“Nearly all the Kanawha salt-wells contained more or less

petroleum.”—_Dr. Hale, A. D. 1825._

“There are numerous springs of this mineral-oil in various regions of

the West and South.”—_Prof. B. Silliman, A. D. 1833._

“The morning star was turning golden-white, like cream in a violet

sky.”—_S. R. Crockett._

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

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

“I waited underneath the dawning hills.”—_Tennyson._

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

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

----------

While cannel-coal in the western end of Pennsylvania and other sections

of the country, bitumen and shales from the Gulf of Mexico to Lake

Huron, chapapote or mineral pitch in Cuba and San Domingo, oozings in

Peru and Ecuador, asphaltum in Canada and oil-springs in Columbia and a

half-dozen states of the Union from California to New York denoted the

presence of petroleum over the greater part of this hemisphere, wells

bored for salt were leading factors in bringing about its full

development. Scores of these wells pumped more or less oil long before

it “entered into the mind of man” to utilize the unwelcome intruder.

Indeed, so often were brine and petroleum found in the same geological

formation that scientists ascribed to them a kindred origin. The first

borings to establish this peculiarity were on the Kanawha River, in West

Virginia, a state destined to play an important part in oleaginous

affairs. Dr. J. P. Hale, a reputable authority, claims oil caused much

annoyance in Ruffner Brothers’ salt-well, begun in 1806, bored sixty

feet with an iron-rod and two-inch chisel-bit attached by a rope to a

spring-pole, completed in 1808 and memorable as the _first

artesian-well_ on this continent. The fluid came from the territory once

famous as the “Kanawha Salines,” reputed to produce an unsurpassed

table-salt. Before the advent of the white man the Indians made salt

from the saline springs a short distance above the site of Charleston.

There Daniel Boone had a log-cabin and George Washington, as long ago as

1775, for military services was awarded lands containing a “burning

spring.” Fired by the tidings of the saline springs, Joseph Ruffner sold

his possessions in the Shenandoah Valley and journeyed beyond the

mountains in 1794 to establish salt-works on the Kanawha. He leased the

salt-interest to Elisha Brooks, who took brine from the shallow

quicksands. Joseph Ruffner dying, his sons, Joseph and David, acquired

his lands and salt-springs and resolved to try some better plan of

procuring the brine. A section of a hollow sycamore-tree, sunk into the

quicksands, suggested the idea of wooden casing and the wisdom of boring

a little way from the spring. A piece of oak, bored from end to end as

log-pumps used to be, was set in the hole. The ingenious brothers

devised a chisel-like drill to pierce the rock, fastened it to a rope

fixed to a spring-pole and bounced the tools briskly. To shut out the

weak brine above from the strong brine beneath they put in _tin-tubing_,

around which they tied a _leather-bag_ filled with flax-seed. Thus,

three generations ago, Joseph and David Ruffner, aided later by William

Morris and his invention of “jars” in drilling-tools, stumbled upon the

basis of casing, seed-bagging and boring oil-wells. All honor to the

memory of these worthy pioneers, groping in the dark to clear the road

for the great petroleum-boom! Dr. Hale continues:

“Nearly all the Kanawha salt-wells have contained more or less

petroleum, and some of the deeper wells a considerable flow. Many

persons now think, trusting to their recollections, that some of the

wells afforded as much as twenty-five to fifty barrels per day. This was

allowed to flow over from the top of the salt-cisterns to the river,

where, from its specific gravity, it spread over a large surface, and by

its beautiful iridescent hues and not very savory odor could be traced

for many miles down the stream. It was from this that the river received

the nickname of ‘Old Greasy,’ by which it was long known by Kanawha

boatmen and others.”

At the mouth of Hawkinberry Run, three miles north of Fairmount, in

Marion county, a well for salt was put down in 1829 to the depth of

six-hundred feet. “A stinking substance gave great trouble,” an owner

reported, “forming three or four inches on the salt-water tank, which

was four feet wide and sixteen feet long.” They discovered the stuff

would burn, dipped it off with buckets and consumed it for fuel under

the salt-pan. J. J. Burns in 1865 leased the farm, drilled the abandoned

well deeper, stuck the tools in the hole and had to quit after

penetrating sixty feet of “a fine grit oil-rock.” Mr. Burns wrote in

1871:

“The second well put down in this county was about the year 1835, on the

West Fork River, just below what is now known as the Gaston mines. The

well was sunk by a Mr. Hill, of Armstrong county, Pa., who found

salt-water of the purest quality and in a great quantity, same as in the

first well. He died just after the well was finished, so nothing was

done with it. About the time this well was completed one was drilled in

the Morgan settlement, just below Rivesville. Salt-water was found with

great quantities of gas. Twenty-five years since the farmers on Little

Bingamon Creek formed a company and drilled a well—I think to a depth of

eight-hundred feet—in which they claimed to have found oil in paying

quantities. You can go to it to-day and get oil out of it. The president

told me he saw oil spout out of the tubing forty or fifty feet, just as

they started the pump to test it. The company got to quarreling among

themselves, some of the stockholders died and part of the stock got into

the hands of minor heirs, so nothing more was done.”

Similar results attended other salt-wells in West Virginia. The first

oil-speculators were Bosworth, Wells & Co., of Marietta, Ohio, who as

early as 1843 bought shipments of two to five barrels of crude from

Virginians who secured it on the Hughes River, a tributary of the Little

Kanawha. This was sold for medical purposes in Pittsburg, Baltimore, New

York and Philadelphia.

Notable instances of this kind occurred on the Allegheny River, opposite

Tarentum, twenty miles above Pittsburg, as early as 1800. Wells sunk for

brine to supply the salt-works were troubled with what the owners called

“odd, mysterious grease.” Samuel M. Kier, a Pittsburg druggist, whose

father worked some of these wells, conceived the idea of saving the

“grease,” which for years had run waste, and in 1846 he bottled it as a

medicine. He knew it had commercial and medicinal value and spared no

exertions to introduce it widely. He believed implicitly in the greenish

fluid taken from his salt-wells, at first as a healing agent and farther

on as an illuminant. A bottle of the oil, corked and labeled by Kier’s

own hands, lies on my desk at this moment, in a wrapper dingy with age

and redolent of crude. A four-page circular inside recites the good

qualities of the specific in gorgeous language P. T. Barnum himself

would not have scorned to father. For example:

“Kier’s Petroleum, or Rock Oil, Celebrated for its Wonderful Curative

Powers. A Natural Remedy! Procured from a Well in Allegheny Co., Pa.,

Four-Hundred Feet below the Earth’s Surface. Put up and Sold by Samuel

M. Kier, 363 Liberty Street, Pittsburgh, Pa.

“The healthful balm, from Nature’s secret spring,

The bloom of health and life to man will bring;

As from her depths this magic liquid flows

To calm our sufferings and assuage our woes.

“The Petroleum has been fully tested! It was placed before the public as

A REMEDY OF WONDERFUL EFFICACY. Every one not acquainted with its

virtues doubted its healing qualities. The cry of humbug was raised

against it. It had some friends—those who were cured through its

wonderful agency. Those spoke in its favor. The lame through its

instrumentality were made to walk—the blind to see. Those who had

suffered for years under the torturing pains of RHEUMATISM, GOUT AND

NEURALGIA were restored to health and usefulness. Several who were blind

were made to see. If you still have doubts, go and ask those who have

been cured! * * * We have the witnesses, crowds of them, who will

testify in terms stronger than we can write them to the efficacy of this

remedy; cases abandoned by physicians of unquestionable celebrity have

been made to exclaim, “THIS IS THE MOST WONDERFUL REMEDY YET

DISCOVERED!” * * * Its transcendent power to heal MUST and WILL become

known and appreciated. * * * The Petroleum is a Natural Remedy; it is

put up as it flows from the bosom of the earth, without anything being

added to or taken from it. It gets its ingredients from the beds of

substances which it passes over in its secret channel. They are blended

together in such a way as to defy all human competition. * * * Petroleum

will continue to be used and applied as a Remedy as long as man

continues to be afflicted with disease. Its discovery is a new era in

medicine.”

A host of certificates of astonishing cases of curable and incurable

ailments, from blindness to colic, followed this preliminary

announcement. The “remedy” was trundled about by agents in vehicles

elaborately gilt and painted with representations of the Good Samaritan

ministering to a wounded Hebrew writhing in agony under a palm-tree. Two

barrels of oil a day were sold at fifty cents a half-pint. The expense

of bottling and peddling it consumed the bulk of the profits. Kier

experimented with it for light, about 1848, burning it at his wells and

racking his fertile brain for some means to get rid of the offensive

smoke and odor. To be entirely successful the oil must have some other

than this crude form. The tireless experimenter went to Philadelphia to

consult a chemist, who advised distillation, without a hint as to the

necessary apparatus. Fitting a kettle with a cover and a worm, the first

outcome of the embryo refiner’s one-barrel still was a dark substance

little superior to the crude. Learning to manage the fires so as not to

send the oil over too rapidly, by twice distilling he produced an

article the color of cider, which had a horrible smell, as he knew

nothing of the treatment with acids that has revolutionized the light of

the world and brought petroleum to the front.

Slight changes in the camphene-lamp enabled him to burn the distillate

without smoke. Improvements in the lamp, especially the addition of the

“Virna burner,” and in the quality of the fluid brought the

“carbon-oil,” as it was usually termed, to a goodly measure of

perfection. One lot of oil used in these experiments was a purchase of

three barrels in April, 1853, from Charles Lockhart, now an officer of

the Standard Oil-Company in Pittsburg. It came from the Huff well, a

mile down the river from Tarentum. “Carbon-oil” sold readily for a

dollar-fifty per gallon and provided a market for all the petroleum the

salt-wells in the vicinity could produce. The day was dawning and the

great light of the nineteenth century had been foreshadowed in the broad

commonwealth that was to send it forth on its shining mission to all

mankind.

[Illustration: SAMUEL M. KIER.]

Samuel M. Kier slumbers in Allegheny cemetery, resting in peace “after

life’s fitful fever.” He was the first to appreciate the value of

petroleum and to purify it by ordinary refining. His product was in

brisk demand for illuminating purposes. He invented a lamp with a

four-pronged burner, arranged to admit air and give a steady light. If

he failed to reap the highest advantage from his researches, to patent

his process and to sink wells for petroleum alone, he paved the way for

others, enlarged the field of the product’s usefulness and by his labors

suggested its extensive development. Has not he earned a monument more

enduring than brass or marble?

“As in a building

Stone rests on stone, and wanting the foundation

All would be wanting, so in human life

Each action rests on the foregoing event

That made it possible, but is forgotten

And buried in the earth.”

These operations at Tarentum and Pittsburg led to an extraordinary

attempt to fathom the petroleum-basin by _digging_ to the oil-bearing

rock! Through Kier’s experiments the crude had become worth from fifty

cents to one dollar a gallon. Among the owners of Tarentum’s salt-wells

was Thomas Donnelly, who sold his well on the Humes farm to Peterson &

Irwin. The senior partner, ex-Mayor Louis Peterson, of Allegheny, lived

until recently to recount his interesting experiences with the coming

light. He thought the Donnelly well, which produced salt-water only, if

enlarged and pumped vigorously, would produce oil. Humes received

twenty-thousand dollars for his farm. The hole was reamed out and

yielded five barrels of petroleum a day. This was in 1856. A specimen

sent to Baltimore was used successfully in oiling wool at the

carding-mills and the total production was shipped to that city for

eight years. Eastern capitalists bought the farm and well in 1864,

organized “The Tarentum Salt-and-Oil-Company” and determined to dig a

shaft down to the source of supply! The wells were four-hundred to

five-hundred feet deep. The officers of the company argued that it was

feasible to reach that far into the bowels of the earth with pick and

shovel and discover a monstrous cave of brine and oil! They picked a

spot twenty rods from the Donnelly well, sent to England for skilled

miners and started a shaft about eight feet square. Over two years were

employed and forty-thousand dollars spent in sinking this shaft. Heavy

timbers walled the upper portion, the hard rock below needing none. The

water was pumped through iron-pipes, nine men formed each shift and the

work progressed merrily to the depth of four-hundred feet. Then the

salt-water in the Donnelly well was affected by the fresh-water in the

shaft, losing half its strength whenever the latter was let stand a few

hours, showing their intimate connection by veins or crevices. Mr.

Peterson said of it:

“The digging of the shaft was finally abandoned in the darkest period of

the war, from the necessities of the time. A New Yorker named Ferris,

and Wm. McKeown, of Pittsburg, bought the property, shaft and all. The

daring piece of engineering was neglected and finally commenced to fill

up with cinders and dirt, until at last it was level again with the

surface of the ground. You may walk over it to-day and I could point it

out to you if I was up there. Dig it out and you will find those iron

pipes and timbers still there, just as they were originally put in.”

Dyed-in-the-wool Tarentumites insist that natural gas caused the

suspension of work, flowing into the shaft at such a gait that the

miners refused to risk the chances of a speedy trip to Kingdom Come by

suffocation or the ignition of the subtile vapor. This was the case

with two shafts at Tidioute and Petroleum Centre, neither of them

nearly the depth of “the daring piece of engineering” which “set the

pace” for enterprises of this novel brand. The New-York

Enterprise-and-Mining-Company projected the former, intending to sink

a shaft eight feet by twelve to the third sand and tunnel the rock for

petroleum by wholesale. The shaft reached oil-producing sand at

one-hundred-and-sixty feet. The miners worked in squads, eight-hour

turns. Holes had been drilled into the rock at various angles and a

lot of conglomerate brought to the surface. Once a short delay

occurred in changing squads, during which the air-pump, employed to

exhaust the gases from the pit and supply pure ozone from above, was

let stand idle. Mr. Hart was seated on a timber across the shaft when

the men were ready to go down. As was the custom, a man dropped a

taper into the opening to test the air. Natural gas had filled the

shaft and it ignited from the burning torch, causing a terrific

explosion. The workmen were thrown in all directions and lay stunned

and burned. When they regained consciousness Hart was nowhere to be

seen and flames rose from the mouth of the pit to the tree-tops.

Hart’s body was eventually recovered from the bottom of the shaft,

horribly mangled and charred. Work was abandoned and the hole was

partly filled up and covered, none caring to pry farther into the

petroleum-secrets of nature. Were meddlers who seek to poke their

noses into the secrets of other people dealt with thus summarily, what

a thinning out of the population there would be!

Peterson & Irwin’s treatment of the Donnelly well brings out clearly

that the sole object was to procure oil. This is important, in view of

the claim that the first well drilled exclusively for petroleum was put

down in 1859. Practically the two Pittsburgers anticipated this by three

years, a circumstance to remember when considering the varied events

which led up to the petroleum development.

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

date.”

Charles Lockhart, still an honored resident of Pittsburg, may fairly

claim to be the oldest oil-operator in the United States. His first

transaction in petroleum was the purchase, in April of 1853, of three

barrels of crude from Isaac Huff, who brought the stuff in a skiff from

a salt-well at Tarentum. Huff sold the lot at thirty-two cents a gallon

to his friend Lockhart, then connected with a leading mercantile house,

and agreed to furnish him all the well produced during the year at the

same price. The contract might seem like an elephant on his hands, but

Lockhart’s faith in the new industry was not a plant too delicate to

stand alone. Shrewd and far-seeing, the young dealer did not need a Lick

telescope with a Peate lens to discern that this “mysterious grease”

must soon be utilized for the general benefit. Believing a grand future

was about to dawn upon petroleum, he disposed of the Huff oil and

contract at a handsome profit to Samuel M. Kier, who had a small

refinery on Seventh Avenue and the old Canal, and at once secured

control of the Tarentum salt-works. From that date to the present—1853

to 1897—a period of forty-four years, Charles Lockhart has been an

oil-producer, active in furthering the best interests of the business, a

leader in improvements to foster its growth and never lacking the pluck

and enterprise essential to the highest success.

[Illustration: CHARLES LOCKHART.]

[Illustration: JOSEPH BATES.]

[Illustration: WILLIAM FREW.]

In the fall of 1859 he formed a partnership with William Frew, William

Phillips, John Vanausdall and A. V. Kipp to lease lands and put down

oil-wells in Venango County. The five partners drilled on the Tarr Farm

and the east bank of the Allegheny River. The Crystal Palace, an old

keel-boat that cost them twenty-five dollars, horses towed to Oil City

with their machinery and provisions. Accommodations were decidedly

scarce in the settlement, just sprouting at the mouth of Oil Creek, and

the boat served the workmen as a lodging and boarding-place. They cooked

their own meals, of which pork and beans, coffee and molasses were prime

constituents, washed their own clothes and not seldom carried flour

three miles into the country to have a farmer’s wife bake it into

digestible bread. The hardy fellows could navigate the Ohio or the

Allegheny, brave the terrors of a Chilkoot Pass, punch a hole hundreds

of feet into the rock, fry bacon to a turn and dish up a savory meal,

but baking real loaves stumped them every time. The first well—the

Albion, across the river—yielded forty barrels a day. From it, in March

of 1860, the owners shipped sixty barrels of crude, per the steamboat

Venango, Captain Reynolds commanding, _the first oil boated to

Pittsburg_ from the Pennsylvania oil-fields. It was hauled to the store

of J. McCully & Co., on Wood street, near Liberty—Lockhart and Frew were

junior members of the firm—and rolled upon the pavement. Much excitement

followed the landing of the barrels, to which thick layers of Venago’s

mud stuck wickedly. Hundreds of curious Pittsburgers viewed the

importation with extreme interest, curling their noses upwards as the

petroleum-aroma assailed them with an odor resembling liquid Limburger

rather than brut wine. Bungs were taken out to let visitors inspect the

fluid, inhale the unmixed odor and wonder what “in the name of Sam Hill”

people wanted with “the nasty stuff.” A small refinery on the

Fifth-Avenue extension of the city paid thirty-four cents a gallon for

the oil. Such was the humble beginning of a traffic fated to outstrip

coal, iron and cotton and give even breadstuffs a stiff run for first

money.

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

The quintette drilled numerous wells, one of them the largest on Oil

Creek, and prospered greatly. Phillips, Vanausdall and Kipp sold out to

their partners, who organized as Lockhart & Frew. It was an ideal union

of capacity and capital, not a mismating of cut-glass aspiration with

tin-cup attainment, and its wheel of fortune did not travel with a

punctured tire. The new firm shipped extensively, built the Brilliant

Refinery in 1861 and speedily stepped to the front in handling the

greasy staple. In May of 1860 Mr. Lockhart went to Europe with samples

of crude and refined-distillate to establish a market in England. These

were _the first samples_ of crude-petroleum and its products ever

carried across the Atlantic. The mission was most successful, a large

foreign demand springing up quickly. Lockhart & Frew exerted vast

influence in the petroleum-trade, opened branch-agencies throughout the

oil-regions and eventually combined with the Standard Oil-Company. Major

Frew, a man of rare sagacity and broad ideas, died in March of 1880. He

disliked ostentation, was quiet in his tastes and habits, managed the

accounts and office-work of the firm with scrupulous exactness, was

always kindly and genial, helped the needy, served as treasurer of the

Christian Commission and left a fine estate. Time has dealt gently with

Mr. Lockhart, who is young in heart and sympathy and good-fellowship.

His compliments have the juiciness of the peach, his pleasant jokes are

spiced with originality, his years sit upon him lightly and his old

friends are not forgotten. He is happy in his social and business

relations, in recalling the past and awaiting the future, in wealth

gained worthily and enjoyed wisely and in a life crowded with usefulness

and blessing.

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

The late Joseph Bates was closely associated with the early shippers of

petroleum on the Allegheny River. He held the confidence of Lockhart &

Frew and was esteemed everywhere for probity and enterprise. Coming to

the oil-regions in the sixties, he resided at Oil City many years and

operated in different sections of the field. With his friends he was

ever jaunty, jolly and perfectly at home. Judging by the French

standard, that a man is only as old as he feels, he had to the very end

of his sixty years few juniors at Oil City, Parker, Petrolia or

Pittsburg. He was never ill-natured nor uncompanionable, whether his

wells proved unexpectedly large or disappointingly small. His sunny

composition bore no “thrilling region of thick-ribbed ice” to repel and

chill those with whom he came in contact. His steadfast friend, Samuel

B. Harper, who has had charge of the books from about the commencement

of Lockhart & Frew’s partnership, is in Mr. Lockhart’s office to-day. A

record so honorable to all concerned, with its long performance of duty

and unwavering appreciation, is deserving of special remark in these

days of lightning-changes, impaired confidence and devil-may-care

recklessness generally.

[Illustration: AN OLD OIL-SPRING IN OHIO.]

On an old map of the United States, printed in England in 1787, the

word “petroleum” is marked twice, indicating that the “surface-shows”

of oil had attracted the notice of the earliest explorers of Southern

Ohio and Northwestern Pennsylvania a century ago. In one instance it

is placed at the mouth of the stream since famed the world over as Oil

Creek, where Oil City is situated; in the other on a stream

represented as emptying into the Ohio River, close to the site of what

is now the village of Macksburg. When that section of Ohio was first

settled, various symptoms of greasiness were detected, thin films of

oil floating on the waters of Duck Creek and its tributaries, globules

rising in different springs and seepings occurring frequently in the

same manner as in Pennsylvania and West Virginia. Thirty miles north

of Marietta, on Duck Creek, a salt-well sunk by Mr. McKee, in 1814, to

the depth of four-hundred-and-seventy-five feet, discharged

“periodically, at intervals of from two to four days and from three to

six hours’ duration, thirty to sixty gallons of petroleum at each

inception.” Eighteen years afterwards the discharges were less

frequent and the yield of oil diminished to one barrel a week, finally

ceasing altogether. Once thirty or forty barrels stored in a cistern

took fire from the gas at the well having been ignited by a workman

carrying a light. The burning oil ran into the creek, blazed to the

tops of the trees and exhibited for hours to the amazed settlers the

novelty of a rivulet on fire. Ten miles above McConnellsville, on the

Muskingum River, results almost identical attended the boring of

salt-wells in 1819. Dr. S. P. Hildreth, of Marietta, in an account of

the region, written that year, says of the borings for salt-water:

“They have sunk two wells more than four-hundred feet; one of them

affords a strong and pure water, but not in great quantity; the other

discharges such vast quantities of petroleum, or as it is vulgarly

called “Seneca Oil,” and besides is subject to such tremendous

explosions of gas * * * that they make little or no salt. Nevertheless,

the petroleum affords considerable profit and is beginning to be in

demand for workshops and manufactories. It affords a clear, brisk light,

when burned in this way, and will be a valuable article for lighting the

street-lamps in the future cities of Ohio.”

The last sentence bears the force of a prophecy. Writing about the year

1832 the same observant author directs attention to another peculiar

feature:

“Since the first settlement of the regions west of the Appalachian range

the hunters and pioneers have been acquainted with this oil. Rising in a

hidden and mysterious manner from the bowels of the earth, it soon

arrested their attention and acquired great value in the eyes of the

simple sons of the forest. * * * From its success in rheumatism, burns,

coughs, sprains etc., it was justly entitled to its celebrity. * * * It

is also well adapted to _prevent friction in machinery_, for, being free

of gluten, so common to animal and vegetable oils, it preserves the

parts to which it is applied for a long time in free motion; where a

heavy vertical shaft runs in a socket it is preferable to all or any

other articles. This oil rises in greater or less abundance in most of

the salt-wells and, collecting where it rises, is removed from time to

time with a ladle.”

Is it not strange that, with the sources of supply thus pointed out in

different counties and states and the useful applications of petroleum

fairly understood, its real value should have remained unappreciated and

unrecognized for more than thirty years and be at last determined

through experiments upon the distillation of bituminous shales and

coals? Wells sunk hundreds of feet for salt water produced oil in

abundance, yet it occurred to no one that, if bored expressly for

petroleum, it could be found in paying quantity! Hamilton McClintock,

owner of the “oil-spring” famed in history and romance, when somebody

ventured to suggest that he should _dig_ into the rock a short distance,

instead of skimming the petroleum with a flannel-cloth, retorted hotly:

“I’m no blanked fool to dig a hole for the oil to get away through the

bottom!”

[Illustration: KENTUCKY’S FIRST OIL-WELL.]

If West Virginia, Pennsylvania and Ohio played trumps in the exciting

game of Brine vs. Oil, Kentucky held the bowers. The home of James

Harrod and Daniel Boone, Henry Clay and George D. Prentice was noted

for other things besides backwoods fighters, statesmanship, sparkling

journalism, thoroughbred horses, superb women and moonshine-whiskey.

Off in the southeast corner of Wayne county, near the northeast corner

of a six-thousand-acre tract of wild land, David Beatty bored a well

for salt about the year 1818. The land extended four miles westward

from the Big South Fork of the Cumberland River, its eastern boundary,

and three miles down the Fork from Tennessee, its southern line. The

well was located on a strip of flat ground between the stream and a

rocky bluff, streaked with veins of coal and limestone. Five yards

from the water a hole nine feet square was dug ten feet to the rock

and timbered. The well, barely three inches in diameter, was punched

one-hundred-and-seventy feet by manual labor, steam-engines not having

penetrated the trackless forests of Wayne at that period. To the

intense disgust of the workmen a black, sticky, viscid liquid

persisted in coming up with the salt-water and a new location was

chosen two miles farther down the creek. Extra care not to drill too

deep averted an influx of the disagreeable fluid which spoiled the

first venture. Salt-works were established and flourished for years, a

simon-pure oasis in the interminable wilderness.

Beatty was elected to Congress, serving his constituents faithfully and

illustrating the Mulberry-Sellers policy of “the old flag and an

appropriation.” He secured a liberal grant for a road to his property on

the South Fork and constructed a passable thoroughfare. Traces of deep

cuttings, log-culverts and blasted rocks, still discernible amid the

underbrush that well-nigh hides them from view, are convincing evidences

of the magnitude and difficulty of the task. “The rocky road to Dublin”

was a mere bagatelle in comparison with this long-deserted pathway.

“Jordan is a hard road to travel,” says an old song, and the sentiment

would fit equally well in this case. At one rugged point holes were cut

in a rock as steep as the roof of a house, to afford footing for the

mules engaged in drawing salt from the works! Considering the roughness

of the country, the height of the hills, the depth of the chasms and the

scanty facilities available, Beatty’s road was quite as remarkable a

feat as Bonaparte’s passage across the Alps or Ben Butler’s “Dutch-Gap

Canal.” Its spirited projector lived and died at Monticello, the

county-seat, where his descendants resided until recently.

The abandoned well did not propose to be snuffed out unceremoniously or

to enact the role of “Leah the Forsaken.” In its bright lexicon the word

fail was not to be inserted merely because it was too fresh to

participate in the salt-trade. Far from retiring permanently, it spouted

petroleum at a Nancy-Hanks quickstep, filling the pit, running into the

Fork and covering mile after mile of the water with a top-dressing of

oil. Somehow the floating mass caught fire and mammoth pyrotechnics

ensued. The stream blazed and boiled and sizzled from the well to the

Cumberland River, thirty-five miles northward, calcining rocks and

licking up babbling brooks on its fiery march! Trees on its banks burned

and blistered and charred to their deepest roots. Iron-pans at the

salt-wells got red-hot, shriveled, warped, twisted and joined the

junk-pile! Was not that a sweet revenge for plucky No. 1, the well its

owner “had no use for” and devoutly wished at the bottom of the sea?

The Chicago fire “couldn’t hold a candle” to this rural conflagration,

which originated the expressive phrase of “hell with the lid off,”

applied sixty years afterwards by James Parton to the flaming furnaces

at Pittsburg. Unluckily, the region was populated so sparsely that few

spectators had front seats at “the greatest show on earth.” The deluge

of oil ceased eventually, the fire following suit. Anon the salt

industry began to languish and the works were dismantled. No more the

forest-road echoed the sharp crack of the teamster’s whip or heard his

lusty oaths. The district along the South Fork was left as silent as

“the harp that once through Tara’s halls the soul of music shed,” ready

to be labeled “Ichabod,” and tradition alone preserved the name and

record of the “Beatty Well,” THE FIRST OIL-SPOUTER IN AMERICA!

To future generations tell

The story of the Beatty Well,

The father of oil-spouters!

In spite of quips and jibes and sneers

Of arrant cranks and doubters,

Whose forte is flinging wretched jeers,

It richly merits hearty cheers

From true petroleum-shouters.

[Illustration: DR. W. GODFREY HUNTER.]

Accompanied by Dr. W. G. Hunter, and a native as guide, it was my good

fortune to visit this memorable locality in 1877. The start was from

Burksville, Cumberland county, the doctor’s home and my headquarters for

a twelvemonth. At Albany, Clinton county, sure-footed mules, the only

animals that could be ridden safely through the rough country, took the

place of our horses. Soon the last signs of civilization disappeared and

we plunged into the thick woods, a crooked, tortuous trail pointing the

way. Hills, rocks, ravines, fallen trees and mountain-streams by turns

impeded our progress, as we rode in Indian file for thirty miles. Birds

twittered and snakes hissed at the invasion of their solitudes. Several

times the path touched the line of Beatty’s forgotten road and once a

ruined cabin, with three grave-like mounds in a corner of the small

clearing, met our gaze. The guide explained how, twenty years before,

the poor family tenanting the wretched hovel had been poisoned by eating

some kind of berries, the parents and their only child dying alone and

unattended. No human eye beheld their struggles, no soft hand cooled the

fevered brows of the sufferers whose lives went out in that desolate

waste.

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

Provisions in our saddle-bags, a clear brook and evergreen boughs

supplied us with food, drink and an open-air bed. Next morning we

traversed a broad plateau, ending abruptly at the top of a precipitous

bluff a hundred feet high. Beneath us lay a stretch of bottom-land, with

the Big South Fork on its east side and the Cumberland Mountains rearing

their bold crests five miles away. In the center of a patch of cleared

ground stood a shanty, built of poles and roofed with split slabs of

oak. From an open space in one end smoke escaped freely, showing that

the place was inhabited. Tethering the mules and throwing the saddles

upon the grass, we crawled down a slope formed by the collapse of a

portion of the bluff. A shot from my revolver—everybody carried a

pistol—shattered the atmosphere and brought the inmates to the side of

the dwelling. The father, mother, a child in arms and two boys entering

their teens watched our approach. As we drew nigh they scampered into

the shanty and took refuge under a queer structure of rails, straw and

blankets that did duty as a bed for the household! A blanket hung over

the space cut for a door. Drawing this aside, the frightened family

could be seen crouching on the bare soil, for the abode had neither

door, window, floor nor chinking between the logs. It was quite unfit to

shelter a decent porker. Not a chair, table, stove, looking-glass,

bureau or any of the articles of furniture deemed necessary for modern

comfort was in sight! A bench hewn out of timber with an axe, two

metal-pots, some tin-dishes and knives and forks composed the domestic

outfit! Yet it was “home” to the squalid beings huddled in the dark,

damp, musty angle farthest from the intruders who had dropped in upon

them as unexpectedly as a Peary meteor.

[Illustration: AT THE BEATTY WELL IN 1877.]

Calling them to come out and speak with us a moment, the woman appeared,

bearing the inevitable baby. She was truly a revelation, with unkempt

brindle-hair and sallow skin to match. Her raiment consisted of a single

jean-garment, dirty and tattered beyond description, too narrow to

encircle her waist and too short to reach within a dozen inches of her

naked feet. Compared with the flimsy toilet of “a living picture,” this

costume was simplicity itself. The poor creature smoked a cob-pipe

viciously. A request to see her husband evoked the command: “Old man, I

reckon you best git out hyer!” The “old man” heeded this summons and

emerged from his hiding-place, trembling violently. His attire was in

harmony with his wife’s, threadbare jean-pants and shirt comprising it.

Head and feet were bare. His trembling ceased the instant he saw our

guide, whom he knew and greeted cordially. Introductions followed and we

asked if he could show us the way to the Beatty Well. He answered in

perfect English, with the grace of a Chesterfield: “It will be the

greatest pleasure I have known for many a day.”

A brisk walk brought us to the well. Dirt and leaves had filled the pit

nearly level, forming a depression which one might pass without special

notice. Scraping away the rubbish, blackened fragments of the timbered

walls appeared. But not a drop of oil had issued from the veteran-well

for scores of years. One man alone survived of those who had gazed upon

the flow of petroleum previous to the fire which checked the greasian

tide forever. He lived ten miles northwest and his short story was

learned on the return-trip by another route. The scattered rustics were

accustomed to go to the well once or twice a year and dip enough oil to

medicate and lubricate whoever or whatever needed it. The fluid was dark

and heavy and for years rose to within a few feet of the surface. At

length the well clogged up and was almost obliterated. The dim eyes of

the aged narrator sparkled as he recalled the big blaze, concluding with

the emphatic words: “It jes’ looked ez if the devil had hitched up the

hull bottomless pit fur a torch-light percession!”

Except the squatter on the tract of land, which Dr. Hunter and myself

had secured the winter of our visit, the nearest settler lived five

miles distant! The Cincinnati-Southern Railroad, now the Queen &

Crescent route, had not crossed the meandering Kentucky River and the

country was practically inaccessible. Men and women grew up without ever

hearing of a church, a school, a book, a newspaper, a preacher, a

doctor, a wheeled vehicle or a lucifer-match! The heathen of

Bariaboola-Gha were as well informed concerning God and a future state.

They herded in miserable cabins, lived on “corn-dodgers and sow-belly,”

drank home-made whiskey and never wandered ten miles from their own

fireside. Of the great outside world, of moral obligations, of religious

conviction and of current events they were profoundly ignorant. Think of

people fifty, sixty, seventy years old, born and reared in the United

States, who never saw a loaf of wheat-bread, a wagon, a cart or a

baby-carriage, to say nothing of a plum-pudding, railway-coach, a

trolley-car or a tandem-bicycle! It seems incredible, in this advanced

age and bang-up nation, that such conditions should be possible, yet

they existed in Southeastern Kentucky. And the American eagle flaps his

wings, while Americans boast of their culture and send barrels of cold

cash to buy flannel-shirts for perspiring Hottentots and goody-goody

tracts for jolly cannibals!

“Consistency’s a jewel.”

Small need of barbed-wire fences to shut out the cattle and chickens of

neighbors five miles apart! Their children did not quarrel and sulk and

yell “You can’t play in our yard!” Our host, who took us over the

property and told us all he knew about it, had not seen a strange face

for twenty-nine weary months! Then the neighbor five miles off had come

in the vain search of a cruse of oil from the old well to rub on an

afflicted hog! Three years had rolled by since his last expedition to

the cross-roads, fourteen miles away, to trade “coon-skins” for jeans

and groceries. Could isolation be more complete? Was Alexander Selkirk

less blessed with companionship on his secluded island? Had Coleridge’s

Ancient Mariner, “on a wide, wide sea,” greater cause for an attack of

the blues?

The steel-track and the iron-horse are prime civilizers and eighteen

years have wrought a wondrous change in the section bordering upon the

Cumberland Mountains. The schoolmaster has come in with the railroad and

improvement is the prevailing order. Farmers have turned their forests

into cultivated fields and bought the latest implements. Their boys read

the papers, yearn for the city, smoke cigarettes, dabble in politics and

dream of unbounded wealth. The girls, no longer content with homespun

frocks and sunbonnets, dress in silk and velvet, wear stylish hats,

devour French novels, sport high-heeled shoes and balloon-sleeves, play

Beethoven and Chopin, waltz divinely and are altogether lovable!

An apparition muttering “I am thy father’s ghost” would not have

surprised us so much as the politeness of our half-clad, barefooted,

bareheaded pilot to the neglected well. His manners and his language

were faultless. Not a coarse word or grammatical error marred his fluent

speech. At noon he invited us to share his humble dinner, apologizing

with royal dignity for the poverty of his surroundings. “Gentlemen,” he

said, “I regret that parched corn and fat bacon are all I can offer, but

I beg you to honor me with your presence at my table!” Remembering the

cabin and its presiding divinity, we felt obliged to decline and

requested him to lunch with us. It was a positive pleasure to see with

what relish he ate the baked chicken, biscuit and good things Mrs.

Hunter had packed in our saddle-bags. After the meal we prepared to

depart. The end of a Louisville paper under the flap of my saddle

attracted the old man’s attention.

“Is that a newspaper?” he inquired.

“Yes, do you want it?”

“Oh, thank you a thousand times! It is fifteen years since I have seen a

paper and this will be such a treat!”

He seized the sheet eagerly, dropped upon the grass and glanced over the

printed page. In an instant he jumped to his feet and tears coursed down

his wrinkled cheeks.

“I did not mean to be rude,” he said earnestly, “but you cannot imagine

how my feelings mastered me, after so many years of separation from the

world, at sight of a paper from the city of my birth!”

The next moment the good-byes were uttered and we had left the hermit of

South Fork, to meet no more this side of eternity. He stood peering

after us until the woods shut us from his wistful gaze. Six years later

death, the grim detective no vigilance can elude, claimed the guardian

of the Beatty Well. His family removed to parts unknown. He rests in an

unmarked grave, beneath a spreading oak, near the murmuring stream. The

lonely exile has reached home at last!

Who on earth was this educated, courteous, gentlemanly personage, and

how did he drift into such a place? This perplexing problem beat the

fifteen-puzzle, “Pigs in Clover,” or the confusing dogma of Freewill and

Predestination. Our guide enlightened us. The old man was reared in

Louisville, graduated from college and entered an office to study law.

In a bar-room row one night a young man, with whom he had some trouble,

was stabbed fatally. Fearing he would be accused of the deed, the

student fled to the woods. For years he shunned mankind, subsisting on

game and fruit and sleeping in a cave. Every rustling leaf or snapping

twig terrified him with the idea that officers were at his heels.

Ultimately he gained courage and sought the acquaintance of the few

settlers in his vicinity. Striving to forget the past, he cohabited with

the woman he called his wife, erected a shanty and brought up three

children. Fire destroyed his hut and its contents, leaving him

destitute, and he located where we met him. The fear of arrest could not

be shaken off and he supposed we had come to take him a prisoner, after

twenty-five years of hiding, for a crime of which he was innocent. This

explained his retreat under the bed and violent trembling. He carried

his secret in his own bosom until 1873, when he was believed to be dying

and disclosed it to a friend, our guide, with a sealed letter giving his

true name. He recovered, the letter was handed back unopened and the

fugitive’s identity was never revealed. What an existence for a man of

refinement and collegiate training! What volumes of unwritten,

unsuspected tragedies environ us, could we but pierce the outward mask

and read the tablets of the heart!

Eight or ten years ago J. O. Marshall, a Pennsylvania oil-operator,

cleaned out the Beatty Well and drilled another a half-mile north.

Neither yielded any oil, although the second was put down nine-hundred

feet. Mr. Marshall leased a great deal of land in Wayne and adjacent

counties, expecting to operate extensively, but he died without seeing

his purposes accomplished. He was a genial, enterprising, whole-souled

fellow, whose faith in Kentucky as an oil-field never faltered.

Dr. Hunter, my esteemed associate on many a delightful trip, was

practicing at Newcastle, Pa., when the civil war broke out. He sold his

drug-store, offered his services to the Government and was placed in

charge of a medical department, where he made a first-class record. He

amputated the leg of General James A. Beaver, subsequently Governor of

Pennsylvania. At the close of the war he settled in Cumberland county,

married a prominent young lady, built up an immense practice and

acquired a competence. He served with signal ability and credit in the

Legislature and in Congress, elected time and again in a district

overwhelmingly against his party. He was chairman of the Republican

State-Committee, and ought to be the successor of Blackburn in the

United-States Senate.

Seventy years ago William Morris, a practical driller, whose name oilmen

should perpetuate, invented the contrivance that culminated in “jars”

for drilling-tools. This contrivance, which enabled the Ruffners and

other salt-borers to go a thousand feet or more for brine, renders it

possible to drill a mile for oil, if ambitious operators desire to get

so far towards the antipodes. The manner in which the oil-resources of

West Virginia, Ohio and Kentucky were thrown away by the early pioneers

is a surprising feature in the history of human affairs. Fifty years

before Pennsylvania oil-wells had been heard of the Kanawha salt-seekers

were drilling what to-day would be paying oil-wells. Instead of saving

the oil, which is enriching West Virginia operators now, they wasted it

and saved the salt-water. They wasted the natural gas, the best fuel of

the century, and boiled their salt-water with wood, the most expensive

and least satisfactory fuel of the valley. That is often the way

humanity gropes in the dark. The men who rushed to California drove

their ox-wagons past the big bonanzas of the Comstock lode, while the

men who later went to the Comstock went past the rich carbonates of

Leadville, just as later prospectors ran over the Cripple-Creek silver

and gold-leads in the search for things farther distant and the crowds

hurrying to Alaska ignored the teeming ledges of the Black Hills. The

Kanawha salt-men scorned the oil, yet drilled the first oil-wells, and

in doing it invented the methods which have come into use throughout the

entire oil-territory. If Joseph and David Ruffner and William Morris had

displayed half the wisdom in utilizing the oil they manifested in

inventing tools to find salt-water, theirs would be the familiar names

in Oildom down to the end of time.

“Fellow-citizens,” shouted a free-silver orator to a host of starving

coal-miners three months after the last Presidential inauguration, “they

tell us Major McKinley is the advance-agent of prosperity, but, if so,

he seems to be a deuce of a way ahead of the show!” In like fashion the

Ruffners were a long way ahead of the petroleum-development, but the

show got there at last, heralded by salt-wells that pointed unerringly

towards the dawn.

THEY NOTICED IT.

Writing of several Jesuits who, about 1642, penetrated the territory of

the Eries, probably near what is now Cuba, N. Y., Charlevoix says:

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

brandy.”

The map of the Missionaries Dollier and Galinèe, printed in 1670, has a

hint of the presence of petroleum in the north-western part of New York.

Near the spot which was to become the site of Cuba these words are

marked:

“Fonteaine de Bitume.”

In 1700 the Earl of Bellmont, Governor of New York, thus instructed

Engineer Wolfgang W. Romer to visit the Five Nations:

“You are to go and view a well or spring which is eight miles beyond the

Seneks’ farthest castle, which they told me blazes up in a flame when a

lighted coal or firebrand is put into it. You will do well to taste the

said water and * * * bring with you some of it.”

Sir William Johnson, who visited Niagara in 1767, in his journal says

with reference to the spring at Cuba:

“Arcushan came in with a quantity of curious oyl, taken at the top of

the water of some very small lake near the village he belongs to.”

David Leisberger, the Moravian Missionary, went up the Allegheny River

in 1767, established a mission near the mouth of Tionesta Creek and in

1770 removed to Butler county. His manuscript records:

“I have seen three kinds of oil-springs—such as have an outlet, such as

have none and such as rise from the bottom of the creeks. From the first

water and oil flow out together, the oil impregnating the grass and

soil; in the second it gathers on the surface of the water to the depth

of the thickness of a finger; from the third it rises to the surface and

flows with the current of the creek. The Indians prefer wells without an

outlet. From such they first dip the oil that has accumulated, then stir

the well and, when the water has settled, fill their kettles with fresh

oil, which they purify by boiling. It is used medicinally, as an

ointment for toothache, headache, swellings, rheumatism and sprains.

Sometimes it is taken internally. It is of a brown color and can also be

used in lamps. It burns well.”

Dr. John David Schopf, a surgeon in the British service, visited

Pittsburg in 1783 and in an account of his journey remarked:

“Petroleum was found at several places up the Allegheny, particularly at

a spring and a creek, which were covered with this floating substance.”

General William Irvine, in a letter to John Dickinson, dated “Carlisle,

August 17, 1785,” tells of exploring the western part of Pennsylvania.

He says:

“Oil Creek takes its name from an oily or bituminous matter being found

floating on its surface. Many cures are attributed to this oil. * * * It

rises in the bed of the creek at very low water. In a dry season I am

told it is found without any mixture of water and is pure oil. It rises

when the creek is high from the bottom in small globules.”

George Henry Loskiel, in his “Geschichte der Mission der Evangelischen

Bruder unter der Indianen in Nordamerika,” published in 1789, noted:

“One of the most favorite medicines used by the Indians is Fossil-oil

exuding from the earth, commonly with water * * * This oil is of a brown

color and smells like tar. * * * They use it chiefly in external

complaints. Some take it inwardly and it has not been found to do harm.

It will burn in a lamp. The Indians sometimes sell it to the white

people at four guineas a quart.”

An officer of the United States Army, who descended the Ohio River in

1811, wrote a book of travels in which he remarks:

“Not far from the mouth of the Little Beaver a spring has been found,

said to rise from the bottom of the river, from which issues an oil

which is highly inflammable and is called Seneca oil. It resembles

Barbadoes tar and is used as a remedy for rheumatic pains.”

[Illustration: NOTABLE WELLS ON OIL CREEK IN 1861-2-3.]

IV.

WHERE THE BLUE-GRASS GROWS.

INTERESTING PETROLEUM DEVELOPMENTS IN KENTUCKY AND TENNESSEE—THE FAMOUS

AMERICAN WELL—A BOSTON COMPANY TAKES HOLD—PROVIDENTIAL

ESCAPE—REGULAR MOUNTAIN VENDETTA—A SUNDAY LYNCHING PARTY—PECULIAR

PHASES OF PIETY—AN OLD WOMAN’S WELCOME—WARM RECEPTION—STORIES OF

RUSTIC SIMPLICITY.

----------

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

“Often do the spirits of great events stride on before the

events.”—_Coleridge._

“Coming events cast their shadows before.”—_Thomas Campbell._

“In Cumberland county, Kentucky, a run of pure oil was struck.”—_Niles’

Register, A. D. 1829._

“Indications of oil are plentiful at Chattanooga, Tennessee.”—_Robert B.

Roosevelt, A. D. 1863._

“Ever since the first settlement of the country oil has been gathered

and used for medicinal purposes.”—_Cattlesburg, Ky., Letter, A. D.

1884._

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

Field._

“To all appearance it was chiefly by Accident and the grace of

Nature.”—_Carlyle._

----------

Interesting and unexpected results from borings for salt-water in

Kentucky were not exhausted by the initial experiment on South Fork.

Special peculiarities invest that venture with a romantic halo

essentially its own, but “there are others.” Wayne county was not to

monopolize the petroleum-feature of salt-wells by a large majority.

“Westward the star of empire takes its way” affirmed Bishop Berkeley

two-hundred years ago, with the instinct of a born prophet, and it was

so with the petroleum-star of Kentucky, however it might be with

brilliant Henri Watterson’s “star-eyed goddess of Reform.”

The storm-center next shifted to Cumberland county, the second west of

Wayne, Clinton separating them. Hardy breadwinners, braving the

hardships and privations of pioneer-life in the backwoods, early in this

century settled much of the country along the Cumberland River. Upon one

section of irregular shape, its southern end bordered by Tennessee, the

state of Davy Crockett and Andrew Jackson, the name of the winding river

intersecting it was appropriately bestowed. A central location, between

the west bank of the Cumberland and the foot of a lordly hill, was

selected for the county-seat and christened Burksville, in honor of a

respected citizen who owned the site of the embryo hamlet. From a

cross-roads tavern and blacksmith-shop the place expanded gradually into

an inviting village of one-thousand population. It has fine stores, good

churches and schools, a brick court-house, and for years it boasted the

only college in Kentucky for the education of girls.

Burksville pursued “the even tenor of its way” slowly and surely. Forty

miles from a railroad or a telegraph-wire, its principal outlet is the

river during the season of navigation. The Cumberland retains the

fashion of rising sixty to eighty feet above its summer-level when the

winter rains set in and dwindling to a mere brooklet in the dry, hot

months. Old-timers speak of “the flood of 1826” as the greatest in the

history of the community. The rampant waters overflowed fields and

streets, invaded the ground-floors of houses and did a lot of unpleasant

things, the memory of which tradition has kept green. In January of 1877

the moist experience was repeated almost to high-water mark. Saw-logs

floated into kitchens and parlors and improvised skiffs navigated

back-yards and gardens. Seldom has the town cut a wide swath in the

metropolitan press, because it avoided gross scandals and attended

strictly to home-affairs. The chief dissipation is a trip by boat to

Nashville or Point-Burnside, or a drive overland to Glasgow, the

terminus of a branch of the Louisville & Nashville Railroad.

The first great event to stir the hearts of the good people of

Cumberland county occurred in 1829. A half-mile from the mouth of Rennix

Creek, a minor stream that empties into the Cumberland two miles north

of the county-town, a well was sunk one-hundred-and-eighty feet for

salt-water. Niles’ _Register_, published the same year, told the tale

succinctly:

“Some months since, in the act of boring for salt-water on the land of

Mr. Lemuel Stockton, situated in the county of Cumberland, Kentucky, a

run of pure oil was struck, from which it is almost incredible what

quantities of the substance issued. The discharges were by floods, at

intervals of from two to five minutes, at each flow vomiting forth many

barrels of pure oil. I witnessed myself, on a shaft that stood upright

by the aperture in the rock from which it issued, marks of oil 25 or 30

feet perpendicularly above the rock. These floods continued for three or

four weeks, when they subsided to a constant stream, affording many

thousand gallons per day. This well is between a quarter and a half-mile

from the bank of the Cumberland River, on a small rill (creek) down

which it runs to the Cumberland. It was traced as far down the

Cumberland as Gallatin, in Sumner county, Tennessee, nearly a hundred

miles. For many miles it covered the whole surface of the river and its

marks are now found on the rocks on each bank.

[Illustration: FAMOUS “AMERICAN WELL.”]

“About two miles below the point on which it touched the river, it was

set on fire by a boy, and the effect was grand beyond description. An

old gentleman who witnessed it says he has seen several cities on fire,

but that he never beheld anything like the flames which rose from the

bosom of the Cumberland to touch the very clouds.”

This was the beginning of what was afterwards known from the equator to

the poles as the “American Well.” The flow of oil spoiled the well for

salt and the owners quitted it in disgust, sinking another with better

success in an adjacent field. For years it remained forsaken, an object

of more or less curiosity to travelers who passed close by on their way

to or from Burksville. It was very near the edge of the creek, on flat

ground most of which has been washed away. Neighboring farmers dipped

oil occasionally for medicine, for axle-grease and—“tell it not in Gath,

publish it not in Askelon”—to kill vermin on swine!

Job Moses, a resident of Buffalo, N. Y., visited the locality about the

year 1848. He had read of the oil-springs in New York, Pennsylvania,

West Virginia and Ohio and he decided that the hole on Rennix Creek

ought to be a prize-package. His moderate offer for the well was

accepted by the Bakers, into whose hands the Stockton tract had come. He

drilled the well to four-hundred feet and erected a pumping-rig. The

five or six barrels a day of greenish-amber fluid, 42° gravity, he put

up in half-pint bottles, labeled “American Rock Oil” and sold at fifty

cents, commending it as a specific for numberless complaints. He reaped

a harvest for several years, until trade languished and the well was

abandoned.

With the proceeds of his enterprise Moses bought a large block of land

at Limestone, N. Y., adjoining the northern boundary of McKean county,

Pa., and built a mansion big enough for a castle. He farmed

extensively, raised herds of cattle, employed legions of laborers and

dispensed a bountiful hospitality. In 1862-3 he drilled three wells

near his dwelling, finding a trifling amount of gas and oil. Had he

drilled deeper he would inevitably have opened up the phenomenal

Bradford field a dozen years in advance of its actual development.

Wells twelve-hundred to three-thousand feet deep had not been dreamt

of in petroleum-philosophy at that date, else Job Moses might have

diverted the whole current of oil-operations northward and postponed

indefinitely the advent of the Clarion and Butler districts! Boring a

four-inch hole a few hundred feet farther would have done it!

On what small causes great effects sometimes depend! Believing a

snake-story induced our first parents to sample “the fruit of that

forbidden tree whose mortal taste brought sin into our world and all our

woe.” Ambition to be a boss precipitated Lucifer “from the battlements

of heaven to the nethermost abyss.” A dream released Joseph from prison

to be “ruler over Egypt.” The smiles of a wanton plunged Greece into war

and wiped Troy from the face of the earth. A prod on the heel slew

Achilles, a nail—driven by a woman at that—finished Sisera and a pebble

ended Goliath. The cackling of a goose saved Rome from the barbarous

hordes of Brennus. A cobweb across the mouth of the cave secreting him

preserved Mahomet from his pursuers and gave Arabia and Turkey a new

religion. The scorching of a cake in a goatherd’s hut aroused King

Alfred and restored the Saxon monarchy in England. The movements of a

spider inspired Robert Bruce to renewed exertions and secured the

independence of Scotland. An infected rag in a bundle of Asiatic goods

scourged Europe with the plague. The fall of an apple from a tree

resulted in Sir Isaac Newton’s sublime theory of gravitation. The

vibrations of a tea-kettle lid suggested to the Marquis of Worcester the

first conception of the steam-engine. A woman’s chance-remark led Eli

Whitney to invent the cotton-gin. The twitching of a frog’s muscles

revealed galvanism. A diamond-necklace hastened the French Revolution

and consigned Marie Antoinette to the guillotine. Hacking a cherry-tree

with a hatchet earned George Washington greater glory than the victory

of Monmouth or the overthrow of Cornwallis. A headache helped cost

Napoleon the battle of Waterloo and change the destiny of twenty

kingdoms. An affront to an ambassador drove Germany to arms, exiled

Louis Napoleon and made France a republic. Mrs. O’Leary’s kicking cow

laid Chicago in ashes and burst up no end of insurance-companies. An

alliterative phrase defeated James G. Blaine for President of the United

States. An epigram, a couplet or a line has been known to confer

immortality. A new bonnet has disrupted a sewing-society, split a

congregation and put devout members on the toboggan in their hurry to

backslide. An onion-breath has severed doting lovers, cheated parsons of

their wedding-fees and played hob with Cupid’s calculations. Statistics

fail to disclose the awful havoc wrought in millions of homes by such

observations, on the part of thoughtless young husbands, as “this isn’t

the way mother baked,” or “mother’s coffee didn’t taste like this!”

Moses lived to produce oil from his farms and to witness, five miles

south of Limestone, the grandest petroleum-development of any age or

nation. He was built on the broad-gauge plan, physically and mentally,

and “the light went out” peacefully at last. The Kentucky well was never

revived. The rig decayed and disappeared, a timber or two lingering

until carried off by the flood in 1877.

[Illustration: GOVERNOR AMES.]

In the autumn of 1876 Frederic Prentice, a leading operator, engaged me

to go to Kentucky to lease and purchase lands for oil-purposes. Shortly

before Christmas he wished me to meet him in New York and go from there

to Boston, to give information to parties he expected to associate with

him in his Kentucky projects. Together we journeyed to the city of

culture and baked-beans and met the gentlemen in the office of the

Union-Pacific Railroad-Company. The gathering was quite notable. Besides

Mr. Prentice, who had long been prominent in petroleum affairs, Stephen

Weld, Oliver Ames, Sen., Oliver Ames, Jun., Frederick Ames, F. Gordon

Dexter and one or two others were present. Mr. Weld was the richest

citizen of New England, his estate at his death inventorying twenty-two

millions. The elder Oliver Ames, head of the giant shovel-manufacturing

firm of Oliver Ames & Sons, was a brother of Oakes Ames, the creator of

the Pacific Railroads, whom the Credit-Mobilier engulfed in its ruthless

destruction of statesmen and politicians. His nephew and namesake was a

son of Oakes Ames and Governor of Massachusetts in 1887-8-9. He began

his career in the shovel-works, learning the trade as an employé, and at

thirty-five had amassed a fortune of ten-millions. He occupied the

finest house in Boston, entertained lavishly, spent immense sums for

paintings and bric-a-brac and died in October of 1895. Frederick Ames,

son of the senior Oliver, has inherited his father’s executive talent

and he maintains the family’s reputation for sagacity and the

acquisition of wealth. F. Gordon Dexter is a multi-millionaire, a power

in the railroad-world and a resident of Beacon street, the swell avenue

of the Hub.

Such were the men who heard the reports concerning Kentucky. They did

not squirm and hesitate and wonder where they were at. Thirty-five

minutes after entering the room the “Boston Oil Company” was organized,

the capital was paid in, officers were elected, a lawyer had started to

get the charter and authority was given me to draw at sight for whatever

cash was needed up to one-hundred-thousand dollars! This record-breaking

achievement was about as expeditious as the Chicago grocer, who closed

his store one forenoon and pasted on the door a placard inscribed in

bold characters: “At my wife’s funeral—back in twenty minutes!”

Oliver Ames, the future governor, invited the party to lunch at the

Parker House, Boston’s noted hostelry. An hour sped quickly. My

return-trip had been arranged by way of Buffalo and the Lake-Shore Road

to Franklin. The time to start arrived, the sleigh to take me to the

depot was at the door, the good-byes were said, the driver tucked in the

robes and grasped the lines. At that instant Oliver Ames, Sen., called:

“Please come into the hotel one moment; I want to jot down something you

told us about the American Well.” The other gentlemen looked on, the

explanation was penciled rapidly, my seat in the sleigh was resumed and

Mr. Dexter jokingly said to the Jehu: “You’ll have to hustle, or your

fare will miss his train!”

Through the narrow, twisted, crowded streets the horses trotted briskly.

Rushing into the station, the train was pulling out and the

ticket-examiner was shutting the iron-gates. He refused to let me

attempt to catch the rear car and my disappointment was extreme. A train

for New York and Pittsburg left in fifteen minutes. It bore me, an

unwilling passenger, safely and satisfactorily to the “Smoky City.”

There the news reached me of the frightful railway-disaster at

Ashtabula, in which P. P. Bliss and fourscore fellow-mortals, filled

with fond anticipations of New-Year reunions, perished in the icy waters

ninety feet beneath the treacherous bridge that dropped them into the

yawning chasm! The doomed train was the same that would have borne me to

Ashtabula and—to death, had not Mr. Ames detained me to make the entry

in his memorandum-book! Call it Providence, Luck, Chance, what you will,

an incident of this stamp is apt to beget “a heap of tall thinking.”

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

[Illustration: GIRL CLIMBING A DERRICK.]

Returning to Burksville in January, the work of leasing went ahead

merrily. The lands around the American Well were taken at one-eighth

royalty. Forty rods northeast of the American, in a small ravine, a well

was drilled eight-hundred feet. At two-hundred feet some gas and oil

appeared, but the well proved a failure. While it was under way the gas

in a deserted salt-well twenty rods northwest of the American burst

forth violently, sending frozen earth, water and pieces of rock high

into the air. The derrick at the Boston Well, rising to the height of

seventy-two feet, was a perennial delight to the natives. Youths, boys

and old men ascended the ladder to the topmost round to enjoy the

beautiful view. Pretty girls longed to try the experiment and it was

whispered that six of them, one night when only the man in the moon was

peeping, performed the perilous feat. Certain it is that a winsome

teacher at the college, who climbed the celestial stair years ago,

succeeded in the effort and wrecked her dress on the way back to solid

ground. A dining-room girl at Petrolia, in 1873, stood on top of a

derrick, to win a pair of shoes banteringly offered by a jovial oilman

to the first fair maiden entitled to the prize. Lovely woman and

Banquo’s ghost will not “down!”

Three miles northeast of the American Well, at the mouth of Crocus

Creek, C. H. English drilled eight shallow wells in 1865. They were

bunched closely and one flowed nine-hundred barrels a day.

Transportation was lacking, the product could not be marketed and the

promising field was deserted. Twelve years later the Boston Oil-Company

drilled in the midst of English’s cluster, to discover the quality of

the strata, and could not exhaust the surface-water by the most

incessant pumping. The company also drilled on the Gilreath farm, across

the Cumberland from Burksville, where Captain Phelps found heavy oil in

paying quantity back in the sixties. The well produced nicely and would

have paid handsomely had a railroad or a pipe-line been within reach. A

well two miles west of the American, drilled in 1891, had plenty of sand

and showed for a fifty-barreler.

Six miles south-west of Burksville, at Cloyd’s Landing, J. W. Sherman,

of Oil-Creek celebrity, drilled a well in 1865 which spouted a thousand

barrels of 40° gravity oil in twenty-four hours. He loaded a barge with

oil in bulk, intending to ship it to Nashville. The ill-fated craft

struck a rock in the river and the oil floated off on its own hook.

Sherman threw up the sponge and returned to Pennsylvania. Three others

on the Cloyd tract started finely, but the wonderful excitement at

Pithole was breaking out and operations elsewhere received a cold chill.

Dr. Hunter purchased the Cloyd farm and leased it in 1877 to Peter

Christie, of Petrolia, who did not operate on any of the lands he

secured in Kentucky and Tennessee. Micawber-like, Cumberland county is

“waiting for something to turn up” in the shape of facilities for

handling oil. When these are assured the music of the walking-beam will

tickle the ears of expectant believers in Kentucky as the coming

oil-field.

Wayne and Cumberland had been heard from and Clinton county was the

third to have its inning. On the west bank of Otter Creek, a sparkling

tributary of Beaver Creek, a well bored for salt fifty or more years ago

yielded considerable oil. Instead of giving up the job, the owners

pumped the water and oil into a tank, over the side of which the lighter

fluid was permitted to empty at its leisure. The salt-works came to a

full stop eventually and the well relapsed into “innocuous desuetude.”

L. D. Carter, of Aurora, Ill., sojourning temporarily in Clinton for his

health, saw the old well in 1864. He dipped a jugful of oil, took it to

Aurora, tested it on the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, found it

a good lubricant and concluded to give the well a square trial. The

railroad-company agreed to buy the oil at a fair price. Carter pumped

six or eight barrels a day, hauled it in wagons over the hills to the

Cumberland River and saved money. He granted Mr. Prentice an option on

the property in 1877. The day the option expired J. O. Marshall bought

the well, farm and ten-thousand acres of leases conditionally, for a

Butler operator who “didn’t have the price,” and the deal fell through.

The well stood idle until 1892, when J. Hovey, an ex-broker from New

York and relative of a late Governor of Indiana, drilled a short

distance down the creek. The result was a strike which produced

twenty-four hundred barrels of dark, heavy, lubricating oil in fifty

days. It was shut down for want of tankage and means to transport the

product to market. The Carter again yielded nicely, as did three more

wells in this neighborhood. In 1895 the Standard Oil-Company was given a

refusal of the Hovey and surrounding interests, in order to test the

territory fully and lay a pipe-line to Glasgow or Louisville, should the

production warrant the expenditure. Wells have been sunk east of the

Carter nearly to Monticello, eighteen miles off, finding gas and

indications of oil. Every true Clintonite is positive an ocean of

petroleum underlies his particular neck of woods, impatient to be

relieved and burden landholders and operators alike with excessive

wealth!

A hard-headed youth, out walking with his best girl in the dog-days,

told her a fairy-story of the dire effects of ice-cream upon the

feminine constitution. “I knew a girl,” he declared, “who ate six plates

of the dreadful stuff and died next day!” The shrewd damsel exclaimed

rapturously: “Oh, wouldn’t it be sweet to die that way? Let us begin on

six plates now!” And wouldn’t it be nice to be loaded with riches, not

gained by freezing out some other fellow, by looting a bank, by wedding

an unloved bride, by grinding the poor, by manipulating stocks, by

cornering grain or by practices that make the angels weep, but by

bringing oil honestly from the bowels of the earth?

About the year 1839 a salt-well in Lincoln county, eight miles from the

pretty town of Stanford, struck a vein of oil unexpectedly. The

inflammable liquid gushed out with great force, took fire and burned

furiously for weeks. The owner was a grim joker in his way and he aptly

remarked, upon viewing the conflagration: “I reckon I’ve got a little

hell of my own!” Four more wells were drilled farther up the stream, two

getting a show of oil. One was plugged and the other, put down by the

late Marcus Hulings, the wealthy Pennsylvania operator, proved dry.

Surface indications in many quarters gave rise to the belief that oil

would be found over a wide area, and in 1861 a well was bored at

Glasgow, Barren county, one-hundred-and-ten miles below Louisville. It

was a success and a hundred have followed since, most of which are

producing moderately. Col. J. C. Adams, formerly of Tidioute, Pa., was

the principal operator for twenty years. A suburban town, happily termed

Oil City, is “flourishing like a green bay-horse.” The oil, dark and

ill-flavored, smelling worse than “the thousand odors of Cologne,” is

refined at Glasgow and Louisville. It can be deodorized and converted

into respectable kerosene. Sixteen miles south of Glasgow, on Green

River, four shallow wells were bored thirty years ago, one flowing at

the rate of six-hundred barrels, so that Barren county is by no means

barren of interest to the oil-fraternity.

At Bowling Green a well was sunk two-hundred feet, a few gallons of

green-oil bowling to the surface. Torpedoing was unknown, or the fate of

many Kentucky wells might have been reversed. John Jackson, of Mercer,

Pa., in 1866 drilled a well in Edmonson county, twenty-five miles

north-west of Glasgow. The tools dropped through a crevice of the

Mammoth Cave, but neither eyeless fish nor slippery petroleum repaid the

outlay of muscle and greenbacks. As if to add insult to injury, the well

hatched a mammoth cave that buried the tools eight-hundred feet out of

sight!

Loyal to his early training and hungry for appetizing slapjacks, Jackson

once imported a sack of the flour from Louisville and asked the obliging

landlady of his boarding-house to have buckwheat-cakes for breakfast. He

was on hand in the morning, ready to do justice to the savory dish. The

“cakes” were brought in smoking hot, baked into biscuit, heavy as lead

and irredeemably unpalatable! The sack of flour went to fatten the

denizens of a neighbor’s pig-pen. Jackson was a pioneer in the Bradford

region, head of the firm of Jackson & Walker, clever and generous. The

grass and the flowers have grown on his grave for ten years, “the

insatiate archer” striking him down in the prime of vigorous manhood.

Sandy Valley, in the north-eastern section of the state, contributed its

quota to the stock of Kentucky petroleum. From the first settlement of

Boyd, Greenup, Carter, Johnson and Lawrence counties oil had been

gathered for medical purposes by skimming it from the streams. About

1855 Cummings & Dixon collected a half-dozen barrels from Paint Creek

and treated it at their coal-oil refinery in Cincinnati, with results

similar to those attained by Kier in Pittsburg. They continued to

collect oil from Paint Creek and Oil-Spring Fork until the war, at times

saving a hundred barrels a month. In 1861 they drilled a well

three-hundred feet on Mud Lick, a branch of Paint Creek, penetrating

shale and sandstone and getting light shows of oil and gas. Surface-oil

was found on the Big-Sandy River, from its source to its mouth, and in

considerable quantities on Paint, Blaine, Abbott, Middle, John’s and

Wolf Creeks. Large springs on Oil-Spring Fork, a feeder of Paint Creek,

yielded a barrel a day. At the mouth of the Fork, in 1860, Lyon & Co.

drilled a well two-hundred feet, tapping three veins of heavy oil and

retiring from the scene when “the late unpleasantness” began to shake up

the country. The same year a well was sunk one-hundred-and-seventy feet,

on the headwaters of Licking River, near the Great Burning Spring. Gas

and oil burst out for days, but the low price of crude and the impending

conflict prevented further work. What an innumerable array of nice

calculations this cruel war nipped in the bud!

[Illustration: NORTH-EASTERN KENTUCKY.]

J. Hinkley bored two-hundred feet in 1860, on Paint Creek, eight miles

above Paintville, meeting a six-inch crevice of heavy-oil, for which

there was no demand, and the capacity of the well was not tested.

Salt-borers on a multitude of streams had much difficulty, fifty or

sixty years ago, in getting rid of oil that persisted in coming to the

surface. These old wells have been filled with dirt, although in some

the oil works to the top and can be seen during the dry seasons. The

Paint-Creek region had a severe attack of oil-fever in 1864-5. Hundreds

of wells were drilled, boats were crowded, the hotels were thronged and

the one subject of conversation was “oil—oil—oil!” Various causes,

especially the extraordinary developments in Pennsylvania, compelled the

plucky operators to abandon the district, notwithstanding encouraging

symptoms of an important field. Indeed, so common was it to find

petroleum in ten or fifteen counties of Kentucky that land-owners ran a

serious risk in selling their farms before boring them full of holes,

lest they should unawares part with prospective oil-territory at

corn-fodder prices!

Tennessee did not draw a blank in the awards of petroleum-indications.

Along Spring Creek many wells, located in 1864-5 because of

“surface-shows,” responded nobly, at a depth comparatively shallow, to

the magic touch of the drill. The product was lighter in color and

gravity than the Kentucky brand. Twelve miles above Nashville, on the

Cumberland River, wells have been pumped at a profit. Around Gallatin,

Sumner county, decisive tests demonstrated the presence of petroleum in

liberal measure. On Obey Creek, Fentress county, sufficient drilling has

been done to justify the expectation of a rich district. Near

Chattanooga, on the southern border of the state, oil seepages are “too

numerous to mention.” The Lacy Well, eighteen miles south of the Beatty,

drilled in 1893, is good for thirty barrels every day in the week. The

oil is of superior quality, but the cost of marketing it is too great. A

dozen wells are going down in Fentress, Overton, Scott and Putnam. Some

fine day the tidal wave of development will sweep over the

Cumberland-River region, with improved appliances and complete

equipment, and give the country a rattling “show for its white alley!”

Surely all these spouting-wells, oil-springs and greasy oozings mean

something. To quote a practical oilman, who knows both states from a to

z: “Twenty counties in Kentucky and Tennessee are sweating petroleum!”

“Jes’ nail dat mink to de stable do’—

De niggahs’ll dance when de oil-wells flo!”

Picking up a million acres of supposed oil-lands in the Blue-Grass and

Volunteer States had its serio-comic features. The ignorant squatters in

remote latitudes were suspicious of strangers, imagining them to be

revenue-officers on the trail of “moonshiners,” as makers of untaxed

whisky were generally called. More than one northern oilman narrowly

escaped premature death on this conjecture. J. A. Satterfield, the

successful Butler operator, went to Kentucky in the winter of 1877 to

superintend the leasing of territory for his firm, between which and the

Prentice combination a lively scramble had been inaugurated. Somebody

thought he must be a Government agent and passed the word to the lawless

mountaineers. The second night of his stay a shower of bullets riddled

the window, two lodging in the bed in which Satterfield lay asleep!

Daylight saw him galloping to the railroad at a pace eclipsing

Sheridan’s ride to Winchester, eager to “get back to God’s country.”

“Once was enough for him” to figure as the target of shooters who seldom

failed to score “a hit, a palpable hit.” The grim archer didn’t miss him

in 1894.

[Illustration: THREE DANGLING FROM A TREE.]

Arriving late one Saturday at Mt. Vernon, the county-seat of Rockcastle,

the colored waiter on Sunday morning inquired: “Hes yo done gone an’

seen em?” Asking what he meant, he informed me that three men were

dangling from a tree in the court-house yard, lynched by an infuriated

mob during the night on suspicion of horse-stealing, “the unpardonable

sin” in Kentucky. A party of citizens had started for the cabin of a

notorious outlaw, observed skulking homeward under cover of darkness,

intending to string him up. The desperado was alert. He fired one shot,

which killed a man and stampeded the assailants. They returned to the

village, broke into the jail, dragged out three cowering wretches and

hanged them in short metre! The bodies swung in the air all day, a

significant warning to whoever might think of “walkin’ off with a hoss

critter.”

On that trip to Rockcastle county the train stopped at a wayside-station

bearing the pretentious epithet of Chicago. A tall, gaunt, unshaven,

uncombed man, with gnarled hands that appealed perpetually for soap and

water, high cheekbones, imperfect teeth and homespun-clothes of the

toughest description, stood on the platform in a pool of tobacco-juice.

A rustic behind me stuck his head through the car-window and addressed

the hard-looking citizen as “Jedge.” Honors are easy in Kentucky, where

“colonels,” “majors” and “judges” are “thick as leaves in Vallambrosa,”

but the title in this instance seemed too absurd to pass unheeded. When

the train started, in reply to my question whether the man on the

platform was a real judge, his friendly acquaintance took the pains to

say: “Wal, I can’t swar es he’s zackly, but las’ year he wuz jedge ov a

chicken-fight down ter Si Mason’s an’ we calls ’im jedge ever sence!”

[Illustration: A MOUNTAIN VENDETTA.]

Kentucky vendettas have often figured in thrilling narratives. Business

took me to the upper end of Laurel county one week. Litigants, witnesses

and hangers-on crowded the village, for a suit of unusual interest was

pending before the “’squar.” The principals were farmers from the hilly

region, whose fathers and grandfathers had been at loggerheads and

transmitted the quarrel to their posterity. Blood had been shed and

hatred reigned supreme. The important case was about to begin. Two shots

rang out so closely together as to be almost simultaneous, followed by a

regular fusilade. Everybody ran into the street, where four men lay

dead, a fifth was gasping his last breath and two others had ugly

wounds. The tragedy was soon explained. The two parties to the suit had

met on their way to the justice’s house. Both were armed, both drew

pistols and both dropped in their tracks, one a corpse and the second

ready for the coroner in a few moments. Relatives and adherents

continued the dreadful work and five lives paid the penalty of

ungovernable passion. The dead were wrapped in horse-blankets and carted

home. The case was not called. It had been “settled out of court.”

[Illustration: “A BIGGER MAN ’N GEN’RAL GRANT.”]

The spectators of this dreadful scene manifested no uncommon concern.

“It’s what might be expected,” echoed the local oracle; “when them

mountain fellers gets whiskey inside them they don’t care fur nuthin’!”

Within an hour of the shooting a young man stopped me on the

street-corner, where stood a wagon containing two bodies. “Kunnel,” he

went on to say, “I’ve h’ard es yo’s th’ man es got our farm fur oil. Dad

an’ Cousin Bill’s ’n that ar wagon, an’ I want yo ter giv’ me a job

haulin’ wood agin yo starts work up our way.” He mounted the vehicle and

drove off with his ghastly freight without a quiver of emotion.

At Crab Orchard, one beautiful Sunday, the clerk chatted with me on the

hotel-porch. A stalwart individual approached and my companion

ejaculated: “Thar’s a bigger man ’n Gen’ral Grant!” Next instant Col.

Kennedy was added to my list of Kentucky acquaintances. He was very

affable, wished oil-operations in the neighborhood success and, with

characteristic Southern hospitality, invited me to visit him. After he

left us the clerk, in answer to my desire to learn the basis of

Kennedy’s greatness, naively said: “Why, he’s killed eight men!”

“Some have greatness thrust upon them.”

Politics and religion were staple wares, the susceptible negroes

inclining strongly to the latter. Their spasms of piety were extremely

inconvenient at times. News of a “bush meetin’” would be circulated and

swarms of darkeys would flock to the appointed place, taking provisions

for a protracted siege. No matter if it were the middle of harvest and

rain threatening, they dropped everything and went to the meeting.

“Doant ’magine dis niggah’s gwine ter lose his ’mo’tal soul fer no load

uv cow-feed” was the conclusive rejoinder of a colored hand to his

employer, who besought him to stay and finish the haying.

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

Rev. George O. Barnes, the gifted evangelist, who resigned a

five-thousand-dollar Presbyterian pastorate in Chicago to assist Moody,

was reared in Kentucky and lived near Stanford. He would traverse the

country to hold revivals, staying three to six weeks in a place. His

personal magnetism, rare eloquence, apostolic zeal, fine education,

intense fervor and catholic spirit made him a wonderful power. Converts

he numbered by thousands. He preferred Calvary to Sinai, the gentle

pleadings of infinite mercy to the harsh threats of endless torment. His

daughter Marie, with the voice of a Nilsson and the face of a Madonna,

accompanied her father in his wanderings, singing gospel-hymns in a

manner that distanced Sankey and Philip Phillips. Her rendering of “Too

Late,” “Almost Persuaded,” and “Only a Step to Jesus,” electrified and

thrilled the auditors as no stage-song could have done. Raymon Moore’s

hackneyed verses had not been written, yet the boys called Miss Barnes

“Sweet Marie” and thronged to the penitent-bench. The evangelist and his

daughter tried to convert New York, but the Tammany stronghold refused

to budge an inch. They invaded England and enrolled hosts of recruits

for Zion. The Prince of Wales is said to have attended one of their

meetings in the suburbs of London. Mr. Barnes finally proposed to cure

diseases by “anointing with oil and laying on of hands.” His pink

cottage became a refuge for cranks and cripples and patients, until a

mortgage on the premises was foreclosed and the queer aggregation

scattered to the winds.

Albany, the county-seat of Clinton, experienced a Barnes revival of the

tip-top order. Business with Major Brentz, the company’s attorney,

landed me in the cosy town on a bright March forenoon. Not a person was

visible. Stores were shut and comer-loungers absent. What could have

happened? Halting my team in front of the hotel, nobody appeared.

Ringing the quaint, old-fashioned bell attached to a post near the pump,

a lame, bent colored man shuffled out of the barn.

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

“Where is the landlord?”

“Done gone ter meetin’.”

“Will dinner soon be ready?”

“Soon the folkses gits back frum meetin’.”

“All right, take good care of the horses and I’ll go over to the

court-house.”

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

It was true. Mr. Barnes was holding three services a day and the village

emptied itself to get within sound of his voice. For five weeks this

kept up. Lawyers quit their desks, merchants locked their stores, woman

deserted their houses and young and old thought only of the meetings.

Hardly a sinner was left to work upon, even the village-editor and the

disciples of Blackstone joining the hallelujah band! No wonder Satan’s

imps wailed sadly:

“And the blow almost killed father!”

An African congregation at Stanford had a preacher black as the ace of

spades and wholly illiterate, whom many whites liked to hear. “Brudders

an’ sistahs, niggahs and white folks,” he closed an exhortation by

saying, “dar’s no use ’temptin’ to sneak outen de wah ’tween de good

Lawd an’ de black debbil, ’cos dar’s on’y two armies in dis worl’ an’

bofe am a-fitin’ eberlastingly! So ’list en de army ob light, ef yer

want ter gib ole Satan er black eye an’ not roast fureber an’ eber in de

burnin’ lake whar watah-millions on ice am nebber se’ved for dinnah!”

Could the most astute theological hair-splitter have presented the issue

more concisely and forcibly to the hearers of the sable Demosthenes?

The first and only circus that exhibited at Burksville produced an

immense sensation. It was “Bartholomew’s Equescurriculum,” with

gymnastics and ring exercises to round out the bill. Barns, shops and

trees for miles bore gorgeous posters. Nast’s cartoons, which the most

ignorant voters could understand, did more to overthrow Boss Tweed than

the masterly editorials of the New-York _Times_. The flaming pictures

aroused the Cumberlanders, hundreds of whom could not read, to the

highest pitch of expectation. Monday was the day set for the show. On

Saturday evening country-patrons began to camp in the woods outside the

village. A couple from Overton county, Tennessee, and their four

children rode twenty-eight miles on two mules, bringing food for three

days and lodging under the trees! A Burksville character of the stripe

Miss Ophelia styled “shiftless” sold his cooking-stove for four dollars

to get funds to attend! “Alf,” the ebony-hued choreman at Alexander

College, who built my fires and blacked my shoes, was worked up to

fever-heat. “Befo’ de Lawd,” he sobbed, “dis chile’s er gone coon, ’less

yer len’ er helpin’ han’! Mah wife’s axed her mudder an’ sister ter th’

ci’cus an’ dar’s no munny ter take ’em an’ mah sister!” Giving him the

currency for admission dried the mourner’s tears and “pushed them clouds

away.”

[Illustration: AN AFRICAN TALE OF WOE.]

At noon on Sunday the circus arrived by boat from Nashville. Service was

in progress in one church, when an unearthly sound startled the

worshippers. The wail of a lost soul could not be more alarming. Simon

Legree, scared out of his boots by the mocking shriek of the wind

blowing through the bottle-neck Cassy fixed in the garret knot-hole, had

numerous imitators. Again and again the ozone was rent and cracked and

shivered. The congregation broke for the door, the minister jerking out

a sawed-off benediction and retreating with the rest. A half-mile down

the river a boat was rounding the bend. A steam-calliope, distracting,

discordant and unlovely, belched forth a torrent of paralyzing notes.

The whole population was on the bank by the time the boat stopped. The

crowd watched the landing of the animals and belongings of the circus

with unflinching eagerness. Few of the surging mass had seen a theatre,

a circus, or a show of any sort except the Sunday-school Christmas

performance. They were bound to take in every detail and that Sunday was

badly splintered in the peaceful, orderly settlement.

With the earliest streak of dawn the excitement was renewed. Groups of

adults and children, of all ages and sizes and complexions, were on hand

to see the tents put up. By eleven o’clock the town was packed. A

merry-go-round, the first Burksville ever saw, raked in a bushel of

nickels. The college domestics skipped, leaving the breakfast-dishes on

the table and the dinner to shift for itself. A party of friends went

with me to enjoy the fun. Beside a gap in the fence, to let wagons into

the field, sat “Alf,” the image of despair. Four weeping females—his

wife, sister, mother-in-law and sister-in-law—crouched at his feet. As

our party drew near he beckoned to us and unfolded his tale of woe. “Dem

fool-wimmin,” he exclaimed bitterly, “hes done spended de free dollars

yer guv me on de flyin’-hosses! Dey woodn’t stay off nohow an’ now dey

caint see de ci’cus! Oh, Lawd! Oh, Lawd!” The purchase of tickets poured

oil on the troubled waters. The Niobes wiped their eyes on their

jean-aprons and “Richard was himself again.” How the antics of the

clowns and the tricks of the ponies pleased the motley assemblage! Buck

Fanshaw’s funeral did not arouse half the enthusiasm in Virginia City

the first circus did in Burksville.

[Illustration: A WELCOME IN JUGS.]

It was necessary for me to visit Williamsburg, the county-seat of

Whitley, to record a stack of leases. Somerset was then the nearest

railway-point and the trip of fifty miles on horseback required a guide.

The arrival of a Northerner raised a regular commotion in the well-nigh

inaccessible settlement of four-hundred population. The landlord of the

public-house slaughtered his fattest chickens and set up a bed in the

front parlor to be sure of my comfort. The jailer’s fair daughter, who

was to be wedded that evening, kindly sent me an invitation to attend

the nuptials. By nine o’clock at night nearly every business-man and

official in the place had called to bid me welcome. Before noon next day

seventeen farmers, whose lands had been leased, rode into town to greet

me and learn when drilling would likely begin. Each insisted upon my

staying with him a week, “or es much longer es yo kin,” and fourteen of

them brought gallon-jugs of apple-jack, their own straight goods, for my

acceptance! Such a reception a king might envy, because it was entirely

unselfish, hearty and spontaneous. Williamsburg has got out of

swaddling-clothes, the railway putting it in touch with the balance of

creation.

Thirteen miles of land, in an unbroken line, on a meandering stream, had

been tied-up, with the exception of a single farm. The owner was

obdurate and refused to lease on any terms. Often lands not regarded

favorably as oil territory were taken to secure the right-of-way for

pipe-lines, as the leases conveyed this privilege. Driving past the

stubborn farmer’s homestead one afternoon, he was chopping wood in the

yard and strode to the gate to talk. His bright-eyed daughter of four

summers endeavored to clamber into the buggy. Handing the cute fairy in

coarse jeans a new silver-dollar, fresh from the Philadelphia mint, the

father caught sight of the shining coin.

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

“Plenty more.”

“Make out leases fur my three farms an’ me an’ the old woman’ll sign

’em! I want three ov ’em kines, for they be th’ slickest Demmycratic

money my eyes hes sot onto sence I fit with John Morgan!”

The documents were filled up, signed, sealed and delivered in fifteen

minutes. The chain of leased lands along Fanny Creek was intact, with

the “missing link” missing at last.

The simplicity of these dwellers in the wilderness was equaled only by

their apathy to the world beyond and around them. Parents loved their

children and husbands loved their wives in a quiet, unobtrusive fashion.

“She wuz a hard-workin’ woman,” moaned a middle-aged widower in Fentress

county, telling me of his deceased spouse, “an’ she allers wore a frock

five year, an’ she bed ’leven chil’ren, an’ she died right in

corn-shuckin’!” He was not stony-hearted, but twenty-five years of

married companionship meant to him just so many days’ work, so many

cheap frocks, child-bearing, corn-cake and bacon always ready on time.

Among these people woman was a drudge, who knew nothing of the higher

relations of life. Children were huddled into the hills to track game,

to follow the plough or to drop corn over many a weary acre. Reading and

writing were unknown accomplishments. Jackson, “the great tradition of

the uninformed American mind,” and Lincoln, whose name the tumult of a

mighty struggle had rendered familiar, were the only Presidents they had

ever heard of. “Where ignorance is bliss ’tis folly to be wise” may be a

sound poetical sentiment, but it was decidedly overdone in South-eastern

Kentucky and North-eastern Tennessee so recently as the year of the

Philadelphia Centennial.

Opposite the Hovey and Carter wells in Clinton county lives a portly

farmer who “is a good man and weighs two-hundred-and-fifty pounds.” He

is known far and wide as “Uncle John” and his wife, a pleasant-faced

little matron, is affectionately called “Aunt Rachel.” A log-church a

mile from “Uncle John’s” is situated on a pretty hill. There the young

folks are married, the children are baptized and the dead are buried.

The “June meetin’,” when services are held for a week, is the grand

incident of the year to the people for a score of miles. In December of

1893 Dr. Phillips, of Monticello, drove me to the wells. We stopped at

“Uncle John’s.” As we neared the house a dog barked and the hospitable

farmer came out to meet us. Behind him walked a man who greeted the

Doctor cordially. He glanced at me, recognition was mutual and we

clasped hands warmly. He was Alfred Murray, formerly connected with the

Pennsylvania-Consolidated Land-and-Petroleum-Company in Butler and at

Bradford. Fourteen years had glided away since we met and there were

many questions to ask and answer. He had been in the neighborhood a

twelvemonth, keeping tab on oil movements and indications, hoping,

longing and praying for the speedy advent of the petroleum-millenium. We

pumped the Hovey Well one hour, rambled over the hills and talked until

midnight about persons and things in Pennsylvania. Meeting in so dreary

a place, under such circumstances, was as thorough a surprise as

Stanley’s discovery of Livingstone in Darkest Africa. During our

conversation regarding the roughest portion of the county, bleak,

sterile and altogether repellant, selected by a hermit as his lonely

retreat, my friend remarked: “I have heard that the poor devil was

troubled with remorse and, as a sort of penance, vowed to live as near

Sheol as possible until he died!”

The stage that bore me from Monticello to Point Burnside on my homeward

journey stopped half-way to take up a countryman and an aged woman. Room

was found inside for the latter, a stout, motherly old creature, into

whose beaming face it did jaded mortals good to look. She said “howdy”

to the three passengers, a local trader, a farmer’s young wife and

myself, sat down solidly and fixed her gaze upon me intently. It was

evident the dear soul was fairly bursting with impatience to find out

about the stranger. Not a word was spoken until she could restrain her

inquisitive impulse no longer.

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

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

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

“Yes.”

“Wal, I be orful glad ter see yo!” and she stretched out her hand and

shook mine vigorously. “Hope yo’re right peart, but yo’ be a long way

from home! Did yo see ’em wells over thar by Aunt Rachel’s?”

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

[Illustration: “I BE ORFUL GLAD TER SEE YO!”]

“I ain’t seed Aunt Rachel for nigh a year an’ a half. My old man bed

roomatiz and we couldn’t get ter meetin’ this summer. He sez thar’s ile

onto our farm. I be seventy-four an’ him on the ruf be my son’n-law. Yo

see he married, Jess did, my darter Sally an’ tha moved ter a place tha

call Kansas. Tha’s bin thar seventeen year an’ hes six chil’ren. Jess he

cum back las’ week ter see his fokeses an’ he be takin’ me ter Kansas

ter see Sally an’ the babies. I never seed ’em things Jess calls cyars,

an’ he sez tha ain’t drord by no hoss nuther! I wuz bo’n eight mile down

hyar an’ never wuz from home more’n eighteen mile, when we goes ter June

meetin’. But I be ter Monticeller six times.”

Truly this was a natural specimen, bubbling over with kindness,

unspoiled by fashion and envy and frivolity and superficial pretense.

Here was the counterpart of Cowper’s humble heroine, who “knew, and knew

no more, her Bible true.” The wheezy stage was brighter for her

presence. She told of her family, her cows, her pigs, her spinning and

her neighbors. She lived four miles from the Cumberland River, yet never

went to see a steamboat! When we alighted at the Burnside station and

the train dashed up she looked sorely perplexed. “Jess” helped her up

the steps and the “cyars” started. The whistle screeched, daylight

vanished and the train had entered the tunnel below the depot. A fearful

scream pierced the ears of the passengers. The good woman seventy-four

years old, who “never seed ’em things” before, was terribly frightened.

We tried to reassure her, but she begged to be let off. How “Jess”

managed to get her to Kansas safely may be imagined. But what a story

she would have to tell about the “cyars” and “Sally an’ the babies” when

she returned to her quiet home after such a trip! Bless her old heart!

[Illustration: “EF YO KNOW’D COUSIN JIM.”]

Although the broad hills and sweeping streams which grouped many sweet

panoramas might be dull and meaningless to the average Kentuckian of

former days, through some brains glowing visions flitted. Two miles

south of Columbia, Adair county, on the road to Burksville, a heap of

stones and pieces of rotting timber may still be seen. Fifty-five years

ago the man who owned the farm constructed a huge wheel, loaded with

rocks of different weights on its strong arms. Neighbors jeered and

ridiculed, just as scoffers laughed at Noah’s ark and thought it

wouldn’t be much of a shower anyway. The hour to start the wheel arrived

and its builder stood by. A rock on an arm of the structure slipped off

and struck him a fatal blow, felling him lifeless to the earth! He was a

victim of the craze to solve the problem of Perpetual Motion. Who can

tell what dreams and plans and fancies and struggles beset this obscure

genius, cut off at the moment he anticipated a triumph? The wheel was

permitted to crumble and decay, no human hand touching it more. The heap

of stones is a pathetic memento of a sad tragedy. Not far from the spot

Mark Twain was born and John Fitch whittled out the rough model of the

first steamboat.

Riding in Scott county, Tennessee, at full gallop on a rainy afternoon,

a cadaverous man emerged from a miserable hut and hailed me. The

dialogue was not prolonged unduly.

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

“Yes, what can I do for you?”

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

“Who is your cousin Jim?”

“Law, Jim Sickles! I tho’t ez how ev’rybody know’d Jim! He went up No’th

arter th’ wah an’ ain’t cum back yit. Ef yo see ’im tell ’im yo seed

me!”

A promise to look out for “Jim” satisfied the verdant backwoodsman, who

probably had never been ten miles from his shanty and deemed “up No’th”

a place about the size of a Tennessee hunting-ground!

The South-Penn and the Forest Oil-Companies, branches of the Standard,

have drilled considerably in Kentucky and Tennessee, sometimes finding

oil in regular strata and occasionally encountering irregular

formations. More operating is required to determine precisely what place

to assign these pebbles on the beach as sources of oil-production.

Fair women, pure Bourbon and men extra plucky,

No wonder blue-grass folks esteem themselves lucky—

But wait till the oil-boom gets down to Kentucky!

Let Fortune assume forms and fancies Protean,

No matter for that, there will rise a loud pæan

So long as oil gladdens the proud Tennesseean!

[Illustration:

Map

of

VENANGO COUNTY

Pennsylvania

]

[Illustration:

EARLY OPERATORS ON OIL CREEK.

WM. BARNSDALL.

GEO. H. BISSELL. DR. F. B. BREWER.

DR. A. G. EGBERT. JONATHAN WATSON. COL. E. L. DRAKE.

DAVID EMERY. CHARLES HYDE.

DAVID CROSSLEY.

]

V.

A HOLE IN THE GROUND.

THE FIRST WELL DRILLED FOR PETROLEUM—THE MEN WHO STARTED OIL ON ITS

TRIUMPHANT MARCH—COLONEL DRAKE’S OPERATIONS—SETTING HISTORY

RIGHT—HOW TITUSVILLE WAS BOOMED AND A GIANT INDUSTRY

ORIGINATED—MODEST BEGINNING OF THE GREATEST ENTERPRISE ON EARTH—SIDE

DROPPINGS THAT THROW LIGHT ON AN IMPORTANT SUBJECT.

----------

“Was it not time that Cromwell should come?”—_Edwin Paxton Hood._

“He who would get at the kernel must crack the shell.”—_Plautus._

“We should at least do something to show that we have lived.”—_Cicero._

“I have tapped the mine.”—_E. L. Drake._

“Petroleum has come to be King.”—_W. D. Gunning._

“It is our mission to illuminate all creation.”—_Robert Bonner._

“Tell the truth or trump, but take the trick.”—_Mark Twain._

“How far that little candle throws his beams!”—_Shakespeare._

“Behold how great a matter a little fire kindleth.”—_St. James iii:5._

“Judge of the size of the statue of Hercules from that of the

foot.”—_Latin Proverb._

----------

Nature certainly spared no effort to bring petroleum into general notice

ages before James Young manufactured paraffine-oil in Scotland or Samuel

M. Kier fired-up his miniature refinery at Pittsburg. North and south,

east and west the presence of the greasy staple was manifested

positively and extensively. The hump of a dromedary, the kick of a mule

or the ruby blossom on a toper’s nose could not be more apparent. It

bubbled in fountains, floated on rivulets, escaped from crevices,

collected in pools, blazed on the plains, gurgled down the mountains,

clogged the ozone with vapor, smelled and sputtered, trickled and seeped

for thousands of years in vain attempts to divert attention towards the

_source_ of this prodigal display. Mankind accepted it as a liniment and

lubricant, gulped it down, rubbed it in, smeared it on and never thought

of seeking whence it came or how much of it might be procured. Even

after salt-wells had produced the stuff none stopped to reflect that the

golden grease must be imprisoned far beneath the earth’s surface, only

awaiting release to bless the dullards callous to the strongest hints

respecting its headquarters. The dunce who heard Sydney Smith’s

side-splitting story and sat as solemn as the sphinx, because he

couldn’t see any point until the next day and then got it heels over

head, was less obtuse. Puck was right in his little pleasantry: “What

fools these mortals be!”

Dr. Abraham Gesner obtained oil from coal in 1846 and in 1854 patented

an illuminator styled “Kerosene,” which the North American Kerosene

Gaslight Company of New York manufactured at its works on Long Island.

The excellence of the new light—the smoke and odor were eliminated

gradually—caused a brisk demand that froze the marrow of the animal-oil

industry. Capitalists invested largely in Virginia, Kentucky and

Missouri coal-lands, saving the expense of transporting the “raw

material” by erecting oil-works at the mines. Exactly in the ratio that

mining coal was cheaper than catching whales mineral-oil had the

advantage in competing for a market. Realizing this, men owning fish-oil

works preserved them from extinction by manufacturing the

mineral-product Young and Gesner had introduced. Thus Samuel Downer’s

half-million-dollar works near Boston and colossal plant at Portland

were utilized. Downer had expanded ideas and remarked with

characteristic emphasis, in reply to a friend who criticised him for the

risk he ran in putting up an enormous refinery at Corry, as the

oil-production might exhaust: “The Almighty never does a picayune

business!” Fifty or sixty of these works were turning out oil from

bituminous shales in 1859, when the influx of petroleum compelled their

conversion into refineries to avert overwhelming loss. Maine had one,

Massachusetts five, New York five, Pennsylvania eight, Ohio twenty-five,

Kentucky six, Virginia eight, Missouri one and one was starting in

McKean county, near Kinzua village. The Carbon Oil-Company, 184 Water

street, New York City, was the chief dealer in the illuminant. The

entire petroleum-traffic in 1858 was barely eleven-hundred barrels, most

of it obtained from Tarentum. A shipment of twelve barrels to New York

in November, 1857, may be considered the beginning of the history of

petroleum as an illuminator. How the baby has grown!

The price of “kerosene” or “carbon-oil,” always high, advanced to two

dollars a gallon! Nowadays people grudge ten cents a gallon for oil

vastly clearer, purer, better and safer! One good result of the high

prices was an exhaustive scrutiny by the foremost scientific authorities

into all the varieties of coal and bitumen, out of which comparisons

with petroleum developed incidentally. Belief in its identity with

coal-oil prompted the investigations which finally determined the

economic value of petroleum. Professor B. Silliman, Jun., Professor of

Chemistry in Yale College, in the spring of 1855 concluded a thorough

analysis of petroleum from a “spring” on Oil Creek, nearly two miles

south of Titusville, where traces of pits cribbed with rough timber

still remained and the sticky fluid had been skimmed for two

generations. In the course of his report Professor Silliman observed: