"Reckon, men, you'd best get out and walk alongside. The women can stay
in; and if she's going over, you can shore up."
Under these cheerful auspices the descent was accomplished, and, by some
miracle, without accident.
At the foot of the bluff commences the slough in which Oil City is set;
and as it deepened, the horses gradually sank from view, until only
their backs were visible, floundering through a sea of oily mud of a
peculiarly tenacious character. Miselle has the warning of Munchausen
before her eyes; but, in all sadness, she avers that in the principal
street of Oil City, and at the door of the principal hotel, the mud was
on that day above the hubs of the wagon-wheels.
Having refreshed themselves in body and mind at the Petroleum House,
where a lady in a soiled print dress and much jewelry kindly played at
them upon a gorgeous piano, the party went forth to view the city.
The same mingling of urgent civilization and unsubdued Nature observable
in Corry characterizes Oil City to a greater extent. On one side of the
street, crowded with oil-wagons, the freight of each worth thousands of
dollars, stand long rows of dwellings, shops, and warehouses, all built
within two years, and on the other impinges a bluff still covered with
its forest growth of shrubs and wood-plants,--while upon the frowning
front of a cliff that has for centuries faced nothing meaner than the
Alleghany, with its mountain background, some Vandal has daubed the
advertisement of a quack nostrum.
Farther on, where the bluff is less precipitous, it has been graded
after a fashion; and the houses built at the upper side of the new
street seem to be sliding rapidly across it to join their opposite
neighbors, which, in their turn, are sinking modestly into the mud.
A plank sidewalk renders it possible to walk through the principal
streets of this city; but temptation to do so is of the slightest.
Monotonous lines of frail houses, shops whose scanty assortment of goods
must be sold at enormous prices to pay the expense of transportation
from New York or Philadelphia, crowds of oil-speculators, oil-dealers,
oil-teamsters, a clumsy bridge across the Creek, a prevailing atmosphere
of petroleum,--such is Oil City.
At the water-side the view is somewhat more interesting. No wharves
have yet been built; and the swarming flatboats "tie up" all along the
bank, just as they used to do three years ago, when, with a freight of
lumber instead of oil, they stopped for the night at the solitary little
Dutch tavern then monopolizing the site of the present city.
A rakish little stern-wheel steamer lay in the stream, bound for
Pittsburg, and sorely was Miselle tempted to take passage down the
Alleghany in her; but lingering memories of home and the long-suffering
Caleb at last prevailed, and, with a sigh, she turned her back upon the
beautiful river, and retraced her steps through yards crowded with
barrels of oil waiting for shipment,--oil in rows, oil in stacks, oil in
columns, and oil in pyramids wellnigh as tall and as costly as that of
Cheops himself.
Returned to the Petroleum House, Miselle bade a reluctant good-bye to
the kindly Scots, who here took stage for Franklin, and watched them
float away, as it appeared, upon the sea of mud in a wagon-body whose
wheels and horses were too nearly submerged to make any noticeable
feature in the arrangement.
Soon after, Jamie appeared at the door of the parlor nominally to
announce himself ready to return; but, after a fierce struggle with his
natural modesty of disposition, he advanced into the room, and silently
laid two of the biggest apples that ever grew in the laps of Mrs.
Williams and Miselle. Putting aside all acknowledgments with "Ho! what's
an apple or two?" the woodsman next proceeded on a tour of inspection
round the room, serenely unconscious of the magnificent scorn withering
him from the eyes of the jewelled lady, who now reclined upon a
broken-backed sofa, taking a leisurely survey of the strangers.
Jamie paused some time at the piano.
"And what might such a thing as that cost noo?" asked he, at length,
giving the case a little back-handed blow.
"About eight hundred dollars," ventured Miselle, to whom the inquiry was
addressed.
Jamie opened his wide black eyes.
"Hoot! Feyther could ha' bought Jim Tarr's whole farm for that, three
year ago," said he; and, with one more contemptuous stare at the piano,
he left the room, and was presently seen in the stable-yard, shouldering
from his path a wagon laden with coals.
Soon after, Miselle and her friends gladly bade farewell to Oil City,
leaving the scornful lady seated at the piano executing the charming
melody of "We're a band of brothers from the old Granite State."
Having entered the city by the hill-road, it was proposed to return
along the Creek, although, as Jamie candidly stated, the road "might,
like enough, be a thought worser than the other."
And it was.
Before the oil fever swept through this region, a man might have
travelled from the mouth of the Creek to its head-waters, and seen no
more buildings than he could have numbered on his ten fingers. Now the
line of derricks, shanties, engine-houses, and oil-tanks is continuous
through the whole distance; and thousands of men may be seen to-day
accumulating millions of dollars where three years ago the squirrel and
his wife, hoarding their winter stores, were the only creatures that
took thought for the morrow.
After its incongruous mixture of society, the social peculiarity of Oil
Creek is a total disregard of truth.
A mechanic, a tradesman, or a boatman makes the most solemn promise of
service at a certain time. Terms are settled, a definite hour appointed
for the fulfilment of the contract; the man departs, and is seen no
more. His employer is neither disappointed nor angry; he expects nothing
else.
A cart laden with country produce enters the settlement from the farms
behind it. Every housewife drops her broom, and rushes out to waylay the
huckster, and induce him to sell her the provisions already engaged to
her neighbor. Happy she, if stout enough of arm to convey her booty home
with her; for if she trust the vendor to leave it at her house, even
after paying him his price, she may bid good-bye to the green delights,
as eagerly craved here as on a long sea-voyage.
This "peculiar institution" is all very well, doubtless, for those who
understand it, but is somewhat inconvenient to a stranger, as Miselle
discovered during the three days she was trying to leave Tarr Farm.
On the third morning, after waiting two hours upon the bank of the Creek
for a perjured boatman, Mr. Williams rushed desperately into a crowd of
teamsters and captured the youth whose first impressions of a railway
have been chronicled on a preceding page. Probably even he, had time
been allowed to consider the proposition at length, would have declined
the journey; but, overborne by the vehemence of his employer, he found
himself well upon the road to Schaeffer's Farm before he had by any
means decided to go thither.
The pleasantest part of the "carriage exercise" on this road is fording
the Creek, a course adopted wherever the bluff comes down to the bank,
and the flat reappears upon the opposite side, no one having yet spent
time to grade a continuous road on one side or the other. A railway
company has, however, made a beginning in this direction; and it is
promised that in another year the traveller may proceed from Schaeffer's
to Oil City by rail.
At Titusville Miselle bade good-bye to her kind friend Williams, and
once more took herself under her own protection.
Spending the night at Corry, she next day found herself in the city of
Erie, and could have fancied it Heidelberg instead, the signs bearing
such names as Schultz, Seelinger, Jantzen, Cronenberger, Heidt, and
Heybeck. Hans Preuss sells bread, Valentin Ulrich manufactures saddles,
and P. Loesch keeps a meat-market, with a sign representing one
gentleman holding a mad bull by a bit of packthread tied to his horns,
while an assistant leisurely strolls up to annihilate the creature with
a tack-hammer.
Here, too, a little beyond the middle of the town, was a girl herding a
flock of geese, precisely as did the princess in the "Brueder Grimm
Tales," while a doltish boy stared at her with just the imbecile
admiration of Kurdkin for the wily maiden who combed her golden, hair
and chanted her naughty spell in the same breath.
A little farther on stood a charming old Dutch cottage with cabbages in
the front yard, and a hop-vine clambering the porch. An infant Teuton
swung upon the gate, who, being addressed by Miselle, lisped an answer
in High Dutch, while his mother shrilly exchanged the news with her next
neighbor in the same tongue.
Two hours sufficed to exhaust the wonders of Erie, and Miselle gladly
took the cars for Buffalo, and on the road thither fell in with a good
Samaritan, who solaced her weary faintness with delicate titbits of
grouse, shot and roasted upon an Ohio prairie.
At Buffalo waited the Eastern-bound cars of the New-York Central
Railway; but only twenty miles farther on, thundered Niagara, and
Miselle could not choose but obey the sonorous summons. So, after
spending the night at a "white man's" hotel in Buffalo, the next morning
found her standing, an insignificant atom, before one of the world's
great wonders. One or two other travellers, however, have mentioned
Niagara; and Miselle refrains from expressing more than her thanks for
the kindness which enabled her to fulfil her darling wish of standing
behind the great fall on the Canada side.
Truly, it is no empty boast that places Americans preeminent over the
men of every other nation in their courtesy to women; and Miselle would
fain most gratefully acknowledge the constant attention and kindness
everywhere offered to her, while never once was she annoyed by obtrusive
or unwelcome approach; and not the vast resources of her country, not
the grandeur of Niagara, give her such pride and satisfaction as does
the new knowledge she has gained of her countrymen.