[Illustration: _ALL IN THE DAY’S WORK_]
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ALL IN THE DAY’S WORK
An Autobiography
BY IDA M. TARBELL
[Illustration]
NEW YORK
_The Macmillan Company_
1939
_Copyright, 1939, by_
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
All rights reserved—no part of this book may be
reproduced in any form without permission in
writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer
who wishes to quote brief passages in connection
with a review written for inclusion in magazine
or newspaper.
FIRST PRINTING.
PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
AMERICAN BOOK—STRATFORD PRESS, INC., NEW YORK
TO
SARAH A. TARBELL
My Sister and My Loyal Friend
------------------------------------------------------------------------
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
1. MY START IN LIFE 1
2. I DECIDE TO BE A BIOLOGIST 19
3. A COEDUCATIONAL COLLEGE OF THE EIGHTIES 37
4. A START AND A RETREAT 49
5. A FRESH START—A SECOND RETREAT 64
6. I FALL IN LOVE 89
7. A FIRST BOOK—ON NOTHING CERTAIN A YEAR 124
8. THE NAPOLEON MOVEMENT OF THE NINETIES 147
9. GOOD-BYE TO FRANCE 161
10. REDISCOVERING MY COUNTRY 179
11. A CAPTAIN OF INDUSTRY SEEKS MY ACQUAINTANCE 202
12. MUCKRAKER OR HISTORIAN? 231
13. OFF WITH THE OLD—ON WITH THE NEW 254
14. THE GOLDEN RULE IN INDUSTRY 280
15. A NEW PROFESSION 301
16. WOMEN AND WAR 319
17. AFTER THE ARMISTICE 336
18. GAMBLING WITH SECURITY 359
19. LOOKING OVER THE COUNTRY 385
20. NOTHING NEW UNDER THE SUN 398
INDEX 409
ILLUSTRATIONS
AT SEVENTY _Frontispiece_
PAGE
EARLIEST PORTRAIT 2
OFFICE STAFF OF _THE CHAUTAUQUAN_, 1888 76
AT _McCLURE’S_, 1898 156
AT THE _AMERICAN_, 1907 258
IN A CONNECTICUT GARDEN, 1914 266
AT RED CROSS HEADQUARTERS, PARIS, 1919 338
POSING AS A GARDENER, 1925 360
ALL IN THE DAY’S WORK
1
MY START IN LIFE
If it had not been for the Panic of 1857 and the long depression which
followed it I should have been born in Taylor County, Iowa. That was
what my father and mother had planned. In fact, however, I was born in a
log house in Erie County, Pennsylvania, on November 5, 1857. It was the
home of my pioneering maternal grandfather Walter Raleigh McCullough. No
home in which I have ever lived has left me with pleasanter memories of
itself. It was a Cape Cod house, a story and a half high, built of
matched hewn logs, its floors of narrow fitted oak planks, its walls
ceiled, its “upstairs” finished, a big fireplace in its living room.
There were spreading frame outbuildings to accommodate the multiple
activities of a farm which was in my time a going concern. I remember
best the big cool milk room with its dozens of filled pans on the racks,
its huge wooden bowl heaped with yellow butter on its way to the firkin,
its baskets piled with eggs, its plump dressed poultry ready for market.
Like all young married people of pioneer ancestry and experience having
their way to make, my parents wanted land. Land of their own, combined
with what my father could earn at his profession as a teacher and his
trade as a joiner, meant future security. It was the proved way of the
early American.
After much looking about in northwestern Pennsylvania where the families
of both were settled, they had decided that the West offered greater
opportunity and so in the spring of 1857, a year after his marriage, my
father, Franklin Sumner Tarbell by name, started out to find a farm. He
had but little money in his pocket, and the last one hundred fifty miles
of his search were made on foot. How enthusiastic he was over the claim
he at last secured! His letters tell of the splendid dome of sky which
covered it, of the far view over the prairie, of marvelous flowers and
birds, of the daily passing along the horizon of a stream of covered
wagons, settlers bound for California, Pikes Peak, Kansas, Nebraska; and
some of them, he found, were earlier Iowa settlers, leaving the very
state which for the moment seemed to him the gate to Paradise.
He set himself gaily at breaking land, building the house for mother,
working in a sawmill to pay for the lumber. He did it alone, even to the
making of window frames and doors. I know how he did it—whistling from
morning till night, mischief and tenderness chasing each other across
his blue eyes as he thought of my mother’s coming, their future
together.
The plan they had made provided for her going west with their household
goods in August. The money was arranged for, so they thought; but before
it was taken from the bank the panic came, and every county bank in
Pennsylvania was closed. There was no money anywhere, nothing for my
mother to do but stay where she was while my father struggled to earn by
teaching and carpenter work the money which would bring us on. But the
panic reached Iowa, dried up its money supply. People were living by
barter, my father reported. What a heartbreaking waiting it was for
them, coming as it did after an engagement of six years every week of
which they had both found long!
The fall and winter of 1857, the spring and summer of 1858 passed. Still
there was no money to be had, and then in the fall of 1858 father
started out to _teach_ his way to us. Before he found a school he had
walked one hundred and eighty miles—walked until his shoes and clothes
were worn and tattered. It was “shabby and broke,” as he had written it
would be, that he finally in the spring of 1859, when I was a year and a
half old, made his way back to my mother still living in the log house
in Erie County.
According to the family annals I deeply resented the intimacy between
the strange man and my mother, so far my exclusive possession. Flinging
my arms about my mother, so the story went, I cried, “Go away, bad man.”
[Illustration:
_Esther Ann McCullough Tarbell and Ida Minerva Tarbell, November 5,
1858_
]
The problem for my father now was to earn money to take us back to Iowa,
for my mother to continue her patient waiting. For a dozen years before
her marriage she had taught in district schools in Erie County, as well
as in a private school of an aunt in Poughkeepsie, New York. She was a
good teacher, but she was married! She must stay with her family then
until her husband had a home ready for her; so ruled my grandmother,
chock-full as she was of the best and severest New England rules for
training girls to be ladies. You might live in a log house. You were
reminded loftily that many of the “best families” had done that while
“settling the country,” but you must “never forget who you are!”
“Remember that your father is a McCullough of an ancient and honored
Scotch clan, his mother a Raleigh of Sir Walter’s family, that I am a
Seabury, my great-uncle the first Episcopal Bishop in the United States,
my mother a Welles, her father on Washington’s staff.” It was a litany
her four daughters all had to learn!
Exciting employment waited my father. For six or seven years before his
marriage, when he was earning his way through the Academy of Jamestown,
New York, he spent his summers running a fleet of three or more
flatboats of merchandise to be delivered at trading points on the
Allegheny and the Ohio River—always as far south as Louisville,
sometimes even up the Mississippi. “Captain Tarbell,” his small and
jolly crew called him. The River was the chief highway of a great
country. To its waters came the pioneer and trader, the teacher, the
preacher, the scientist, the prophet, as well as every species of
gambler, charlatan, speculator, swindler, cutthroat. My father’s stories
of what he saw were among the joys of my childhood: a great fleet of
steamboats burning at Pittsburgh, a hanging, river churches and
preachers and show boats, children who never knew other homes than a
boat, towns, cities, and what he loved best of all—nights floating
quietly down the great Ohio, the moon above. Not strange that after
those cruel months of working his way back to us he should have seized
this opportunity again to take charge of his Jamestown friend’s river
enterprise.
The trip went well, and at the end of August, 1859, he turned back,
money in his pocket to take us to Iowa. But as he journeyed eastward he
was met everywhere by excitement. A man had drilled a well near a lumber
settlement in northwestern Pennsylvania—Titusville it was called—drilled
for oil and found it, quantities of it. My father, like most men who
traveled up and down the Allegheny and Ohio in those days, was familiar
with crude petroleum. He had used it to grease creaking machinery and,
too, as a medicine, a general cure-all, Seneca oil; used it for the
colds, the fever and ague, the weak lungs which had afflicted him from
boyhood. He knew, too, that there were those who believed that if rock
oil, as it was called, could be found in sufficient quantities it would
make a better light than the coal and whale oils then in common use. The
well near Titusville producing twenty-five to one hundred barrels a
day—nobody knew how much—proved that if other reservoirs or veins could
be opened by such drilling there would be oil to light the world.
Rumors were exciting and grew in the telling. The nearer he came to Erie
County, the bigger the well. He met men on foot and horseback making
their way in. Something to look into before he started back to Iowa. He
looked into it, not merely at Titusville with its first well, but down
the stream on which the first well stood and where other wells were
already drilling. Oil Creek, it was called. What if they continued to
get oil? my father asked himself. Where would they put it? They would
need tanks, tanks in numbers. He believed he could build one that would
hold five hundred or more barrels. He said as much to the owner of a
well drilling down the creek near the mouth of a tributary called Cherry
Run. “Show me a model that won’t leak, and I’ll give you an order.” He
lost no time in making his model and got his order.
Here was a chance for a business if oil continued to be found, a
business with more money in it than he had ever dreamed of making.
Moreover, he knew all the elements of that business, had had experience
in handling them. Tank building called for his trade, that of the
joiner. Iowa could wait.
By the summer of 1860 he had his shop going at the mouth of Cherry Run
near the well for which he had received his first order. The shop
running, he built what was to be my mother’s first home of her own, the
one for which with infinite confidence and infinite pain she had been
waiting since her marriage four years and a half before.
It was in October of 1860 that my father drove his little family over
the Allegheny foothills some forty miles. There were two of us children
now, for in July of 1860 my brother William Walter Tarbell, named from
his two grandfathers, had been born. Close beside his shop father had
built a shanty. It had a living room with an alcove, a family bedroom
with trundle beds for us children, and a kitchen. A covered passage led
into the shop, which was soon to be the joy of my life for here were
great piles of long odorous curly pine shavings into which to roll, to
take naps, to trim my gown, and in which to search day in and day out
for the longest, the curliest.
But these shavings and my delight in them were a later discovery. My
first reaction to my new surroundings was one of acute dislike. It
aroused me to a revolt which is the first thing I am sure I remember
about my life—the birth in me of conscious experience. This revolt did
not come from natural depravity; on the contrary it was a natural and
righteous protest against having the life and home I had known, and
which I loved, taken away without explanation and a new scene, a new set
of rules which I did not like, suddenly imposed.
My life in the log house had been full of joyous interests. There were
turkeys and ducks and chickens, lambs and colts and calves, kittens and
puppies—never could I be without playmates. There were trees and woods
and flowers in summer—a great fireplace with popcorn and maple candy in
winter, and I an only grandchild the center of it all. But what had I
come to? As mother realized, a place of perils, a creek rushing wildly
at the side of the house, great oil pits sunken in the earth not far
away, a derrick inviting to adventurous climbing at the door. No wonder
that warnings and scoldings and occasional switchings dogged my steps.
Moreover, I was no longer the center of the circle: a baby filled her
arms—“my” arms! A man still strange gave me orders and claimed her—“my”
mother.
It was not to be endured, and so one November day just after my third
birthday I announced I was going to leave. “Going back to Grandma.”
“Very well,” my mother said. I knew the way the men went when they
walked away from the shop, and I followed it, but not far. Across the
valley in which we lived ran an embankment. To my young eyes it was as
high as a mountain, and the nearer I came the higher it looked, the
higher and blacker. And then suddenly as I came to its foot I realized
that I had never been on the other side, that I did not know the way to
Grandma’s. I knew I was beaten, and sat down to think it over. Never in
all these years since have I faced defeat, known that I must retreat,
that I have not been again that little figure with the black mountain in
front of it, a little figure looking longingly at a shanty dim in the
growing night but showing a light in the window.
Finally I turned slowly back to the house and sat down on the steps. It
seemed a long time before the door opened and my mother in a surprised
voice said:
“Why, Ida! I thought you had gone to Grandma’s.”
“I don’t know the way,” I said humbly.
“Very well. Come in and get your supper.”
Respect for my mother, her wisdom in dealing with hard situations, was
born then. I was not to be punished; I was not to be laughed at; I was
to be accepted. Years later she told me of the unhappy hour she spent
watching me go off so sturdily, to come back so droopingly, watching
with tears running down her cheeks, but determined I must learn my
lesson. It was a bit of wisdom she never ceased to practice. My mother
always let me carry out my revolts, return when I would and no questions
asked.
In the three years we spent in the shanty on the flats there was but one
other episode that had for me the same self-revealing quality as this
revolt. It was my first attempt to test by experiment. The brook which
ran beside the house was rapid, noisy, in times of high water dangerous
for children. Watching it, fascinated, I observed that some things
floated on the surface, others dropped to the bottom. It set me to
wondering what would happen to my little brother, then in dresses, if
dropped in. I had to find out. There was a footbridge near the house,
and one day when I supposed I was unobserved I led him onto it and
dropped him in. His little skirts spread out and held him up.
Fortunately at that moment his screams brought a near-by workman, and he
was rescued. I suppose I was spanked; of that I remember nothing, only
the peace of satisfied curiosity in the certainty that my brother
belonged to the category of things which floated.
What I really remember of these early days concerns only my personal
discoveries, discoveries of the kind of person I was, of the nature of
things around me which stirred my curiosity. Whether a childish
experience was deep enough to etch itself on my memory or I only know of
it from hearing it told and retold, I always decide by this test: if I
really remember it, the happening is set in a scene—a scene with a
background, exits, entrances, and properties. I know I remember my
revolt and defeat because I always see it as an act on a stage, every
detail, every line clear.
Of the pregnant, bizarre, and often tragic development going on about me
I remember nothing; yet the uncertainties and dangers of it were part of
our daily fare.
Whether there was oil in the ground in sufficient quantities to justify
the prodigious effort being made to find it, nobody could know. If not,
the shop and shanty were a dead loss—another long delay on the road to
Iowa. All that winter of 1860 and 1861 my father was asking himself that
question; but in 1861 it was answered when up and down Oil Creek a
succession of flowing wells came in, wells producing from three hundred
to three thousand barrels a day—“fountain wells,” “gushers,” “spouters,”
they called them from the great streams which rose straight into the air
one to two hundred feet, to fall in an oily green-black spray over the
surrounding landscape.
Deadly, dangerous, too, as the Oil Region learned to its sorrow by a
disaster almost at the doorsteps of our Cherry Run home. It was the
evening of April 17, 1861. The news of the Fall of Sumter had just
reached the settlement, remote as it was from rail and telegraph
connections, and all the men of the town had gathered after supper at
one place or another to discuss the situation. What did it mean? What
would the President do? My father was sitting on a cracker barrel in the
one general store. As he and his friends talked a man ran in to tell the
company that a fresh vein of oil had been struck in a well on the edge
of the town. Its owner, Henry Rouse, had been drilling it deeper; the
oil was spouting over the derrick. Great news for the community still
uncertain as to the extent of its field. Great news for my father. It
meant tanks. Everybody jumped to run to the well when the earth was
rocked by a mighty explosion. A careless light had ignited the gas which
had spread from the flowing oil until it had enveloped everything in the
vicinity. Before my father reached the place nineteen men, among them
his friend the well—owner Henry Rouse, had been burned to death. How
many had escaped and in what condition, nobody knew.
Late that night as my father and mother grieved they heard outside their
door a stumbling something. Looking out, they saw before them a terrible
sight, a man burned and swollen beyond recognition and yet alive, alive
enough to give his name—one of their friends. My mother took him in—the
alcove became a hospital. For weeks she nursed him—the task of the woman
in a pioneer community, a task which she accepted as her part. Thanks to
her care, the man lived. The relics of that tragedy were long about our
household—comforts and bedquilts she had pieced and quilted for Iowa
stained with linseed oil, but too precious to be thrown away.
But all this is as something read in a book, something which has become
more poignant as the years have gone by and I am able to feel what those
long weeks of care over that broken man meant to my mother.
The business prospered, the shop grew. Little do I remember of all this,
or the increased comforts of life or moving into the new home on the
hillside above the town by this time known as Rouseville. But the change
in the outlook on the world about me, I do remember. We had lived on the
edge of an active oil farm and oil town. No industry of man in its early
days has ever been more destructive of beauty, order, decency, than the
production of petroleum. All about us rose derricks, squatted
engine-houses and tanks; the earth about them was streaked and damp with
the dumpings of the pumps, which brought up regularly the sand and clay
and rock through which the drill had made its way. If oil was found, if
the well flowed, every tree, every shrub, every bit of grass in the
vicinity was coated with black grease and left to die. Tar and oil
stained everything. If the well was dry a rickety derrick, piles of
debris, oily holes were left, for nobody ever cleaned up in those days.
But we left the center of this disorder, went to the hillside, looked
down on it; and as for me I no longer saw it, for opposite us was a
hillside so steep it had never been drilled. It was clothed with the
always changing beauty of trees and shrubs, the white shadflowers and
the red maples, the long garlands of laurel and azalea in the spring,
the green of every shade through the summer, the crimson and gold,
russets and tans of the fall, the frost- and snow-draped trees of the
winter. I did not see the derricks for the trees. The hillside above our
house and the paths which led around it became a playground in which I
reveled. I was not the only one about to forget the ugliness of the
Valley and remember through life the beauty of those hillsides. Years
later I was to know fairly well one of the great figures in the
development of oil, Henry H. Rogers, then the active head of the
Standard Oil Company. We discovered in talking over the early days of
the industry that at the very moment I was beginning to run the hills
above Rouseville he was running a small refinery on the Creek and living
on a hillside just below ours, separated only by a narrow ravine along
each side of which ran a path. “Up that path,” Mr. Rogers told me, “I
used to carry our washing every Monday morning, go for it every Saturday
night. Probably I’ve seen you hunting flowers on your side of the
ravine. How beautiful it was! I was never happier.” That reminiscence of
Henry H. Rogers is only one of several reasons I have for heartily
liking as fine a pirate as ever flew his flag in Wall Street.
Soon after we went to the home on the hill the oil country, at that
moment suffering a depression, was stirred by the news that a great well
had been struck ten miles from Rouseville at Pithole, an isolated
territory to which the veterans in the business had never given a
thought. The news caused a wild scramble. A motley procession of men
with and without money, with and without decency, seeking leases, jobs,
opportunity for adventure, excitement and swindling travelled on foot or
horseback up the Valley of Cherry Run in full view from our house.
Father was one of the first to take advantage of the Pithole discovery,
putting up his tank shops there and doing a smashing business during the
short life of the field. Its “bottom fell out” in 1869. He rode back and
forth from his shop on a little saddle horse—Flora, beautiful
creature—usually with considerable sums of money in his pocket. The
country was full of ruffians, and stories of robbery were common. When
he was very late in returning mother would walk the floor wringing her
hands. I could never go to bed those nights until he had returned, not
because I felt her anxiety but because of the excitement and mystery of
it. I carried a dramatic picture of him in mind, a kind of Paul Revere
dashing along the lonely road, the rein on Flora’s neck, his pistol in
hand. But he always came home, always brought the money he had
collected, which he must keep in the tiny iron safe in his office
annexed to the house until he could carry it to Oil City where he
banked.
My life became rapidly more conscious now that I had left the flats
behind, experience deeper. Here was my first realization of tragedy. It
was the spring of 1865. Father was coming up the hill, mother and I were
watching for him. Usually he walked with a brisk step, head up, but now
his step was slow, his head dropped. Mother ran to meet him crying,
“Frank, Frank, what is it?” I did not hear the answer; but I shall
always see my mother turning at his words, burying her face in her
apron, running into her room sobbing as if her heart would break. And
then the house was shut up, and crape was put on all the doors, and I
was told that Lincoln was dead.
From that time the name spelt tragedy and mystery. Why all this sorrow
over a man we had never seen, who did not belong to our world—_my_
world? Was there something beyond the circle of hills within which I
lived that concerned me? Why, and in what way, did this mysterious
outside concern me?
I was soon to learn that tragedy did not come always from a mysterious
beyond. What a chain of catastrophes it took to teach the men and women
who were developing the new industry the constant risk they ran in
handling either crude or refined oil. They came to our very door, when a
neighboring woman hurrying to build a fire in her cookstove poured oil
on the wood before she had made sure there were no live coals in the
firebox. An awful explosion occurred and she and two women who ran to
her assistance were burned to a crisp. I heard horrified whisperings
about me. The refusal to tell me what had happened aroused a terrible
curiosity. I gathered that the bodies were laid out in a house not far
away and, when nobody was looking, stole in to look at them. Broken
sleep for me for nights.
The mystery of death finally came into our household. There had been a
fourth child born in the house on the hill—“little Frankie,” we always
called him—blue-eyed like my father, the sunniest of us all. For weeks
one season he lay in the parlor fighting for life—scarlet fever—a
disease more dreaded by mothers in those days than even smallpox. Daily
I stood helpless, agonized, outside the door behind which little Frankie
lay screaming and fighting the doctor. I remember even today how long
the white marks lasted on the knuckles of my hands after the agony
behind the closed door had died down and my clenched fists relaxed.
Little Frankie died, became a pathetic and beloved tradition in the
household. My little sister, who had made a terrible and successful
fight against the disease, told me how she could not understand why
father and mother cried when they talked of Frankie.
“If they want to see him,” she thought, “why do they not put a ladder
from the top of the hill up to the sky into heaven and climb up? If
Frankie is there God would let them see him.”
I have said that my first recollection of Lincoln was the impression
made by the tragedy of his death. That this was so was not for the lack
of material on him in our household. My father was an ardent Republican.
Back in ’56 he had written from his river trip, “Hurrah for Frémont and
Dayton.” As soon as he had had more money than the actual needs of the
family required, he had subscribed to _Harper’s Weekly_, _Harper’s
Monthly_, the New York _Tribune_, began to buy books. Of all of these I
remember only the _Weekly_ and _Monthly_. My brother and I used to lie
by the hour flat on our stomachs, heels in the air, turning over the
exciting pages of the War numbers; but none of it went behind my
eyes—none concerned me. Only now when I go back to the files of those
old papers there is a whispering of something once familiar.
Of the _Monthly_ I have more distinct recollections. It was in these
that I first began to read freely. Many a private picnic did I have with
the _Monthly_ under the thorn bushes on the hillside above Oil Creek, a
lunch basket at my side. There are still in the family storeroom copies
of _Harper’s Monthly_ stained with lemon pie dropped when I was too deep
into a story to be careful. Here I read my first Dickens, my first
Thackeray, my first Marian Evans, as George Eliot then signed herself.
My first Wilkie Collins came to me in the _Weekly_. Great literature—all
pirated, I was to learn much later. My friend Viola Roseboro tells me
that at this time she was reading Harper’s pirated paper-bound copies of
Dickens. It was much later that they came my way.
However, all the reading I was doing was not so respectable. On the sly
I was devouring a sheet forbidden to the household—the _Police
Gazette_—the property of the men around the house, for we had men around
the house, men of various degrees of acceptability to my mother, but all
necessary to my father’s enterprises. The business had grown; it meant a
clerk, bosses, workmen. In a pioneer community like ours it was hard to
find comfortable living quarters for single men. My father and mother,
both brought up on farms, accepted as a matter of course the housing and
feeding of hired men. So it was in line with their experience as well as
with the necessities of the case that our household was arranged to take
care of a certain number of men connected with my father’s business. For
sleeping quarters a bunkhouse was built on the hillside; mornings and
evenings, they sat at the family table. This accepting men of whose
manners and ways she often heartily disapproved was distasteful to my
mother; but she had not been a schoolteacher for nothing, and she
applied her notions of discipline. She would not have swearing,
drinking, rough manners, and certainly she would not have had the
_Police Gazette_ in the house. But the men had it, and now and then when
my brother and I played about the bunkhouse it was easy for me to pick
up a copy and slip it away where my dearest girl friend and I looked
unashamed and entirely unknowing on its rough and brutal pictures. If
they were obscene we certainly never knew it. There was a wanton gaiety
about the women, a violent rakishness about the men—wicked, we supposed,
but not the less interesting for that.
One reason the _Police Gazette_ fascinated me was that it pictured a
kind of life I knew to be flourishing in a neighboring settlement, a
settlement where my father had shops run by a boss who, as well as his
sister, was a family friend, and where I was often allowed to visit.
This settlement, Petroleum Center, had by something like general consent
become Oil Creek’s “sink of iniquity.”
The discovery of oil, the growing certainty that it was the beginning of
a new industry, that money was flowing into the Oil Region quickly
brought an invading host of men and women seeking fortunes. It was a new
and rich field for tricksters, swindlers, exploiters of vice in every
known form. They were soon setting up shops in every settlement and, to
the credit of the manhood of the Oil Region, usually being driven out by
self-directed vigilantes.
At Rouseville a “joy boat” which made its way up the Creek that first
winter and tied up near my father’s shop was cut loose in the middle of
the night after its arrival. Its visitors found themselves floating down
the Allegheny River the next morning and obliged to walk back. From that
time open vice shunned the town. But when wealth poured out of the
ground at Petroleum Center there was too great excitement to think of
order, decency. Before it was realized, the town was alive with every
known form of wantonness and wickedness. By the time I was allowed to
visit our friends there, I saw from the corner of my eye as I walked
sedately the length of the street saloons, dance halls, brothels; and I
noted many curious things. The house where I visited stood on a slope
overlooking one of the most notorious dance halls of the Oil Region—Gus
Reil’s. Often I left my bed at night and watched that long low building
from which rose loud laughter, ribald songs, shouts, curses. Later
horror was added to Gus Reil’s fascination, for here a Rouseville boy
was shot one night.
If Petroleum Center was giving me an opportunity to feed my curiosity
about things in the world of which I was not supposed to know, it
happened also to be the indirect means of awaking my interest in the
stars, one of the most beautiful interests of my youth. My father had
seen the early passing of the wooden oil tank, the coming of the iron
tank, and had used his capital to become an oil producer. One of his
first investments had been in an oil farm on the hills above the wicked
town which so excited my curiosity. His partner in this venture, M. E.
Hess, lived on this farm with his family. In that family was a daughter
about my age and bearing my name—Ida. We became friends and visited back
and forth as chance offered. My chance came often when Mr. Hess, riding
with a companion over the hills to Rouseville to consult with father,
dropped his companion and took me back with him, usually at night. A
fine pair of saddle horses he had—“High Fly” and “Shoo Fly.” My first
experience in horseback riding was following him on “Shoo Fly” over the
hills after dark.
Mr. Hess was an altogether unusual man, educated, with a vein of poetry
in him. As we rode he would stop every now and then to name the stars,
trace the constellations, repeat the legends. My first consciousness of
space, its beauty, its something more than beauty, came then.
Not a bad counterbalance for what I was gathering in the town below the
farm on the hill and seeing reproduced in the _Police Gazette_, which so
perfectly pictured its activities.
But there were other correcting forces at work on me. The men who formed
the vigilante committee to make Rouseville difficult for commercialized
vice (my father one of them) set themselves early to establishing
civilizing agencies—first a church.
It was decided by the men and women who were to build and support this
church that it should be of the denomination of which there were the
largest number in the community. The Methodists had the numbers, and so
my father and mother who were Presbyterians became and remained
Methodists. Their support was active. We did not merely go to church; we
stayed to class meeting; we went to Sunday school, where both father and
mother had classes; we went to Wednesday night—or was it Thursday
night?—prayer meeting. And when there was a revival we went every night.
In my tenth or eleventh year I “went forward” not from a sense of guilt
but because everybody else was doing it. My sense of sin came after it
was all over and I was tucked away in bed at night. I had been keenly
conscious as I knelt at the Mourners’ bench that the long crimson
ribbons which hung from my hat must look beautiful on my cream-colored
coat. The realization of that hypocrisy cut me to the heart. I knew
myself a sinner then, and the relief I sought in prayer was genuine. I
never confessed. It wasn’t the kind of sin other converts talked about.
But it aroused self-observation; I learned that often when I was saying
the polite or proper thing I was thinking quite differently. For a long
time it made me secretly unhappy thinking that in me alone ran an
underground river of thought. Later I began to suspect that other people
were like this, that always there flowed a stream of unspoken thought
under the spoken thought. It made me wary of strangers.
A side of my life which moves me deeply now, as I think back, was the
continuous effort of my father and mother to give me what were called
advantages, to use their increasing income to awaken and develop in me a
taste for things which they had always been denied. They wanted music in
the household and our grandest possession became a splendid Bradbury
square piano—a really noble instrument—with one of the finest, mellowest
tones that I have ever heard in a piano.
A music teacher turned up in the community and I was at once set at
five-finger exercises, and I was kept at them and all that follows them
for many years; but I found no joy in what I was doing. It is possible
that with different teachers from those available there might have been
a spring touched, for untrained as I am I am not without a certain
appreciation of music.
I mastered the mechanics of piano playing well enough, however, to
become later one of the regular performers in the high school in the
town to which we were to move—Titusville, Pennsylvania. I remembered
nothing of this until two of my old friends in Titusville, school chums,
told me that I was one of the three or four who played the piano for the
morning exercises, that I sometimes played my show pieces, and that on
one occasion I was an actor in a scene which they recalled with glee.
They told me I was playing a duet with a classmate. We either lost our
place or did not agree as to time—stopped entirely, argued the matter
out, began over, and this time went through without dissension; but I
have only this secondhand memory of my contribution to the musical life
of the Titusville High School.
I remember the efforts of my father and mother to show me something of
the outside world much more clearly than I do those to awaken my
interest in books and music. There were little trips, once as far as
Cleveland—the whole family—the marvel of the “best hotel,” of new hats
and coats and armfuls of toys. There were summers at the farm, only
thirty miles away. Best remembered and most enjoyed were the
all-day-excursion picnics. No one can understand the social life of a
great body of the American people in the latter part of the nineteenth
century without understanding the hold the picnic had on them. The
Tarbell household took the picnic so seriously that it had a special
equipment of stout market baskets, tin cups and plates, steel knives and
forks, tin spoons, worn napkins (the paper ones were then unheard of).
The menus were as fixed as that for a Thanksgiving dinner: veal loaf,
cold tongue, hard-boiled eggs—“two apiece”—buttered rusks, spiced
peaches, jelly, cucumber pickles, chowchow, cookies, doughnuts (we
called them fried cakes), and a special family cake. And you ate until
you were full.
Our grandest picnic excursions in those days were to Chautauqua Lake, a
charming sheet of water only some fifty miles from home. Near the head
of the lake lay an old Chautauqua County town, Mayville; at its foot,
Jamestown where my father for several years had been a student in the
Academy, and from which in vacations he had gone on his annual trips
down the Ohio. Loaded with big baskets of lunch, we took an early train
to Mayville, changed there to a little white steamer: zigzagged the
length of the lake, twenty or so miles, stopping at point after point.
We ate our lunch en route, and at Jamestown went uptown to drink a
bottle of “pop.” And then came the slow return home, where we arrived
after dark exhausted by pleasure.
Three or four miles from Mayville on the west side of the lake jutted a
wooded promontory—Fair Point—the site in those days of a Methodist camp
meeting; and here we sometimes stopped for the day. We never liked it so
well as going to Jamestown; neither did father.
2
I DECIDE TO BE A BIOLOGIST
Five years went by in the house on the hill, and then in 1870 when I was
thirteen I found myself in Titusville, Pennsylvania, in a new house my
father had built. How characteristic of the instability of the oil towns
of that day, as well as of the frugality of my father, was this house!
From the beginning of the Pithole excitement he had, as I have said,
made money—more than he could ever have dreamed, I fancy; and then about
1869 practically without warning the bottom fell out, as the vernacular
of the region put it. The end shut up my father’s shops there, but it
also gave us the makings of a home. In that rapid development, only four
years long, a town of some twenty thousand had grown up with several big
hotels—among them, one called the Bonta House. It had features which
delighted my father—long French windows, really fine iron brackets
supporting its verandahs, handsome woodwork. The Bonta House was said to
have cost $60,000, but its owners were glad to take the $600 father
offered when the town “blew up.” He paid the money, tore down the
building, loaded its iron brackets and fine doors and windows, mouldings
and all, and I suppose much of its timber, onto wagons and carted it ten
miles away to Titusville where, out of it, he built the house which was
our home for many years.
Titusville was not like Rouseville, which had suddenly sprung from the
mud as uncertain as a mushroom of the future. It had been a substantial
settlement twenty years before oil was found there, small but sturdy
with a few families who had made money chiefly in lumber, owning good
homes, carefully guarding the order and decency of the place.
The discovery of oil overran the settlement with hundreds of fortune
seekers. They came from far and near, on foot, horseback, wagon. The
nearest railroad connection was sixteen miles away, and the roads and
fields leading in were soon cut beyond recognition by the heavy hauling,
its streets at times impassable with mud.
The new industry demanded machinery, tools, lumber—and the bigger it
grew, the greater the demand. Titusville, the birthplace of all this
activity, as well as the gateway down the Creek, must furnish food and
shelter for caravans of strangers, shops for their trades, offices for
speculators and brokers, dealers in oil lands and leases, for oil
producers, surveyors, and draftsmen—all the factors of the big business
organization necessary to develop the industry. In 1862 the overflow was
doubled by the arrival of a railroad with a connection sixteen miles
away with the East and West. The disbanding of the Army in June of 1865
brought a new rush—men still in uniform, their rifles and knapsacks on
their backs. Most of this fresh inflow was bound to the scene of the
latest excitement, Pithole.
Stampeded though she was, Titusville refused to give up her idea of what
a town should be. She kept a kind of order, waged a steady fight on
pickpockets, drunkards, wantons; and in this she was backed by the
growing number of men and women who, having found their chance for
fortune in oil, wanted a town fit for their families. After churches,
the schools were receiving the most attention. It was the Titusville
schools which had determined my father and mother to make the town their
permanent home.
But school did not play a serious part in my scheme of things at the
start. I went because I was sent, and had no interest in what went on. I
was thirteen, but I had never been in a crowded room before. In a small
private school the teacher had been my friend. Here I was not conscious
my teacher recognized my existence. I soon became a truant; but the
competent ruler of that schoolroom knew more than I realized. She was
able to spot a truant, and one day when I turned up after an
unexplainable absence she suddenly turned on me and read me a scathing
lecture. I cannot remember that I was ashamed or humiliated, only
amazed, but something in me asserted itself. I suppose that here a
decent respect for the opinions of mankind was born; at least I became
on the instant a model pupil.
A few months later I passed into high school; and when at the end of the
year the grades were averaged at a ceremony where everybody was present
I stood at the head of the honor roll. Nobody could have been more
surprised. I had not been working for the honor roll: I had simply been
doing what they expected me to do as I understood it, and here I was at
the top. I remember I felt very serious about it. Having made the top
once, I knew what would be expected of me. I couldn’t let my father and
mother or my teachers down, so I continued to learn my lessons. It was a
good deal like being good at a game. I liked to work out the mathematics
and translations—good puzzles, but that they had any relation to my life
I was unconscious. And then suddenly, among these puzzles I was set to
solve, I found in certain textbooks the sesame which was to free my
curiosity, stir desires to know, set me working on my own to find out
more than these books had to offer. The texts which did all this for me
were a series I suspect a modern teacher might laugh at—Steele’s
Fourteen Weeks in Zoology, Geology, Botany, Natural Philosophy,
Chemistry.
Here I was suddenly on a ground which meant something to me. From
childhood, plants, insects, stones were what I saw when I went abroad,
what I brought home to press, to put into bottles, to “litter up the
house.” The hills about Rouseville were rich in treasures for such a
collector, but nobody had ever taught me more than their common names. I
had never realized that they were subjects for study, like Latin and
geometry and rhetoric and other such unmeaning tasks. They were too
fascinating. But here my pleasure became my duty. School suddenly became
exciting. Now I could justify my tramps before breakfast on the hills,
justify my “collections,” and soon I knew what I was to be—a scientist.
Life was beginning to be very good, for what I liked best to do had a
reason. No doubt this uplift was helped by the general cheerfulness of
the family under our new conditions of life.
Things were going well in father’s business; there was ease such as we
had never known, luxuries we had never heard of. Our first Christmas in
the new home was celebrated lavishly. Far away was that first Christmas
in the shanty on the flats when there was nothing but nuts and candy and
my mother and father promising, “Just wait, just wait, the day will
come.” The day had come—a gorgeous Christmas tree, a velvet cloak, _and_
a fur coat for my mother. I haven’t the least idea what there was for
the rest of us, but those coats were an epoch in my life—my first notion
of elegance.
This family blossoming was characteristic of the town. Titusville was
gay, confident of its future. It was spending money on schools and
churches, was building an Opera House where Janauschek soon was to play,
Christine Nilsson to sing. More and more fine homes were going up. Its
main street had been graded and worked until fine afternoons, winter and
summer, it was cleared by four o’clock for the trotting of the fast
horses the rich were importing. When New Year’s Day came every woman
received—wine, cakes, salads, cold meats on the table—every man went
calling. That is, Titusville was taking on metropolitan airs, led by a
few citizens who knew New York and its ways, even spoke familiarly of
Jay Gould and Jim Fisk, both of whom naturally enough had their eye on
us. Did not the Erie road from which they at the moment were filling
their pockets regard oil as one of its most profitable freights? We were
grain for their mill.
There was reason for confidence. In the dozen years since the first well
was drilled the Oil Creek Valley had yielded nearly thirty-three million
barrels of crude oil. Producing, transporting, refining, marketing,
exporting, and by-products had been developed into an organized industry
which was now believed to have a splendid future.
Then suddenly this gay, prosperous town received a blow between the
eyes. Self-dependent in all but transportation and locally in that
through the pipe lines it was rapidly laying to shipping points, it was
dependent on the railroads for the carrying of its crude oil to outside
refining points and for a shipping of both crude and refined to the
seaboard—a rich and steady traffic for which the Oil Region felt the
railroads ought to be grateful; but it was the railroads that struck the
blow. A few refiners outside the region—Cleveland, Pittsburgh,
Philadelphia—concocted a marvelous scheme which they had the persuasive
power to put over with the railroads, a big scheme by which those in the
ring would be able to ship crude and refined oil more cheaply than
anybody outside. And then, marvelous invention, they would receive in
addition to their advantage a drawback on every barrel of oil shipped by
any one not in the group. Those in the South Improvement Company, as the
masterpiece was called, were to be rewarded for shipping; and those not
in, to be doubly penalized. Of course it was a secret scheme. The Oil
Region did not learn of it until it had actually been put into operation
in Cleveland, Ohio, and leaked out. What did it mean to the Oil Region?
It meant that the man who produced the oil, and all outside refiners,
were entirely at the mercy of this group who, if they would, could make
the price of crude oil as well as refined. But it was a plan which could
not survive daylight. As soon as the Oil Region learned of it a
wonderful row followed. There were nightly antimonopoly meetings,
violent speeches, processions; trains of oil cars loaded for members of
the offending corporation were raided, the oil run on the ground, their
buyers turned out of the oil exchanges; appeals were made to the state
legislature, to Congress for an interstate commerce bill, producers and
refiners uniting for protection. I remember a night when my father came
home with a grim look on his face and told how he with scores of other
producers had signed a pledge not to sell to the Cleveland ogre that
alone had profited from the scheme—a new name, that of the Standard Oil
Company, replacing the name South Improvement Company in popular
contempt.
There were long days of excitement. Father coming home at night, silent
and stern, a sternness even unchanged by his after-dinner cigar, which
had come to stand in my mind as the sign of his relaxation after a hard
day. He no longer told of the funny things he had seen and heard during
the day; he no longer played his jew’s-harp, nor sang to my little
sister on the arm of his chair the verses we had all been brought up on:
Augusta, Maine, on the Kennebec River,
Concord, New Hampshire, on the Merrimack, etc.