Sitting On A Gusher (February 1959 | Volume: 10, Issue: 2)

Sitting On A Gusher

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Authors: Hildegarde Dolson

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February 1959 | Volume 10, Issue 2

Perhaps the most bizarre of all the great mineral booms of the nineteenth century took place not in a remote western wilderness, but in the northwest corner of Pennsylvania, within easy reach of such well-established centers of population as New York and Pittsburgh. In this case the sought-after prize was not gold or silver but an infinitely more valuable substance, petroleum. If Edwin L. Drake’s 1859 strike was not as stupendous as the turn-of-the-century Spindletop gusher in Texas ( AMERICAN HERITAGE , June, 1958), it was more significant. For the greasy liquid that bubbled to the surface one August day a hundred years ago launched an industry. The account of the first months of the Pennsylvania oil boom that follows is taken from Hildegarde Dolson’s The Great Oildorado, to be published later this month by Random House.

 

After his well came in, poor Edwin Drake got shoved aside in all the excitement and nearly lost in the rush. He was the hero, all right, but one of those heroes who seem to have been chosen in a game of blindfold, like Pin The Tail On The Donkey. It took an improbable trio of New Englanders—a hearty country doctor, a lawyer-promoter who looked like a Greenwich Village poet, and a banker with an undercoating of ballyhoo—to propel the ex-railroad conductor into his one larger-than-life act.

In fact, there are still factions who say that the other three men were the heroes. Since 1859, there have been so many fierce arguments that it seems only sensible to point out that nobody “discovered” oil. The truth is large enough—that Drake was probably the first man to carry through a practical method for drilling and pumping out of the earth mass quantities of the liquid wealth that had been collecting for a few million years, in the slow distillation of matter, animal, vegetable, or mineral. Job, in the Bible, sounds like the best prophet of the lot, with his talk of the rock that poured out “rivers of oil.”

In the seventeenth century British and French explorers in what is now western Pennsylvania and New York sent back eager accounts of the oil pools that looked like water and burned like brandy, but nobody seemed to care. Lewis Evans, drawing a map of the middle British colonies in America in 1755, carefully lettered Petroleum near the spot where Seneca and Cornplanter Indians spread blankets on the rainbowed oily surface of the creek, then wrung out the slippery liquid into earthenware vessels for liniment and medicine and to mix with their war paint for glistening, waterproof make-up. For his help in the Revolution, the great chief Cornplanter was given 300 acres in Venango County, Pennsylvania. The hillside settlement of shanties above Oil Creek was called Cornplanter long after the chief sold the land, in 1818, to two white settlers for $2,121. Later it became Oil City.

After making a survey of other Revolutionary land