How Natural Gas Played Its Part—Fire and Water Much in
Evidence—Changes in Methods and Appliances—Deserted
Towns—Peculiar Coincidences and Fatalities—Railroad
Episodes—Reminiscences of Bygone Scenes—Practical
Jokers—Sad Tragedies—Lights and Shadows Intermingle
and the Curtain Falls Forever.
PORTRAITS.
_Name_ _Page_
Abbott, William H. 320
Adams, Rev. Clarence A. 112
Albee, J. P. 187
Allen, Col. M. N. 344
Ames, Gov. Oliver 46
Anderson, George K. 116
Andrews, Charles J. 388
Andrews, Frank W. 116
Andrews, William H. 389
Angell, Cyrus D. 111
Archbold, John D. 420
Armor, William C. 374
Babcock, John 442
Barber, F. H. 373
Barnsdall, Theodore 217
Barnsdall, William 60
Bates, Joseph 32
Baum, William T. 82
Bayne, S. G. 9
Beatty, David 191
Beers, Henry I. 165
Bell, Edwin C. 368
Benninghoff, John 157
Bishop, Coleman E. 344
Bissell, George H. 60
Bleakley, Col. James 87
Bloss, Henry C. 344
Bloss, William W. 344
Boden, Frederick 218
Booth, J. Wilkes 104
Borland, James B. 349
Bowen, Frank W. 359
Bowman, J. H. 344
Boyle, Patrick C. 357
Brewer, Dr. F. B. 60
Brigham, Samuel P. 350
Brown, Samuel Q. 149
Brownson, Marcus 258
Buchanan, George 22
Cady, Daniel 70
Cain, Col. John H. 90
Campbell, John R. 323
Carnegie, Andrew 443
Carroll, Reuben 229
Carroll, R. W. 229
Carter, Col. John J. 222
Chambers, Wesley 150
Clapp, Edwin E. 194
Cochran, Alexander 102
Cochran, Robert L. 346
Colman, Moses J. 104
Cone, Andrew 354
Cone, Mrs. Andrew 354
Conver, Peter O. 351
Cornen, Peter P. 165
Crane, Rev. Ezra G. 112
Crawford, Dr. A. W. 240
Crawford, John P. 107
_Name_ _Page_
Crawford, William R. 82
Criswell, Robert W. 366
Crocker, Frederick 214
Crossley, David 60
Cummings, Capt. H. H. 266
Delamater, George W. 123
Delamater, George B. 42
Dennison, David D. 371
Densmore, Emmett 446
Densmore, James 446
Densmore, Joel D. 446
Densmore, William 446
Dewoody, J. Lowry 88
Dimick, George 261
Dodd, Levi 87
Dodd, Samuel C. T. 423
Dougall, David 259
Drake, Col. Edwin L. 60
Eaton, John 448
Eaton, Rev. S. J. M. 376
Egbert, Dr. A. G. 60
Egbert, Dr. M. C. 133
Emery, David 60
Emery, Lewis 217
Evans, James 82
Fassett, Col. L. H. 449
Fertig, John 127
Fertig, Samuel S. 121
Fisher, Frederick 317
Fisher, Henry 317
Fisher, John J. 317
Forman, George V. 326
Forst, Barney 285
Frew, William 32
Fox, William L. 243
Funk, Capt. A. B. 127
Galey, John H. 254
Galloway, John 180
Goe, Bateman 218
Grandin, Elijah B. 202
Grandin, John L. 202
Gray, Samuel H. 377
Greenlee, C. D. 285
Griffith, W. E. 283
Grimm, Daniel 82
Guffey, James M. 250
Guffey, Wesley S. 250
Haffey, Col. J. K. 371
Hanna, J. Lindsay 87
Harley, Henry 320
Harley, Stephen W. 368
Hasson, Capt. William 116
Henry, Col. James T. 344
Hess, Michael Edic 295
Heydrick, Jesse 191
_Name_ _Page_
Hoover, Col. James P. 82
Hopkins, Edward 323
Hughes, S. B. 196
Hulings, Marcus 246
Hunter, Jahu 266
Hunter, Dr. W. G. 36
Hyde, Charles 60
Irvin, Samuel P. 370
James, Henry F. 82
Janes, Heman 142
Jennings, Edward H. 293
Jennings, Richard 261
Johns, Walter R. 344
Johnston, Dr. Frank H. 377
Jones, Edward C. 373
Jones, Capt. J. T. 217
Kantner, H. Beecher 349
Karns, Stephen D. 261
Kern, Thomas A. 371
Kerr, J. Melville 379
Kier, Samuel M. 30
Kirk, David 217
Koch, George 448
Lambing, James M. 254
Leckey, Robert 218
Lee, John H. 246
Leonard, Charles C. 362
Lock, Jonathan 77
Lockhart, Charles 32
Longwell, W. H. 344
Mapes, George E. 366
Martin, Z. 79
Martindale, Thomas 440
Mather, John A. 175
Metcalfe, L. H. 344
Miller, Charles 96
Miller, T. Preston 447
Mitchell, Foster W. 149
Mitchell, John L. 149
Mitchell, J. Plumer 399
Moorhead, Joseph 373
Morton, Col. L. M. 344
Munson, William 391
Murray, F. F. 366
Muse, James B. 349
Myers, J. J. 239
McCalmont, S. P. 348
McCargo, David 443
McClintock, Homer 357
McCray, James S. 137
McCullagh, W. J. 357
McDonough, Col. Thos. 113
McDowell, Col. Alex. 20
McKeown, John 221
McKinney, J. Curtis 273
McKinney, John L. 273
McLaurin, John J. Front
McMullan, W. S. 90
McMullen, Justus C. 374
Needle, George A. 368
Negley, John H. 369
Nesbitt, George H. 261
Neyhart, Adnah 202
Nicklin, James P. 84
Noble, Orange 42
O’Day, Daniel 323
Oesterlin, Dr. Charles 432
Osmer, James H. 236
Painter, William 88
Persons, Charles E. 371
Phillips, Isaac N. 135
Phillips, John T. 135
Phillips, Thomas M. 135
Phillips, Charles M. 135
Phillips, William 116
Phillips, Fulton 375
Phipps, Porter 166
Place, James M. 366
Post, A. G. 443
Plumer, Frederick 246
Plumer, Warren C. 344
Ponton, John 362
Pratt, Charles 421
Prentice, Frederic 109
Rattigan, P. A. 369
Raymond, Aaron W. 87
Reed, William 162
Reineman, Isaac 447
Reisinger, Col. J. W. H. 350
Reno, Gen. Jesse L. 234
Rial, Edward 88
Roberts, Col. E. A. L. 382
Roberts, Dr. Walter B. 382
Rockefeller, John D. 409
Rouse, Henry R. 116
Rowland, James W. 300
Rumsey, George 239
Satterfield, John 258
Seep, Joseph 335
Shamburg, Dr. G. 167
Shannon, Philip M. 198
Shaw, John 226
Sheakley, Gov. James 182
Sheasley, Jacob 82
Showalter, J. B. 445
Sibley, Edwin H. 377
Sibley, Joseph C. 96
Simonds, Joseph W. 104
Simpson, Robert 359
Siviter, William H. 357
Smiley, Alfred W. 181
Smiley, Edwin W. 347
Smiley, J. Howard 347
Smith, George P. 90
Smith, J. Harrison 347
Smith, William A. 61
Smithman, John B. 447
Snell, Alfred L. 374
Snowden, Rev. N. R. 20
Speechly, Samuel 432
Staley, W. H. 210
Stevens, William H. 442
Stewart, Samuel 169
Stone, Charles W. 206
Stuck, Col. Edward H. 357
Swan, B. E. 101
Tarbell, Franklin S. 116
Tarr, James S. 292
Taylor, Frank H. 357
Taylor, Hascal L. 258
Taylor, O. P. 223
Thompson. William A. 392
Thomson, Frank 442
Thropp, Miss Amelia 354
Titus, Jonathan 65
Truesdell, Frank W. 366
Tyson, James 362
Vanausdall, John 116
Vandergrift, Capt. J. J. 326
Vandergrift, T. J. 209
Watson, D. T. 446
Watson, Jonathan 60
Watson, Lewis F. 206
Welch, Philip C. 359
Wenk, Jacob 350
Wetter, Henry 252
Whitaker, Albert P. 346
Whitaker, William S. 346
White, Charles E. 357
Wicker, Charles C. 360
Williams, Samuel L. 364
Yewens, Rev. Harry L. 345
Young, Samuel 370
Young, W. J. 269
Youngson, A. B. 443
Youngson, J. J. 443
Zane, John P. 116
Zeigler, H. C. 300
Zeigler, Col. Jacob 370
--------------
ILLUSTRATIONS.
_Page_
Oil-Wells in India 6
View in Oil City, Pa., after 26
the flood, March 17, 1867
Baku, Russia and Bakany Views 14
Notable Wells on Oil Creek in 42
1861-2-3
Map of Venango County 59
Early Operators on Oil Creek 60
Group Picture—Maj. W. T. Baum, 82
Jacob Sheasley, Henry F.
James, James Evans, W. R.
Crawford, Daniel Grimm, Col.
Jas. P. Hoover
Miller & Sibley’s Prospect 115
Hill Stock Farm, Franklin,
Pa.
Group Picture—John Vanausdall, 116
G. K. Anderson, Wm.
Phillips, F. S. Tarbell, F.
W. Andrews, Capt. Wm.
Hasson, Henry R. Rouse, John
P. Zane. D. W. Kenney’s
Allemagoozelum City Well No.
2
Petroleum Centre, 1894 131
Wells on Benninghoff Run, 156
Venango Co., Pa., in 1866
General View of Pithole in 172
August, 1895
_Page_
Parker Oil Exchange in 1874 190
Up the Allegheny River 212
Views at St. Petersburg, 232
Edenburg and Other Places
Karns City, Greece City, 258
Petrolia, 1873; Group of
Hascal L. Taylor, Marcus
Brownson and John
Satterfield
Group Picture—Richard 261
Jennings, S. D. Karns,
George Nesbit and George
Dimick
Armstrong Well 281
Views on the Tarr Farm, Oil 292
Creek, in 1863-6. Refinery
and Oil-Wells at Russia and
Baku
Pond Freshet at Oil City, 310
March, ’63
A Cluster of Pioneer Editors 344
Group Picture—F. F. Murray, 366
Frank W. Truesdell, R. W.
Criswell, James M. Place and
George E. Mapes
Group Picture—Col. J. K. 371
Haffey, D. A. Dennison,
Thomas A. Kern and Charles
F. Persons
Well Flowing Oil After 382
Torpedoing
Standard Building, 26 408
Broadway, N.Y.
I.
THE STAR IN THE EAST.
PETROLEUM IN ANCIENT TIMES—KNOWN FROM AN EARLY PERIOD IN THE WORLD’S
HISTORY—MENTIONED IN THE SCRIPTURES AND BY PRIMITIVE WRITERS—SOLOMON
SUSTAINED—STUMBLING UPON THE GREASY STAPLE IN VARIOUS
LANDS—INCIDENTS AND ANECDOTES OF DIFFERENT SORTS AND SIZES—OVER
ASIA, AFRICA AND EUROPE FOR THE STUFF.
----------
“The morning star in all its splendor was rising in the East.”—_Felix
Dahn._
“Alone in the increasing darkness * * * it is a beacon
light.”—_Disraeli._
“It were all one that I should love a bright particular
star.”—_Shakespeare._
“The years that are gone roll before me with their deeds.”—_Ossian._
“Oil out of the flinty rock.”—_Deuteronomy xxxii: 13._
“And the rock poured me out rivers of oil.”—_Job xxix: 6._
“Will the Lord be pleased with * * * ten-thousands of rivers of
oil?”—_Micah vi: 7._
“I have myself seen pitch drawn out of the lake and from water in
Zacynthus.”—_Herodotus._
“The people of Agrigentum save oil in pits and burn it in
lamps.”—_Dioscorides._
“Can ye not discern the signs of the times?”—_St. Matthew xvi: 3._
----------
Petroleum, a name to conjure with and weave romances around, helps out
Solomon’s oft-misapplied declaration of “No new thing under the sun.”
Possibly it filled no place in domestic economy when the race, if the
Darwinian theory passes muster, sported as ring-tailed simians, yet the
Scriptures and primitive writers mention the article repeatedly. Many
intelligent persons, recalling the tallow-dip and lard-oil lamp of their
youth, consider the entire petroleum-business of very recent date,
whereas its history goes back to remotest antiquity. Naturally they are
disappointed to find it, in various aspects, “the same thing over
again.” Men and women in the prime of life have forgotten the flickering
pine-knot, the sputtering candle or the smoky sconce hardly long enough
to associate rock-oil with “the brave days of old.” This idea of newness
the host of fresh industries created by oil-operations has tended to
deepen in the popular mind. Enjoying the brilliant glow of a modern
argand-burner, double-wicked, silk-shaded, onyx-mounted and altogether a
genuine luxury, it seems hard to realize that the actual basis of this
up-to-date elegance has existed from time immemorial. Of derricks,
drilling-tools, tank-cars, refineries and pipe-lines our ancestors were
blissfully ignorant; but petroleum itself, the foundation of the
countless paraphernalia of the oil-trade of to-day, flourished “ere
Noah’s flood had space to dry.” Although used to a limited extent in
crude-form for thousands of years, it was reserved for the present age
to introduce the grand illuminant to the world generally. After sixty
centuries the game of “hide-and-seek” between Mother Earth and her
children has terminated in favor of the latter. They have pierced
nature’s internal laboratories, tapping the huge oil-tanks wherein the
products of her quiet chemistry had accumulated “in bond,” and up came
the unctuous fluid in volumes ample to fill all the lamps the universe
could manufacture and to grease every axle on this revolving planet! The
demon of darkness has been exorcised from the gloomy caverns of old to
make room for the modern angel of light. Science, the rare alchemist
which converts the tear of unpaid labor into a steam-giant that turns
with tireless arm the countless wheels of toil, lays bare the deepest
recesses of the past to bring forth treasures for the present.
The capital invested in petroleum in this country has increased from
one-thousand dollars, raised in 1859 to drill the first well in
Pennsylvania, to six-hundred-millions. It is just as easy to say
six-hundred-million dollars as six-hundred-million grains of sand, but
the possibilities of such a sum of money afford material for endless
flights of the imagination. Thirty-thousand miles of pipe-lines handle
the output most expeditiously, conveying it to the seaboard at less than
teamsters used to receive for hauling it a half-mile. Ten-thousand
tank-cars have been engaged in its transportation. Seventy-five
bulk-steamers and fleets of sailing-vessels carry refined from
Philadelphia and New York to the most distant ports in Europe, Africa
and Asia. “Astral Oil” and “Standard White” have penetrated “wherever a
wheel can roll or a camel’s foot be planted.” In Pennsylvania,
South-eastern Ohio and West Virginia thirty-five-million barrels have
been produced and eight-thousand wells drilled in a single year. Add to
this the results of operations in North-eastern Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky,
Tennessee, Kansas, Colorado, Wyoming and California, and it must be
acknowledged that petroleum is entitled to the chief seat in the
synagogue. Edward Bellamy may, perhaps, be imitated profitably and
pleasantly in this connection by “Looking-Backward.”
Looking forward is the proper kink,
Smooth as skating in an icy rink,
In one’s planning how to fill a chink
At manifold times and places;
But for winning in a thoughtful think,
Past and present joining with a link
Guaranteed to wash and never shrink,
Looking backward holds four aces.
[Illustration: THE BAD BOY’S IDEA OF ADAM’S FALL.]
Precisely how, why, when, where and by whom petroleum was first
discovered and utilized nobody living can, and nobody dead will, tell
anxious inquirers. The information has “gone where the woodbine
twineth,” to join the dodo, the megatherium, the ichthyosaurus and the
“lost arts” Wendell Phillips embalmed in fadeless prose. An erratic
Joe-Millerite has traced the stuff to the Garden of Eden in a fashion
akin to the chopping logic of the Deacon’s “Wonderful One-Horse Shay.”
Hear him:
“Adam had a fall?”
“Sure as death and taxes.”
“Why did he fall with such neatness and dispatch?”
“Maybe he took a spring to fall.”
“Naw! Because everything was greased for the occasion! Unquestionably
the only lubricant on this footstool just then was the petroleum brewed
in God’s own subterranean stills. Therefore, petroleum figured in Eden,
which was to be demonstrated according to Hoyle. See?”
There is no “irrepressible conflict” between this reasoning, the version
of the Pentateuch and the idea of Peck’s Bad Boy that “Adam clumb a
appul-tree to put coal-oil onto it to kill the insecks, an’ he sawed a
snaik, an’ the oil made the tree slippy, an’ he fell bumpety-bump!” What
a heap of trouble would have been avoided if that pippin had been soaked
in crude-oil, that Eve might turn up her nose at it and give the serpent
the marble heart! As Miss Haney expresses it:
“O Eve, little Eve, if you only had guess’d
Who it was that tempted you so,
You’d have kept out of mischief, nor lost your nice home
For the sake of an apple, I know.”
Other wags attribute the longevity of antediluvian veterans to their
unstinted use of petroleum for internal and external ailments! Had
medical almanacs, patent nostrums and circus-bill testimonials been
evolved at that interesting period, the oleum-vender would have hit the
bull’s-eye plump in the center. Guess at the value of recommendations
like these, with the latest accompaniment of “before-and-after” pictures
in the newspapers:
LAND OF NOD, _April 1, B. C. 5678.—This is to certify that I keep my
strength up to blacksmith pitch by frequent applications of Petroleum
Prophylactic and six big drinks of Benzine Bitters daily. Lifting an
elephant, with one hand tied behind me, is my favorite trick.
SANDOW TUBAL-CAIN.
MT. ARARAT, _July 4, B. C. 4004.—Your medicine is out of sight in our
family. It relieved papa of an overdose of fire-water, imbibed in honor
of his boat distancing Dunraven’s barge on this glorious anniversary,
and cured Ham of trichina yesterday. Mamma’s pug slid off the upper deck
into the swim and was fished out in a comatose condition. A solitary
whiff of your Pungent Petroleum Pastils revived him instantly, and he
was able to howl all night.
SHEM & JAPHETH.
SOMEWHERE IN ASIA, _Dec. 21, B. C. 4019.—Your incomparable Petroleum
Prophylactic, which I first learned about from a college chum, is a
daisy-cutter. Thanks to its superlative virtues, I have lived to be a
trifle older than the youngest ballet-girl in the “Black Crook.” I
celebrated my nine-hundred-and-sixty-ninth birth-day by walking umsteen
miles before luncheon, playing left-tackle with the Y. M. C. A.
Foot-ball Team in the afternoon and witnessing “Uncle Tom’s Cabin”—two
Topsys, two Markses, two Evas, two donkeys and four Siberian
Bloodhounds—in the evening. Next morning’s paper flung this ticket to
the breeze:
“For Mayor of Jeroosalum
We nominate Methoosalum.”
By sticking faithfully and fearlessly to your unrivaled elixir I expect
to round out my full thousand years and run for a second term. Refer
silver-skeptics and gold-bug office-seekers to me for particulars as to
the proper treatment.
GROVER LINGER LONGER METHUSELAH.
PLEASANT VALLEY, _Oct. 30, B. C. 5555.—I just want to shout “Eureka,”
“Excelsior,” “Hail Columbia,” “E Pluribus Unum,” and give three cheers
for your Kill-em-off Kerosene! Both my mothers in-law, who had bossed me
seventy decades, tried a can of it on a sick fire this morning. Their
funeral is billed for four o’clock p. m. to-morrow. Send me ten gallons
more at once.
BRIGHAM YOUNG LAMECH.
ISLES OF GREECE.—I defy the Jersey Lighting to knock me out while your
Benzine Bitters are in the ring. “A good thing; push it along.”
SULLIVAN AJAX.
Leaving the realm of conjecture, it is quite certain that the “pitch”
which coated the ark and the “slime” of the builders of Babel were
products of petroleum. Genesis affirms that “the vale of Siddim was full
of slime-pits”—language too direct to be dismissed by hinting vaguely at
“the mistakes of Moses.” Deuteronomy speaks of “oil out of the flinty
rock” and Micah puts the pointed query: “Will the Lord be pleased with *
* * ten thousands of rivers of oil?” To the three friends who condoled
with him in his grievous visitation of boils the patriarch of Uz
asserted: “And the rock poured me out rivers of oil.” Whatever his
hearers might think of this apparent stretch of fancy, Job’s forecast of
the oleaginous output was singularly felicitous. Evidently the
Old-Testament writers, whose wise heads geology had not muddled, knew a
good deal about the petroleum situation in their day.
[Illustration: Well, this beats the deuce!]
A follower of Voltaire was accustomed to wind up his assaults on
inspiration by criticising these oily quotations unmercifully. “Could
anything be more absurd,” he would ask, “than to talk of ‘oil from a
flinty rock’ and ‘rocks pouring forth rivers of oil?’ If anything were
needed to prove the Bible a fool-book from start to finish, such
utterances would settle the matter beyond dispute. Rocks yielding rivers
of oil cap the climax of ridiculous nonsense! Next they’ll want folks to
believe that Jonah swallowed the whale, hair and hide and breeches.
Bah!”
Months and years passed away swiftly, as they have a habit of doing, and
the sturdy agnostic continued arguing pluckily. At length tidings of
oil-wells flowing thousands of barrels of crude reached him from William
Penn’s broad heritage. He came, he saw and, unlike Julius Cæsar, he
surrendered unconditionally. Remarking, “This beats the deuce!” the
doubter doubted no more. He revised his opinions, humbly accepted the
gospel and professed religion, openly and above-board. Hence the
petroleum-development is entitled to the credit of one notable
conversion, at least, and the balance is on the right side of the
ledger, assuming that a human soul outweighs the terrestrial globe in
the unerring scales of the Infinite.
Can they be wrong, who think the stingy soul
That grudges honest toil its scanty dole
Not worth its weight in slaty, sulphur coal?
Whether petroleum, which literally signifies “rock-oil,” be of mineral,
vegetable or animal origin matters little to the producer or consumer,
who views it from a commercial standpoint. In its natural state it is a
variable mixture of numerous liquid hydro-carbons, holding in solution
paraffine and solid bitumen, or asphaltum. The fountains of Is, on the
Euphrates, were familiar to the founders of Babylon, who secured
indestructible mortar for the walls of the city by pouring melted
asphaltum between the blocks of stone. These famous springs attracted
the attention of Alexander, Trajan and Julian. Even now asphaltum
procured from them is sold in the adjacent villages. The commodity is
skimmed off the saline and sulphurous waters and solidified by
evaporation. The ancient Egyptians used another form of the same
substance in preparing mummies, probably obtaining their supplies from a
spring on the Island of Zante, described by Herodotus. It was flowing in
his day, it is flowing to-day, and a citizen of Boston owns the
property. Wells drilled near the Suez canal in 1885 found petroleum. So
the gay world jogs on. Mummified Pharaohs are burned as fuel to drive
locomotives over the Sahara, while the Zantean fount whose oil besmeared
“the swathed and bandaged carcasses” is purchased by a Massachusetts
bean-eater! Yet victims of “that tired feeling” turn to namby-pamby
novels of the Laura-Jean-Libby brand for real romance!
“For truth is strange, stranger than fiction.”
Asphaltum is found in the Dead Sea, the supposed site of Sodom and
Gomorrah, and on the surface of a chain of springs along its banks, far
below the level of the ocean. Strabo referred to this remarkable feature
two thousand years ago. The destruction of the two ill-fated cities may
have been connected with, if not caused by, vast natural stores of this
inflammable petroleum. The immense accumulations of hardened rock-oil in
the center and on the banks of the sea were oxidized into rosin-like
asphalt. Pieces picked up from the waters are frequently carved, in the
convents of Jerusalem, into ornaments, which retain an oily flavor.
Aristotle, Josephus and Pliny mention similar deposits at Albania, on
the shores of the Adriatic. Dioscorides Pedanius, the Greek historian,
tells how the citizens of Agrigentum, in Sicily, burned petroleum in
rude lamps prior to the birth of Christ. For two centuries it lighted
the streets of Genoa and Parma, in northern Italy. Plutarch describes a
lake of blazing petroleum near Ecbatana. Persian wells have produced oil
liberally for ages, under the name of “naphtha,” the descendants of
Cyrus, Darius and Xerxes consuming the fluid for its light. The earliest
records of China refer to petroleum and small quantities have been found
in Thibet. An oil-fountain on one of the Ionian Islands has gushed
steadily for over twenty centuries, without once going on a strike or
taking a vacation. Austria and France likewise possess oil-springs of
considerable importance. Thomas Shirley, in 1667, tested the contents of
a shallow pit in Lancashire, England, which burned readily. Rev. John
Clayton visited it and wrote in 1691:
“I saw a ditch where the water burned like brandy. Country-folk boil
eggs and meat in it.”
Near Bitche, a small fort perched on the top of a peak, at the entrance
of one of the defiles of Lorraine, opening into the Vosges Mountains-a
fort which was of great embarrassment to the Prussians in their last
French campaign—and in the valley guarded by this fortress stand the
chateau and village of Walsbroun, so named from a strange spring in the
forest behind it. In the middle ages this fountain was famous.
Inscriptions, ancient coins and the relics of a Roman road attest that
it had been celebrated even in earlier times. In the sixteenth century a
basin and bath for sick people existed. No record of its abandonment has
been preserved. In the last century it was rediscovered by a medical
antiquarian, who found the naphtha, or white petroleum, almost
exhausted.
Nine years ago Adolph Schreiner died in a Vienna hospital, destitute and
alone. Yet he was the only son of a man known in Galicia as “the
Petroleum King” and founder of the great industry of oil-refining. The
father shared the lot of many inventors and benefactors, increasing the
world’s wealth untold millions and poverty-stricken himself in his last
days. Schreiner owned a piece of ground near Baryslaw from which he took
a black, tarry muck the peasants used to heal wounds and grease
cart-axles. He kneaded a ball from the slime, stuck a wick into it and a
red flame burned until the substance exhausted. This was _the first
petroleum-lamp_! Later Schreiner heard of distillation, filled a kettle
with the black earth and placed it on the fire. The ooze boiled over and
exploded, shivering the kettle and covering the zealous experimenter
with deep scars. He improved his apparatus, produced the petroleum of
commerce and sold bottles of the fluid to druggists in 1853. He drilled
the first Galician oil-well in 1856 and built a real refinery, which
fire destroyed in 1866. He rebuilt the works on a larger scale and fire
blotted them out, ruining the owner. Gray hairs and feebleness had come,
he ceased the struggle, drank to excess and died in misery. His son,
from whom much was expected, failed as a merchant and peddled matches in
Vienna from house to house, just as the aged brother of Signor Blitz,
the world-famed conjuror, is doing in Harrisburg to-day. Dying at last
in a public hospital, kindred nor friends followed the poor outcast to a
pauper’s grave. “Vanity of vanities, all is vanity and vexation of
spirit.”
Life’s page holds each man’s autograph—
Each has his time to cry or laugh,
Each reaps his share of grain or chaff,
But all at last the dregs must quaff—
The tombstone holds their epitaph.
[Illustration: OIL IN SUMATRA.]
Around the volcanic isles of Cape Verde oil floats on the water and to
the south of Vesuvius rises through the Mediterranean, exactly as when
“the morning stars sang together.” Hanover, in Germany, boasts the most
northerly of European “earth-oils.” The islands of the Ottoman
Archipelago and Syria are richly endowed with the same product. Roumania
is literally flowing with petroleum, which oozes from the Carpathians
and pollutes the water-springs. Turkish domination has hindered the
development of the Roumanian region. Southern Australia is blessed with
bituminous shales, resembling those in Scotland, good for sixty gallons
of petroleum to the ton. The New-Zealanders obtained a meager supply
from the hill-sides, collecting carefully the droppings from the
interior rocks, and several test-wells have resulted satisfactorily. The
unsophisticated Sumatrans, whose straw-huts and squeaky music rendered
the Javanese village at the Columbian Exposition a tip-top novelty,
stick pipes in rocks and hills that trickle petroleum and let the liquid
drop upon their heads until their bodies are sleek and slippery as an
eel. Chauncey F. Lufkin, of Lima, Ohio, inventor of the “Disk Powers”
that make oil-wells almost pump themselves, says it is funnier than a
three-ringed circus to watch a group of half-clad girls and women,
two-thirds of them carrying babies, taking turns at this operation. He
has traveled through the oil-fields of Sumatra, India and Russia and his
kodak has reproduced many odd scenes for the delectation of his friends.
Two companies drilling in Java propose to find out all about its
oil-resources as quickly as the tools can reach the decisive spot.
Ultimately Java coffee may be tinged with an oily flavor that will
tickle the palates of consumers and set them wondering how the new aroma
escaped their notice so persistently. Verily, “no pent-up Utica
confines” petroleum within the narrow compass of a nation or a
continent. With John Wesley it may exultingly exclaim: “The whole earth
is my parish,” or echo the Shakespearean refrain: “The world’s mine
oyster.”
J. W. Stewart, of Clarion, has been in Africa drilling for oil. An
English syndicate is behind the enterprise and test-wells are to be
bored in the goldfields on the southern coast. Stewart, who returned
lately, says it is amusing to see the monkeys climb up a derrick and
watch the drillers at work. Just how amused they will be, if the
Englishmen strike a spouter that drenches the monkeys and the derrick,
each must diagram for himself until the result of carrying the
petroleum-war into Africa is decided. C. E. Seavill, since 1874
mining-and-land agent at Kimberley, in the diamond-fields of South
Africa, has organized a company with seventy-five-thousand dollars
capital to operate at Ceres, eighty miles north of Cape Town. He has
leased enormous tracts of land, which American experts pronounce likely
to prove rich oil-territory, and the first well will be drilled at a
spot selected by W. W. Van Ness, of New York, an authority on petroleum.
Mr. Seavill spent years endeavoring to educate the people up to the
notion that South Africa might be good for something besides gold and
precious stones. A series of gushers in the Ceres district, big enough
to discount yellow nuggets and sparkling gems, should be the fitting
reward of his enterprise. Perhaps Heber’s missionary-hymn may yet start
like this, when the Hottentots pose as oil-operators:
From Java’s spicy mountains,
From Afric’s golden strand,
Come tales of oily fountains
Roll’d up by the third sand.
[Illustration: OIL-WELLS IN INDIA.]
The Rangoon district of India long yielded four-hundred-thousand
hogsheads annually, the Hindoos using the oil to heal diseases, to
preserve timber and to cremate corpses. Birma has been supplied from
this source for an unknown period. The liquid, which is of a
greenish-brown color and resembles lubricating-oil in density, gathers
in pits sunk twenty to ninety feet in beds of sandy clays, overlying
slates and sandstones. Clumsy pots or buckets, operated by quaint
windlasses, hoist the oil slowly to the mouth of the pits, whence it is
often carried across the country in leathern bags, borne on men’s
shoulders, or in earthern jars, packed into carts drawn by oxen. Major
Michael Symes, ambassador to the Court of Ava in 1765, published a
narrative of his sojourn, in which is this passage:
“We rode until two o’clock, at which hour we reached Yaynangheomn, or
Petroleum Creek. * * * The smell of the oil is extremely offensive. It
was nearly dark when we approached the pits. There seemed to be a great
many pits within a small compass. Walking to the nearest, we found the
aperture about four feet square and the sides lined, as far as we could
see down, with timber. The oil is drawn up in an iron-pot, fastened to a
rope passed over a wooden cylinder, which revolves on an axis supported
by two upright posts. When the pot is filled, two men take hold of the
rope by the end and run down a declivity, which is cut in the ground, to
a distance equal to the depth of the well. When they reach the end of
the track the pot is raised to its proper elevation; the contents, water
and oil together, are discharged into a cistern, and the water is
afterward drawn through a hole in the bottom. * * * When a pit yielded
as much as came up to the waist of a man, it was deemed tolerably
productive; if it reached his neck it was abundant, and that which
reached no higher than his knee was accounted indifferent.”
Labor-saving machinery has not forged to the front to any great degree
in the oil-fields of the East Indies. For the Burmese trade flat-boats
ascend the Irrawaddy to Rainanghong, a town inhabited almost exclusively
by the potters who make the earthen jars in which the oil is kept for
this peculiar traffic. The methods of saving and handling the greasy
staple have not changed one iota since John the Baptist wore his suit of
camel’s-hair and curry-combed the Sadducees in the Judean wilderness.
Progress cuts no ice beneath the shadows of the Himalayas,
notwithstanding the missionary efforts of Xavier, Judson, Carey,
Morrison and Duff.
[Illustration: GROUP OF NATIVE OIL-OPERATORS IN INDIA DOWN FROM THE
HILLS.]
Petroleum in India occurs in middle or lower tertiary rock. In the
Rawalpindi district of the Panjab it is found at sixteen localities. At
Gunda a well yielded eleven gallons a day for six months, from a boring
eighty feet deep, and one two-hundred feet deep, at Makum, produced a
hundred gallons an hour. The coast of Arakan and the adjacent islands
have long been famed for mud-volcanoes caused by the eruption of
hydrocarbon gases. Forty-thousand gallons a year of petroleum have been
exported by the natives from Kyoukpyu. The oil is light and pure. In
1877 European enterprise was attracted to this industry and in 1879 work
was undertaken by the Borongo Oil-Co. The company started on a large
scale and in 1883 had twenty-four wells in operation, ranging from
five-hundred to twelve-hundred feet in depth, one yielding for a few
weeks one-thousand gallons daily. The total pumped from ten wells during
the year was a quarter-million gallons; and in 1884 the company had to
suspend payment. Large supplies of high-class petroleum might be
obtained from this region, if suitable methods of working were employed.
[Illustration: WOMEN IN JAPAN CARRYING OIL ON THEIR BACKS.]
Japan also takes a position in the oleiferous procession allied to that
of the yellow dog under the band-wagon. At the base of Fuji-Yama, a
mountain of respectable altitude, the thrifty subjects of the Mikado
manage a cluster of oil-pits in the style practiced by their
forefathers. The mirv holes, the creaking apparatus and the general
surroundings are second editions of the Rangoon exhibits. Yum-Yum’s
countrymen are clever students and they have much to learn concerning
petroleum. Twenty-one years ago a Japanese nobleman inspected the
Pennsylvania oil-fields, sent thither to report to the government all
about the American system of operating the territory. His observations,
embodied in an official statement, failed to amend the moss-grown
processes of the Fuji-Yamans, who preferred to “fight it out on the old
line if it took all summer.” Two others followed on a similar mission in
1897. Fifty wells, from one thousand to eighteen hundred feet deep, are
producing in the Echigo province of Japan. The largest flowed
five-hundred barrels the first day, declining to eight or ten, the
customary average. The sand is white and the oil is of two grades, one
amber of 38° gravity, the other much darker and of 310 gravity. The
methods of refining and transporting are of the rudest, women carrying
the crude from the wells on their backs as squaws in North America tote
their papooses.
[Illustration: S. G. BAYNE.]
In 1874 S. G. Bayne, now president of the Seaboard Bank of New-York
City, visited these oriental regions. The hard fate of the benighted
heathen moved him to briny tears. They had never heard or read of “the
annealed steel coupling,” “the Palm link,” the tubing, casing, engines
and boilers the distinguished tourist had planted in every nook and
corner of Oildom. With the spirit of a true philanthropist, Bayne
determined to “set them on a higher plane.” His choicest Hindostanee
persiflage was aired in detailing the advantages of the Pennsylvania
plan of running the petroleum-machine. Tales of fortunes won on Oil
Creek and the Allegheny River were garnished with scintillations of
Irish wit that ought to have convulsed the listeners. Alas! the supine
Asiatics were not built that way and the good seed fell upon barren
soil. The story and, despite the finest lacquer and veneer
embellishments, the experience were repeated in Japan. What better could
be expected of pagans who wore skirts for full-dress, practiced
hari-kari and knew not a syllable about Brian Boru? Their conduct was
another convincing evidence of “the stern Calvinistic doctrine” of total
depravity. The Japs voted to stay in their venerable rut and not monkey
with the Yankee buzz-saw. “And the band played on.”
Years afterwards two cars of drilling-tools and well-machinery were
shipped to Calcutta and a couple of complete rigs to Yeddo—“only this
and nothing more.” The genial Bayne attempted to square the account by
printing his eastern adventures and sending marked copies of
translations to the Indo-Japanese press. Doubtless the waste-basket
received what the office-cat spared of this unusual consignment. Mr.
Bayne began his prosperous career as an oilman by striking a snug well
in 1869, on Pine Creek, near Titusville. He has written a book on
Astronomy which twinkles with gobs of astral science Copernicus,
Herschell, Leverrier, Proctor or Maria Mitchell never dreamed of. His
unique advertisements have spread his fame from the Atlantic to the
Pacific. Digest these random samples of originality worthy of John J.
Ingalls:
“We never make kite-track records; our speed takes in the full circle.”
“The graveyards of the enemy are the monuments of our success.”
“We never speak of our goods without glancing at the bust of George
Washington which squats on the top of our annealed steel safe; a
twenty-five cent plaster cast of George lends an atmosphere of veracity
to a trade which in these days it sometimes needs.”
“Abdul Azis, the late Sultan of Morocco, bought a cheap boiler to drill
a water-well. It bu’st and he is now Abdul Azwas.”
“We will never be buried with the ‘unknown dead’—we advertise.”
“Our patent coupling is the precipitated vapor of fermented progress.”
“The intellectual and æsthetic are provided for in consanguinity to
their taste.”
“Our conversational soloists never descend to orthochromatic photography
in their orphean flights; they hug the shore of plain Anglo-Saxon and
scoop the doubting Thomas.”
“It will never do to shake a man because the lambrequins begin to appear
on the bottom of his pants and he wears a ‘dickey’ with a sinker.”
“The Forget-me-nots of to-day are frequently found the Has-beens of
to-morrow.”
“Credit is the flower that blooms in life’s buttonhole.”
“Many a man who now gives dinner-parties in a Queen-Anne front would be
nibbling his Frankfurter in a Mary-Ann back had we not given him a
helping hand at the right moment.”
[Illustration: CLASSIC GROUND OF PETROLEUM.]
The classic ground of Petroleum is the little peninsula of Okestra,
jutting into the Caspian Sea. Extraordinary indications of oil and gas
extend over a strip of country twenty-five miles long by a half-mile
wide, in porous sandstone. Springs of heavier petroleum flow from hills
of volcanic rocks in the vicinity. Open wells, in which the oil settles
as it oozes from the rocks, are dug sixteen to twenty feet deep. For
countless generations the simple natives dipped up the sticky fluid and
carried it great distances on their backs, to burn in its crude state,
besides sending a large amount yearly to the Shah’s dominions. It is a
forbidding spot-rocky, desolate, without a stream or a sign of
vegetation. The unfruitful soil is saturated with oil, which exudes from
the neighboring hills and sometimes filters into receptacles hewn in the
rock at a prehistoric epoch. On gala days it was part of the program to
pour the oil into the Caspian and set it ablaze, until the sea and land
and sky appeared one unbroken mass of vivid, lurid, roaring flame. The
“pillar of fire” which guided the wandering Israelites by night could
scarcely have presented a grander spectacle. The sight might well convey
to awe-stricken beholders intensely realistic notions of the place of
punishment Col. Ingersoll and Henry Ward Beecher have sought by tongue
and pen to abolish. “Old Nick,” however, at last advices was still doing
a wholesale business at the old stand!
Near Belegan, six miles from the chief village of the Baku district, the
grandest of these superb exhibitions was given in 1817. A column of
flame, six-hundred yards in diameter, broke out naturally, hurling rocks
for days together and raising a mound nine-hundred feet high. The roar
of steaming brine was terrific. Oil and gas rise wherever a hole is
bored. The sides of the mountain are black with dark exudations, while a
spring of white oil issues from the foot. A clay-pipe or hollow reed,
steeped in lime water and set upright in the floor of a dwelling, serves
as a sufficient gas-pipe. No wonder such a land as Baku, where in the
fissures of the earth and rock the naphtha-vapors flicker into flame,
where a boiling lake is covered with flame devoid of sensible heat,
where after the autumn showers the surrounding country seems wrapped in
fire, where the October moon lights up with an azure tint the entire
west and Mount Paradise dons a robe of fiery red, where innumerable jets
envelope the plains on moonless nights, where all the phenomena of
distillation and combustion can be studied, should have aroused the
religious sentiment of oriental mystics. The adoring Parsee and the
cold-blooded chemist might worship cheek-by-jowl. Amidst this devouring
element men live and love, are born and die, plant onions and raise
sheep, as in more prosaic regions.
At the southern extremity of the peninsula oil and gas shot upward in a
huge pyramid of light. Here was “the eternal fire of Aaku,” burning
two-thousand-years as when Zoroaster reverently beheld it and flame
became the symbol of Deity to the entranced Parsees. Here the poor
Gheber gathered the fuel to feed the sacred fire which burned
perpetually upon his altar. Hither devout pilgrims journeyed even from
far-off Cathay, to do homage and bear away a few drops of the precious
oil, before the wolf had suckled Romulus or Nebuchadnezzar had been
turned out to pasture. The “Eternal Fire,” unquenched for twenty-five
centuries, the digging of wells that tapped its supply of fuel put out a
generation ago. Modern greed, respecting neither ancient association nor
religious sentiment, drew too lavishly upon the bountiful stock that fed
throughout the ages the grandest flame in history. At Lourakhanel, not
far from Baku, is a temple built by the fire-worshipers. The sea in
places has such quantities of gas that it can be lighted and burned on
the surface of the water until extinguished by a strong wind. Strange
destiny of petroleum, first and last, to be the panderer of
idolatry—fire-worship in the olden time, mammon-worship in this era of
the “Almighty Dollar!”
Developments from Baku to the region north of the Black Sea,
seven-hundred miles westward, have revealed vast deposits of petroleum.
Hundreds of wells have been drilled, some flowing one-hundred-thousand
barrels a day! Nobel Brothers’ No. 50, which commenced to spout in 1886,
kept a stream rising four-hundred feet into the air for seventeen
months, yielding three million barrels. This would fill a ditch five
feet wide, six feet deep, and a hundred miles long. These monsters eject
tons of sand daily, which piles up in high mounds. Stones weighing forty
pounds have been thrown out. The common way of obtaining the oil is to
raise it by means of long metal-cylinders with trap-bottoms. Pumps are
impossible on account of the fine sand coming up with the oil. These
cylinders, which will hold from one to four barrels, on being raised to
the surface are discharged into pipes or ditches. Each trip of the
bucket or cylinder takes a minute-and-a-half and the well is worked day
and night. The average daily yield of a Russian well is about
two-hundred barrels.
Pipe-lines, refineries and railroads have been provided and the three
big companies operating the whole field consolidated in 1893. The
Rothschilds combined with the Nobels and a prohibitory tariff prevents
the importation of foreign oils. Tank-steamers ply the Caspian Sea and
the Volga, many of the railways use the crude-oil for fuel and the
supply is practically unlimited. The petroleum-products are carried in
these steamers to a point at the mouth of the Volga River called Davit
Foot, about four-hundred miles north of Baku and ninety miles from
Astrakhan, and transferred into barges. These are towed by small
tug-boats to the various distributing points on the Volga, where tanks
have been constructed for railway-shipments. The chief distributing
point upon the Volga is Tsaritzin, but there is also tankage at Saratof,
Kazan, and Nijni-Novgorod. From these points it is distributed all over
Russia in tank-cars. Some is exported to Germany and to Austria. Russian
refined may not be as good an illuminant as the American, but it is made
to burn well enough for all purposes and emits no disagreeable odor.
After taking from crude thirty per-cent. illuminating distillate, about
fifteen per-cent. is taken from the residuum. It is called “solar oil”
and the lubricating-oil distillate is next taken off. From this
distillate a very good lubricant is obtained, affected neither by
intense heat nor cold. The lubricating oil is made in Baku, but great
quantities of the distillate are shipped to England, France, Belgium and
Germany and there purified.
Russian competition was for years the chief danger that confronted
American producers. Three partial cargoes of petroleum were sent to the
United States as an experiment, netting a snug profit. Heaven favors the
hustler from Hustlerville, who hoes his own row and doesn’t squat on a
stump expecting the cow will walk up to be milked, and American oilmen
are not easily downed. They have perfected such improvements in
handling, transporting, refining and marketing their product that the
major portion of Europe and Asia, outside of the czar’s dominions, is
their customer. Nailing their colors to the mast and keeping their
powder dry, the oil-interests of this glorious climate don’t propose to
quit barking until the last dog is dead!
The early Persians and Tartars burned crude-oil for light in stoneware
jugs, with a spout on one side to hold the flax-wick, that answered the
purpose of lamps. In 1851 a chemist of Polish Austria exhibited a small
quantity of distilled petroleum at the World’s Fair in London. The
Austrian Emperor rewarded this step towards refining crude-oil by making
the chemist a prince.
All these things prove conclusively that petroleum is a veritable
antique, always known and prized by millions of people in Asia, Africa
and Europe, and not a mushroom upstart. Indeed, its pedigree sizes up to
the most exacting Philadelphia requirement. Mineralogists think it was
quietly distilling “underneath the ground” when the majestic fiat went
forth: “Let there be light!” Happily “age does not wither nor custom
stale the infinite variety” of its admirable qualities. Neither is it a
hot-house exotic, adapted merely to a single clime or limited to one
favored section of any country. It is scattered widely throughout the
two hemispheres, its range of usefulness is extending constantly and it
is not put up in retail packages, that exhaust speedily. Alike in the
tropics and the zones, beneath cloudless Italian skies and the bleak
Russian firmament, amid the flowery vales of Cashmere and the
snow-crowned heights of the Caucasus, by the banks of the turbid Ganges
and the shores of the limpid Danube, this priceless boon has ever
contributed to the comfort and convenience of mankind.
The Star in the East was crowding into line as the full orb of day.
A PETROLEUM IDYL.
A ragged street-Arab, taken to Sunday-school by a kind teacher, heard
for the first time the story of Christ’s boundless love and sufferings.
Big tears coursed down his grimy cheeks, until he could no longer
restrain his feelings. Springing upon the seat, the excited urchin threw
his tattered cap to the ceiling and screamed “Hurrah for Jesus!” It was
an honest, sincere, reverent tribute, which the Recording Angel must
have been delighted to note. In like manner, considering its wondrous
past, its glowing present and its prospective future, men, women and
children everywhere, while profoundly grateful to the Divine Benefactor
for the transcendent gift, may fittingly join in a universal “Hurrah for
Petroleum!”
[Illustration:
WELL AT BAKU, RUSSIA, FLOWING 50,000 BARRELS
A DAY, THROUGH A 16-INCH PIPE.
]
Don’t make the mistake that Petroleum,
Like the kodak, the bike, or linoleum,
Is something decidedly new;
Whereas it was known in the Garden
When Eve, in fig-leaf Dolly Varden
Gave Adam an apple to chew.
Nor deem it a human invention,
By reason of newspaper-mention
Just lately commanding attention,
Because it is Nature’s own brew.
Repeatedly named in the Bible,
Let none its antiquity libel
Or seek to explain it away.
It garnish’d Methuselah’s table,
Was used by the builders of Babel
And pilgrims from distant Cathay;
When Pharaoh and Moses were chummy
It help’d preserve many a mummy,
Still dreadfully life-like and gummy,
In Egypt’s stone-tombs from decay!
At Baku Jove’s thunderbolts fir’d it,
Devout Zoroaster admir’d it
As Deity symbol’d in flame;
Parsees from the realms of Darius,
Unweariedly earnest and pious,
Adoring and worshipping came.
It cur’d Noah’s Ham of trichina,
Greas’d babies and pig-tails in China,
Heal’d Arabs from far-off Medina—
The blind and the halt and the lame!
Herodotus saw it at Zante,
It blazed in the visions of Dante
And pyres of supine Hindostan;
The tropics and zones have rich fountains,
It bubbles ’mid snow cover’d mountains
And flows in the pits of Japan.
Confin’d to no country or nation,
A blessing to God’s whole creation
For light, heat and prime lubrication,
All hail to this grand gift to man!
[Illustration: TEMPLE OF THE FIRE-WORSHIPPERS AT LOURAKHANEL, NEAR
BAKU.]
[Illustration: BURNING OF OIL IN THE BOGADOFF SHIPPING-YARD, RUSSIA.]
[Illustration: VIEW OF WELLS AT BAKANY, IN THE RUSSIAN OIL-FIELD.]
II.
A GLIMMER IN THE WEST.
NUMEROUS INDICATIONS OF OIL ON THIS CONTINENT—LAKE OF
ASPHALTUM—PETROLEUM SPRINGS IN NEW YORK AND PENNSYLVANIA—HOW HISTORY
IS MANUFACTURED—PIONEERS DIPPING AND UTILIZING THE PRECIOUS
FLUID—TOMBSTONE LITERATURE—PATHETIC EPISODE—SINGULAR STRIKE—GEOLOGY
TRIES TO EXPLAIN A KNOTTY POINT.
----------
“Thou who wouldst see where dawned the light at last must westward
go.”—_Edwin Arnold._
“America is the Lord’s darling.”—_Dr. Talmage._
“Thee, hid the bowering vales amidst, I call.”—_Euripides._
“A Mercury is not to be carved out of every wood.”—_Latin Proverb._
“Never no duck wasn’t hatched by a drake.”—_Hall Caine._
“Near the Niagara is an oil-spring known to the Indians.”—_De la Roche
D’Allion, A. D. 1629._
“There is a fountain at the head of the Ohio, the water of which is like
oil, has a taste of iron and seems to appease pain.”—_Captain de
Joncaire, A. D. 1721._
“It is light bottled up for tens-of-thousands of years—light absorbed by
plants and vegetables. * * * And now, after being buried long ages,
that latent light is again brought forth and made to work for human
purposes.”—_Stephenson._
“It is not a farthing glim in a bedroom.”—_Charles Reade._
“The west glimmers with some streaks of day.”—_Shakespeare._
“Even the night shall be light about me.”—_Psalms cxxxix: 11._
----------
The Land Columbus ran against, by anticipating Horace Greeley’s advice
to “Go West,” was not neglected in the unstinted distribution of
petroleum. It abounds in South America, in the West Indies, the United
States and Canada. The most extensive and phenomenal natural fountain of
petroleum ever known is on the Island of Trinidad. Hot bitumen has
filled a basin four miles in circumference, three-quarters of a mile
from the sea, estimated to contain the equivalent of ten-millions of
barrels of crude-oil. The liquid boils up continually, observing no
holidays or Sundays, seething and foaming at the center of the lake,
cooling and thickening as it recedes, and finally becoming solid
asphaltum. The bubbling, hissing, steaming caldron emits a sulphurous
odor, perceptible for ten or twelve miles and decidedly suggestive of
the orthodox Hades. Humboldt in 1799 reported his impressions of this
spontaneous marvel, in producing which the puny hand of man had no
share. From it is derived the dark, tough, semi-elastic material, first
utilized in Switzerland for this purpose, which paves the streets of
scores of cities. Few stop to reflect, as they glide over the noiseless
surface on whirling bicycles or behind prancing steeds, that the smooth
asphaltum pavements and the clear “water-white” in the piano-lamp have a
common parentage. Yet bloomers and pantaloons, twin-creations of the
tailor, or diamonds and coal, twin-links of carbon, are not related more
closely.
“Even men and monkeys may be kin.”
The earliest printed reference to petroleum in America is by Joseph de
la Roche D’Allion, a Franciscan missionary who crossed the Niagara river
from Canada in 1629 and wrote of oil, in what is now New York, known to
the Indians and by them given a name signifying “plenty there.” Likely
this was the petroleum occupying cavities in fossils at Black Rock,
below Buffalo, in sufficient abundance to be an object of commerce.
Concerning the celebrated oil-spring of the Seneca Indians near Cuba, N.
Y., which D’Allion may also have seen, Prof. Benjamin Silliman in 1833
said:
“This is situated in the western part of the county of Alleghany, in the
state of New York. This county is the third from Lake Erie on the south
line of the state, the counties of Cattaraugus and Chautauqua lying west
and forming the southwestern termination of the state of New York. The
spring is very near the line which divides Alleghany and Cattaraugus. *
* * The country is rather mountainous, but the road running between the
ridges is very good and leads through a cultivated region rich in soil
and picturesque in scenery. Its geographical formation is the same as
that which is known to prevail in the western region; a silicious
sandstone with shale, and in some places limestone, is the immediate
basis of the country. * * * The oil-spring or fountain rises in the
midst of a marshy ground. It is a muddy, dirty pool of about eighteen
feet in diameter and is nearly circular in form. There is no outlet
above ground, no stream flowing from it, and it is, of course, a
stagnant water, with no other circulation than than which springs from
the changes in temperature and from the gas and petroleum that are
constantly rising through the pool.
“We are told that the odor of petroleum is perceived at a distance in
approaching the spring. This may be true in particular states of the
wind, but we did not distinguish any peculiar smell until we arrived on
the edge of the fountain. Here its peculiar character became very
obvious. The water is covered with a thin layer of petroleum or mineral
oil, as if coated with dirty molasses, having a yellowish-brown color.
“They collect the petroleum by skimming it like cream from a milk-pan.
For this purpose they use a broad, flat board, made thin at one edge
like a knife; it is moved flat upon and just under the surface of the
water and is soon covered by a coating of petroleum, which is so thick
and adhesive that it does not fall off, but is removed by scraping the
instrument upon the lip of a cup. It has then a very foul appearance,
but it is purified by heating and straining it while hot through
flannel. It is used by the people of the vicinity for sprains and
rheumatism and for sores on their horses.”
The “muddy, dirty pool” was included in an Indian reservation, one mile
square, leased in 1860 by Allen, Bradley & Co., who drove a pipe into
the bog. At thirty feet oil began to spout to the tune of
a-barrel-an-hour, a rhythm not unpleasing to the owners of the venture.
The flow continued several weeks and then “stopped short, never to go
again.” Other wells followed to a greater depth, none of them proving
sufficiently large to give the field an orchestra-chair in the
petroleum-arena.
It is told of a jolly Cuban, wearing a skull innocent of garbage as
Uncle Ned’s, who “had no wool on the top of his head in the place where
the wool ought to grow,” that he applied oil from the “dirty pool” to an
ugly swelling on the apex of his bare cranium. The treatment lasted a
month, by which time a crop of brand-new hair had begun to sprout. The
welcome growth meant business and eventually thatched the roof of the
happy subject with a luxuriant vegetation that would have turned
Paderewski, Absalom, or the most ambitious foot-ball kicker green with
envy! Tittlebat Titmouse, over whose excruciating experiences with the
“Cyanochaitanthropopoion” that dyed his locks a bright emerald readers
of “Ten-Thousand a Year” have laughed consumedly, was “not in it”
compared with the transformed denizen of the pretty village nestling
amid the hills of the Empire State. Those inclined to pronounce this a
bald-headed fabrication may see for themselves the precise spot the
mud-hole furnishing the oil occupied prior to the advent of the prosaic,
unsentimental driving-pipe.
Captain de Joncaire, a French officer in colonial days, who had charge
of military operations on the Upper Ohio and its tributaries in 1721,
reported “a fountain at the head of a branch of the Ohio, the water of
which is like oil.” Undoubtedly this was the same “fountain” referred to
in the _Massachusetts Magazine_ for July, 1791, as follows:
“In the northern part of Pennsylvania is a creek called Oil Creek, which
empties into the Allegheny river. It issues from a spring on which
floats an oil similar to that called Barbadoes tar, and from which one
may gather several gallons a day. The troops sent to guard the western
posts halted at this spring, collected some of the oil and bathed their
joints with it. This gave them great relief from the rheumatism, with
which they were afflicted.”
[Illustration: OIL-SPRING ON OIL CREEK.]
The history of petroleum in America commences with the use the pioneer
settlers found the red-men made of it for medicine and for painting
their dusky bodies. The settlers adopted its medicinal use and retained
for various affluents of the Allegheny the Indian name of Oil Creek.
Both natives and whites collected the oil by spreading blankets on the
marshy pools along the edges of the bottom-lands at the foot of steep
hill-sides or of mountain-walls that hem in the valleys supporting
coal-measures above. The remains of ancient pits on Oil Creek-the Oil
Creek ordained to become a household word—lined with timbers and
provided with notched logs for ladders, show how for generations the
aborigines had valued and stored the product. Some of these queer
reservoirs, choked with leaves and dirt accumulated during hundreds of
years, bore trees two centuries old. Many of them, circular, square,
oblong and oval, sunk in the earth fifteen to twenty feet and strongly
cribbed, have been excavated. Their number and systematic arrangement
attest that petroleum was saved in liberal quantities by a race
possessing in some degree the elements of civilization. The oil has
preserved the timbers from the ravages of decay, “to point a moral or
adorn a tale,” and they are as sound to-day as when cut down by hands
that crumbled into dust ages ago.
Scientists worry and perspire over “the mound-builders” and talk glibly
about “a superior race anterior to the Indians,” while ignoring the
relics of a tribe smart enough to construct enduring storehouses for
petroleum. People who did such work and filled such receptacles with oil
were not slouches who would sell their souls for whiskey and their
forest-heritage for a string of glass-beads. Did they penetrate the rock
for their supply of oil, or skim it drop by drop from the waters of the
stream? Who were they, whence came they and whither have they vanished?
Surely these are conundrums to tax the ingenuity of imaginative solvers
of perplexing riddles. Shall Macaulay’s New-Zealand voyager, after
viewing the ruins of London and flying across the Atlantic, gaze upon
the deserted oil-wells of Venango county a thousand years hence and
wonder what strange creatures, in the dim and musty past, could have
bored post-holes so deep and so promiscuously? Rip Van Winkle was right
in his plaintive wail: “How soon are we forgotten!”
[Illustration: FIRST OIL “SHIPPED” TO PITTSBURG.]
The renowned “spring” which may have supplied these remarkable vats was
located in the middle of Oil Creek, on the McClintock farm, three miles
above Oil City and a short distance below Rouseville. Oil would escape
from the rocks and gravel beneath the creek, appearing like air-bubbles
until it reached the surface and spread a thin film reflecting all the
colors of the rainbow. From shallow holes, dug and walled sometimes in
the bed of the stream, the oil was skimmed and husbanded jealously. The
demand was limited and the enterprise to meet it was correspondingly
modest. Nathanael Cary, the first tailor in Franklin and owner of the
tract adjoining the McClintock, peddled it about the townships early in
the century, when the population was sparse and every good housewife
laid by a bottle of “Seneca Oil” in case of accident or sickness. Cary
would sling two jars or kegs across a faithful horse, belonging to the
class of Don Quixote’s “Rosinante” and too sedate to scare at anything
short of a knickerbockered feminine astride a rubber-tired wheel.
Mounting this willing steed, which transported him steadily as “Jess”
carried the self-denying physician of “Beside the Bonnie Brier-Bush.”
the tailor-peddler went his rounds at irregular intervals. Occasionally
he took a ten-gallon cargo to Pittsburg, riding with it eighty miles on
horseback and trading the oil for cloth and groceries. His memory should
be cherished as the first “shipper” of petroleum to “the Smoky City,”
then a mere cluster of log and frame buildings in a patch of cleared
ground surrounding Fort Pitt. “Things are different now.”
The Augusts, a family living in Cherrytree township and remembered only
by a handful of old residents, followed Cary’s example. Their stock was
procured from springs farther up Oil Creek, especially one near
Titusville, which achieved immortality as the real source of the
petroleum-development that has astounded the civilized world. They sold
the oil for “a quarter-dollar a gill” to the inhabitants of neighboring
townships. The consumption was extremely moderate, a pint usually
sufficing a household for a twelvemonth. Nature’s own remedy, it was
absolutely pure and unadulterated, a panacea for “the thousand natural
shocks that flesh is heir to,” and positively refused to mix with water.
If milk and water were equally unsocial, would not many a dispenser of
the lacteal fluid train with Othello and “find his occupation gone?”
Don’t “read the answer in the stars;” let the overworked pumps in
thousands of barnyards reply!
No latter-day work on petroleum, no book, pamphlet, sketch or magazine
article of any pretensions has failed to reproduce part of a letter
purporting to have been sent in 1750 to General Montcalm, the French
commander who perished at Quebec nine years later, by the commander of
Fort Du Quesne, now Pittsburg. A sherry-cobbler minus the sherry would
have been pronounced less insipid than any oil-publication omitting the
favorite extract. It has been quoted as throwing light upon the
religious character of the Indians and offered as evidence of their
affinity with the fire-worshippers of the orient! Official reports
printed and endorsed it, ministers embodied it in missionary sermons and
it posed as infallible history. This is the paragraph:
“I would desire to assure you that this is a most delightful land. Some
of the most astonishing natural wonders have been discovered by our
people. While descending the Allegheny, fifteen leagues below the mouth
of the Conewango and three above the Venango, we were invited by the
chief of the Senecas to attend a religious ceremony of his tribe. We
landed and drew up our canoes on a point where a small stream entered
the river. The tribe appeared unusually solemn. We marched up the stream
about half-a-league, where the company, a band, it appeared, had arrived
some days before us. Gigantic hills begirt us on every side. The scene
was really sublime. The great chief then recited the conquests and
heroism of their ancestors. The surface of the stream was covered with a
thick scum, which, upon applying a torch at a given signal, burst into a
complete conflagration. At the sight of the flames the Indians gave
forth the triumphant shout that made the hills and valleys re-echo
again. Here, then, is revived the ancient fire-worship of the East;
here, then, are the Children of the Sun.”
The style of this popular composition, in its adaptation to the occasion
and circumstances, rivals Chatterton’s unsurpassed imitations of the
antique. Montcalm was a gallant soldier who lost his life fighting the
English under General Wolfe, the hero whose noble eulogy of the poet
Gray—“I would rather be the author of the ‘Elegy Written in a Country
Churchyard’ than the captor of Quebec”—should alone crown him with
unfading laurels. The commander of Fort Du Quesne also “lived and moved
and had a being.” The Allegheny River meanders as of yore, the Conewango
empties into it at Warren, the “Venango” is the French Creek which joins
the Allegheny at Franklin. The “small stream” up which they marched
“about half-a-league” was Oil Creek and the destination was the
oil-spring of Joncaire and “Nat” Cary. The “gigantic hills” have not
departed, although the “thick scum” is stored in iron tanks. But neither
of the French commanders ever wrote or read or heard of the much-quoted
correspondence, for the excellent reason that it had not been evolved
during their sojourn on this mundane sphere!
Franklin, justly dubbed “The Nursery of Great Men,” gave birth to the
pretty story. Sixty-six years ago a bright young man was admitted to the
bar and opened a law-office in the attractive hamlet at the junction of
the Allegheny River and French Creek. He soon ranked high in his
profession and in 1839 was appointed judge of a special district-court,
created to dispose of accumulated business in Venango, Crawford, Erie
and Mercer counties. The same year a talented divinity-student was
called to the pastorate of the Presbyterian church in Franklin. The
youthful minister and the new judge became warm friends and cultivated
their rare literary tastes by writing for the village-paper, a
six-column weekly. Among others they prepared a series of fictitious
articles, based upon the early settlement of Northwestern Pennsylvania,
designed to whet the public appetite for historic and legendary lore. In
one of these sketches the alleged letter to Montcalm was included.
Average readers supposed the minute descriptions and bold narratives
were rock-ribbed facts, an opinion the authors did not care to
controvert, and at length the “French commander’s letter” began to be
reprinted as actual, bona-fide, name-blown-in-the-bottle history!
[Illustration: REV. NATHANIEL R. SNOWDEN.]
One of the two writers who coined this interesting “fake” was Hon. James
Thompson, the eminent jurist, who learned printing in Butler, practiced
law in Venango county, served three terms—the last as speaker—in the
Legislature and one in Congress, was district-judge six years and sat on
the Supreme bench fifteen years, five of them as chief-justice of this
state. Judge Thompson removed to Erie in 1842 and finally to
Philadelphia. He married a daughter of Rev. Nathaniel R. Snowden, first
pastor of the First Presbyterian church in Harrisburg, in 1794-1803, and
afterwards master of a noted academy at Franklin. Mr. Snowden’s wife was
the daughter of Dr. Gustine, a survivor of the frightful Wyoming
massacre. Their son, an eminent Franklin physician of early times, was
the father of the late Dr. S. Gustine Snowden and of Major-General
George R. Snowden, of Philadelphia, commander of the National-Guard of
Pennsylvania. The good minister died in Armstrong county, descending to
the grave as a shock of wheat fully ripe for the harvest.
[Illustration: COL. ALEXANDER MCDOWELL.]
——“What is death
To him that meets it with an upright heart?
A quiet haven, where his shatter’d bark
Harbors secure till the rough storm is past,
After a passage overhung with clouds.”
Judge Thompson’s literary co-worker was the Rev. Cyrus Dickson, D. D.,
who resigned his first charge in 1848, settled in the east and gained
distinction in the pulpit and as a forcible writer. How thoroughly these
kindred spirits, now happily reunited “beyond the smiling and the
weeping,” must have enjoyed the overwhelming success of their ingenious
plot and laughed at the easy credulity which accepted every line of
their contributions as gospel-truth! They could not fail to relish the
efforts, prompted mainly by their fanciful scene on Oil Creek, to
identify as Children of the Sun the savage braves in buckskin and
moccasins whose noblest conception of heaven was an eternal surfeit of
dog-sausage!
The Indian may be superstitious,
His tastes may be wholly pernicious;
But he bitterly spurns—can we blame him?—
The cranks who are ready to claim him
And with a white pedigree shame him.
Signs of petroleum in the Keystone State were not confined to Oil-Creek.
Ten miles westward, in water-wells and in the bed and near the mouth of
French Creek, the indications were numerous and unmistakable. The first
white man to turn them to account was Marcus Hulings, of Franklin, the
original Charon of Venango county. Each summer he would skim a quart or
two of “earth-oil” from a tiny pond, formed by damming a bit of the
creek, the fluid serving as a liniment and medicine. This was the small
beginning of one whose relative and namesake, two generations later, was
to rank as a leading oil-millionaire. Hulings “ferried” passengers
across the unbridged stream in a bark-canoe and plied a keel-boat to
Pittsburg, the round-trip frequently requiring four weeks. Passengers
were “few and far between,” consequently a book-keeper and a treasurer
were not engaged to take care of the receipts. The proprietor of the
canoe-ferry cleared a number of acres, raised corn and potatoes and
lived in a log-cabin, not far from the site of the brush-factory, which
stood for fifty years after his death. Probably he was buried in the
north-west corner of the old graveyard, beside his wife and son, of whom
two sunken headstones record:
In
memory of
Michael Hulings who
departed this life: the 9th
of August, 1797. Aged
27 years, 1 month &
14 days.
[Illustration]
Massar,
wife of
Marcus Hulings
Died
Feb. 9. 1813.
Aged 67 yrs,
2 ms and 22 ds.
The once hallowed resting-place of many worthy pioneers sadly needs the
kindly ministrations of some “Old Mortality” to replace broken slabs,
restore illegible inscriptions and brush away the obnoxious weeds.
Quaint spelling and lettering and curious epitaphs are not uncommon.
Observe these examples:
In
memory of James
and Catherine Ha
nne Ho departed
this life July 3 1830
JAMES AGED TWO
years one months,
ten days CETHERIN
E AGED two months
and 14 days.
JANE consort of
DAVID KING
who departed this
life. April 14 1829
aged 31 years
O may I see thy tribes rejoic
and aid their triumphs
with my voice this all. my
Glory Lord to be joined to
thy saints and near to. thee
In memory of
Samuel Riddle, Esq.
Born Aug. 4, 1821
At Scrubgrass.
Died May 28, 1853,
At Franklin,
Venango County, Pa.
Here lies an honest lawyer,
Honored and respected living,
Lamented and mourned dead.
Trains on the Lake-Shore Railroad thunder past the lower end of the
quiet “God’s Acre,” close to the mounds of the McDowells, the
Broadfoots, the Bowmans, the Hales and other early settlers, but the
peaceful repose of the dead can be disturbed only by the blast of
Gabriel’s trumpet on the resurrection morning.
The venerable William Whitman, familiarly called “Doctor,” over whose
grave the snows of twenty-five long years have drifted, often told me
how, when a youngster, he carried water to the masons building Colonel
Alexander McDowell’s stone house, on Elk street. He hemmed in a pool on
the edge of French Creek, soaked up the greasy scum with a piece of
flannel, wrung out the cloth and filled several bottles with
dark-looking oil. The masons would swallow doses of it, rub it on their
bruised hands and declare it a sovereign internal and external remedy.
In early manhood Mr. Whitman settled in Canal township, eleven miles
northwest of Franklin, cultivated a farm and reared a large family. It
was the dream of his old age to see oil taken from his own land. In 1866
two wells were drilled on the Williams tract, across the road from
Whitman’s, with encouraging prospects. Depressed prices retarded
operations and these wells remained idle. Four years later my uncle,
George Buchanan, and myself drilled on the Whitman farm. The patriarch
watched the progress of the work with feverish interest, spending hours
daily about the rig. A string of driving-pipe, up to that time said to
be the longest—153 feet—ever needed in an oil-well, had to be forced
down. Three feet farther a vein of sparkling water, tinged with sulphur,
spouted above the pipe and it has flowed uninterruptedly since. The
heavy tools pierced the rock rapidly and the delight of the “Doctor” was
unbounded. He felt confident a paying well would result and waited
impatiently for the decisive test. A boy longing for Christmas or his
first pair of boots could not be more keenly expectant. His fondest wish
was not to be gratified. He took sick and died, after a very short
illness, in 1870, four days before the well was through the sand and
pumping at the rate of fifty barrels per diem!
[Illustration: GEORGE BUCHANAN.]
This singular well merits a brief notice. From the first sand, not a
trace of which was met in the two wells on the other side of the road,
oil and gas arose through the water so freely that drilling was stopped
and tubing inserted. In twenty-four hours the well yielded fifty-eight
barrels of the blackest lubricant in America, 28° gravity, the hue of a
stack of ebony cats and with plenty of gas to illuminate the
neighborhood. Subsiding quickly, the tubing was drawn and the hole
drilled in quest of the third sand, the rock which furnished the lighter
petroleum on Oil Creek. Eight feet were found seven-hundred feet towards
the antipodes, a torpedo was exploded, the tubing was put back and the
well produced two barrels a day for a year, divided between the sands
about equally, the green and black oils coming out of the pipe
side-by-side and positively declining to merge into one. Other wells
were drilled years afterwards close by, without finding the jugular. Mr.
Whitman sleeps in the Baptist churchyard near Hannaville, the sleep that
shall have no awakening until the Judgment Day. Mr. Buchanan, who
operated at Rouseville, Scrubgrass, Franklin and Bradford, left the
oil-regions nine years ago for the Black Hills and died in South Dakota
on March twenty-eighth, 1897. He was a man of sterling attributes, nobly
considerate and unselfish. No truer, braver heart e’er beat in human
breast.
“Yes, we must follow soon, will glad obey
When a few suns have rolled their cares away;
Tired with vain life, will close the weary eye—
’Tis the great birthright of mankind to die.”
Excavating for the Franklin canal in 1832, on the north bank of French
Creek, opposite “the infant industry” of Hulings forty years previously,
the workmen were annoyed by a persistent seepage of petroleum,
execrating it as a nuisance. A well dug on the flats ten years later,
for water, encountered such a glut of oil that the disgusted wielder of
the spade threw up his job and threw his besmeared clothes into the
creek! When the oil-excitement invaded the county-seat the greasy well
was drilled to the customary depth and proved hopelessly dry! At
Slippery Rock, in Beaver county, oil exuded abundantly from the sandy
banks and bed of the creek, failing to pan out when wells were put down.
Something of the same sort occurred in portions of Lawrence county and
on the banks of many streams in different sections of the country. A
geological expert endeavors to make it as clear as mud in this manner:
“‘Surface shows’ have been the fascination of many. The places of most
copious escape to the surface were regarded as the favored spots where
‘the drainage from the coal measures, in defiance of the laws of gravity
and hydro-dynamics, had obligingly deposited itself. Such shows’ were
always illusory. A great ‘surface show’ is a great waste; where nature
plays the spendthrift she retains little treasure in her coffers. The
production of petroleum in quantities of economical importance has
always been from reservoirs in which nature has been hoarding it up,
instead of making a superficial and deceptive display of her wealth.”
Applying this method, the place to find petroleum is where not a symptom
of it is visible! An honest Hibernian, asked his opinion of a notorious
falsifier, answered that “he must be chock-full ov truth, fur bedad he
niver lets any ov it git out!” The above explanation is of this stripe.
“Flee to the mountains of Hepsidam” rather than attempt to bore for oil
in localities having “shows” of the very thing you are after! These
dreadfully deceptive “shows” show that the oil has got out and emptied
the “reservoirs in which nature had been hoarding it up!” This is a
pretty rough joke on poor deluded nature! How could these “surface
shows” have strayed off anyhow, unless connected with reservoirs of
genuine petroleum at the outset? The first wells on Oil Creek and at
Franklin were drilled beside “surface shows” which revealed the
existence of petroleum and supplied Cary, August, McClintock and Hulings
with the coveted oil. These wells produced petroleum “in quantities of
economical importance,” demonstrating that “such shows were _not_ always
illusory.” Is nature buncoing petroleum-seekers by hanging out a
Will-o’-the-Wisp signal where there is “little treasure in her coffers?”
The failures at Slippery Rock and divers other places resulted from the
fact that the seepages had traveled considerable distances to find
breaks in the rocks that would permit of the “most copious escape.”
Central and South America are fairly stocked with petroleum-indications.
In the early days of the Panama Railroad and during the construction of
the ill-fated canal numerous efforts were made to explore the
coal-regions of the Atlantic, in proximity to the ports of Colon and
Panama. These researches led to the discovery of bituminous shales and
lignite near the port of Boca del Toro, on the Caribbean Sea. The map of
Colombia shows a great indenture on the Atlantic Coast of the department
of Cauca, formed by the Gulfo de Uraba, or Darian del Nord. Into this
gulf flow the Atrato, Arboletes, Punta de Piedra and many small streams.
Explorations on the Gulf of Uraba and its tributaries disclosed
extensive strata of “oil-rock” and “oil-springs” near the Rio Arboletes.
The largest of forty of these springs has a twelve-inch crater, which
gushes oil sufficient to fill a six-inch pipe. Near this Brobdignagian
spring is a petroleum-pond sixty feet in diameter and from three to ten
feet deep. The flow of these oil-springs deserves the attention of
geologists and investors. They lie at a distance of one to three miles
from the shores of the gulf. The oil is remarkably pure, passing through
a bed of coral, which seems to act as a filter and refiner. A proper
survey of the oil-region of the Uraba would be interesting from a
scientific and an industrial standpoint. The proper development of its
possibilities might result in the control of the petroleum-market of
South America. The climate is too sultry for the display of seal sacques
and fur-overcoats, a palm-hat constituting the ordinary garb of the
average citizen. This providential dispensation eliminates dudes and
tailor-made girls, stand-up collars and bifurcated skirts from the
domestic economy of the happy Isthmians.
In the canton of Santa Elena, Ecuador, embracing the entire area of
country between the hot springs of San Vicinte and the Pacific coast,
petroleum is found in abundance. It is of a black color, its density
varies, it is considered superior to the Pennsylvania product and is
entirely free from offensive odor. Little has been done towards working
these wells. The people are unacquainted with the proper method of
sinking them and no well has exceeded a few feet in depth. Geologists
think, when the strata of alumina and rock are pierced, reservoirs will
be found in the huge cavities formed by volcanic convulsions of the
Andes. Venezuela is in the same boat.
From the Chira to the Fumbes river, a desert waste
one-hundred-and-eighty miles in length and fifteen miles in width,
lying along the coast between the Pacific ocean and the Andes, the
oil-field of Peru is believed to extend. For two centuries oil has
been gathered in shallow pits and stored in vats, precisely as in
Pennsylvania. The burning sun evaporated the lighter parts, leaving a
glutinous substance, which was purified and thickened to the
consistency of sealing-wax by boiling. It was shipped to southern
ports in boxes and used as glazing for the inside of Aguardiente jars.
The Spanish government monopolized the trade until 1830, when M. Lama
purchased the land. In 1869 Blanchard C. Dean and Rollin Thorne,
Americans, “denounced” the mine, won a lawsuit brought by Lama and
drilled four wells two-hundred-and-thirty feet deep, a short distance
from the beach. Each well yielded six to ten barrels a day, which
deeper drilling in 1871-2 augmented largely. Frederic Prentice, the
enterprising Pennsylvania operator, secured an enormous grant in 1870,
bored several wells—one a thousand-barreler—erected a refinery,
supplied the city of Lima with kerosene and exported considerable
quantities to England and Australia. The war with Chili compelled a
cessation of operations for some years. Dr. Tweddle, who had
established a refinery at Franklin, tried to revive the Peruvian
fields in 1887-8. He drilled a number of wells, refined the output,
enlisted New-York capital and shipped cargoes of the product to San
Francisco. Hon. Wallace L. Hardison, who represented Clarion in the
Legislature and operated at Bradford and in California, is now
exploring the Peruvian field for flowing oil-wells and gold-nuggets.
Qualified judges have no doubt that, “in the sweet-bye-and-bye,” the
oleaginous goose may hang altitudinum in Peru.
A larger percentage of the oil-product of the United States is sent
abroad than of any other except cotton, while nearly every home in the
land is blessed with petroleum’s beneficent light. America has toed the
mark so grandly that the petroleum-industry is the one circus bigger
inside the canvas than on the posters. Beginning with 1866, the exports
of illuminating oils were doubled in 1868, again in 1871, again in 1877
and again in 1891. The average exports per week in 1894 were as much as
for the entire year 1864. Not less impressive is the marvelous reduction
in the price of refined, so that it has found a welcome everywhere.
Export-oil averaged, in 1861, 61½ cents per gallon; in 1871, 23⅝ cents
per gallon; in 1881, 8 cents per gallon; in 1891, 6⅞ cents per gallon;
in 1892, 6 cents per gallon; in 1894, 5⅙ cents per gallon, or
one-twentieth that in 1861. But this decrease, great as it is, does not
represent the real reduction in the price of oil, as the cost of the
barrel is included in these prices. A gallon of bulk-oil cost in 1861
not less than 58 cents; in 1894, not more than 3½ cents, or hardly
one-seventeenth. In January, 1871, the price was 75 cents; in January,
1894, one-twenty-fifth that of thirty-three years before. Consumers have
received the benefit of constant improvements and reductions in prices,
while thirteen-hundred-million dollars have come from abroad to this
country for petroleum.
The glimmer has broadened and deepened into noon-day brightness.
THE BABY HAS GROWN.
PRODUCTION AND PRICES OF CRUDE PETROLEUM IN PENNSYLVANIA, WEST VIRGINIA
AND
SOUTH-EASTERN OHIO, QUANTITY AND VALUE OF OIL (REFINED REDUCED TO CRUDE
EQUIVALENT) EXPORTED FROM THE UNITED STATES, WELLS COMPLETED, AND
AVERAGE YEARLY PRICE OF REFINED AT NEW YORK, FROM SEPTEMBER
1ST, 1859, TO DECEMBER 31ST, 1896.
----------
If needs be, petroleum may well be defiant;
The baby has grown to be earth’s greatest giant.
TOTAL LOWEST HIGHEST YEARLY TOTAL TOTAL TOTAL REFINED
BARRELS MONTHLY AVERAGE WELLS GALLONS VALUE AT PER GAL.
YEARS. PRODUCED. AVERAGE PRICE. PRICE. DRILLED. EXPORTED. NEW YORK. NEW YORK.
1859 1,873 $20 00 $20 00 $20 00 4
1860 547,439 2 75 19 25 9 60 175 1,300 $850
1861 2,119,045 10 1 00 49 340 12,700 5,800 $0 61½
1862 3,153,183 10 2 25 1 05 425 400,000 146,000 36⅜
1863 2,667,543 2 25 3 37½ 3 15 514 1,000,000 450,000 44¾
1864 2,215,150 4 00 12 12½ 9 87½ 937 22,210,369 10,782,689 65
1865 2,560,200 4 62½ 8 25 6 59 890 25,496,849 16,563,413 58¾
1866 3,385,105 2 12½ 4 50 3 74 830 50,987,341 24,830,887 42½
1867 3,458,113 1 75 3 55 41 876 70,255,581 24,407,642 28⅜
1868 3,540,670 1 95 5 12½ 3 62½ 1,055 79,456,888 21,810,676 29½
1869 4,186,475 4 95 6 95 5 63¾ 1,149 100,636,684 31,127,433 32¾
1870 5,308,046 3 15 4 52½ 3 89 1,653 113,735,294 32,668,960 26⅜
1871 5,278,072 3 82½ 4 82½ 4 34 1,392 149,892,691 36,894,810 24¼
1872 6,505,774 3 15 4 92½ 3 64 1,183 145,171,583 34,058,390 23⅝
1873 9,849,508 1 00 2 60 1 83 1,263 187,815,187 42,050,756 17⅞
1874 11,102,114 55 1 90 1 17 1,317 247,806,483 41,245,815 13
1875 8,948,749 1 03 1 75 1 35 2,398 221,955,308 30,078,568 13
1876 9,142,940 1 80 3 81 2 56¼ 2,920 243,650,152 32,915,786 19⅛
1877 13,230,330 1 80 3 53¼ 2 42 3,939 309,198,914 61,789,438 15½
1878 15,272,491 82½ 1 65¼ 1 19 3,064 338,841,303 46,574,974 10¾
1879 19,835,903 67⅛ 1 18⅛ 85⅞ 3,048 378,310,010 40,305,249 08⅛
1880 26,027,631 80 1 10¼ 94½ 4,217 423,964,699 36,208,625 09
1881 27,376,509 81¼ 95½ 85¼ 3,880 397,660,262 40,315,609 08
1882 30,053,500 54½ 1 27⅛ 78⅝ 3,304 559,954,590 51,232,706 07⅜
1883 23,128,389 92½ 1 16⅞ 1 06¾ 2,847 505,931,622 44,913,079 08
1884 23,772,209 63¾ 1 11¼ 83¾ 2,265 513,660,092 47,103,248 08⅛
1885 20,776,041 70⅞ 1 05½ 88½ 2,761 574,628,180 50,257,747 08
1886 25,798,000 62⅛ 88¾ 71¼ 3,478 577,781,752 50,199,844 07⅛
1887 21,478,883 59¼ 80 66⅝ 1,660 592,803,267 46,824,933 06¾
1888 16,488,668 76 93¾ 87 1,515 578,351,638 47,042,409 07½
1889 21,487,435 83¼ 1 08⅛ 94 5,434 616,195,459 49,913,677 07⅛
1890 30,065,867 68⅞ 1 05 86½ 6,435 664,491,498 51,403,089 07⅜
1891 35,742,152 59 77¾ 66¾ 3,390 710,124,077 52,026,734 06⅞
1892 33,332,306 52 64⅛ 55⅛ 1,954 715,471,979 44,805,992 06
1893 31,362,890 53½ 78⅜ 64 1,980 804,337,168 42,142,058 05¼
1894 29,597,614 80 91⅜ 84 3,756 908,281,968 41,499,806 05⅙
1895 31,147,235 95⅝ 1 79⅝ 1 35¼ 7,138 853,126,180 56,223,425 07⅓
1896 33,298,437 1 40 1 50 1 19 7,811 927,431,959 62,132,432 06⅞
—————————— —————-————— —————————— —————————
Totals 593,232,488 93,197 13,110,140,927 $6,332,963,049
WELLS BARRELS STOCKS
OPERATIONS IN 1896. DRILLED. PRODUCED. DEC. 31.
Pennsylvania, West Virginia, South-eastern Ohio 7,811 33,298,437 9,550,582
North-eastern Ohio, Indiana, Kentucky, Tennessee,
Kansas,
Colorado, Wyoming, California 5,895 22,491,500 23,985,000
———— ————— —————
TOTALS 13,706 55,789,937 33,535,582
----------
Breadstuffs and cotton, iron and coal
All have been distanc’d; oil has the pole.
[Illustration: VIEW IN OIL CITY, PA., AFTER THE FLOOD, MARCH 17, 1865.]
III.
NEARING THE DAWN.
SALT-WATER HELPING SOLVE THE PROBLEM—KIER’S IMPORTANT
EXPERIMENTS—REMARKABLE SHAFT AT TARENTUM—WEST VIRGINIA AND OHIO TO
THE FRONT—THE LANTERN FIEND—WHAT AN OLD MAP SHOWED—KENTUCKY PLAYS
TRUMPS—THE FATHER OF FLOWING WELLS—SUNDRY EXPERIENCES AND
OBSERVATIONS AT VARIOUS POINTS.
----------
“Just now the golden-sandaled dawn.”—_Sappho._
“The first dawnings open slowly, by little and little, into the full,
clear light.”—_Newton._
“Let there be light.”—_Genesis i: 3._
“Come into the bright light beyond.”—_Wilson Barrett._
“Watchman, what of the night? The morning cometh.”—_Isaiah xxi: 11-12._
“The for’ard light’s shining bright and all’s well.”—_Richard Harding
Davis._
“A salt-well dug in 1814, to the depth of four-hundred feet, near
Marietta, discharged oil periodically at intervals of two to four
days.”—_Dr. Hildreth, A. D. 1819._