CHAPTER XXV.

SOMETHING ABOUT OIL.

THE very word has wrought like magic. The smell of the article has turned men crazy. It has opened purse-strings which the cries of the orphaned, the tears of the widowed, and the pleas of religion could never loose. It has made men lavish in a hopeless enterprise who had no pence to spare under the counsels of wisdom. It has caused men to scorn the admonitions of the instructed and professional, to trust their own stark ignorance in the stake of a fortune. It has led the self-reliant and pursey capitalist to heap contempt on the wisdom and experience of science, to follow the lead of his own olfactory. All this because oil" is a synonym for gold.

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Auri sacra fames! quid non mortalia pectora cogis?

Since the historical excitement of the "South-Sea Bubble," the business world has hardly been invaded by such a fever of speculation as raged over the Northern United States from 1862 to 1866. When it was positively settled that oil could be drawn from the solid rocks-oil suited to the uses of illumination, gas-making, fuel, and lubrication— men who have the keenest eye to utility, and who counterpoise all values with bullion, were constrained to admit that Providence had done more for our race than they had ever dreamed. No doubt many men made suitable recognition of the services of the Almighty in facilitating the ends of money-getting. The picture which memory treasures, however, is that of a herd of porcine quadrupeds jos

tling each other for the largest share of their master's allowance.

At first it was generally supposed that one locality was as likely as another to yield the oleaginous fluid, and experiments innumerable were instituted wherever men could be found whom the infectious fever had reached. We now know that not one neighborhood in a thousand affords the geological conditions requisite to success. Another precipitate and erroneous conclusion was that which assumed the surface configuration of the earth to be the only essential condition of oil accumulation. Wherever a region could be found with a physical geography like that of Venango County-wherever a creek like Oil Creek had scored a country underlaid by sandstone like Northwestern Pennsylvania-there might have been seen the men whose experienced olfactories were employed to test the odor of every bog, and stain, and film which prying eyes could bring to light. Especially if such a creek were bordered by a flat walled in by rocky bluffs-but most especially if such a flat could be found at the fork of two streams, environed by rocks and hills of Pennsylvania sandstone, were the "oil-smellers" in high ecstasies. Happy the squatter whose steep and rugged hill-sides and narrow intervales afforded these first-class evidences of "productive property." I know of many an instance in which his land was tripled in market value by the magic touch of the magician of the hazel wand. The same kind of sandstone was essential; and it is marvelous that Nature had so disposed it that the oil-seeker could in every instance detect also the "first," "second," and "third" sandstones after the Venango style. No matter upon what formation the exploration might be progressing-perhaps a thousand feet below or above the geological horizon of Venango County-these oil-hunters, who had a wisdom above geology, could infal