THE METEORIC CITY THAT DAZZLED MANKIND—FROM NOTHING TO SIXTEEN-THOUSAND

POPULATION IN THREE MONTHS—FIRST WELLS AND FABULOUS PRICES—NOTED

ORGANIZATIONS AT PITHOLE—A FORETASTE OF HADES—EXCITEMENT AND

COLLAPSE—SPECULATION RUN WILD—DUPLICITY AND DISAPPOINTMENT—THE WILD

SCRAMBLE FOR THE ALMIGHTY DOLLAR.

----------

“The gourd came up in a night and perished in a night.”—_Jonah,

iv:10._

“The earth hath bubbles, as the water has.”—_Shakespeare._

“All things rise to fall and flourish to decay.”—_Sallust._

“A lively place in days of yore, but something ails it

now.”—_Wordsworth._

“Ah! who shall lift that wand of magic power?”—_Longfellow._

“Wealth flowed from wood and stream and soil,

The rock poured forth its amber oil,

And, lo! a magic city rose.”—_Marjorie Meade._

“It went up like a rocket and came down like a stick.”—_Thomas Paine._

“Yet golde all is not that doth golden seeme.”—_Spenser._

“Can it be that this is all remains of life.”—_Bryon._

“What it is to eat forbidden fruit and find it a turnip!”—_Flora Annie

Steel._

“Old Rhinestein’s walls are crumbled now.”—_Birch Arnold._

“For this will never hold water again.”—_J. Fenimore Cooper._

“Of the vanished drama no image was there left.”—_William Morris._

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Pithole, “the magic city,” had little in its antecedents to betoken the

meteoric rise and fall of the most remarkable oil-town that ever “went

up like a rocket and came down like a stick.” The unpoetic name of

Pithole Creek was applied to the stream which flows through Allegheny

township and bounds Cornplanter for several miles on the east. It

empties into the Allegheny River eight miles above Oil City and was

first mentioned by Rev. Alfred Brunson, an itinerant Methodist minister,

in his “Western Pioneer” in 1819. Upheavals of rock left a series of

deep pits or chasms on the hills near the mouth of the stream. From the

largest of these holes a current of warm air repels leaves or pieces of

paper. Snow melts around the cavity, which is of unknown depth, and the

air is a mephitic vapor or gas. A story is told of three hunters who,

finding the snow melted on a midwinter day, determined to investigate.

One of them swore it was an entrance to the infernal regions and that he

intended to warm himself. He sat on the edge of the hole, dangled his

feet over the side, thanked the devil for the opportune heat, inhaled

the gas and tumbled back insensible. His companions dragged him away and

the investigation ended summarily. Seven miles up the creek, in the

northeast corner of Cornplanter, Rev. Walter Holmden was a

pioneer-settler. Choosing a tract of two-hundred acres, he built a

log-house on the west bank of the creek, cleared a few acres, struggled

with poverty and died in 1840. Mr. Holmden was a fervent Baptist

preacher. Thomas Holmden occupied the farm after the good old man’s

decease, with the Copelands and Blackmers and James Rooker as neighbors.

Developments had covered the farms from the Drake well to Oil City.

Operators ventured up the ravines, ascended the hills and began to take

chances miles from either side of Oil Creek. Successful wells on the

Allegheny River broadened opinions regarding the possibilities of

petroleum. Nervy men invaded the eastern portion of Cornplanter, picking

up lands along Pithole Creek and its tributaries. I. N. Frazer, fresh

from his triumph on Cherry Run as joint-owner of the Reed well, desired

fresh laurels. He organized the United-States Oil-Company, leased part

of the Holmden farm for twenty years and started a well in the fall of

1864. The primitive derrick was reared in the woods below the Holmden

home. At six-hundred feet the “sixth sand”—generally called that at

Pithole—was punctured. Ten feet farther the tools proceeded, the

drillers watching intently for signs of oil. On January seventh, 1865,

the torrent broke loose, the well flowing six-hundred-and-fifty barrels

a day and ceasing finally on November tenth. A picture of the well,

showing Frazer with his back to the tree beside his horse and a group of

visitors standing around, was secured in May. Kilgore & Keenan’s Twin

wells, good for eight-hundred barrels, were finished on January

seventeenth and nineteenth. The unfathomable mud and disastrous floods

of that memorable season retarded the hegira from other sections, only

to intensify the excitement when it found vent. Duncan & Prather bought

Holmden’s land for twenty-five-thousand dollars and divided the flats

and slopes into half-acre leases. The first of May witnessed a small

clearing in the forest, with three oil-wells, one drilling-well and

three houses as its sole evidences of human handiwork.

[Illustration: FRAZER WELL, ON HOLMDEN FARM, PITHOLE, IN MAY, 1865.]

Ninety days later the world heard with unfeigned surprise of a “city” of

sixteen-thousand inhabitants, possessing most of the conveniences and

luxuries of the largest and oldest communities! Capitalists eager to

invest their greenbacks thronged to the scene. Labor and produce

commanded extravagant figures, every farm for miles was leased or bought

at fabulous rates, money circulated like the measles and for weeks the

furore surpassed the frantic ebullitions of Wall Street on Black Friday!

New strikes perpetually inflated the mania. Speculators wandered far and

wide in quest of the subterranean wealth that promised to outrival the

golden measures of California or the silver-lodes of Nevada. The value

of oil-lands was reckoned by millions. Small interests in single wells

brought hundreds-of-thousands of dollars. New York, Philadelphia, Boston

and Chicago measured purses in the insane strife for territory. Hosts of

adventurers sought the new Oil-Dorado and the stocks of countless

“petroleum-companies” were scattered broadcast over Europe and America.

An ambitious operator sold _seventeen_-sixteenths in one well and shares

in leases were purchased ravenously. A half-acre lease on the Holmden

farm realized bonuses of twenty-four-thousand dollars before a well was

drilled on the property and the swarm of dealers resembled the plague of

locusts in Egypt in number and persistence!

Everything favored the growth of Pithole. The close of the war had left

the country flooded with paper currency and multitudes of men thrown

upon their own resources. Hundreds of these flocked to the inviting

“city,” which presented manifold inducements to venturesome spirits,

keen shysters, unscrupulous stock-jobbers, needy laborers and dishonest

tricksters. The post-office speedily ranked third in Pennsylvania,

Philadelphia and Pittsburg alone excelling it. Seven chain-lightning

clerks assisted Postmaster S. S. Hill to handle the mail. Lines of men

extending a block would await their turns for letters at the

general-delivery. It was a roystering time! Hotels, theaters, saloons,

drinking-dens, gambling-hells and questionable resorts were counted by

the score. A fire-department was organized, a daily paper established

and a mayor elected. Railways to Reno and Oleopolis were nearly

completed before “the beginning of the end” came with terrible

swiftness. In November and December the wells declined materially. The

laying of pipe-lines to Miller Farm and Oleopolis, through which the oil

was forced to points of shipment by steam-pumps, in one week drove

fifteen-hundred teams to seek work elsewhere. Destructive fires

accelerated the final catastrophe. The graphic pen of Dickens would fail

to give an adequate idea of this phenomenal creation, whose career was a

magnified type of dozens of towns that suddenly arose and as suddenly

collapsed in the oil-regions of Pennsylvania.

[Illustration: JOHN A. MATHER.]

Pithole had many wells that yielded freely for some time. The Homestead,

on the Hyner farm, finished in June of 1865, proved a gusher. On August

first the Deshler started at one-hundred barrels; on August second the

Grant, at four-hundred-and-fifty barrels; on August twenty-eighth the

Pool, at eight-hundred barrels; on September fifth the Ogden, at

one-hundred barrels, and on September fifteenth Pool & Perry’s No. 47,

at four-hundred barrels. The Frazer improved during the spring to

eight-hundred barrels, while the Grant reached seven-hundred in

September. On November twenty-second the Eureka joined the chorus at

five-hundred barrels. The daily production of the Holmden farm exceeded

five-thousand barrels for a limited period, with a proportionate yield

of seven-dollar crude from adjacent tracts. John A. Mather, the veteran

Titusville photographer, discarded his camera to become a full-fledged

oilman. He bored a well that tinctured the suburban slope of Balltown a

glowing madder. The frenzy spread. J. W. Bonta and James A. Bates paid

James Rooker two-hundred-and-eighty-thousand dollars for his

hundred-acre farm, south of the Holmden. Rooker, a hard-working tiller

of the soil, lived in a kind of rookery and earned a poor subsistence by

constant toil. He stuck to the money derived from the sale of his farm,

and he is still living at a goodly age. The Grand Dutch S well would

have given Lillian Russell new wrinkles in her delineation of the “Grand

Duchess of Gerolstein.” A neighbor refused eight-hundred-thousand

dollars for his barren acres. “I don’t keer ter hev my buckwheat tramped

over,” he explained, “but you kin hev this farm next winter fur a

million!” He kept the farm, reaped his crop and was not disturbed until

death compelled him to lodge in a plot six by two.

[Illustration: GRAND DUTCH S WELL.]

[Illustration: VIEW OF PITHOLE IN THE FALL OF 1865.]

Bonta & Bates did not linger for “two blades of grass to grow where one

grew before.” Within two months they disposed of ninety leases for

four-hundred-thousand dollars and half the oil! They spent

eighty-thousand on the Bonta House, a sumptuous hostlery. Duncan &

Prather leased building-lots at a yearly rental of one-hundred to

one-thousand dollars. First, Second and Holmden streets bristled with

activity. The Danforth House stood on a lot subleased for

fourteen-thousand dollars bonus. Sixty hotels could not accommodate the

influx of guests. Beds, sofas and chairs were luxuries for the few.

“First come, first served,” was the rule. The many had to seek the

shaving-pile, the hay-cock or the tender side of a plank. Some mingled

promiscuously in “field-beds”—rows of “shake-downs” on attic floors.

Besides the Bonta and Danforth, the United States, Chase, Tremont,

Buckley, Lincoln, Sherman, St. James, American, Northeast, Seneca,

Metropolitan, Pomeroy and fifty hotels of minor note flourished. If

palaces of sin, gorgeous bar-rooms, business-houses and places of

amusement abounded, churches and schools marked the moral sentiment.

Fire wiped out the Tremont and adjoining houses in February of 1866.

Eighty buildings went up in smoke on May first and June thirteenth.

Thirty wells and twenty-thousand barrels of oil went the same road in

August. The best buildings were torn down, to bloom at Pleasantville or

Oil City. The disappearance of Pithole astonished the world no less than

its marvelous growth. The Danforth House sold for sixteen dollars, to

make firewood! The railroads were abandoned and in 1876 only six voters

remained. A ruined tenement, a deserted church and traces of streets

alone survive. Troy or Nineveh is not more desolate.

In July of 1865 Duncan & Prather granted Henry E. Picket, George J.

Sherman and Brian Philpot, of Titusville, a thirty-day option on the

Holmden farm for one-million-three-hundred-thousand dollars. Mr. Sherman

arranged to sell the property in New York at sixteen-hundred-thousand!

The wells already down produced largely, seventy more were drilling and

the annual ground-rents footed up sixty-thousand dollars. The Ketcham

forgeries tangled the funds of the New-Yorkers and negotiations were

opened with H. H. Honore, of Chicago. After dark on the last day of the

option Honore tendered the first payment—four-hundred-thousand dollars.

It was declined, on the ground that the business day expired at sundown,

and litigation ensued. A compromise resulted in the transfer of the

property to Honore. The deal involved the largest sum ever paid in the

oil regions for a single tract of land. The bubble burst so quickly that

the Chicago purchaser, like Benjamin Franklin, “paid too much for the

whistle.” Col. A. P. Duncan commanded the Fourth Cavalry Company, the

first mustered in Venango county, every member of which carried to the

war a small Bible presented by Mrs. A. G. Egbert, of Franklin. Tall,

erect, of military bearing and undoubted integrity, he lived at Oil City

and died years ago. Duncan & Prather owned one of the two banks that

handled car-loads of money in the dizziest town that ever blasted

radiant hopes and shriveled portly pocket-books.

[Illustration: UNITED STATES OIL COMPANY'S OFFICE.]

[Illustration: BONTA HOUSE, PITHOLE.]

The Pithole bubble was blown at an opportune moment to catch suckers.

Hundreds of oil-companies had come into existence in 1864, hungry for

territory and grasping at anything within rifle-shot of an actual or

prospective “spouter.” The speculative tide flowed and ebbed as never

before in any age or nation. Volumes could be written of amazing

transitions of fortune. Scores landed at Pithole penniless and departed

in a few months “well heeled.” Others came with “hatfuls of money” and

went away empty-handed. Thousands of stockholders were bitten as badly

as the sailor, whom the shark nipped off by the waist-band. It was

rather refreshing in its way for “country Reubens” to do up Wall-street

sharpers at their own game. Shrewd Bostonians, New-Yorkers and

Philadelphians, magnates in business and finance, were snared as readily

as hayseeds who buy green-goods and gold-bricks. There are no flies on

the smooth, glib Oily Gammon whose mouth yielded more lubricating oil

than the biggest well on French Creek. His favorite prey was a pilgrim

with a bursting wallet or the agent of an eastern petroleum-company. A

well pouring forth three, six, eight, ten, twelve or fifteen-hundred

barrels of five-dollar crude every twenty-four hours was a spectacle to

fire the blood and turn the brain of the most sluggish beholder. “Such a

well,” he might calculate, “would make me a millionaire in one year and

a Crœsus in ten.” The wariest trout would nibble at bait so tempting.

The schemer with property to sell had “the very thing he wanted” and

would “let him in on the ground-floor.” He met men who, driving mules or

jigging tools six months ago, were “oil-princes” now. Here lay a tract,

“the softest snap on top of the earth,” only a mile from the Great

Geyser, with a well “just in the sand and a splendid show.” He could

have it at a bargain-counter sacrifice—one-hundred-thousand dollars and

half the oil. The engine had given out and the owner was about to order

a new one when called home by the sudden death of his mother-in-law.

Settling the old lady’s estate required his entire attention, therefore

he would consent to sell his oil-interests “dirt-cheap” to a responsible

buyer who would push developments. The price ought to be two or three

times the sum asked, but the royalty from the big wells sure to be

struck would ultimately even up matters. The tale was plausible and the

visitor would “look at the property.” He saw real sand on the

derrick-floor and everything besmeared with grease. The presence of oil

was unmistakable. Drilling ten feet into the rich rock would certainly

tap the jugular and—glorious thought!—perhaps outdo the Great Geyser

itself. He closed the deal, telegraphed for an engine—he was dying to

see that stream of oil climbing skywards—and chuckled gleefully. The

keen edge of his delight might have been dulled had he known that the

well was _through_, not merely _to_, the sand and absolutely guiltless

of the taint of oil! He did not suspect that barrels of crude and

buckets of sand from other wells had been dumped into the hole at night,

that the engine had been disabled purposely and that another innocent

was soon to cut his wisdom-teeth! He found out when the well “came in

dry” that Justice Dogberry was not a greater ass and that the

fool-killer’s snickersnee was yearning for him. Possibly he might by

persistent drilling find paying wells and get back part of his money,

but nine times out of ten the investment was a total loss and the

disgusted victim quit the scene with a new interpretation of the

scriptural declaration: “I was a stranger and ye took me in.” Butler

anticipated Pithole when he wrote in Hudibras:

“Make fools believe in their foreseeing

Of things before they are in being;

To swallow gudgeons ere they’re catched,

And count their chickens ere they’re hatched.”

The methods of “turning an honest penny” varied to fit the case. To

“doctor” a well by dosing it with a load of oil was tame and

commonplace. In three instances wells sold at fancy prices were

connected by underground pipes with tanks of oil at a distance. When the

parties arrived to “time the well” the secret pipe was opened. The oil

ran into the tubing and pumped as though coming direct from the sand!

The deception was as perfect as the oleomargarine the Pennsylvania State

Board of Agriculture pronounced “dairy butter of superior quality!”

“Seeing is believing” and there was the oil. They had seen it pumping a

steady stream into the tank, timed it, gauged it, smelled it. The

demonstration was complete and the cash would be forked over, a

twenty-barrel well bringing a hundred-barrel price! A smart widow near

Pithole sold her farm at treble its value because of “surface

indications” she created by emptying a barrel of oil into a spring. The

farm proved good territory, much to the chagrin of the widow, who

roundly abused the purchasers for “cheatin’ a poor lone woman!” Selling

stock in companies that held lands, or interests in wells to be drilled

“near big gushers”—they might be eight or ten miles off—was not

infrequent. On the other hand, a very slight risk often brought an

immense return. Parties would pay five-hundred dollars for the refusal

of a tract of land and arrange with other parties to sink a well for a

small lease on the property. If the well succeeded, one acre would pay

the cost of the entire farm; if it failed, the holders of the option

forfeited the trifle that secured it and threw up the contract. It was

risking five-hundred dollars on the chance, not always very remote, of

gaining a half-million.

Sometimes the craze to invest bordered upon the ludicrous. Sixteenths

and fractions of sixteenths in producing, non-producing, drilling,

undrilled and never-to-be-drilled wells “went like hot cakes” at two to

twenty-thousand dollars. A newcomer, in his haste to “tie onto

something,” shelled out one-thousand dollars for a share in a gusher

that netted him two quarts of oil a day! Another cheerfully paid

fifteen-thousand for the sixteenth of a flowing well which discounted

the Irishman’s flea—“you put your finger on the varmint and he wasn’t

there”—by balking that night and declining ever to start again! At a

fire in 1866 water from a spring, dashed on the blaze, added fuel to the

flames. An examination showed that oil was filling the spring and

water-wells in the neighborhood. From the well in Mrs. Reichart’s yard

the wooden pump brought fifty barrels of pure oil. L. L. Hill’s well and

holes dug eight or ten feet had the same complaint. Excitement blew off

at the top gauge. The _Record_ devoted columns to the new departure. Was

the oil so impatient to enrich Pitholians that, refusing to wait for the

drill to provide an outlet, it burst through the rocks in its eagerness

to boom the district? Patches of ground the size of a quilt sold for

two, three or four-hundred dollars and rows of pits resembling open

graves decorated the slope. In a week a digger discovered that a break

in the pipe-line supplied the oil. The leak was repaired, the pits dried

up, the water-wells resumed their normal condition and the fiasco ended

ignominiously. It was a modern version of the mountain that set the

country by the ears to bring forth a mouse.

Joseph Wood, proprietor of the St. James Hotel at Paterson, N.J., died

on May thirteenth, 1896. He was a wit and story-teller of the best kind,

a gallant fighter for the Union and for a year lived at Pithole. A

fortune made by operating and speculation he lost by fire in a year. He

conducted hotels at Hot Springs, Washington, Chicago and Milwaukee and

was one of the famous Bonifaces of the United States. On his

business-cards he printed these “religious beliefs:”

“Do not keep the alabaster-boxes of your love and tenderness sealed up

until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness. Speak

approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them and while their

hearts can be thrilled and made happier by them. The kind things you

mean to say when they are gone say before they go. The flowers you mean

to send to their coffins send to brighten and sweeten their homes before

they leave them. If my friends have alabaster-boxes laid away, full of

fragrant perfumes of sympathy and affection, which they intend to break

over my dead body, I would rather they would bring them out in my weary

and troubled hours and open them, that I may be refreshed and cheered by

them while I need them. I would rather have a plain coffin without a

flower, a funeral without a eulogy, than a life without the sweetness of

love and sympathy. Let us learn to anoint our friends beforehand for

their burial. Post-mortem kindness does not cheer the burdened spirit.

Flowers on the coffin cast no fragrance backward over the weary way.”

Let down the bars and enter the field that was once the seething,

boiling caldron called Pithole. A poplar-tree thirty feet high grows in

the cellar of the National Hotel. Stones and underbrush cover the site

of the Metropolitan Theater and Murphy’s Varieties. This bit of sunken

ground, clogged with weeds and brambles, marks the Chase House. Here was

Main street, where millions of dollars changed hands daily. For years

the Presbyterian church stood forsaken, the bell in the tower silent,

the pews untouched and the pulpit-Bible lying on the preacher’s desk.

John McPherson’s store and Dr. Christie’s house were about the last

buildings in the place. Not a human-being now lives on the spot. All the

old-timers moved away. All? No, a score or two quietly sleep among the

bushes and briars that run riot over the little graveyard in which they

were laid when the dead city was in the throes of a tremendous

excitement.

The rate at which towns rose was surely most terrific

Nothing to rival it from Maine to the Pacific;

The rate at which they fell has never had an equal—

Woods, city, ruin’d waste—the story and the sequel.

[Illustration: JOHN GALLOWAY.]

Pithole was the Mecca of a legion of operators whose history is part and

parcel of the oil-development. Phillips Brothers, giants on Oil Creek,

bought farms and drilled extensively. Frederic Prentice and W. W. Clark,

who figured in two-thirds of the largest transactions from Petroleum

Centre to Franklin, held a full hand. Frank W. Andrews, John

Satterfield, J. R. Johnson, J. B. Fink, A. J. Keenan—the first

burgess—D. H. Burtis, Heman Janes, “Pap” Sheakley, L. H. Smith and

hundreds of similar caliber were on deck. John Galloway, known in every

oil-district of Pennsylvania and West Virginia as a tireless hustler,

did not let Pithole slip past unnoticed. He has been an operator in all

the fields since his first appearance on Oil Creek in the fall of 1861.

Sharing in the prosperity and adversity of the oil-regions, he has never

been hoodooed or bankrupted. His word is his bond and his promise to pay

has always meant one-hundred cents on the dollar. More largely

interested in producing than ever, he attends to business at Pittsburg

and lives at Jamestown, happy in his deserved success, in the love of

his family and the esteem of countless friends. Mr. Galloway’s

pedestrian feats would have crowned him with olive-wreaths at the

Olympic games. Deerfoot could hardly have kept up with him on a

twenty-mile tramp to see an important well or hit a farmer for a lease

before breakfast. He’s a good one!

The Swordsman’s Club attained the highest reputation as a social

organization. One night in 1866, when Pithole was at the zenith of its

fame, John Satterfield, Seth Crittenden, Alfred W. Smiley, John

McDonald, George Burchill, George Gilmore, Pard B. Smith, L. H. Smith,

W. H. Longwell and other congenial gentlemen met for an evening’s

enjoyment. The conversation turned upon clubs. Smiley jumped to his feet

and moved that “we organize a club.” All assented heartily and the

Swordman’s Club was organized there and then, with Pard B. Smith as

president and George Burchill as secretary. Elegant rooms were fitted

up, the famous motto of “R. C. T.” was adopted and the club gave a

series of most elaborate “promenade-concerts and balls” in 1866-7.

Invitations to these brilliant affairs were courted by the best people

of Oildom. The club dissolved in 1868. Its membership included four

congressmen, two ex-governors wore its badge and scores of men

conspicuous in the state and nation had the honor of belonging to the

Swordman’s. At regular meetings “the feast of reason and the flow of

soul” blended merrily with the flowing bowl. Sallies of bright wit,

spontaneous and never hanging fire, were promptly on schedule time. Good

fellowship prevailed and C. C. Leonard immortalized the club in his

side-splitting “History of Pithole.” Verily the years slip by. Long ago

the ephemeral town went back to its original pasture, long ago the

facetious historian went back to dust, long ago many a good clubman’s

sword turned into rust. Pard B. Smith runs a livery in Cleveland,

Longwell is in Oil City, Smiley—he represented Clarion county twice in

the Legislature—manages the pipe-line at Foxburg, L. H. Smith is in New

York and others are scattered or dead. On November twenty-first, 1890,

the “Pioneers of Pithole”—among them a number of Swordsmen—had a reunion

and banquet at the Hotel Brunswick, Titusville. These stanzas, composed

and sung by President Smith and “Alf” Smiley, were vociferously cheered:

“’Twas side by side, as Swordsmen true,

In Pithole long ago,

We met the boys on common ground

And gave them all a show.

In social as in business ways

Our honor was our law,

And when a brother lost his grip

He on the boys could draw.

CHORUS: “We’re the boys, the same old boys,

Who were there in sixty-five;

If any Swordsman comes our way

He’ll find us still alive.

“What if grim age creeps on apace,

Our souls will ne’er grow old;

We will, as in the Pithole days,

Stand true as Swordsmen bold.

In those old days we had our fun,

But stood for honor true;

Here, warmly clasping hand-to-hand,

Our friendship we renew.”

“Spirits” inspired four good wells at Pithole. One dry hole, a mile

south-east of town, seriously depressed stock in their skill as

“oil-smellers.” An enthusiastic disciple of the Fox sisters, assured of

“a big well,” drilled two-hundred feet below the sixth sand in search of

oil-bearing rock. He drilled himself into debt and Sheriff C. S.

Mark—six feet high and correspondingly broad—whom nobody could mistake

for an ethereal being, sold the outfit at junk-prices.

[Illustration: ALFRED W. SMILEY.]

In the swish and swirl of Pithole teamsters—a man with two stout horses

could earn twenty dollars a day clear—drillers and pumpers played no

mean part. They received high wages and spent money freely.

Variety-shows, music-halls—with “pretty waiter-girls”—dance-houses,

saloons, gambling-hells and dens of vice afforded unlimited

opportunities to squander cash and decency and self-respect. Many a

clever youth, flushed with the idea of “sowing his wild oats,”

sacrificed health and character on the altars of Bacchus and Venus. Many

a comely maiden, yielding to the wiles of the betrayer, rounded up in

the brothel and the potter’s field. Many a pious mother, weeping for the

wayward prodigal who was draining her life-blood, had reason to inquire:

“Oh, where is my boy to-night?” Many a husband, forgetting the trusting

wife and children at home, wandered from the straight path and tasted

the forbidden fruit. Many a promising life was blighted, many a hopeful

career blasted, many a reputation smirched and many a fond heart broken

by the pitfalls and temptations of Pithole. Dollars were not the only

stakes in the exciting game of life—good names, family ties, bright

prospects, domestic happiness and human souls were often risked and

often lost. “The half has never been told.”

[Illustration: GOVERNOR SHEAKLEY.]

Scarcely less noted was the organization heralded far and wide as

“Pithole’s Forty Thieves.” Well-superintendents, controlling the

interests of outside companies, were important personages. Distant

stockholders, unable to understand the difficulties and uncertainties

attending developments, blamed the superintendents for the lack of

dividends. No class of men in the country discharged their duties more

faithfully, yet cranky investors in wildcat stocks termed them “slick

rascals,” “plunderers” and “robbers.” Some joker suggested that once a

band of Arabian Knights—fellows who stole everything—associated as “The

Forty Thieves” and that the libeled superintendents ought to organize a

club. The idea captured the town and “Pithole’s Forty Thieves” became at

once a tangible reality. Merchants, producers, capitalists and

business-men hastened to enroll themselves as members. Hon. James

Sheakley, of Mercer, was elected president. Social meetings were held

regularly and guying greenhorns, who supposed stealing to be the object

of the organization, was a favorite pastime. The practical pranks of the

“Forty” were laughed at and relished in the whole region. Nine-tenths of

the members were young men, honorable in every relation of life, to whom

the organization was a genuine joke. They enjoyed its notoriety and

delighted to gull innocents who imagined they would purloin engines,

derricks, drilling-tools, saw-mills and oil-tanks. Ten years after the

band disbanded its president served in Congress and was a leading

debater on the Hayes-Tilden muddle. “Pap” Sheakley—as the boys

affectionately called him—was the embodiment of integrity, kindliness

and hospitality. He operated in the Butler field and lived at

Greenville. Bereft of his devoted wife and lovely daughters by “the fell

sergeant, Death,” he sold his, desolated home and accepted from

President Cleveland the governorship of Uncle Sam’s remotest Territory.

His administration was so satisfactory that President Harrison

reappointed him. There was no squarer, truer, nobler man in the public

service than James Sheakley, Ex-Governor of Alaska.

Rev. S. D. Steadman, the first pastor at Pithole, a zealous

Methodist—was universally respected for earnestness and piety. The

“forty thieves” sent him one-hundred-and-fifty dollars at Christmas of

1866, with a letter commending his moral teachings, his courtesy and

charity. Another minister inquired of a Swordsman what the letters of

the club’s motto—“R. C. T.”—signified, “Religious Councils Treasured”

was the ready response. This raised the club immensely in the divine’s

estimation and led to a sermon in which he extolled the jolly

organization! He “took a tumble” when a deacon smilingly informed him

that the letters—a fake proposed in sport—symbolized “Rum, Cards,

Tobacco.”

[Illustration: AN INVOLUNTARY MUD-BATH.]

Mud was responsible for the funniest—to the spectators—mishap that ever

convulsed a Pithole audience. A group of us stood in front of the

Danforth House at the height of the miry season. Thin mud overflowed the

plank-crossing and a grocer laid short pieces of scantling two or three

feet apart for pedestrians to step on. A flashy sport, attired in a

swell suit and a shiny beaver, was the first to take advantage of the

improvised passage. Half-way across the scantling to which he was

stepping moved ahead of his foot. In trying to recover his balance the

sport careened to one side, his hat flew off and he landed plump on his

back, in mud and water three feet deep! He disappeared beneath the

surface as completely as though dropped into the sea, his head emerging

a moment later. Blinded, sputtering and gasping for breath, he was a

sight for the gods and little fishes! Mouth, eyes, nose and ears were

choked with the dreadful ooze. Two men went to his assistance, led him

to the rear of the hotel and turned the hose on him. His clothes were

ruined, his gold watch was never recovered and for weeks small boys

would howl: “His name is Mud!”

John Galloway, on one of his rambles for territory, ate dinner at the

humble cabin of a poor settler. A fowl, tough, aged and peculiar, was

the principal dish. In two weeks the tourist was that way again. A boy

of four summers played at the door, close to which the visitor sat down.

A brood of small chickens approached the entrance. “Poo’, ittey sings,”

lisped the child, “oo mus’ yun away; here’s ’e yasty man ’at eated up

oos mammy.” The good woman of the shanty had stewed the clucking-hen to

feed the unexpected guest.

A maiden of uncertain age owned a farm which various operators vainly

tried to lease. Hoping to steal a march on the others, one smooth talker

called the second time. “I have come, Miss Blank,” he began, “to make

you an offer.” He didn’t get a chance to add “for your land.” The old

girl, not a gosling who would let a prize slip, jumped from her chair,

clasped him about the neck and exclaimed: “Oh! Mr. Blank, this is so

sudden, but I’m yours!” The astounded oilman shook her off at last and

explained that he already had a wife and five children and wanted the

Farm only. The clinging vine wept and stormed, threatened a

breach-of-promise suit and loaded her dead father’s blunderbuss to be

prepared for the next intruder.

W. J. Bostford, who died at Jamestown in November of 1895, operated at

Pithole in its palmy days. Business was done on a cash basis and

oil-property was paid for in money up to hundreds-of-thousands of

dollars. Bostford made a big sale and started from Pithole to deposit

his money. A cross-country trip was necessary to reach Titusville.

Shortly after leaving Pithole he was attacked by robbers, who took all

the money and left him for dead upon the highway. He was picked up

alive, with a broken head and many other injuries, which he survived

thirty years.

[Illustration: THE DINNER HOUR AT WIGGINS’S HOTEL.]

The first “hotel” at Pithole—a balloon-frame rushed up in a day—bore the

pretentious title of Astor House. Before its erection pilgrims to the

coming city took their chance of meals at the Holmden farm-house. As a

guest wittily remarked: “It was table d’hote for men and also table

d’oat for horses.” The viands were all heaped upon large dishes and

everybody helped himself. The Morey-Farm Hotel, just above Pithole,

charged twenty-one dollars a week for board, had gas-light, steam-heat,

telegraph-office, barber-shop, colored waiters and “spring-mattresses.”

Its cooking rivalled the best in the large cities. At Wiggins’s Hotel, a

three-story boarding-house in the Tidioute field, two-hundred men would

often wait their turn to get dinner. This was a common experience in the

frontier towns, to which big throngs hurried before houses could be

erected for their accommodation. E. H. Crittenden’s hotel at Titusville

was the finest Oildom boasted in the sixties. Book & Frisbee’s was

notable at the height of the Parker development. A dollar for a meal or

a bed, four dollars a day or twenty-eight dollars a week, be the stay

long or short, was the invariable rate. Peter Christie’s Central Hotel,

at Petrolia, was immensely popular and a regular gold-mine for the

owner. Oil City’s Petroleum House was a model hostelry, under “Charley”

Staats and “Jim” White. The Jones House cleared Jones forty-thousand

dollars in nine months. Its first guest was a Mr. Seymour, who spent one

year collecting data for a statistical work on petroleum. His

manuscripts perished in the flood of 1865. The last glimpse my eyes

beheld of Jones was at Tarport, where he was driving a dray. Bradford’s

Riddell House and St. James Hotel both sized up to the most exacting

requirements. Good hotels and good restaurants were seldom far behind

the triumphant march of the pioneers whose successes established

oil-towns.

Col. Gardner, “a big man any way you take him,” was Chief-of-Police at

Pithole. He has operated at Bradford and Warren, toyed with politics and

military affairs and won the regard of troops of friends. Charles H.

Duncan, of Oil City—his youthful appearance suggests Ponce de Leon’s

spring—served in the borough-council, of which James M. Guffey, the

astute Democratic leader and successful producer, was clerk. Col. Morton

arrived in August of 1865 with a carpet-bag of job-type. His first

work—tickets for passage over Little Pithole Creek—the first printing

ever done at Pithole, was never paid for. The town had shoals of trusty,

generous fellows—“God’s own white boys,“ Fred Wheeler dubbed them—whose

manliness and enterprise and liberality were always above par.

When men went crazy at Pithole and outsiders thought the oil-country was

“flowing with milk and honey” and greenbacks, a party of wags thought to

put up a little joke at the expense of a new-comer from Boston. They

arranged with the landlord for some coupon-bonds to use in the

dining-room of the hotel and to seat the youth at their table. The

New-Englander was seated in due course. The guests talked of oil-lands,

fabulous strikes and big fortunes as ordinary affairs. Each chucked

under his chin a five-twenty government-bond as a napkin. One lay in

front of the Bostonian’s plate, folded and creased like a genuine

linen-wiper. Calmly taking the “paper” from its receptacle, the chap

from The Hub wiped his brow and adjusted the valuable napkin over his

shirt-bosom. A moment later he beckoned to a servant and said: “See

here, waiter, this napkin is too small; bring me a dish of soup and a

‘ten-forty.’” The jokers could not stand this. A laugh went around the

festive board that could have been heard at the Twin Wells and the

matter was explained to the bean-eater. He was put on the trail of “a

soft snap” and went home in a month with ten-thousand dollars. “Bring me

a ten-forty” circulated for a twelve-month in cigar-shops and bar-rooms.

Ben Hogan was one of the motley crew that swarmed to Pithole “broke.” He

taught sparring and gave exhibitions of strength at Diefenbach’s

variety-hall. He fought Jack Holliday for a purse of six-hundred dollars

and defeated him in seven rounds. Four-hundred tough men and tougher

women were present, many of them armed. Hogan was assured before the

fight he would be killed if he whipped his opponent. He was shot at by

Marsh Elliott during the mill, but escaped unhurt. Ben met Elliott soon

thereafter and knocked him out in four brief rounds, breaking his nose

and using him up generally. Next he opened a palatial sporting-house,

the receipts of which often reached a thousand dollars a day. An

adventure of importance was with “Stonehouse Jack.” This desperado and

his gang had a grudge against Hogan and concocted a scheme to kill him.

Jack was to arrange a fight with Ben, during which Hogan was to be

killed by the crowd. Ben saw his enemy coming out of a dance-house and

blazed away at him, but without effect. The fusillade scared

“Stonehouse” away from Pithole and on January twenty-second, 1866, a

vigilance committee at Titusville drove the villain out of the

oil-region, threatening to hang him or any of his gang who dared return.

This committee was organized to clear out a nest of incendiaries and

thugs. The vigilants erected a gallows near the smoking embers of E. B.

Chase & Co.’s general store, fired the preceding night, and decreed the

banishment of hordes of toughs. “Stonehouse Jack” and one-hundred other

men, with a number of vile women came under this sentence. The whole

party was formed in line in front of the gallows, the “Rogue’s March”

was played and the procession, followed by a great crowd of people,

proceeded to the Oil-Creek Railroad station. The prisoners were ordered

on board a special train, with a warning that if they ever again set

foot upon the soil of Titusville they would be summarily executed. This

salutary action ended organized crime in the oil-region.

North of Pithole the tide crossed into Allegheny township. Balltown, a

meadow on C. M. Ball’s farm in July, 1865, at the end of the year

paraded stores, hotels, a hundred dwellings and a thousand people. Fires

in 1866 scorched it and waning production did the rest. Dawson Centre,

on the Sawyer tract, budded, frosted and perished. The Morey House, on

the Copeland farm, was the oasis in the desert, serving meals that

tickled the midriff and might cope with Delmonico’s. Farms on Little

Pithole Creek were riddled without swelling the yield of crude

immoderately. Where are those oil-wells now? Echo murmurs “where?” In

all that section of Cornplanter and Allegheny townships a derrick, an

engine-house or a tank would be a novelty of the rarest breed.

Eight miles north-east of Titusville, where Godfrey Hill drilled a

dry-hole in 1860 and two companies drilled six later, the Colorado

district finally rewarded gritty operators. Enterprise was benefited by

small wells in the vicinity. Down Pithole Creek to its junction with the

Allegheny the country was punctured. Oleopolis straggled over the slope

on the river’s bank, a pipe-line, a railroad to Pithole and minor wells

contributing to its support. The first well tackled a vein of natural

gas, which caught fire and consumed the rig. The driller was alone, the

owner of the well having gone into the shanty. In a twinkling flames

enveloped the astonished knight of the temper-screw, who leaped from the

derrick, clothes blazing and hair singed off, and headed for the water.

“Boss,” he roared in his flight, “jump into the river and say your

prayers quick! I’ve bu’sted the bung and hell’s running out.”

“Breathe through the nostrils” is good advice. People should breathe

through the nose and not use it so much for talking and singing through.

Yet every rule has exceptions. A pair of mules hauled oil from Dawson

Centre in the flush times of the excitement. The mud was practically

bottomless. A visitor was overheard telling a friend that the bodies of

the mules sank out of sight and that they were breathing through their

ears, which alone projected above the ooze. Dawson and many more

departed oil-towns suggest the jingle:

“There was an old woman lived under a hill;

If she hadn’t moved she’d be there still:

But she moved!”

About St. Valentine’s Day in 1866, when the burning of the Tremont House

led to the discovery of oil in springs and wells, was a hilarious time

at Pithole. Every cellar was fairly flooded with grease. People pumped

it from common pumps, dipped it from streams, tasted it in tea, inhaled

it from coffee-pots and were afraid to carry lights at night lest the

very air should cause explosion and other unhappiness. It became a

serious question what to drink. The whiskey could not be watered—there

was no water. Dirty shirts could not be washed—the very rain was crude

oil. Dirt fastened upon the damask cheeks of Pithole damsels and found

an abiding-place in the whiskers of every bronzed fortune-hunter. Water

commanded an enormous price and intoxicating beverages were cheap, since

they could scarcely be taken in the raw. The editor of the _Record_, a

strict temperance man, was obliged to travel fourteen miles every

morning by stone-boat to get his glass of water. Stocks of oil-companies

were the only thing in the community thoroughly watered. Tramps, hobos,

wandering vagrants and unwashed disbelievers that “cleanliness is next

to Godliness” pronounced Pithole a terrestrial paradise. They were

willing to reverse Muhlenburg’s sentiment and “live alway” in that kind

of dry territory.

“You’re not fit to sit with decent people; come up here and sit along

with me!” thundered a Dawson teacher who sat at his desk hearing a

recitation, as he discovered at a glance the worst boy in school

annoying his seatmate.

Charles Highberger, who had lost a leg, was elected a justice of the

peace at Pithole in 1866. Attorney Ruth, who came from Westmoreland

county, was urging the conviction of a miserable whelp when he noticed

Highberger had fallen asleep, as was his custom during long arguments.

Mr. Ruth aroused him and remarked: “I wish your honor would pay

attention to the points which I am about to make, as they have an

important bearing on the case.” Highberger opened his eyes, glared

around the room and rose on his crutches in great wrath, exclaiming:

“There has been too much blamed chin-whacking in this case; you have

been talking two hours and I haven’t seen a cent of costs. The prisoner

may consider himself discharged. The court will adjourn to Andy

Christy’s drug-store.” This was the way justice was dispensed with in

those good old days when “go as you please” was the rule at Pithole.

John G. Saxe once lectured at Pithole and was so pleased with the people

and place that he donated twenty-five dollars to the charity-fund and

wrote columns of descriptive matter to a Boston newspaper. “If I were

not Alexander I would be Diogenes,” said the Macedonian conqueror.

Similarly Henry Ward Beecher remarked, when he visited Oil City to

lecture, “If I were not pastor of Plymouth church I would be pastor of

an Oil-City church.” The train conveying Dom Pedro, Emperor of Brazil,

through the oil-region stopped at Foxburg to afford the imperial guest

an opportunity to see an oil-well torpedoed. He watched the filling of

the shell with manifest interest, dropped the weight after the torpedo

had been lowered and clapped his hands when a column of oil rose in the

air. An irreverent spectator whispered: “This beats playing pedro.”

[Illustration: J. P. ALBEE.]

J. P. Albee, laborer, painter, carpenter, rig-builder, pumper,

pipe-liner, merchant and insurance-agent, was born in Warren county,

reared on a farm in the Wisconsin lead-mining regions, enlisted in 1861,

served three years gallantly and was discharged because of a wound in

the breast by a rifle-ball. He struck Pithole in September of 1865,

shared in the ups and downs of the transitory excitement and was one of

the founders, if not the full-fledged father, of Cash-Up. The brave

veteran was a pioneer in shoving ahead and demonstrating where oil was

_not_ to be expected. He owned fourteen dry-holes in whole or part, a

number sufficient to establish quite a record. Drifting to Butler with

the tide of developments, he engaged in various pursuits with varying

success. Hosts of friends relish his tales of army-life and of ventures

in Oildom, a knapsack of which he has constantly on hand. The years

speed quickly, bringing many changes in their wake, and thousands who

once waded through the muddy streets of Pithole are now treading the

golden pavements of the Celestial City. Those who linger here a while

longer love to recall the times that can never be repeated under the

blue canopy.

Mud-veins in the third sand on Oil Creek and at Pithole would often

stick the tools effectually. On Bull Run three wells in one derrick were

abandoned with tools stuck in the third sand. The theory was that the

mud vein was a stratum of slate in the sand, which became softened and

ran into the well when water came in contact with it. Casing has robbed

it of its terrors.

Before casing was introduced it was often difficult to tell if oil was

found. Oilmen would examine the sand, look for “soot” on the

sand-pumpings and place a lighted match to the sand-pump immediately

after it was drawn from the well, as a test for gas. If the driller was

sure the drill dropped two or three feet, with “soot” on the

sand-pumpings, the show was considered worth testing. A seed-bag was put

on the tubing and the well was allowed to stand a day or two to let the

seed swell. To exhaust the water sometimes required weeks, but when all

hope of a producer was lost and the last shovel of coal was in the

boiler the oil might come. There seemed to be a virtue in that last

shovel of coal. The shoemaker who could make a good seed-bag was a big

man. The man who tied on the seed-bag for a well that proved a good

producer was in demand. If, after oil showed itself, flax-seed was seen

coming from the pipe the well-owner’s heart could be found in his boots.

The bag was burst, the water let in and the operator’s hopes let out.

A young divine preached a sermon at Pithole, on the duty of

self-consecration, so effectively that a hearer presented him with a

bundle of stock in a company operating on the Hyner farm. The preacher

sold his shares for ten-thousand dollars and promptly retired from the

pulpit to study law! Rev. S. D. Steadman, while a master of sarcasm that

would skewer a hypocrite on the point of irony, was particularly at home

in the realm of the affections and of the ideal. In matters of the heart

and soul few could with surer touch set aflow the founts of tender

pathos. He met his match occasionally. Rallying a friend on his

Calvinism, he said, “I believe Christians may fall from grace.” “Brother

Steadman,” was the quick rejoinder, “you need not argue that; the flock

you’re tending is convincing proof that the doctrine is true of your

membership.”

A good deal of fun has been poked at the Georgia railroad which had

cow-catchers at the rear, to keep cattle from walking into the cars, and

stopped in the woods while the conductor went a mile for milk to

replenish a crying baby’s nursing-bottle. On my last trip to Pithole by

rail there were no other passengers. The conductor sat beside me to chat

of former days and the decadence of the town at the northern end of the

line. Four miles from Oleopolis fields of wild strawberries “wasted

their sweetness on the desert air.” In reply to my hint that the berries

looked very tempting, the conductor pulled the bell-rope and stopped the

train. All hands feasted on the luscious fruit until satisfied.

Coleridge, who observed that “Doubtless the Almighty _could_ make a

finer fruit than the wild strawberry, but doubtless He never did,” would

have enjoyed the scene. “Don’t hurry too much,” the conductor called

after me at Pithole “we can start forty minutes behind time and I’ll

wait for you!” The rails were taken up and the road abandoned in the

fall, but the strawberry-picking is as fresh as though it happened

yesterday.

Long ago teamsters would start from the mines with twenty bushels of

fifteen-cent coal. By the time they reached Pithole it would swell to

thirty-five bushels of sixty-cent coal. With oil for back-loading the

teamsters made more money then than a bond-juggler with a cinch on the

United-States treasury.

A farmer’s wife near Dawson Centre, who had washed dishes for forty

years, became so tired of the monotony that, the day her husband leased

the farm for oil-purposes, she smashed every piece of crockery in the

house and went out on the woodpile and laughed a full hour. It was the

first vacation of her married life and dish-washing women will know how

to sympathize with the poor soul in her drudgery and her emancipation.

Pithole, Shamburg, Red-Hot, Tip-Top, Cash-Up, Balltown and Oleopolis

have passed into history and many of their people have gone beyond the

vale of this checkered pilgrimage, yet memories of these old times come

back freighted with thoughts of joyous days that will return no more

forever.

“Better be a young June-bug than an old bird of Paradise.”

PITHOLE REVISITED.

The following lines, first contributed by me to the Oil-City _Times_ in

1870, went the rounds twenty-five years ago:

Not a sound was heard, not a shrill whistle’s scream,

As our footsteps through Pithole we hurried;

Not a well was discharging an unctuous stream

Where the hopes of the oilmen lay buried!

We walk’d the dead city till far in the night—

Weeds growing where wheels once were turning—

While seeking to find by the struggling moonlight

Some symptom of gas dimly burning.

No useless regret should encumber man’s breast,

Though dry-holes and Pitholes may bound him;

So we lay like a warrior taking his rest,

Each with his big overcoat ’round him.

Few and short were the prayers we said,

We spoke not a sentence of sorrow,

But steadfastly gazed on the place that was dead

And bitterly long’d for the morrow!

We thought, as we lay on our primitive bed,

An old sand-pump reel for a pillow,

How friends, foes and strangers were heartily bled

And ruin swept on like a billow!

Lightly we slept, for we dreamt of the scamp,

And in fancy began to upbraid him,

Who swindled us out of our very last stamp—

In the grave we could gladly have laid him!

We rose half an hour in advance of the sun,

But little refreshed for retiring!

And, feeling as stiff as a son of a gun,

Set off on a hunt for some firing.

Slowly and sadly our hard-tack went down,

Then we wrote a brief sketch of our story

And struck a bee-line for Oil City’s fair town,

Leaving Pithole alone in its glory!

[Illustration: PARKER OIL EXCHANGE IN 1874.]

TOP ROW—

J. D. Emery

Warren Gray.

—— Harris.

E. Seldon.

C. Seldon.

Nelson Cochran.

Col. Sellers.

Unknown.

Milo Marsden.

W. A. Pullman.

L. W. Waters.

Lemuel Young.

Chas. Archbold.

Unknown.

Unknown.

Harry Parker.

Hugh McKelvy.

James Green.

James McCutcheon.

J. M’Donald.

Dr. Thorn.

Unknown.

Unknown.

MIDDLE ROW—

O J. Greer.

Fullerton Parker.

Full. Parker, Jr.

James Goldsborough.

W. C. Henry.

Thos. McLaughlin.

Col. Brady.

Sam. Morrow.

Joseph Seep.

Charles Hatch.

John Barton.

R. Moorhead.

H. W. Batchelor.

—— Gephardt.

Shep. Morehead.

LOWER ROW—

Capt. J. T. Chalfant.

Thos. McConnell.

Weston Howland.

James Lowe.

Chas. Riddell.

Richard Conn.

Rem Offley.

Ren. Kerr.

Harry Marlin.

H. Beers.

Jas. Garrett.

Chas. W. Ball.

Walter Fleming.

Chas. J. Frazer.

X.

UP THE WINDING RIVER.

ALONG THE ALLEGHENY FROM OIL CREEK—THE FIRST PETROLEUM COMPANY’S BIG

STRIKE—RULER OF PRESIDENT—FAGUNDAS, TIDIOUTE AND TRIUMPH HILL—THE

ECONOMITES—WARREN AND FOREST—CHERRY GROVE’S BOMBSHELL—SCOUTS AND

MYSTERY WELLS—EXCITING EXPERIENCES IN THE MIDDLE FIELD—DRAINING A

JUICY SECTION OF OILDOM.

----------

“The ocean is vast and our craft is small.”—_Norman Gunnison._

“Heaven sends us good meat, but the devil sends cooks.”—_Garrick._

“Stay, stay thy crystal tide,

Sweet Allegheny!

I would by thee abide,

Sweet Allegheny.”—_Marjorie Meade._

“Keep account of crises and transactions in this life.”—_Mrs.

Browning._

“Five minutes in a crisis is worth years.”—_Freeman Hunt._

“It does upset a man’s calculations most confoundedly.”—_Grant

Allen._

“Run if you like, but try to keep your breath.”—_Holmes._

“Then it was these Philistine sinners’ turn to be skeered and they

broke for the brush.”—_Dr. Pierson._

“And all may do what has by man been done.”—_Edward Young._

“Spurr’d boldly on and dashed through thick and thin.”—_Dryden._

----------

[Illustration: DAVID BEATTY.]

[Illustration: JESSE A. HEYDRICK.]

In transforming the unfruitful, uninteresting Valley of Oil Creek into

the rich, attractive Valley of Petroleum the course of developments was

southward from the Drake well. Although some persons imagined that a

pool or a strip bordering the stream would be the limit of successful

operations, others entertained broader ideas and believed the

petroleum-sun was not doomed to rise and set on Oil Creek. The Evans

well at Franklin confirmed this view. Naturally the Allegheny River was

regarded with favor as the base of further experiments. Quite as

naturally the town at the junction of the river and the creek was

benefited. The Michigan Rock-Oil-Company laid out building-lots and Oil

City grew rapidly in wealth, ambition, enterprise and population. From a

half-dozen dwellings, two unbridged streams, the remnants of an

iron-furnace and a patch of cleared land on the flats it speedily

advanced to a hustling settlement of five-thousand souls, “out for the

stuff” and all eager for profit. Across the Allegheny, on the Downing

and Bastian farms, William L. Lay laid out the village of Laytonia in

1863 and improved the ferriage. Phillips & Vanausdall, who struck a

thirty-barrel well on the Downing farm in 1861, established a ferry

above Bastian’s and started the suburbs of Albion and Downington. In

1865 these were merged into Imperial City, which in 1866 was united with

Laytonia and Leetown to form Venango City. In 1871 the boroughs of

Venango City and Oil City were incorporated as the city of Oil City,

with William M. Williams as mayor. Three passenger-bridges, one railroad

bridge and an electric street-railway connect the north and south sides

of the “Hub of Oildom.” Beautiful homes, first-class schools and

churches, spacious business-blocks, paved streets, four railroads,

electric-lights, water-works, pipe-line offices, strong banks, enormous

tube-works, huge refineries, bright newspapers, a paid fire-department,

all the modern conveniences and twelve-thousand clever people make Oil

City one of the busiest and most desirable towns in or out of

Pennsylvania.

The largest of twenty-five or thirty wells drilled around Walnut Bend,

six miles up the river, in 1860-65, was rated at two-hundred barrels.

Four miles farther, two miles north-east of the mouth of Pithole Creek,

John Henry settled on the north bank of the river in 1802. Henry’s Bend

perpetuates the name of this brave pioneer, who reared a large family

and died in 1858. The farm opposite Henry’s, at the crown of the bend,

Heydrick Brothers, of French Creek township, leased in the fall of 1859.

Jesse Heydrick organized the Wolverine Oil-Company, the second ever

formed to drill for petroleum. Thirty shares of stock constituted its

capital of ten-thousand-five-hundred dollars. The first well,

one-hundred-and-sixty feet deep, pumped only ten barrels a day, giving

Wolverine shares a violent chill. The second, also sunk in 1860, at

three-hundred feet flowed fifteen-hundred barrels! Beside this giant the

Drake well was a midget. The Allegheny had knocked out Oil Creek at a

stroke, the production of the Heydrick spouter doubling that of all the

others in the region put together. It was impossible to tank the oil,

which was run into a piece of low ground and formed a pond through which

yawl-boats were rowed fifty rods! By this means seven-hundred barrels a

day could be saved. At last the tubing was drawn, which decreased the

yield and rendered pumping necessary. The well flowed and pumped about

one-hundred-thousand barrels, doing eighty a day in 1864-5, when the

oldest producer in Venango county. It was a celebrity in its time and

proved immensely profitable. In December of 1862 Jesse Heydrick went to

Irvine, forty miles up the river, to float down a cargo of empty

barrels. Twenty-five miles from Irvine, on the way back, the river was

frozen from bank to bank. He sawed a channel a mile, ran the barrels to

the well, filled them, loaded them in a flat-boat and arrived at

Pittsburg on a cold Saturday before Christmas. Oil was scarce, the

zero-weather having prevented shipments, and he sold at thirteen dollars

a barrel. A thaw set in, the market was deluged with crude and in four

days the price dropped to two dollars! Stock-fluctuations had no

business in the game with petroleum.

Wolverine shares climbed out of sight. Mr. Heydrick bought the whole

batch, the lowest costing him four-thousand dollars and the highest

fifteen-thousand. He sold part of his holdings on the basis of

fifteen-hundred-thousand dollars for the well and farm of two-hundred

acres, forty-three-thousand times the original value of the land!

Heydrick Brothers bored seventy wells on three farms in President

township, one of which cost eighteen months’ labor and ten-thousand

dollars in money and produced nine barrels of oil. They disposed of it,

the new owner fussed with it and for five years received fifteen barrels

of oil a day.

Accidents and incidents resulting from the Wolverine operations would

fill a dime-novel. Jesse Heydrick, organizer of the company, went east

with two or three-hundred-thousand dollars, presumably to “play Jesse”

with the bulls and bears of Wall Street. He returned in a year or more

destitute of cash, but loaded with entertaining tales of adventure. He

told a thrilling story of his abduction from a New-York wharf and

shipment to Cuba by a band of kidnappers, who stole his money and

treated him harshly. He endured severe hardships and barely escaped with

his life and a mine of experience. Working his way north, he resumed

surveying, prepared valuable maps of the Butler field and was a standard

authority on oil-matters in the district. For years he was connected

with a pipe-line in Ohio, returning thence to Butler, his present

residence, to engage in oil-operations. Mr. Heydrick is cultured and

social, brimful of information and interesting recitals, and not a

bilious crank who thinks the world is growing worse because he lost a

fortune. A brother at Franklin was president of the Oil-City Bank,

incorporated in 1864 as a bank of issue and forced to the wall in 1866,

and served a year on the Supreme Bench. James Heydrick was a skilled

surveyor and Charles W. resided at the old homestead on French Creek.

Heydrick Brothers were “the Big Four” in developments that brought the

Allegheny-River region into the petroleum-column. It is singular that

the Heydrick well, located at random thirty-seven years ago, was the

largest ever struck on the banks of the zig-zagged, ox-bowed stream.

It set the pace to serve as an example,

But not another could come up to sample.

Eight rods square on the Heydrick tract leased for five-thousand dollars

and fifty per cent. of the oil, while the Wolverine shares attested the

increasing wealth of the oil-interest and the pitch to which oil-stocks

might rise. Hussey & McBride secured the Henry farm and obtained a large

production in 1860-1. The Walnut Tree and Orchard wells headed the list.

Warren & Brother pumped oil from Pithole to Henryville, a small town on

the flats, of whose houses, hotels, stores and shipping-platforms no

scrap survives. The Commercial Oil-Company bought the Culbertson farm,

above Henry, and drilled extensively on Muskrat and Culbertson Runs.

Patrick McCrea, the first settler on the river between Franklin and

Warren, the first Allegheny ferryman north of Franklin and the first

Catholic in Venango county, migrated from Virginia in 1797 to the wilds

of North-western Pennsylvania. C. Curtiss purchased the McCrea tract of

four-hundred acres in 1861 and stocked it in the Eagle Oil-Company of

Philadelphia. Fair wells were found on the property and the town of

Eagle Rock attained the dignity of three-hundred buildings. An eagle

could fly away with all that is left of the town and the wells.

[Illustration: EDWIN E. CLAPP.]

Farther along Robert Elliott, who removed from Franklin, owned

one-thousand acres on the south side of the river and built the first

mill in President township. Rev. Ralph Clapp built a blast-furnace in

1854-5, a mile from the mouth of Hemlock Creek, at the junction of which

with the Allegheny a big hotel, a store and a shop are situated. Mr.

Clapp gained distinction in the pulpit and in business, served in the

Legislature and died in 1865. His son, Edwin E. Clapp, had a block of

six-thousand acres, the biggest slice of undeveloped territory in

Oildom. Productive wells have been sunk on the river-front, but Clapp

invariably refused to sell or lease except once. To Kahle Brothers, for

the sake of his father’s friendship for their father, he leased

two-hundred acres, on which many good wells are yielding nicely.

Preferring to keep his own lands untouched until he “got good and

ready,” he operated largely at Tidioute, he and his brother, John M.

Clapp, acquiring great wealth. He was chairman of the Producers’ Council

and active in the memorable movements of 1871-3. He built for his home

the President Hotel, furnishing it with every comfort and luxury except

the one no _bachelor_ can possess. From him Macadam, Talbot and

Nicholson could have learned much about road-making. At his own expense

he constructed many a mile of first-class roads in President, grading,

ditching and leveling in a fashion to make a bicycler’s mouth water.

There was not a scintilla of pride or affectation in his composition. It

is told that an agent of the Standard Oil-Company appointed a time to

meet him “on important business.” The interview lasted two minutes.

“What is the business?” interrogated Clapp. “Our company authorizes me

to offer you one-million dollars for your lands in President and I am

prepared to pay you the money.” “Anything else?” “No.” “Well, the land

isn’t for sale; good-morning!” Off went Clapp as coolly as though he had

merely received a bid for a bushel of potatoes. Whether true or not, the

story is characteristic. As a friend to swear by, a helper of the poor,

a believer in fair-play, a prime joker and an inimitable weaver of comic

yarns few could equal, none excel, the “President of President.” He died

in July, 1897.

Around Tionesta, the county-seat of Forest, numerous holes were punched.

Thomas Mills, who operated in Ohio and missed opening the Sistersville

field by a scratch, drilled in 1861-2. The late George S. Hunter—he

built Tionesta’s first bridge and ought to have a monument for

enterprise—hunted earnestly for paying territory. Up Tionesta Creek

operations extended slowly, but developments in 1882-3 atoned for the

delay. Then Forest county was “the cynosure of all eyes,” each week

springing fresh surprises. Balltown had a crop of dry-holes, followed by

wells of all grades from twenty barrels to fifteen-hundred. At Henry’s

Mills and on the Cooper lands, north-east of Balltown and running into

Warren county, spouters were decidedly in vogue. Reno No. 1 well,

finished in December of 1882, flowed twenty-eight-hundred barrels! Reno

No. 2, McCalmont Oil-Company’s No. 1, Patterson’s and the Anchor

Oil-Company’s No. 14 went over the fifteen-hundred mark. In the midst of

these gushers Melvin, Walker & Shannon’s duster indicated spotted

territory, uncertain as the verdict of a petit jury. The Forest splurge

held the entire oil-trade on the ragged edge for months. Every time one

or more fellows took to the woods to manipulate a wildcat-well oil took

a tumble. Notwithstanding the magnitude of the business, with

thirty-six-million barrels of oil in stock and untold millions of

dollars invested, the report from Balltown or Cooper of a new strike

caused a bad break. Some owners of important wells worked them as

“mysteries” to “milk the trade.” Derricks were boarded tightly, armed

men kept intruders from approaching too near and information was

withheld or falsified until the gang of manipulators “worked the

market.” To offset this leading dealers employed “scouts,” whose mission

was to get correct news at all hazards. The duties of these trusty

fellows involved great labor, night watches, incessant vigilance and

sometimes personal danger. The “mystery” racket and the introduction of

“scouts” were new elements in the business, necessitated by the peculiar

tactics of a small clique whose methods were not always creditable. The

passing of the Forest field, which declined with unprecedented rapidity,

practically ended the system that had terrorized the oil-exchanges in

New York, Oil City, Bradford and Pittsburg. The collapse of the Cooper

pool was more unexpected than the striking of a gusher would be under

any circumstances. Its influence upon oil-values was ridiculously

disproportionate to its merits, just as the tail sometimes wags the dog.

[Illustration: IN THE MIDDLE FIELD.]

Closely allied to Balltown and Cooper in its principal features, its

injurious effects and sudden depreciation, was the field that taught the

Forest lesson. On May nineteenth, 1882, the oil-trade was paralyzed by

the report of a big well in Cherry-Grove township, Warren county, miles

from previous developments. The general condition of the region was

prosperous, with an advancing market and a favorable outlook. The new

well—the famous “646”—struck the country like a cyclone. Nobody had

heard a whisper of the finding of oil in the hole George Dimick was

drilling near the border of Warren and Forest. The news that it was

flowing twenty-five-hundred barrels flashed over the wires with

disastrous consequences. The excitement in the oil-exchanges, as the

price of certificates dropped thirty to fifty per cent. in a few

moments, was indescribable. Margins and small-fry holders were wiped out

in a twinkling and the losses aggregated millions. It was a panic of the

first water, far-reaching and ruinous. A plunge from one-thirty to

fifty-five cents for crude meant distress and bankruptcy to thousands of

producers and persons carrying oil. Men comfortably off in the morning

were beggared by noon. Other wells speedily followed “646.” The Murphy,

the Mahoopany and scores more swelled the daily yield to thirty-thousand

barrels. Five-hundred wells were rushed down with the utmost celerity.

Big companies bought lands at big prices and operated on a big scale.

Pipe-lines were laid, iron-tanks erected and houses reared by the

hundred. Cherry Grove dwarfed the richest portions of the region into

insignificance. It bade fair to swamp the business, to flood the world

with cheap oil, to compel the abandonment of entire districts and to

crush the average operator. But if the rise of Cherry Grove was vividly

picturesque, its fall was startlingly phenomenal. One dark December

morning the workmen noticed that the Forest Oil-Company’s largest gusher

had stopped flowing. Within a week the disease had spread like an

epidemic. Spouters ceased to spout and obstinately declined to pump. The

yield was counted by dozens of barrels instead of thousands. In January

one-fourth the wells were deserted and the machinery removed.

Three-hundred wells on April first yielded hardly two-thousand barrels,

three-quarters what “646” or the Murphy had done alone! The suddenness

of the topple cast Oil Creek into the shade and eclipsed Pithole itself.

Piles of junk represented miles of pipe-lines and acres of tanks. The

Cooper fever was breaking out and, with Henry’s Mills and Balltown,

repeated in 1883 the hurrah of 1882. For eleven months the Forest-Warren

pools fretted and fumed, producing five-million barrels of oil and

having the trade by the throat. In that brief period Cherry Grove came

and went, Cooper threatened and subsided, and Balltown was bowled out.

Nine-tenths of the operators figured as heavy losers. Pennsylvania’s

production shrank from ninety-thousand barrels to sixty-thousand and a

healthy reaction set in. Petroleum-developments often presented

remarkable peculiarities, but the strangest of all was the readiness

with which speculators time and again fell a prey to the schemes of

Forest-Warren jobbers, whose “picture is turned to the wall.”

[Illustration: S. B. HUGHES.]

The professional “oil-scout” first became prominent at Cherry Grove. He

was neither an Indian fighter nor a Pinkerton detective, although

possessing the courage and sharpness of both. He combined a knowledge of

woodcraft and human-nature with keen discernment, acute judgment and

infinite patience. S. B. Hughes, J. C. Tennent, P. C. Boyle, J. C.

McMullen, Frank H. Taylor, Joseph Cappeau, James Emery and J. H. Rathbun

were captains in the good work of worrying and circumventing the

“mystery” men. Hughes rendered service that won the confidence of his

employers and brought him a competence. Never caught napping, for one

special feat he was said to have received ten-thousand dollars. It was

not uncommon for him and his comrades to keep their boots on a week at a

stretch, to snatch a nap under a tree or on a pile of casing, to creep

on all-fours inside the guard-lines and watch pale Luna wink merrily and

the bright stars twinkle while reclining on the damp ground to catch the

faintest sound from a mystified well. Boyle and Tennent made brilliant

plays in the campaign of 1882-3. Captain J. T. Jones, failing to get

correct information regarding “646,” lost heavily on long oil when the

Cherry-Grove gusher hypnotized the market and sent Tennent from Bradford

to size up the wells and the movements of those manipulating them.

Michael Murphy, learning that Grace & Dimick were quietly drilling a

wildcat-well on lot 646, smelled a large-sized rodent and concluded to

share in the sport. For one-hundred dollars an acre and one-eighth the

usufruct Horton, Crary & Co., the Sheffield tanners, sold him lot 619,

north-east of 646. Murphy had cut his eye-teeth as an importer—John S.

Davis was his partner—of oil-barrels, an exporter of crude and an

operator at Bradford. He pushed a well on the south-west corner of his

purchase and secured lands in the vicinity. Grace & Dimick held back

their well a month to tie up lots and complete arrangements regarding

the market. Everything was managed adroitly. The trade had not a glimmer

of suspicion that a bombshell might be fired at any moment. Murphy’s rig

burned down on May fifteenth, he was in Washington trying to close a

deed for another tract and “646” was put through the sand. On June

second Murphy’s No. 1, which he guarded strictly after rebuilding the

rig, flowed sixteen-hundred barrels. His No. 2, finished on July third,

flowed thirty-six-hundred barrels in twenty-four hours! The Mahoopany

and a half-dozen others aided in the demoralization of prices. Murphy

sold eighty acres of lot 619 for fifty-thousand dollars to the McCalmont

Oil-Company. The Anchor Oil-Company’s gusher on lot 647 caught fire,

without curtailing the flow, and was burning furiously as “Jim” Tennent

arrived from Bradford. The scouts had their hands full, with the

“white-sand pools” and the keenest masters of “mystery wells” to demand

their best licks.

Watching Murphy’s dry-hole on lot 633 was Tennent’s initial job. The

Whale Oil-Company’s duster on lot 648 next claimed the attention of the

scouts. It had been drilled below the sand-level and the tools left at

the bottom. On Sunday night, July ninth, 1882, Boyle, Tennent and two

companions raised the tools by hand, measured the well with a steel-line

and telegraphed their principals that it was dry. This report jumped the

market on Monday morning from forty-nine cents to sixty. The Shannon

well on the Cooper tract needed constant care and the scouts divided the

labor. Tennent and Rathbun one night sought to crawl near the well. A

twig snapped off and a guard fired, the ball grazing “Jim’s” ear. In

December Boyle and W. C. Edwards drilled Grandin No. 4 below the sand

before the owners knew the rock had been reached. Its failure surprised

the trade as much as the success of “646.” Boyle actually posted the

guards to keep intruders away and they refused to let W. W. Hague, an

owner of the well, inside the line until the contractor appeared and

permitted him to pass! Boyle and Tennent did fine work north of the

Cooper field. At the Shultz well Tennent, in order to make a quick trip

of a half-mile to the pipe-line telegraph, clung to the tail of

Cappeau’s horse and kept up with the animal’s gallop. Mercury might not

have endorsed that style of locomotion, but it served the purpose and

got the news to Jones ahead of everybody else. Tennent played the market

skillfully, cleared twenty-five-thousand dollars on Macksburg lands and

operated with tolerable success in McKean county. Nine years ago he

removed to his thousand-acre prairie-farm in Kansas, the land of

sockless statesman and nimble grasshoppers.

Boyle, brimful of novel resources, puzzled the “mystery” chaps by his

bold ingenuity and usually beat them at their own game. He squarely

overmatched the field-marshals of manipulation. His fertile brain

originated the plan of drilling Grandin No. 4 and other test wells. The

night he went to drill the Grace well through the sand he paid the

ferryman at Dunham’s Mills not to answer any calls until morning, thus

cutting off all chance of pursuit and surprise. At the well Boyle wrote

an order to deliver the well to Tennent, signing it Pickwick, and the

drillers retired to bed! Somebody had been there before them and poured

back the sand-pumpings. At the Patterson well Boyle devised a code of

tin-horn signals that outwitted the men inside the derrick and flashed

the result to Gusher City. The number of expedients continually devised

was a marvel. Thanks to the energy and ability of these tireless scouts,

of whose midnight exploits, wild rides, hairbreadth escapes and queer

adventures many pages could be written, the effect of “mysteries” was

frequently neutralized and at length the whole system of guarded wells,

bull-dogs and shot-guns was eliminated.

[Illustration: P. M. SHANNON.]

The Forest-Warren white-sand pools marked a new era in developments,

with new ideas and new methods to hoodoo speculation. Cherry Grove had

wilted from twenty-five-thousand barrels in September to three-thousand

in December, when Cooper Hill loomed above the horizon and Balltown

appeared on deck. Shallow wells had been sunk far up Tionesta Creek in

1862-3. Near the two dwellings, saw-mill, school-house and barn dubbed

Foxburg, the stamping-ground of deer-hunters and bark-peelers, Marcus

Hulings—his name is a synonym for successful wildcatting—in 1876 drilled

a well that smacked of oil. The derrick stood ten years and globules of

grease bubbled up from the depths, a thousand feet beneath. C. A.

Shultz, a piano-tuner, taking his cue from the Hulings well, interested

Frederick Morck, a Warren jeweler, and leased the Fox estate and

contiguous lands in 1881. The Blue-Jay and two Darling wells, small

producers, created a ripple which dry-holes evaporated. They were on

Warrant 2991, Howe township, known to fame as the Cooper tract,

north-west of Foxburg. The conditions of the lease required a well at

the western end of the warrant. Cherry Grove was at its zenith, crude

was flirting with the fifties and operators considered the Blue-Jay

chick a lean bird. J. Mainwaring leased one-hundred acres from Morck &

Shultz and built a rig at the head of a wild ravine, in the sunless

woodland, a half-mile from Tionesta Creek. He lost faith and the

Mainwaring lease and rig passed to P. M. Shannon, of Bradford. Born in

Clarion county, Philip Martin Shannon enlisted at fourteen, served

gallantly through the war, traveled as salesman for a Pittsburg house

and in 1870 cast his lot with the oilmen at Parker. A pioneer at

Millerstown and its burgess in 1874, he filled the office capably and in

1876 received a big majority at the Republican primary for the

legislative nomination. The county-ring counted him out. He drifted with

the tide to Bullion, removed to Bradford in 1879, was elected mayor in

1885 and discharged his official duties with excellent discretion.

Temperate in habits and upright in conduct, Mayor Shannon had been an

observer and not a participant in the nether side of oil-region life and

knew where to draw the line. He was a favorite in society, high in

Masonic circles and efficient in securing lands for firms with which he

had become connected. Pittsburg is now his home and he manages the

company that is developing the Wyoming field. Mr. Shannon is always

generous and courteous. He could give a scout “the marble heart,”

lecture an offender, denounce a wrong or decline to furnish points

regarding his mystery-well in a good-natured way that disarmed

criticism. He retains his old-time geniality and prosperity has not

compelled him to buy hats three sizes larger than he wore at Parker and

Millerstown “in the days of auld lang-syne.”

A. B. Walker and T. J. Melvin joined Shannon in his Cooper venture. A

road was cut through the dense forest from the Fox farm-house up the

steep hill to the Mainwaring derrick. An engine and boiler were dragged

to the spot and Captain Haight contracted to drill the hole. Melvin and

Walker, believing the well a failure at eighteen-hundred feet, went to

Cherry Grove on July twenty fifth, 1882. Shannon stayed to urge the

drill a trifle farther and it struck the sand at one o’clock next day.

He drove in two pine-plugs, sent a messenger for his partners and filled

the well with water to shut in the oil. The well wouldn’t consent to be

plugged and drowned. The stream broke loose at three o’clock, hurling

the tools and plugs into the Forest ozone. Shannon and Haight, standing

in the derrick, narrowly escaped death as the tools crashed through the

roof and fell to the floor. More plugs, sediment and old clothes were

jammed down to conceal the true inwardness of the well, news of which

was expected to pulverize the market. Heavy flows following the

expulsion of the tools led the owners to anticipate a big strike.

Outposts were established and guards, each armed with a Winchester

rifle, were changed every six hours. The wildcat-well, eight miles from

a telegraph-wire, became an entrenched camp with a half-dozen wakeful

scouts besieging the citadel. Vicksburg was not guarded more vigilantly.

If a twig cracked or an owl hooted a shower of bullets whizzed in the

direction of the noise. Through August the well was permitted to

slumber, oil that forced a passage in spite of the obstructions running

into pits inside “the dead-line.” The trade staggered under the adverse

fear of the mystery. Bradford operators formed a syndicate with the

owners in lands and speculation and sold a million barrels of crude

short. When everything was ready to spring the trap some of the parties

went to drill out the plugs and usher in the market-crusher. “We have a

jack-pot to open at our pleasure” remarked one of them, voicing the

sentiment of all. None looked for anything smaller than fifteen-hundred

barrels. The four drillers were discharged and two trusted lieutenants

turned the temper-screw and dressed the bits. Ten plugs and a mass of

dirt must be cleaned out. From a distance the scouts timed every motion

of the walking-beam, gluing their eyes to field-glasses that not a

symptom of a flow might slip their eager gaze, “like stout Cortez when

he stared at the Pacific upon a peak in Darien.” Swift horses were

fastened to convenient trees, saddled and bridled for a race to the

telegraph-office. A slice of bread and a can of beans served for food.

For days the drilling continued. On September fourteenth the last

splinter of the plugs was extracted, the sand was cut deeper and—the

well didn’t respond worth a cent! The faithful scouts, who had stood

manfully between the trade and the manipulators, rushed the report. It

was a bracer to the market. Bears who pinned their hopes to the Shannon

well, the pivot upon which petroleum hinged, scrambled to cover their

shorts at heavy loss. Balltown duplicated some of the Cooper

experiences, mystery-wells on Porcupine Run agitating the trade in the

spring of 1883. The Cherry-Grove, Cooper-Hill and Balltown pools yielded

eight or nine-million barrels. Operations extended to Sheffield and the

cream was soon skimmed off. The middle field had enjoyed a very lively

inning.

Two miles back of Trunkeyville, on the west side of the Allegheny,

Calvert, Gilchrist & Risley drilled the Venture well in April, 1870, on

the Tuttle farm. Fisher Brothers, of Oil City, and O. D. Harrington, of

Titusville, bought the well for fifteen-thousand dollars when it touched

the third sand. It was eight-hundred feet deep, flowed three-hundred

barrels and started the Fagundas field. The day after it began flowing

the Fishers, Adnah Neyhart, Grandin Brothers and David Bently paid

one-hundred-and-twenty-thousand dollars for the Fagundas farm of

one-hundred-and-sixty acres. Mrs. Fagundas, one son and one daughter

died within three months of the sale. Neyhart & Grandin bought a

half-interest in David Beatty’s farm for ninety-thousand dollars. The

Lady Burns well, on the Wilkins farm, finished in June, seconded the

Venture. A daily production of three-thousand barrels and a town of

twenty-five-hundred population followed quickly. A mile from Fagundas

operations on the Hunter, Pearson, Guild and Berry farms brought the

suburb of Gillespie into being. The territory lasted and a small yield

is obtained to-day. A half-dozen houses, the Venture derrick, Andrews &

Co.’s big store and the office in which whole-souled M. Compton—he’s in

Pittsburg with the Forest Oil-Company now—labored as secretary of the

Producers’ Council, hold the fort on the site of well-nigh-forgotten

Fagundas. William H. Calvert, who projected the Venture well, died at

Sistersville, West Virginia, on February seventeenth, 1896. He had

drilled on Oil Creek and at Pithole, operated in the southern field and

was negotiating for a block of lands near Sistersville when a clot of

blood on the brain cut short his active life.

David Beatty had drilled on Oil Creek in 1859-60 with John Fertig. He

settled on a farm in Warren county “to get away from the oil.” His farm

was smothered in oil by the Fagundas development. He removed to the

pretty town of Warren, building an elegant home on the bank of Conewango

Creek. Fortune hounded him and insisted upon heaping up his riches. John

Bell drilled a fifty-barrel well eighty rods above the mansion. Wells

surrounding his lot and in his yard emitted oil. Mr. Beatty resigned

himself to the inevitable and lived at Warren until called to his final

rest some years ago. His case resembled the heroine in Milton Nobles’s

Phenix, where “the villain still pursued her.” The boys used to relate

how a negro, the first man to die at Oil City after the advent of

petroleum, was buried in a lot on the flats. Somebody wanted that

precise spot next day to drill a well and the corpse was planted on the

hill-side. The next week that particular location was selected for a

well and the body was again exhumed. To be sure of getting out of reach

of the drill the friends of the deceased boated his remains down the

river to Butler county. Twelve years later the bones were disinterred—an

oil-company having leased the old graveyard—and put in the garden of the

dead man’s son, to be handy for any further change of base that may be

required.

At East Hickory the Foster well, drilled in 1863, flowed three-hundred

barrels of amber oil. Two-hundred wells were sunk in the Hickory

district, which proved as tough as Old Hickory to nineteen-twentieths of

the operators. Three Hickory Creeks—East Hickory and Little Hickory on

the east and West Hickory—enter the river within two miles. Near the

mouth of West Hickory three Scotchmen named McKinley bored a well

two-hundred-and-thirty feet in 1861. They found oil and were preparing

to tube the well when the war broke out and they abandoned the field. A

well on the flats, drilled in 1865, flowed two-hundred barrels of

lubricating oil, occasioning a furore. One farm sold for a

hundred-thousand dollars and adjacent lands were snapped up eagerly.

Ninety-five years ago hardy lumbermen settled permanently in Deerfield

township, Warren county, thirty miles above the mouth of Oil Creek.

Twenty years later a few inhabitants, supported by the lumber trade, had

collected near the junction of a small stream with the Allegheny. Bold

hills, grand forests, mountain rills and the winding river, sprinkled

with green islets, invested the spot with peculiar charms. Upon the

creek and hamlet the poetic Indian name of Tidioute, signifying a

cluster of islands, was fittingly bestowed. Samuel Grandin, who located

near Pleasantville, Venango county, in 1822, removed to Tidioute in

1839. He owned large tracts of timber-lands and increased the mercantile

and lumbering operations that gave him prominence and wealth. Mr.

Grandin maintained a high character and died at a ripe age. His oldest

son, John Livingston Grandin, returned from college in 1857 and engaged

in business with his father, assuming almost entire control when the

latter retired from active pursuits. News of Col. Drake’s well reached

the four-hundred busy residents of the lumber-center in two days. Col.

Robinson, of Titusville, rehearsed the story of the wondrous event to an

admiring group in Samuel Grandin’s store. Young J. L. listened intently,

saddled his horse and in an hour purchased thirty acres of the Campbell

farm, on Gordon Run, below the village, for three-hundred dollars. An

“oil-spring” on the property was the attraction. Next morning he

contracted with H. H. Dennis, a man of mechanical skill, to drill a well

“right in the middle of the spring.” The following day a derrick—four

pieces of scantling—towered twenty feet, a spring-pole was procured, the

“spring” was dug to the rock, and the “tool” swung at the _first_

oil-well in Warren county and among the first in Pennsylvania. Dennis

hammered a drilling-tool from a bar of iron three feet long, flattening

one end to cut two-and-a-half inches, the diameter of the hole. In the

upper end of the drill he formed a socket, to hold an inch-bar of round

iron, held by a key riveted though and lengthened as the depth required.

Two or three times a day, when the “tool” was drawn out to sharpen the

bit and clean the hole, the key had to be cut off at each joint! With

this rude outfit drilling began the first week of September, 1859, and

the last week of October the well was down one-hundred-and-thirty-four

feet. Tubing would not go into the hole and it was enlarged to four

inches. The discarded axle of a tram-car, used to carry lumber from

Gordon Run to the river, furnished iron for the reamer. Days, weeks and

months were consumed at this task. At last, when the hole had been

enlarged its full depth, the reamer was let down “to make sure the job

was finished.” It stuck fast, never saw daylight again and the well sunk

with so much labor had not one drop of oil!

Other wells in the locality fared similarly, none finding oil nearer

than Dennis Run, a half-mile distant. There scores of large wells

realized fortunes for their owners. In two years James Parshall was a

half-million ahead. He settled at Titusville and built the Parshall

House—a mammoth hotel and opera-house—which fire destroyed. The “spring”

on the Campell farm is in existence and the gravel is impregnated with

petroleum, supposed to percolate through fissures in the rocks from

Dennis Run.

During the summer of 1860 developments extended across and down the

river a mile from Tidioute. The first producing well in the district,

owned by King & Ferris, of Titusville, started in the fall at

three-hundred barrels and boomed the territory amazingly. It was on the

W. W. Wallace lands—five-hundred acres below town—purchased in 1860 by

the Tidioute & Warren Oil-Company, the third in the world. Samuel

Grandin, Charles Hyde and Jonathan Watson organized it. J. L. Grandin,

treasurer and manager of the company, in eight years paid the

stockholders twelve-hundred-thousand dollars dividends on a capital of

ten-thousand! He leased and sub-leased farms on both sides of the

Allegheny, drilling some dry-holes, many medium wells and a few large

ones. He shipped crude to the seaboard, built pipe-lines and iron-tanks

and became head of the great firm of Grandins & Neyhart. Elijah Bishop

Grandin—named from the father of C. E. Bishop, founder of the Oil-City

_Derrick_—who had carried on a store at Hydetown and operated at

Petroleum Centre, resumed his residence at Tidioute in 1867 and

associated with his brother and brother-in-law, Adnah Neyhart, in

producing, buying, storing and transporting petroleum. Mr. Neyhart and

Joshua Pierce, of Philadelphia, had drilled on Cherry Run, on Dennis Run

and at Triumph and engaged largely in shipping oil to the coast. Pierce

& Neyhart—J. L. Grandin was their silent partner—dissolved in 1869. The

firm of Grandins & Neyhart, organized in 1868, was marvelously

successful. Its high standing increased confidence in the stability of

financial and commercial affairs in the oil-regions. The brothers

established the Grandin Bank and Neyhart, besides handling one-fourth of

the crude produced in Pennsylvania, opened a commission-house in New

York to sell refined, under the skilled management of John D. Archbold,

now vice-president of the Standard Oil-Company. They and the Fisher

Brothers owned the Dennis Run and Triumph pipe-lines and piped the oil

from Fagundas, where they drilled a hundred prolific wells and were the

largest operators. They bought properties in different portions of the

oil-fields, extended their pipe-lines to Titusville and erected tankage

at Parker and Miller Farm. The death of Mr. Neyhart terminated their

connection with oil-shipments.

“There is no parley with death.”

[Illustration: J. L. GRANDIN.]

[Illustration: ADNAH NEYHART.]

[Illustration: E. B. GRANDIN.]

Owning thousands of acres in Warren and Forest counties, the

Grandins were heavily interested in developments at Cherry Grove,

Balltown and Cooper. As those sections declined they gradually

withdrew from active oil-operations, sold their pipe-lines and wound

up their bank. J. L. Grandin removed to Boston and E. B. to

Washington, to embark in new enterprises and enjoy, under most

favorable conditions, the fruits of their prosperous career at

Tidioute. Their business for ten years has been chiefly loaning

money, farming and lumbering in the west. They purchased

seventy-two-thousand acres in the Red-River Valley of Dakota—known

the world over as “the Dalrymple Farm”—and in 1895 harvested

six-hundred-thousand bushels of wheat and oats. They employ hundreds

of men and horses, scores of ploughs and reapers and steam-threshers

and illustrate how to farm profitably on the biggest scale. With

Hunter & Cummings, of Tidioute, and J. B. White, of Kansas City, as

partners, they organized the Missouri-Lumber-and-Mining-Company. The

company owns two-hundred-and-forty-thousand acres of timber-land in

Missouri and cut fifty-million feet of lumber last year in its vast

saw-mills at Grandin, Carter county. Far-seeing, clear-headed, of

unblemished repute and liberal culture, such men as J. L. and E. B.

Grandin reflect honor upon humanity and deserve the success an

approving conscience and the popular voice commend heartily.

Above Tidioute a number of “farmers’ wells”—shallow holes sunk by hand

and soon abandoned—flickered and collapsed. On the islands in the river

small wells were drilled, most of which the great flood of 1865

destroyed. Opposite the town, on the Economite lands, operations began

in 1860. Steam-power was used for the first time in drilling. The wells

ranged from five barrels to eighty, at one-hundred-and-fifty feet. They

belonged to the Economites, a German society that enforced celibacy and

held property in common. About 1820 the association founded the village

of Harmony, Butler county, having an exclusive colony and transacting

business with outsiders through the medium of two trustees. The members

wore a plain garb and were distinguished for morality, simplicity,

industry and strict religious principles. Leaving Harmony, they located

in the Wabash Valley, lost many adherents, returned to Pennsylvania and

built the town of Economy, in Beaver county, fifteen miles below

Pittsburg. They manufactured silks and wine, mined coal and accumulated

millions of dollars. A loan to William Davidson, owner of eight-thousand

acres in Limestone township, Warren county, obliged them to foreclose

the mortgage and bid in the tract. Their notions of economy applied to

the wells, which they numbered alphabetically. The first, A well,

yielded ten barrels, B pumped fifty and C flowed seventy. The trustees,

R. L. Baker and Jacob Henrici, erected a large boarding-house for the

workmen, whose speech and manners were regulated by printed rules. Pine

and oak covered the Davidson lands, which fronted several miles on the

Allegheny and stretched far back into the township. Of late years the

Economite Society has been disintegrating, until its membership has

shrunk to a dozen aged men and women. Litigation and mismanagement have

frittered away much of its property. It seems odd that an organization

holding “all things in common” should, by the perversity of fate, own

some of the nicest oil-territory in Warren, Butler and Beaver counties.

A recent strike on one of the southern farms flows sixty barrels an

hour. Natural gas lighted and heated Harmony and petroleum appears bound

to stick to the Economites until they have faded into oblivion.

Below the Economite tract numerous wells strove to impoverish the

first sand. G. I. Stowe’s, drilled in 1860, pumped eight barrels a

day for six years. The Hockenburg, named from a preacher who wrote

an essay on oil, averaged twelve barrels a day in 1861. The

Enterprise Mining-and-Boring-Company of New-York leased fifteen rods

square on the Tipton farm to sink a shaft seven feet by twelve.

Bed-rock was reached at thirty feet, followed by ten feet of shale,

ten of gray sand, forty of slate and soap-rock and twenty of first

sand. The shaft, cribbed with six-inch plank to the bottom of the

first sand, tightly caulked to keep out water, was abandoned at

one-hundred-and-sixty feet, a gas-explosion killing the

superintendent and wrecking the timbers. Of forty wells on the

Tipton farm in 1860-61 not a fragment remained in 1866.

Tidioute’s laurel wreath was Triumph Hill, the highest elevation in the

neighborhood. Wells nine-hundred feet deep pierced sixty feet of

oil-bearing sand, which produced steadily for years. Grandins, Fisher

Brothers, M. G. Cushing, E. E. Clapp, John M. Clapp and other leading

operators landed bounteous pumpers. The east side of the hill was a

forest of derricks, crowded like trees in a grove. Over the summit and

down the west side the sand and the development extended. For five years

Triumph was busy and prosperous, yielding hundreds-of-thousands of

barrels of oil and advancing Tidioute to a town of five-thousand

population. Five churches, the finest school-buildings in the county,

handsome houses, brick blocks, superior hotels and large stores greeted

the eye of the visitor. The Grandin Block, the first brick structure,

built of the first brick made in Deerfield township, contained an

elegant opera-house. Three banks, three planing-mills, two foundries and

three machine-shops flourished. A dozen refineries turned out

merchantable kerosene. Water-works were provided and an iron bridge

spanned the river. Good order was maintained and Tidioute—still a tidy

village—played second fiddle to no town in Oildom for intelligence,

enterprise and all-round attractiveness.

[Illustration: VIEW ON WEST SIDE OF TRIUMPH HILL IN 1874.]

The tidal wave effervesced at intervals clear to the Colorado district.

Perched on a hill in the hemlock woods, Babylon was the rendezvous of

sports, strumpets and plug-uglies, who stole, gambled, caroused and did

their best to break all the commandments at once. Could it have spoken,

what tales of horror that board-house under the evergreen tree might

recount! Hapless wretches were driven to desperation and fitted for the

infernal regions. Lust and liquor goaded men to frenzy, resulting

sometimes in homicide or suicide. In an affray one night four men were

shot, one dying in an hour and another in six weeks. Ben. Hogan, who

laughed at the feeble efforts of the township-constable to suppress his

resort, was arrested, tried for murder and acquitted on the plea of

self-defence. The shot that killed the first victim was supposed to have

been fired by “French Kate,” Hogan’s mistress. She had led the

demi-monde in Washington and led susceptible congressmen astray. Ben met

her at Pithole, where he landed in the summer of 1865 and ran a

variety-show that would make the vilest on the Bowery blush to the roots

of its hair. He had been a prize-fighter on land, a pirate at sea, a

bounty-jumper and blockade-runner, and prided himself on his title of

the “Wickedest Man in the World.” Sentenced to death for his crimes

against the government, President Lincoln pardoned him and he joined the

myriad reckless spirits that sought fresh adventures in the Pennsylvania

oil-fields. In a few months the Scripture legend—“Babylon has

fallen”—applied to the malodorous Warren town. The tiger can “change his

spots”—by moving from one spot to another—and so could Hogan. He was of

medium height, square-shouldered, stout-limbed, exceedingly muscular and

trained to use his fists. He fought Tom Allen at Omaha, sported at

Saratoga and in 1872 ran “The Floating Palace”—a boat laden with harlots

and whiskey—at Parker. The weather growing too cold and the law too hot

for comfort, he opened a den and built an opera-house at Petrolia. In

“Hogan’s Castle” many a clever young man learned the short-cut to

disgrace and perdition. Now and then a frail girl met a sad fate, but

the carnival of debauchery went on without interruption. Hogan put on

airs, dressed in the loudest style and would have been the burgess had

not the election-board counted him out! A fearless newspaper forcing him

to leave Petrolia, Hogan went east to engage in “the sawdust swindle,”

returned to the oil-regions in 1875, built an opera-house at Elk City,

decamped from Bullion, rooted at Tarport and Bradford and departed by

night for New York. Surfeited with revelry and about to start for Paris

to open a joint, he heard music at a hall on Broadway and sat down to

wait for the show to begin. Charles Sawyer, “the converted soak,”

appeared shortly, read a chapter from the Bible and told of his rescue

from the gutter. Ben was deeply impressed, signed the pledge at the

close of the service, agonized in his room until morning and on his

knees implored forgiveness. How surprised the angels must have been at

the spectacle of the prodigal in this attitude! After a fierce struggle,

to quote his own words, “peace filled my soul chock-full and I felt

awful happy.” He claimed to be converted and set to work earnestly to

learn the alphabet, that he might read the Scriptures and be an

evangelist. He married “French Kate,” who also professed religion, but

it didn’t strike in very deep and she eloped with a tough. Mr. Moody

welcomed Hogan and advised him to traverse the country to offset as far

as possible his former misdeeds. Amid the scenes of his grossest

offenses his reception varied. High-toned Christians, who would not

touch a down-trodden wretch with a ten-foot pole, turned up their

delicate noses and refused to countenance “the low impostor.” They

forgot that he sold his jewelry and most of his clothes, lived on bread

and water and endured manifold privations to become a bearer of the

gospel-message. Even ministers who proclaimed that “the blood of Christ

cleanses from _all_ sin” doubted Hogan’s salvation and showed him the

cold shoulder in the chilliest orthodox fashion. He stuck manfully and

for eighteen years has labored zealously in the vineyard. Judging from

his struggles and triumphs, is it too much to believe that a front seat

and a golden crown are reserved for the reformed pugilist, felon,

robber, assassin of virtue and right bower of Old Nick? Unlike

straddlers in politics and piety, who want to go to Heaven on

velvet-cushions and pneumatic tires,

“He doesn’t stand on one foot fust,

An’ then stand on the other,

An’ on which one he feels the wust

He couldn’t tell you nuther.”

[Illustration: LEWIS F. WATSON.]

The expectation of an extension of the belt northward was not fulfilled

immediately. Wells at Irvineton, on the Brokenstraw and tributary runs,

failed to find the coveted fluid. Captain Dingley drilled two wells on

Sell’s Run, three miles east of Irvineton, in 1873, without slitting the

jugular. A test well at Warren, near the mouth of Conewango Creek, bored

in 1864 and burned as pumping was about to begin, had fair sand and a

mite of oil. John Bell’s operations in 1875 opened an amber pool up the

creek that for a season crowded the hotels three deep with visitors.

They bored dozens of wells, yet the production never reached

one-thousand barrels and in four months the patch was cordoned by dry

holes and as quiet as a cemetery. The crowds exhaled like morning dew.

Warren is a pretty town of four-thousand population, its location and

natural advantages offering rare inducements to people of refinement and

enterprise. Its site was surveyed in 1795 and the first shipment of

lumber to Pittsburg was made in 1801. Incorporated as a borough in 1832,

railroad communication with Erie was secured in 1859, with Oil City in

1867 and with Bradford in 1881. Many of the private residences are

models of good taste. Massive brick-blocks, solvent banks, churches,

stores, high-grade schools, shaded streets and modern conveniences

evidence its substantial prosperity. Hon. Thomas Struthers—he built

sections of the Philadelphia & Erie and the Oil-Creek railroads and

established big iron-works—donated a splendid brick building for a

library, opera-house and post-office. His grandson, who inherited his

millions and died in February, 1896, was a mild edition of “Coal-Oil

Johnnie” in scattering money. Lumbering, the principal industry for

three generations, enriched the community. Col. Lewis F. Watson

represented the district twice in Congress and left an estate of

four-millions, amassed in lumber and oil. He owned most of the township

bearing his name. Hon. Charles W. Stone, his successor, ranks with the

foremost members of the House in ability and influence. A Massachusetts

boy, he set out in life as a teacher, came to Warren to take charge of

the academy, was county-superintendent, studied law and rose to eminence

at the bar. He was elected Lieutenant-Governor of the State, served as

Secretary of the Commonwealth and would be Governor of Pennsylvania

to-day had “the foresight of the Republicans been as good as their

hindsight.” He has profitable oil-interests, is serving his fourth term

in Congress and may be nominated the fifth time. Alike fortunate in his

political and professional career, his social relations, his business

connections and his personal friendships, Charles W. Stone holds a place

in public esteem few men are privileged to attain.

[Illustration: CHARLES W. STONE.]

At Clarendon and Stoneham hundreds of snug wells yielded three-thousand

barrels a day from a regular sand that did not exhaust readily.

Southward the Garfield district held on fairly and a narrow-gauge

railroad was built to Farnsworth. The Wardwell pool, at Glade, four

miles east of Warren, fizzed after the manner of Cherry Grove, rich in

buried hopes and dissipated greenbacks. P. M. Smith and Peter Grace

drilled the first well—a sixty-barreler—close to the ferry in July of

1873. Dry-holes and small wells alternated with provoking uncertainty

until J. A. Gartland’s twelve-hundred-barrel gusher on the Clark farm,

in May of 1885, inaugurated a panic in the market that sent crude down

to fifty cents. The same day the Union Oil-Company finished a

four-hundred-barrel spouter and May ended with fifty-six wells producing

and a score of dusters. June and July continued the refrain, values

see-sawing as reports of dry-holes or fifteen-hundred-barrel-strikes,

some of them worked as “mysteries,” bamboozled the trade. Wardwell’s

production ascended to twelve-thousand barrels and fell by the dizziest

jumps to as many hundred, the porous rock draining with the speed of a

lightning-calculator. Tiona developed a lasting deposit of superior oil.

Kane has a tempting streak, in which Thomas B. Simpson and other

Oil-City parties are interested. Gas has been found at Wilcox,

Johnsonburg and Ridgway, Elk county, taking a slick hand in the game.

Kinzua, four miles north-east of Wardwell, revealed no particular cause

why the spirit of mortal ought to be proud. Although Forest and Warren,

with a slice of Elk thrown in, were demoralizing factors in 1882-3-4,

their aggregate output would only be a light luncheon for the polar bear

in McKean county.

The Tidioute belt, varying in narrowness from a few rods to a half-mile,

was one of the most satisfactory ever discovered. When lessees fully

occupied the flats Captain A. J. Thompson drilled a two-hundred-barrel

well on the point, at the junction of Dingley and Dennis Runs. Quickly

the summit was scaled and amid drilling wells, pumping wells, oil-tanks

and engine-houses the town of Triumph was created. Triumph Hill turned

out as much money to the acre as any spot in Oildom. The sand was the

thickest—often ninety to one-hundred-and-ten feet—and the purest the

oil-region afforded. Some of the wells pumped twenty years. Salt-water

was too plentiful for comfort, but half-acre plots were grabbed at

one-half royalty and five-hundred dollars bonus. Wells jammed so closely

that a man could walk from Triumph to New London and Babylon on the

steam-boxes connecting them. Percy Shaw—he built the Shaw House—had a

“royal flush” on Dennis Run that netted two-hundred-thousand dollars.

From an investment of fifteen-thousand dollars E. E. and J. M. Clapp

cleared a half-million.

“Spirits” located the first well at Stoneham and Cornen Brothers’ gasser

at Clarendon furnished the key that unlocked Cherry Grove. Gas was piped

from the Cornen well to Warren and Jamestown. Walter Horton was the

moving spirit in the Sheffield field, holding interests in the Darling

and Blue Jay wells and owning forty-thousand acres of land in Forest

county. McGrew Brothers, of Pittsburg, spent many thousands seeking a

pool at Garland. Grandin & Kelly’s operations below Balltown exploded

the theory that oil would not be found on the south side of Tionesta

Creek. Cherry Grove was at its apex when, in July of 1884, with

Farnsworth and Garfield boiling over, two wells on the Thomas farm, a

mile south-east of Richburg, flowed six-hundred barrels apiece. They

were among the largest in the Allegany district, but a three-line

mention in the Bradford _Era_ was all the notice given the pair.

To the owner of a tract near “646,” who offered to sell it for

fifty-thousand dollars, a Bradford operator replied: “I would take it at

your figure if I thought my check would be paid, but I’ll take it at

forty-five-thousand whether the check is paid or not!” The check was not

accepted.

Tack Brothers drilled a dry-hole twenty-six-hundred feet in Millstone

township, Elk county. Grandin & Kelly drilled four-thousand feet in

Forest county and got lots of geological information, but no oil.