Soon after we went to the home on the hill the oil country, at that moment suffering a depression, was stirred by the news that a great well had been struck ten miles from Rouseville at Pithole, an isolated territory to which the veterans in the business had never given a thought. The news caused a wild scramble. A motley procession of men with and without money, with and without decency, seeking leases, jobs, opportunity for adventure, excitement and swindling travelled on foot or horseback up the Valley of Cherry Run in full view from our house.
Father was one of the first to take advantage of the Pithole discovery, putting up his tank shops there and doing a smashing business during the short life of the field. Its “bottom fell out” in 1869. He rode back and forth from his shop on a little saddle horse—Flora, beautiful creature—usually with considerable sums of money in his pocket. The country was full of ruffians, and stories of robbery were common. When he was very late in returning mother would walk the floor wringing her hands. I could never go to bed those nights until he had returned, not because I felt her anxiety but because of the excitement and mystery of it. I carried a dramatic picture of him in mind, a kind of Paul Revere dashing along the lonely road, the rein on Flora’s neck, his pistol in hand. But he always came home, always brought the money he had collected, which he must keep in the tiny iron safe in his office annexed to the house until he could carry it to Oil City where he banked.
My life became rapidly more conscious now that I had left the flats behind, experience deeper. Here was my first realization of tragedy. It was the spring of 1865. Father was coming up the hill, mother and I were watching for him. Usually he walked with a brisk step, head up, but now his step was slow, his head dropped. Mother ran to meet him crying, “Frank, Frank, what is it?” I did not hear the answer; but I shall always see my mother turning at his words, burying her face in her apron, running into her room sobbing as if her heart would break. And then the house was shut up, and crape was put on all the doors, and I was told that Lincoln was dead.
From that time the name spelt tragedy and mystery. Why all this sorrow over a man we had never seen, who did not belong to our world—my world? Was there something beyond the circle of hills within which I lived that concerned me? Why, and in what way, did this mysterious outside concern me?
I was soon to learn that tragedy did not come always from a mysterious beyond. What a chain of catastrophes it took to teach the men and women who were developing the new industry the constant risk they ran in handling either crude or refined oil. They came to our very door, when a neighboring woman hurrying to build a fire in her cookstove poured oil on the wood before she had made sure there were no live coals in the firebox. An awful explosion occurred and she and two women who ran to her assistance were burned to a crisp. I heard horrified whisperings about me. The refusal to tell me what had happened aroused a terrible curiosity. I gathered that the bodies were laid out in a house not far away and, when nobody was looking, stole in to look at them. Broken sleep for me for nights.
The mystery of death finally came into our household. There had been a fourth child born in the house on the hill—“little Frankie,” we always called him—blue-eyed like my father, the sunniest of us all. For weeks one season he lay in the parlor fighting for life—scarlet fever—a disease more dreaded by mothers in those days than even smallpox. Daily I stood helpless, agonized, outside the door behind which little Frankie lay screaming and fighting the doctor. I remember even today how long the white marks lasted on the knuckles of my hands after the agony behind the closed door had died down and my clenched fists relaxed.
Little Frankie died, became a pathetic and beloved tradition in the household. My little sister, who had made a terrible and successful fight against the disease, told me how she could not understand why father and mother cried when they talked of Frankie.
“If they want to see him,” she thought, “why do they not put a ladder from the top of the hill up to the sky into heaven and climb up? If Frankie is there God would let them see him.”
I have said that my first recollection of Lincoln was the impression made by the tragedy of his death. That this was so was not for the lack of material on him in our household. My father was an ardent Republican. Back in ’56 he had written from his river trip, “Hurrah for Frémont and Dayton.” As soon as he had had more money than the actual needs of the family required, he had subscribed to Harper’s Weekly, Harper’s Monthly, the New York Tribune, began to buy books. Of all of these I remember only the Weekly and Monthly. My brother and I used to lie by the hour flat on our stomachs, heels in the air, turning over the exciting pages of the War numbers; but none of it went behind my eyes—none concerned me. Only now when I go back to the files of those old papers there is a whispering of something once familiar.
Of the Monthly I have more distinct recollections. It was in these that I first began to read freely. Many a private picnic did I have with the Monthly under the thorn bushes on the hillside above Oil Creek, a lunch basket at my side. There are still in the family storeroom copies of Harper’s Monthly stained with lemon pie dropped when I was too deep into a story to be careful. Here I read my first Dickens, my first Thackeray, my first Marian Evans, as George Eliot then signed herself. My first Wilkie Collins came to me in the Weekly. Great literature—all pirated, I was to learn much later. My friend Viola Roseboro tells me that at this time she was reading Harper’s pirated paper-bound copies of Dickens. It was much later that they came my way.