochester certified that the men convicted were men of unimpeachable honor, while the men who testified against them were quite the reverse. The whole affair was a wicked plot to blacken the character of men who stood and who still stand as high as any in Rochester. The court, satisfied of their innocence of any grave offence, inflicted merely a nominal fine.
Many of the attacks in a well-known work by a leading socialist against the Standard are made up of court-cases. The accusations are copied, the moving speeches of plaintiffs’ attorneys are printed; but all else is omitted, except that the case was decided in favor of the Standard. The inference is left to be drawn, or the charge is made openly, that the court was corrupt. Had the evidence of both sides been given, there would be no more room for such an inference than for a pretty maiden’s small brother in the parlor when her best young man is about to pop the momentous question. The rustic divine, weak in his spelling and strong in his opposition to the feminine style of coiling the hair in a huge knot, had better grounds for declaring the Scripture endorsed his view of the fashion. Reading the familiar passage, “let him that is on the housetop not come down to take anything out of his house,” he based his terrific sermon on this dismembered clause of the verse: “Top not, come down.”
One instance may be noted briefly. A Pennsylvania office-holder, whose unworthy motives an investigation exposed, charged that the Standard had defrauded the State of millions of taxes. The case was ably tried before an upright judge and the allegation found to be utterly baseless. Then the judge was charged with corruption. The case was taken to the highest court of the State, which affirmed the decision of the court below. At once the Supreme Court and the Attorney-General, who conducted the case for the State with signal ability, were accused of rank corruption. Perhaps the greatest surprise is that they were not charged with an attempt to get even with Moses by breaking all the commandments at one lick. An investigation committee, appointed by the Legislature, went fully into all the facts and allegations and reported that the case had been ably and fairly tried and correctly decided. It only remained to charge the legislative committee with corruption, which was done with great promptitude and emphasis. Yet every lawyer knows that the case of Pennsylvania against the Standard Oil-Company is a leading case on the subject of taxation of foreign corporations, establishing correct principles which, since its decision, the Supreme Court of the United States has affirmed.
In another case a respectable old man conceived the idea that he had solved the problem of continuous distillation of oil, an invention which would very much cheapen the product and be worth millions to refiners. The Standard aided him in his experiments until convinced they were unsuccessful. He became crazed on the subject and brought suit, alleging he had been prevented from demonstrating his discovery. The case was tried and the baseless suit dismissed, with as little injury to the poor man’s feelings as possible. This incident figures in histories written to fire the popular heart in the war against wealth, accompanied by pictures of a soulless corporation and an insane old man, calculated to draw hot tears and inflame public indignation to a dangerous pitch. Of course the readers are supposed to infer that the court was corrupted and justice grossly outraged. And so the changes are rung along the whole line; but the Standard, regardless of malevolent assaults and villainous distortions of facts, goes right on with its business of furnishing the world with the best light in the universe.
Russian competition, the extent and danger of which most people do not begin to appreciate, was met and overcome by sheer tenacity and superior generalship. The advantages of capable, courageous, intelligent concentration of the varied branches of a great industry were never manifested more strongly. Deprived of the invincible bulwark the Standard offered, the oil-producers of Pennsylvania, New York, West Virginia, Ohio and Indiana would have been utterly helpless. The Muscovite bear would have gobbled the trade of Europe and Asia, driving American oil from the foreign markets. Local consumption would not have exhausted two-thirds of the production, stocks of crude would have piled up and the price would have fallen proportionately. Instead of ranking with the busiest, happiest and most prosperous quarters of the universe, as they are to-day, the oil-regions of five states would have been irretrievably ruined, dragging down thousands of the brightest, manliest, cleverest fellows on God’s footstool! Instead of bringing a vast amount of gold from England, France and Germany for petroleum produced on American soil, refined by American workmen paid American wages and exported by an American company in American vessels, the trade would have been killed, the cash would have stayed across the waters and the country at large would have suffered incalculably! These are things to think of when some cheap agitator, with a private axe to grind, a mean spite to gratify or a selfish object to attain, raises a howl about monopoly and insists that the entire creation should “damn the Standard!”
When the history of this wonderful century is written it will tell how an American boy, born in New York sixty years ago, clerked in a country-store, kept a set of books, started a small oil-refinery at Cleveland and at forty was the head of the greatest business in the world. This is, in outline, the story of John D. Rockefeller’s successful career. Yesterday, as it were, a youth with nothing but integrity, industry and ambition for capital—a pretty good outfit, too—to-day he is one of the half-dozen richest men in Europe or America. Better than all else, integrity that is part and parcel of his moral nature, industry that finds life too fruitful to waste it idly and ambition to excel in good deeds as well as in business are his rich possession still. Gathering the largest fortune ever accumulated in twenty-five years has not blunted his fine sensibilities, dwarfed his intellectual growth, stifled his religious convictions or absorbed his whole being. Increasing wealth brought with it a deep sense of increasing responsibility and he is honored not so much for his millions as for the use he makes of them. Even in an age unrivalled for money-getting and money-giving, Mr. Rockefeller’s keen foresight, executive ability and wise liberality have been notably conspicuous. His faith in the future of petroleum and his desire to benefit humanity he has shown by his works. Believing in the power of united effort to develop an infant-industry, his genius devised the system of practical co-operation that developed into the Standard Oil-Trust, against which prejudice and ignorance have directed their fiercest fire. Believing in education, his magnificent endowment of Chicago University—eight to ten-million dollars—ranks him with the foremost contributors to the foundation of a seat of learning since schools and colleges began. Believing in fresh air for the masses, he donated Cleveland a public park and a million to equip it superbly. Believing in spiritual progress, he builds churches, helps weak congregations and aids in spreading the gospel everywhere. Believing in the claims of the poor, his charities amount to hundreds-of-thousands of dollars yearly, not to encourage pauperism and dependence, but to relieve genuine distress, diminish human suffering and put struggling men and women in the way to improve their condition. He has differed from nearly all other eminent public benefactors by giving freely, quietly and modestly during his active life, without seeking the popular applause his munificence could easily obtain.
Mr. Rockefeller is a strict Baptist, a regular attendant at church and prayer-meeting, a teacher in the Sunday-school and a staunch advocate of aggressive Christianity. His advancement to commanding wealth has not changed his ideas of duty and personal obligation. He realizes that the man who lives for himself alone is always little, no matter how big his bank-account. He and his family walk to service or ride in a street-car, with none of the trappings befitting the worship of Mammon rather than the glory of God. Earnest, positive and vigorous in his religion as in his business, he takes no stock in the dealer who has not stamina or the profession of faith that is too destitute of backbone to have a denominational preference. The president of the Standard Oil-Company impresses all who meet him with the idea of a forceful, decisive character. He looks people in the face, his eyes sparkle in conversation and he relishes a bright story or a clever narration. You feel that he can read you at a glance and that deception and evasion in his presence would be utterly futile. The flatterer and sycophant would make as little headway with him as the bunco-steerer or the green-goods vendor. His estimate of men is rarely at fault and to this quality some measure of the Standard’s success must be attributed. As if by instinct, its chief officer picked out men adapted to special lines of work—men who would not be misfits—and secured them for his company. The capacity and fidelity of the Standard corps are proverbial. Whenever Mr. Rockefeller wishes to enjoy a breathing-spell at his country-seat up the Hudson or on his Ohio farm, he leaves the business with perfect confidence, because his lieutenants are competent and trustworthy and the machine will run along smoothly under their watchful care. He has not accumulated his money by wrecking property, but by building up, by persistent improvement and by rigidly adhering to the policy of furnishing the best articles at the lowest price. Fair-minded people are beginning to understand something of the service rendered the public by the man who stands at the head of the petroleum-industry and more than any other is the founder of its commerce. He has invested in factories, railroads and mines, giving thousands employment, developing the resources of the country and adding to the wealth of the nation. He is human, therefore he sometimes errs; he is fallible, therefore he makes mistakes, but the world is learning that John D. Rockefeller has no superior in business and that the Standard Oil-Company is not an organized conspiracy to plunder producers or consumers of petroleum. It is time to dismiss the idea that ability to build up and maintain a large business is discreditable, that marvellous success is blameworthy and that business-achievements imply dishonesty.
William Rockefeller, who resembles his brother in business skill, is a leader in Standard affairs and has his office in the Broadway building. He was a member of the first Board of Trustees and bore a prominent part in organizing and developing the Oil-Trust. He is largely interested in railroads, belongs to the best clubs, likes good horses and contributes liberally to worthy objects. The Standard folks don’t lock up their money, loan it on mortgages at extravagant rates, spend it in Europe or try to get a gold squeeze on the government. They employ it in manufactures, in railways, in commerce and in enterprises that promote the general welfare.
From the days of the little refinery in Cleveland, the germ of the Standard, Henry M. Flagler and John D. Rockefeller have been closely associated in oil. Samuel Andrews, a practical refiner and for some time their partner, retired from the firm with a million dollars as his share of the business. The organization of the Standard Oil-Company of Cleveland was the first step towards the greater Standard Oil-Company of which all the world knows something. Its growth surprised even the projectors of the combination, who “builded better than they knew.” Mr. Flagler devotes his time largely to beneficent uses of his great wealth. He recognizes the duty of the possessor of property to keep it from waste, to render it productive and to increase it by proper methods. A vast tract of Florida swamp, yielding only malaria and shakes, he has converted into a region suited to human-beings, producing cotton, sugar and tropical fruits and affording comfortable subsistence to thousands of provident settlers. He has transformed St. Augustine from a faded antiquity into a modern town, with the magnificent Ponce de Leon Hotel, paved streets, elegant churches, public halls, and all conveniences, provided by this generous benefactor at a cost of many millions. He has constructed new railroads, improved lines built previously, opened interior counties to thrifty emigrants and performed a work of incalculable advantage to the New South. He and his family attend the West Presbyterian Church, of which the Rev. John R. Paxton, formerly of Harrisburg, was pastor until 1894. Mr. Flagler is of average height, slight build and erect figure. His hair is white, but time has not dealt harshly with the liberal citizen whose career presents so much to praise and emulate.
John D. Archbold, vice-president of the Standard Oil-Company and its youngest trustee during the entire existence of the Oil-Trust, has been actively connected with petroleum from his youth. No man is better known and better liked personally in the oil-regions. From his father, a zealous Methodist minister, and his good mother, one of the noble women to whom this country owes an infinite debt of gratitude, he inherited the qualities of head and heart that achieved success and gained multitudes of friends. A mere lad when the reports of golden opportunities attracted him from Ohio to the land of petroleum, he first engaged as a shipping-clerk for a Titusville refinery. His promptness, accuracy, and pleasant address won him favor and promotion. He soon learned the whole art of refining and his active mind discovered remedies for a number of defects. Adnah Neyhart induced him to take charge of his warehouse in New York City for the sale of refined-oil. His energy and rare tact increased the trade of the establishment steadily. Mr. Rockefeller met the bright young man and offered him a responsible position with the Standard. He was made president of the Acme Refining Company, then among the largest in the United States. He improved the quality of its products and was entrusted with the negotiations that brought many refiners into the combination. He had resided at Titusville, where he married the daughter of Major Mills, and was the principal representative of the Standard in the producing section. When the Trust was organized he removed to New York and supervised especially the refining-interest of the united corporations. His splendid executive talent, keen perception, tireless energy and honorable manliness were simply invaluable. Mr. Archbold is popular in society, has an ideal home, represents the Standard in the directory of different companies and merits the high esteem ungrudingly bestowed by his associates in business and his acquaintances everywhere.
The personal traits and business-successes of Charles Pratt, an original member of the Standard Trust, were typical of American civilization. The son of poor parents in Massachusetts, where he was born in 1830, necessity compelled him to leave home at the early age of ten and seek work on a farm. He toiled three years for his board and a short term at school each winter. For his board and clothes he next worked in a Boston grocery. His first dollar in money, of which he always spoke with pride as having been made at the work-bench, he earned while learning the machinist-trade at Newton, in his native state. With the savings of his first year in the machine-shop he entered an academy, studying diligently twelve months and subsisting on a dollar a week. Then he entered a Boston paints-and-oil store, devoting his leisure hours to study and self-improvement. Coming to New York in 1851, he clerked in Appleton’s publishing-house and later in a paint-store. In 1854 he joined C. T. Reynolds and F. W. Devoe in a paints-and-oil establishment. Petroleum refining became important and the partners separated in 1867, Reynolds controlling the paints-department and Charles Pratt & Co. conducting the oil-branch of the business. The success of the latter firm as oil-refiners was extraordinary. Astral-oil was in demand everywhere. The works at Brooklyn, continuous and surprising as was their expansion, found it difficult to keep pace with the consumption. The firm entered into the association with the Cleveland, Pittsburg and Philadelphia companies that culminated in the Standard Oil-Trust, Mr. Pratt holding the relation of president of the Charles-Pratt Manufacturing Company. He lived in Brooklyn and died suddenly at sixty-three, an attack of heart-disease that prostrated him in his New-York office proving fatal in three hours. For thirty years he devoted much of his time to the philanthropies with which his name will be perpetually identified. He built and equipped Pratt Institute, a school of manual arts, at a cost of two-million dollars. He spent a half-million to erect the Astral Apartment Buildings, the revenue of which is secured to the Institute as part of its endowment. He devoted a half-million to the Adelphia Academy and a quarter-million towards the new edifice of Emanuel Baptist Church, of which he was a devout, generous member. His home-life was marked by gentleness and affection and he left his family an estate of fifteen to twenty-millions. Charles Pratt was a man of few words, alert, positive and unassuming, sometimes blunt in business, but always courteous, trustworthy and deservedly esteemed for liberality and energy.
Jabez A. Bostwick, a member of the Standard Trust from its inception, was born in New York State, spent his babyhood in Ohio, whither the family moved when he was ten years old, and died at sixty-two. His business-education began as clerk in a bank at Covington, Ky. There he first came into public notice as a cotton-broker, removing to New York in 1864 to conduct the same business on a larger scale. He secured interests in territory and oil-wells at Franklin in 1860, organized the firm of J. A. Bostwick & Co. and engaged extensively in refining. The firm prospered, bought immense quantities of crude and increased its refining capacity extensively. Mr. Bostwick was active in forming the Standard Oil-Trust and was its first treasurer. He severed his connection with his oil-partner, W. H. Tilford, who also entered the Standard Oil-Company. Seven years before his death he retired from the oil-business to accept the presidency of the New York & New England Railroad. He held the position six years and was succeeded by Austin Corbin. Injuries during a fire at his country-seat in Mamaroneck caused his death. The fire started in Frederick A. Constable’s stables, in rear of Mr. Bostwick’s. Unknown to his coachman, who was pushing behind it, Mr. Bostwick seized the whiffletrees of a carriage. Suddenly the vehicle swerved and the owner was violently jammed against the side of the stable. The coachman saw his peril and pulled the carriage back. Mr. Bostwick reeled forward, his face white with pain and sank moaning upon a buckboard. “Don’t leave me, Mr. Williams,” he whispered to his son’s tutor, “I fear I am badly hurt.” The sufferer was carried to the house, became unconscious and died in ten minutes, surrounded by members of his household and his neighbors. In 1866 Mr. Bostwick married a daughter of Ford Smith, a retired Cincinnati merchant, who removed to New York during the war. They had a son and two daughters. The daughters married and were in Europe when their father met his tragic fate. The widow and children inherited an estate of twelve millions. Mr. Bostwick was liberal with his wealth, giving largely without ostentation. Forrest College, in North Carolina, and the Fifth Avenue Baptist Church of New York were special recipients of his bounty, while his private benefactions amounted to many thousands yearly. He was strict almost to sternness in his dealings, preferring justice to sentiment in business.
These were the six trustees of the Standard Oil-Trust as first constituted of whom the world has heard and read most. Many of the two-thousand stock-holders of the Standard Oil-Company are widely known. Benjamin Brewster, president of the National-Transit Company, retired with an ample fortune. His successor, H. H. Rogers, the present head of the pipe-line system, is noted alike for business-sagacity and sensible benefactions. The great structure at No. 26 Broadway, the largest office-building in New York occupied by one concern, is the Standard headquarters. Each floor has one or more departments, managed by competent men and all under supervision of the company’s chief officials. From the basement, with its massive vaults and steam-heating plant, to the roof every inch is utilized by hundreds of book-keepers, accountants, stenographers, telegraphers, clerks and heads of divisions. Everything moves with the utmost precision and smoothness. President Rockefeller has his private offices on the eighth floor, next the spacious room in which the Executive Committee meets every day at noon for consultation. Mr. Flagler, Mr. Archbold and Mr. Rogers are located conveniently. The substantial character of the building and the business-like aspect of the departments impress visitors most favorably. There is an utter absence of gingerbread and cheap ornamentation, of confusion and perplexing hurry. The very air, the clicking of the telegraph-instruments, the noiseless motion of the elevators and the prompt dispatch of business indicate solidity, intelligence and perfect system. From that building the movements of a force of employés, numbering twice the United States army and scattered over both hemispheres, are directed. The sails of the Standard fleet whiten every sea, its products are marketed wherever men have learned the value of artificial light and its name is a universal synonym for the highest development of commercial enterprise in any age or country.
Business-men recall with a shudder the frightful stringency in 1893. All over the land industries drooped and withered and died. Raw material, even wool itself, had no market. Commerce languished, wages dwindled, railroads collapsed, factories suspended, and myriads of workmen lost their jobs. Merchants cut down expenses to the lowest notch, loans were called in at a terrible sacrifice, debts were compromised at ten to fifty cents on the dollar, the present was dark and the future gloomy. The balance of trade was heavily against the United States. Government securities tumbled and a steady drain of gold to Europe set in. The efforts of Congress, the Treasury Department and syndicates of bankers to stem the tide of disaster were on a par with Mrs. Partington’s attempt to sweep back the ocean with a sixpenny-broom. Amid the general demoralization, when the nation seemed hastening to positive ruin, one splendid enterprise alone extended its business, multiplied its resources and was largely instrumental in restoring public confidence.
The Standard Oil-Company, unrivalled in its equipment of brains and skill and capital, not merely breasted the storm successfully, but did more than all other agencies combined to avert widespread bankruptcy. Through the sagacity and foresight of this great corporation crude oil advanced fifty per cent., thereby doubling and trebling the prosperity of the producing sections, without a corresponding rise in refined. By this wise policy, which only men of nerve and genius could have carried out, home consumers were not taxed to benefit the oil-regions and the exports of petroleum-products swelled enormously. As the result, while the American demand increased constantly, millions upon millions of dollars flowed in from abroad, materially diminishing the European drainage of the yellow metal from this side of the Atlantic. The salutary, far-reaching effects of such management, by reviving faith and stimulating the flagging energies of the country, exerted an influence upon the common welfare words and figures cannot estimate. Petroleum preserved the thread of golden traffic with foreign nations.
Hon. Samuel C.T. Dodd, one of the ablest lawyers Pennsylvania has produced, is general solicitor of the Standard and resides in New York. His father, the venerable Levi Dodd, established the first Sunday-school and was president of the second company that bored for oil at Franklin, the birthplace of his son in 1836. Young Samuel learned printing, graduated from Jefferson College in 1857, studied law with James K. Kerr and was admitted to the Venango Bar in August of 1859. His brilliant talents, conscientious application and legal acquirements quickly won him a leading place among the successful jurists of the state. During a practice of nearly twenty-two years in the courts of the district and commonwealth he stood in the front rank of his profession. He served with credit in the Constitutional Convention of 1873, framing some of its most important provisions. He traveled abroad and wrote descriptions of foreign lands so charming they might have come from Washington Irving and N. P. Willis. His selection by the Standard Oil-Trust in 1881 as its general solicitor was a marked recognition of his superior abilities. The position, one of the most prominent and responsible to which a lawyer can attain, demanded exceptional qualifications. How capably it has been filled the records of all legal matters concerning the Standard abundantly demonstrate. Mr. Dodd’s profound knowledge of corporation-law, eminent sense of justice, forensic skill, rare tact and clear brain have steered the great company safely and honorably through many suits involving grave questions of right and millions of money. The papers he prepared organizing the Standard Trust have been the models for all such documents since they left his desk. Terse logic, sound reasoning, pointed analysis and apposite expression distinguish his legal opinions and arguments, combining the vigor of a Damascus blade with the beauty of an epic. He is a delightful conversationalist, sincere friend and prudent counsellor, kindly, affable and thoroughly upright. His home, brightened by a loving wife and devoted family, is singularly happy. Amid the cares and anxieties incident to professional life he has cultivated his fine literary-taste, writing magazine-articles and wooing the muses at intervals of leisure only too far apart. He has the honor of writing the first poem on petroleum that ever appeared in print. It was a rich parody on Byron’s “Isles of Greece” and was published in the spring of 1860, as follows:
The land of Grease! the land of Grease! Where burning Oil is loved and sung; Where flourish arts of sale and lease, Where Rouseville rose and Tarville sprung; Eternal summer gilds them not, But oil-wells render dear each spot.
The ceaseless tap, tap of the tools, The engine’s puff, the pump’s dull squeak, The horsemen splashing through the pools Of greasy mud along the Creek, Are sounds which cannot be suppress’d In these dear Ile-lands of the Bless’d.
Deep in the vale of Cherry Run The Humboldt Works I went to see, And sitting there an oil-cask on I found that Grease was not yet free; For busily a dirty carl Was branding “bonded” on each barrel.
I sat upon the rocky brow Which o’erlooks Franklin—far-famed town; A hundred derricks stood below And many a well of great renown; I counted them at break of day, And when the sun set where were they?
They were still there. But where art thou, My dry-hole? On the river-shore The engine stands all idle now, The heavy auger beats no more; And must a well of so great cost Be given up and wholly lost?
’Tis awful when you bore a well Down in the earth six-hundred feet, To find that not a single smell Comes up your anxious nose to greet; For what is left the bored one here? For Grease a wish; for Grease a tear!
Must I but wish for wells more bless’d? Must I but weep? No, I must toil! Earth, render back from out thy breast A remnant of thy odorous oil! If not three-hundred, grant but three Precious barrels a day to me.
What! silent still? and silent all? Ah no! the rushing of the gas Sounds like a distant torrent’s fall And answers, bore ahead, you ass, A few feet more; you miss the stuff Because you don’t go deep enough!
In vain! in vain! Pull up the tools! Fill high the cup with lager-beer! Leave oil-wells to the crazy fools Who from the East are flocking here. See at the first sight of the can How hurries each red-shirted man!
Fill high the cup with lager-beer! The maidens in their promenade Towards my lease their footsteps steer To see if yet my fortune’s made; But sneers their pretty faces spoil To find I have not yet struck oil.
Place me in Oil Creek’s rocky dell, Though mud be deep and prices high; There let me bore another well And find petroleum or die. No more I’ll work this dry-hole here; Dash down that cup of lager-beer.
One of those few and rare occasions upon which John D. Rockefeller is prevailed upon to address an audience was last March in New York, at a social gathering of the Young Men’s Bible Class of the Fifth-Avenue Baptist-Church. Much that he said was extremely interesting. In laying down many excellent precepts he brought forth several lessons from the experiences of his early life. By references to his first ledger, as he called it, which was nothing more than a small paper-covered memorandum-book, he explained how he managed to save money even on a small salary. The little book contained the first items of his receipts and expenditures when he first began to earn money. To judge from the care with which he handled this reminder of his early struggles, Mr. Rockefeller was in earnest when he intimated that it would require a fortune to purchase it. His address, purely informal and conversational, was warmly applauded by his hearers and commended by the press. Its practical wisdom and the light it throws upon the early life of a most successful man entitle it to careful preservation. Mr. Rockefeller said, as reported by the New-York Tribune:
Let me say that it gives me a great deal of pleasure to be here to-night. Although I cannot make you a speech, I have brought with me to show you young men a little book—a book, I think, which may interest you. It is the first ledger I kept. I was trained in business affairs and how to keep a ledger. The practice of keeping a little personal ledger by young men just starting in business and earning money and requiring to learn its value is, I think, a good one. In the first struggle to get a footing—and if you feel as I did I am sorry for you, although I would not be without the memory of that struggle—I kept my accounts in this book, also some memoranda of little incidents that seemed to me important. In after-years I found that book and brought it to New York. It is more than forty-two years since I wrote what it contains. I call it Ledger A, and now I place the greatest value upon it. I have thought that it would be a little help to some of you young men to read one or two extracts from this ledger. [Mr. Rockefeller then produced from his pocket, carefully enveloped in paper-wrapping, the ledger to which he referred, and continued his remarks]:
When I found this book recently I thought it had no cover, because it had writing upon its back. I had utilized the cover to write upon. In those days I was economical, even with paper. When I read it through it brought to my mind remembrances of the care with which I used to record my little items of receipts and disbursements, matters which many of you young men are rather careless over. I believe it is a religious duty to get all the money you can fairly and honestly; to keep all you can and to give away all you can. I think that is a problem that you are all familiar with. I have told you before what pleasure this little book gives me. I dare not let you read it through, because my children, who have read it, say that I did not spell tooth-brush correctly. [Laughter.] But you know we have made great progress in our spelling and I suppose some changes have taken place since those days. [Renewed laughter.] I have not seen this book for twenty-five years. It does not look like a modern ledger, does it? But you could not get that book from me for all the modern ledgers in New York, nor for all that they would bring. It almost brings tears to my eyes when I read over this little book, and it fills me with a sense of gratitude that I cannot express. It shows largely what I received and what I paid out during my first years of business. It shows that from September twenty-sixth, 1855, until January first, 1856, I received $50. Out of that I paid my washerwoman and the lady I boarded with, and saved a little money to put away. I am not ashamed to read it over to you.
Among other things I find that I gave a cent to the Sunday-school every Sunday. That is not a very large sum, is it? But that was all the money I had to give for that particular object. I was also giving to several other religious objects. What I could afford to give I gave regularly, as I was taught to do, and it has been a pleasure to me all my life to do so.
I had a large increase in my revenue the next year. It went up to $25 a month. I began to be a capitalist and, had I regarded myself then as we regard capitalists now, I ought to have felt like a criminal because I had so much money. But we had no trusts or monopolies then. [Laughter.] I paid my own bills and always had a little something to give away, and the happiness of saving some. In fact, I am not so independent now as I was then. It is true I could not secure the most fashionable cut of clothing. I remember I bought mine then of a Jew. [Laughter.] He sold me clothing cheap, clothing such as I could pay for, and it was a great deal better than buying clothing that I could not pay for. I did not make any obligations I could not meet. I lived within my means, and my advice to you young men is to do just the same.
Dr. Faunce has just told you that all young men who come to this church are welcome and are never asked to whom they belong or where they came from. But there is just one question I would like to ask. I would like to know how many of you come from the city and how many come from the country. (Mr. Rockerfeller asked, as a personal favor, if all those present in the room who came from the country would raise their right hand. Fully three-quarters of the number did so.) Now, what a story that tells!
To my mind there is something unfortunate in being born in a city. You have not had the struggles in the city that we have had who were reared in the country. Don’t you notice how the men from the country keep crowding you out here—you who have wealthy fathers? These young men from the country are turning things around and are taking your city. We men from the country are willing to do more work. We were prepared by our experience to do hard work. I remember a little time ago I was in the country and saw a carpenter placing mineral-wool under the roof of a city servant’s bedroom, so that the man should not feel the heat of the summer or hear the patter of the rain-drops on the roof. I could not at the time help recalling the experience of my boyhood, when I slept under a roof. While I could not see the shingles, I remember I could peep through the cracks in them. It was pretty hot in the summer up there, too, I can tell you. But I think I was better for all that sort of experience, for having been reared in the country in that sturdy, practical way, and my heart is sometimes full of sadness as I contemplate the condition of the number of young fellows in this city whom I happen to know well.
They are in the embarrassing position that their fathers have great sums of money, and those boys have not a ghost of a chance to compete with you who come from the country and who want to do something in the world. You are in training now to shortly take the places of those young men. I suppose you cannot realize how many eyes are upon you and how great is the increasing interest that is taken in you. You may not think that, when you are lonely and find it difficult to get a footing. But it is true that, in a place like this, true interest is taken in you. When I left the school-house I came into a place similar to this, where I associated with people whom it was good to know. Nothing better could have happened to me.
I spoke just now of the struggle for success. What is success? Is it money? Some of you have all the money you need to provide for your wants. Who is the poorest man in the world? I tell you, the poorest man I know of is the man who has nothing but money—nothing else in the world upon which to devote his ambition and thought. That is the sort of man I consider to be the poorest in the world. Money is good if you know how to use it.
Now, let me leave this little word of counsel for you. Keep a little ledger, as I did. Write down in it what you receive, and do not be ashamed to write down what you pay away. See that you pay it away in such a manner that your father or mother may look over your book and see just what you did with your money. It will help you to save money, and that you ought to do. When I spoke of a poor man with money I spoke against the poverty of that man who has no affection for anything else, or thought for anything else but money. That kind of a man does not help his own character, nor does he build up the character of another.
Before I leave you I will read a few items from my ledger. I find in looking over it that I was saving money all this time, and in the course of a few years I had saved $1,000. Now, as to some of my expenses. I see that from November twenty-fourth, 1855, to April, 1856, I paid for clothing $9.09. I see also, here, another item which I am inclined to think is extravagant, because I remember I used to wear mittens. The item is a pair of fur-gloves, for which I paid $2.50. In the same period, I find I gave away $5.58. In one month I gave to foreign-missions ten cents; to the mite-society thirty cents, and there is also a contribution to the Five-Points Mission. I was not living then in New York, but I suppose I felt that it was in need of help, so I sent up twelve cents to the mission. Then to the venerable teacher of my class I gave thirty-five cents to make him a present. To the poor people of the church I gave ten cents at this time. In January and February following I gave ten cents more and a further ten cents to the foreign-missions. Those contributions, small as they were, brought me into direct contact with philanthropic work, and with the beneficial work and aims of religious institutions, and I have been helped thereby greatly all my life. It is a mistake for a man who wishes for happiness and to help others to wait until he has a fortune before giving to deserving objects. [Great applause.]
And this exemplary citizen, who in his youth and poverty formed the habit of systematic benevolence, who befriends the poor, who dispenses charity with a bountiful hand, who helps young men better their condition, who gives millions for education and religion, who believes in the justice of God and the rights of man, who has woven the raveled skeins of a weakened industry into the world’s grandest business-enterprise, assassins of character picture as a cold-blooded oppressor, a base conspirator, a “devourer of widows’ houses,” an abettor of larceny and instigator of arson! “Oh, Shame! where is thy blush?”
Although the Standard pays the highest wages in the world and has never had a serious strike in its grand army of forty-thousand men, not one cent of a reduction was ordered during the panic. No works stopped and no employés were turned adrift to beg or starve. On the contrary, improvements and additions were made continually, the force of workmen was augmented, cash was paid for everything bought, no claims remained unsettled and nobody had to wait an hour for money justly due. These are points for the toiling masses, whom prejudice against big corporations sometimes misleads, to understand and consider before accepting the creed that wealth and dishonor are synonymous, that each is the creature of the other and both are twin-links of the same sausage.
A WELL-SHOOTER.
The Oil-City Blizzard, itself as lively as a glycerine-explosion, in a spasm of dynamite-enthusiasm loaded up and fired off this eccentricity:
Pat Magnew was a shooter bold, Who handled glycerine; And though he had no printing-shop He ran a magazine.
And while he had a level head, And business plenty found, ’Most ev’ry job he undertook He ran into the ground.
He never claimed expert to be, But what he did was right, And when he shot a well, you see, He did it “out of sight.”
He seemed to like his daily toil, Its dangers did not fear; He’d help his patrons to find oil, And then he’d disappear.
Sometimes he shot wells with a squib, When at the proper level; Sometimes when he had been to church, He shot with a go-devil.
He always had a great tin-shell Beside him on the seat, Had horses good and drove like—well, No moss grew on their feet.
And when he drove along the road, And that was every day, Wise people all, who knew his load, Gave him the right of way.
His wife once said: “I greatly fear That you will yet be blown To atoms, if you don’t, my dear, Let well enough alone.”
“Some day there’ll be a thunder-sound; And scattered far and near, O’er hill and dale and all around, Will be my husband dear.”
Replied Magnew: “I call to mind— His words are nowise sickly— That Billy Shakespeare once remarked: ‘’Twere well it were done quickly.’
“And I’ll be blown,” continued Pat, “If I didn’t want it known, That I’d rather be by dynamite Than by a woman blown.”
THE OLD YEAR DONE IN OIL.
Old Year! transported by fast freight, With neither drawback nor rebate, How odd it seems to quote thee “late!”
Old Year! since thou wert struck, alas! What surface shows have men let pass— They promised oil and yielded gas!
Old Year! test-wells of crude that smelt, But had no sand like snows would melt. Few always drill straight on the belt!
Old Year! thy option has expired, Certificates have been retired And royalty in full required.
Old Year! thy territory’s played, Pipage and storage-charges paid, Tanks emptied and delivery made.
Old Year! a twelvemonth pump’d thee dry, Now tools and cable are laid by, Engine and derrick idle lie.
Old Year! developments are o’er, The paraffine has clogg’d each pore And thou shalt operate no more.
Old Year! lease out and rig in dust, Time on thy boiler, left to rust, Writes the producer’s motto: “Bu’st!”
And when it comes our turn to be Immediate shipment o’er life’s sea, Old Year! we’ll put a call for thee!
THE CANINE’S DOOM.
When the Oil-City Derrick had its circus with the Allegheny-Valley Railroad it fell to my lot to write up most of the incidents of the conflict. Occasionally a bit of doggerel like this hit the popular fancy:
Moses had a great big dog, His hair was black as jet, And everywhere that Moses went That pup was sure to get.
One day, upon the Valley Road When Moses went to ride, The faithful canine follow’d close And sat down by his side.
But when the train to Scrubgrass got The daily wreck occurr’d, The cars cavorted down the bank Without one warning word.
Sad was that hapless puppy’s fate— So mangled, burn’d and drown’d, Not a bologna could be made From all the fragments found!