“The best-laid schemes o’ mice and men gang aft a-gley.”—Robert Burns.
“Fortune turns everything to the advantage of her favorites.”—Rochefoucauld.
“Good, the more communicated, more abundant grows.”—Milton.
“A gorgeous sunset is coloring the whole sky.”—Julius Stinde.
South and west of Oil Creek for many miles the petroleum-star shed its effulgent luster. Down the Allegheny adventurous operators groped their way patiently, until Clarion, Armstrong, Butler, Washington and West Virginia unlocked their splendid store-houses at the bidding of the drill. Aladdin’s wondrous lamp, Stalacta’s wand or Ali Babi’s magic sesame was not so grand a talisman as the tools which from the bowels of the earth brought forth illimitable spoil. No need of fables to varnish the tales of struggles and triumphs, of disappointments and successes, of weary toil and rich reward that have marked the oil-development from the Drake well to the latest strike in Tyler county. Men who go miles in advance of developments to seek new oil-fields run big chances of failure. They understand the risk and appreciate the cold fact that heavy loss may be entailed. But “the game is worth the powder” in their estimation and impossibility is not the sort of ability they swear by. “Our doubts are traitors and make us lose the good we oft might win” is a maxim oil-operators have weighed carefully. The man who has faith to attempt something is a man of power, whether he hails from Hong Kong or Boston, Johannesburg or Oil City. The man who will not improve his opportunity, whether seeking salvation or petroleum, is a sure loser. His stamina is as fragile as a fifty-cent shirt and will wear out quicker than religion that is used for a cloak only. Muttering long prayers without working to answer them is not the way to angle for souls, or fish, or oil-wells. It demands nerve and vim and enterprise to stick thousands of dollars in a hole ten, twenty, fifty or “a hundred miles from anywhere,” in hope of opening a fresh vein of petroleum. Luckily men possessing these qualities have not been lacking since the first well on Oil Creek sent forth the feeble squirt that has grown to a mighty river. Hence prolific territory, far from being scarce, has sometimes been too plentiful for the financial health of the average producer, who found it hard to cipher out a profit selling dollar-crude at forty cents. As old fields exhausted new ones were explored in every direction, those south of the original strike presenting a very respectable figure in the oil-panorama. If “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty,” eternal hustling is the price of oil-operations. Maria Seidenkovitch, a fervid Russian anarchist, who would rather hit the Czar with a bomb than hit a thousand-barrel well, has written:
“There is no standing still! Even as I pause
The steep path shifts and I slip back apace;
Movement was safety; by the journey’s laws