Of things before they are in being;
To swallow gudgeons ere they’re catched,
And count their chickens ere they’re hatched.”
The methods of “turning an honest penny” varied to fit the case. To “doctor” a well by dosing it with a load of oil was tame and commonplace. In three instances wells sold at fancy prices were connected by underground pipes with tanks of oil at a distance. When the parties arrived to “time the well” the secret pipe was opened. The oil ran into the tubing and pumped as though coming direct from the sand! The deception was as perfect as the oleomargarine the Pennsylvania State Board of Agriculture pronounced “dairy butter of superior quality!” “Seeing is believing” and there was the oil. They had seen it pumping a steady stream into the tank, timed it, gauged it, smelled it. The demonstration was complete and the cash would be forked over, a twenty-barrel well bringing a hundred-barrel price! A smart widow near Pithole sold her farm at treble its value because of “surface indications” she created by emptying a barrel of oil into a spring. The farm proved good territory, much to the chagrin of the widow, who roundly abused the purchasers for “cheatin’ a poor lone woman!” Selling stock in companies that held lands, or interests in wells to be drilled “near big gushers”—they might be eight or ten miles off—was not infrequent. On the other hand, a very slight risk often brought an immense return. Parties would pay five-hundred dollars for the refusal of a tract of land and arrange with other parties to sink a well for a small lease on the property. If the well succeeded, one acre would pay the cost of the entire farm; if it failed, the holders of the option forfeited the trifle that secured it and threw up the contract. It was risking five-hundred dollars on the chance, not always very remote, of gaining a half-million.
Sometimes the craze to invest bordered upon the ludicrous. Sixteenths and fractions of sixteenths in producing, non-producing, drilling, undrilled and never-to-be-drilled wells “went like hot cakes” at two to twenty-thousand dollars. A newcomer, in his haste to “tie onto something,” shelled out one-thousand dollars for a share in a gusher that netted him two quarts of oil a day! Another cheerfully paid fifteen-thousand for the sixteenth of a flowing well which discounted the Irishman’s flea—“you put your finger on the varmint and he wasn’t there”—by balking that night and declining ever to start again! At a fire in 1866 water from a spring, dashed on the blaze, added fuel to the flames. An examination showed that oil was filling the spring and water-wells in the neighborhood. From the well in Mrs. Reichart’s yard the wooden pump brought fifty barrels of pure oil. L. L. Hill’s well and holes dug eight or ten feet had the same complaint. Excitement blew off at the top gauge. The Record devoted columns to the new departure. Was the oil so impatient to enrich Pitholians that, refusing to wait for the drill to provide an outlet, it burst through the rocks in its eagerness to boom the district? Patches of ground the size of a quilt sold for two, three or four-hundred dollars and rows of pits resembling open graves decorated the slope. In a week a digger discovered that a break in the pipe-line supplied the oil. The leak was repaired, the pits dried up, the water-wells resumed their normal condition and the fiasco ended ignominiously. It was a modern version of the mountain that set the country by the ears to bring forth a mouse.
Joseph Wood, proprietor of the St. James Hotel at Paterson, N.J., died on May thirteenth, 1896. He was a wit and story-teller of the best kind, a gallant fighter for the Union and for a year lived at Pithole. A fortune made by operating and speculation he lost by fire in a year. He conducted hotels at Hot Springs, Washington, Chicago and Milwaukee and was one of the famous Bonifaces of the United States. On his business-cards he printed these “religious beliefs:”
“Do not keep the alabaster-boxes of your love and tenderness sealed up until your friends are dead. Fill their lives with sweetness. Speak approving, cheering words while their ears can hear them and while their hearts can be thrilled and made happier by them. The kind things you mean to say when they are gone say before they go. The flowers you mean to send to their coffins send to brighten and sweeten their homes before they leave them. If my friends have alabaster-boxes laid away, full of fragrant perfumes of sympathy and affection, which they intend to break over my dead body, I would rather they would bring them out in my weary and troubled hours and open them, that I may be refreshed and cheered by them while I need them. I would rather have a plain coffin without a flower, a funeral without a eulogy, than a life without the sweetness of love and sympathy. Let us learn to anoint our friends beforehand for their burial. Post-mortem kindness does not cheer the burdened spirit. Flowers on the coffin cast no fragrance backward over the weary way.”
Let down the bars and enter the field that was once the seething, boiling caldron called Pithole. A poplar-tree thirty feet high grows in the cellar of the National Hotel. Stones and underbrush cover the site of the Metropolitan Theater and Murphy’s Varieties. This bit of sunken ground, clogged with weeds and brambles, marks the Chase House.[House.] Here was Main street, where millions of dollars changed hands daily. For years the Presbyterian church stood forsaken, the bell in the tower silent, the pews untouched and the pulpit-Bible lying on the preacher’s desk. John McPherson’s store and Dr. Christie’s house were about the last buildings in the place. Not a human-being now lives on the spot. All the old-timers moved away. All? No, a score or two quietly sleep among the bushes and briars that run riot over the little graveyard in which they were laid when the dead city was in the throes of a tremendous excitement.
The rate at which towns rose was surely most terrific
Nothing to rival it from Maine to the Pacific;