II.

AMERICA ON DECK.

NUMEROUS INDICATIONS OF OIL ON THIS CONTINENT-LAKE OF ASPHALTUMPETROLEUM SPRINGS IN NEW YORK AND PENNSYLVANIA-HOW HISTORY IS MANUFACTURED-PIONEERS DIPPING AND UTILIZING THE PRECIOUS FLUIDTOMBSTONE LITERATURE-PATHETIC EPISODE-SINGULAR STRIKE-GEOLOGY TRIES TO EXPLAIN A KNOTTY POINT.

"Near the Niagara is an oil spring known to the Indians."

-Joseph de la Roche D'Allion, A. D. 1629. "There is a fountain at the head of the Ohio, the water of which is like oil, has a taste of iron and seems to appease pain."-Captain de Joncaire, A. D. 1721.

"It is light bottled-up for tens of thousands of years-light absorbed by plants and vegetables. *** And now after being buried long ages, that latent light is again brought forth and liberated and made to work for human purposes "-Stephenson.

HE LAND Columbus ran against, by anticipating Horace Greeley's advice to "Go West," was not neglected in the lavish distribution of petroleum. It abounds in South America, the West Indies, the United States and Canada. The most extensive and phenomenal natural fountain of petroleum ever known is on the Island of Trinidad. Hot bitumen has filled a basin four miles in circumference, three-quarters of a mile from the sea, estimated to contain the equivalent of ten-millions of barrels of crudeoil. The liquid boils up continually, observing no holidays or Sundays, seething and foaming at the center of the lake, cooling and thickening as it recedes, and finally becoming solid asphaltum. The bubbling, hissing, steaming caldron emits a sulphurous odor, perceptible for ten or twelve miles and decidedly suggestive of the orthodox Hades. Humboldt in 1799 reported his impressions of this spontaneous marvel, in producing which the puny hand of man had no share. From it is derived the dark, tough, semi-elastic material, first utilized in Switzerland for this purpose, which paves the streets of scores of cities. Few stop to reflect, as they glide over the noiseless surface on whirling bicycles or behind prancing steeds, that the smooth asphaltum pavements and the clear "water-white" in the piano-lamp have a common

parentage. Yet bloomers and pantaloons, twin creations of the tailor, or diamonds and coal, twin links of carbon, are not related more closely.

The earliest printed reference to petroleum in America is by Joseph de la Roche D'Allion, a Franciscan missionary who crossed the Niagara river from Canada in 1629 and wrote of oil, in what is now New York, known to the Indians and by them given a name signifying "plenty there." Likely this was the petroleum occupying cavities in fossils at Black Rock, below Buffalo, in sufficient abundance to be an object of commerce. Concerning the celebrated oil-spring of the Seneca Indians near Cuba, N. Y., which D'Allion may also have seen, Prof. Benjamin Silliman in 1833 said:

"This is situated in the western part of the county of Alleghany, in the state of New York. This county is the third from Lake Erie on the south line of the state, the counties of Cattaraugus and Chautauqua lying west and forming the southwestern termination of the state of New York. The spring is very near the line which divides Alleghany and Cattaraugus. ** * The country is rather mountainous, but the road running between the ridges is very good and leads through a cultivated region rich in soil and picturesque in scenery. Its geographical formation is the same as that which is known to prevail in the western region; a silicious sandstone with shale, and in some places limestone, is the immediate basis of the country. ** * The oil-spring or fountain rises in the midst of a marshy ground. It is a muddy, dirty pool of about eighteen feet in diameter and is nearly circular in form. There is no outlet above ground, no stream flowing from it, and it is, of course, a stagnant water, with no other circulation than than which springs from the changes in temperature and from the gas and petroleum that are constantly rising through the pool.

"We are told that the odor of petroleum is perceived at a distance in approaching the spring. This may be true in particular states of the wind, but we did not distinguish any peculiar smell until we arrived on the edge of the fountain. Here its peculiar character became very obvious. The water is covered with a thin layer of petroleum or mineral oil, as if coated with dirty molasses, having a yellowish-brown color.

"They collect the petroleum by skimming it like cream from a milk-pan. For this purpose they use a broad, flat board, made thin at one edge like a knife; it is moved flat upon and just under the surface of the water and is soon covered by a coating of petroleum, which is so thick and adhesive that it does not fall off, but is removed by scraping the instrument upon the lip of a cup. It has then a very foul appearance, but it is purified by heating and straining it while hot through flannel. It is used by the people of the vicinity for sprains and rheumatism and for sores on their horses."

The "muddy, dirty pool" was included in an Indian reservation, one mile square, leased in 1860 by Allen, Bradley & Co., who drove a pipe into the bog. At thirty feet oil began to spout to the tune of a-barrel-an-hour, a rhythm not unpleasing to the owners of the venture. The flow continued several weeks and then "stopped short, never to go again." Other wells followed to a greater depth, none of them proving sufficiently large to give the field an orchestra chair in the petroleum arena.

It is told of a jolly Cuban, wearing a skull innocent of garbage as Uncle Ned's, who "had no wool on the top of his head in the place where the wool ought to grow," that he applied oil from the "dirty pool" to an ugly swelling on the apex of his bare cranium. The treatment lasted a month, by which time a crop of brand-new hair had begun to sprout. The welcome growth meant business and eventually thatched the roof of the happy subject with a luxuriant vegetation that would have turned Paderewski, Absalom, or the most ambitious foot-ball kicker green with envy! Tittlebat Titmouse, over whose excruciating experiences with the "Cyanochaitanthropopoion" that dyed his locks a bright emerald readers of "Ten-Thousand a Year" have laughed consumedly, was "not in it" compared with the transformed denizen of the pretty village nestling amid the hills of the Empire State. Those inclined to pronounce this a bald-headed fabrication may see for themselves the precise

spot the mud-hole furnishing the oil occupied prior to the advent of the prosaic, unsentimental driving-pipe.

Captain de Joncaire, a French officer in colonial days, who had charge of military operations on the Upper Ohio and its tributaries in 1721, reported fountain at the head of a branch of the Ohio, the water of which is like oil." Undoubtedly this was the same fountain" referred to in the Massachusetts Magazine for July, 1791, as follows:

"In the northern part of Pennsylvania is a creek called Oil Creek, which empties into the Allegheny river. It issues from a spring on which floats an oil similar to that called Barbadoes tar, and from which one may gather several gallons a day. The troops sent to guard the western posts halted at this spring, collected some of the oil and bathed their joints with it. This gave them great relief from the rheumatism, with which they were afflicted."

The history of petroleum in America commences with the use the pioneer settlers found the red-men made of it for medicine and for painting their dusky bodies. The settlers adopted its medicinal use and retained for various affluents of the Allegheny the Indian name of Oil Creek. Both natives and whites collected the oil by spreading blankets on the marshy pools along the edges of the bottom-lands at the foot of steep hill-sides or of mountain-walls that hem in the valleys supporting coal-measures above. The remains of ancient pits on Oil Creek-the Oil Creek ordained to become a household word-lined with timbers and provided with notched logs for ladders, show how for generations the aborigines had valued and stored the product. Some of these queer reservoirs, choked with leaves and dirt accumulated during hundreds of years, bore trees two centuries old. Many of them, circular, square, oblong and oval, sunk in the earth fifteen to twenty feet and strongly cribbed, have been excavated. Their number and systematic arrangement attest that petroleum was saved in liberal quantities by a race possessing in some degree the elements of civilization. The oil has preserved the timbers from the ravages of decay, "to point a moral or adorn a tale," and they are as sound to-day as when cut down by hands that crumbled into dust ages ago.

A BUCHANAN

R.HAYS

J NEVIN

CORNPLANTER RUN

CHARLEY

F BUCHANAN

HOOD

CHERRY

RUN

ROUSEVILLE

OIL SPRING

H MCCLINTOCK

OIL

CREEK

CLAPP FARM

[NATHANAL CARY]

Scientists worry and perspire over "the mound-builders" and talk glibly of "a superior race anterior to the Indians," while ignoring the relics of a tribe smart enough to construct enduring storehouses for petroleum. People who did such work and filled such receptacles with oil were not slouches who would sell their souls for whiskey and their forest heritage for a string of glass-beads. Did they penetrate the rock for their supply of oil, or skim it drop by drop from the waters of the stream? Who were they, whence came they and whither have they vanished? Surely these are conundrums to tax the ingenuity of imaginative solvers of perplexing riddles. Shall Macaulay's NewZealand voyager, after viewing the ruins of London and flying across the At

مي

ALLEGHENY

CITY

RIVER

OIL-SPRING ON OIL CREEK.

a

lantic, gaze upon the deserted oil-wells of Venango county a thousand years hence and wonder what strange creatures, in the dim and musty past, could have bored post-holes so deep and so promiscuously? Rip Van Winkle was right in his plaintive wail: "How soon are we forgotten!"

The renowned "spring" which may have supplied these remarkable vats was located in the middle of Oil Creek, on the McClintock farm, three miles above Oil City and a short distance below Rouseville. Oil would escape from the rocks and gravel beneath the creek, appearing like air-bubbles until it reached the surface and spread a thin film reflecting all the colors of the rainbow. From shallow holes, dug and walled sometimes in the bed of the stream, the oil was skimmed and husbanded jealously. The demand was limited and the enterprise to meet it was correspondingly modest. Nathanael Cary, the first

tailor in Franklin and owner of the tract adjoining the McClintock, peddled it about the townships early in the century, when the population was sparse and every good housewife laid by a bottle of "Seneca Oil" in case of accident or sickness. Cary would sling two jars or kegs across a faithful horse, belonging to the class of Don Quixote's "Rosinante" and too sedate to scare at anything short of a knickerbockered feminine astride a rubber-tired wheel. Mounting the willing steed, which carried him steadily as "Jess" bore the selfdenying physician of "Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush," the tailor-peddler went his rounds at irregular intervals. Occasionally he took a tengallon cargo to Pittsburg, riding with it eighty miles on horseback and trading the oil for cloth and groceries. His memory should be cherished as the first "shipper" of petroleum to "the Smoky City," then a mere cluster of log and frame buildings in a patch of cleared ground surrounding Fort Pitt. "Things are different now."

The Augusts, a family living in Cherrytree township and remembered only by a handful of old residents, followed Cary's example. Their stock was procured from springs farther up Oil Creek, especially one near Titusville, which achieved immortality as the real source of the petroleum development that has astounded the civilized world. They sold the oil for "a quarter-dollar a gill" to the inhabitants of neighboring townships. The consumption was extremely moderate, a pint usually sufficing a household for a twelvemonth. Nature's own remedy, it was absolutely pure and unadulterated, a panacea for "the thousand natural shocks that flesh is heir to," and positively refused to mix with water. If milk and water were equally unsocial, would not many a dispenser of the lacteal fluid train with Othello and "find his occupation gone?" Don't "read the answer in the stars ;" let the overworked pumps in thousands of barnyards reply!

No latter-day work on petroleum, no book, pamphlet, sketch or magazine article of any pretensions has failed to reproduce part of a letter purporting to