“WHERE ARE WE NOW?”
A crowd gathered and the burgess got aboard to assist the peeler. He was holding the feet of the law-breaker, with his back to the end-board, at the instant the wheels struck a plank-crossing. The shock keeled Shannon backwards over the end-board into the deep, vicious mud! The spectators thought of shedding tears at the sad plight of their chief magistrate, who sank at full length nearly out of sight. As he raised his head a ragged urchin bawled out: “Where are we now?”[now?”] The laugh that ensued was a risible earthquake and thenceforth the expression had unlimited circulation in the lower districts.
The Millerstown field produced ten-thousand barrels a day at its prime and the temptation to enlarge the productive area even St. Anthony, had he been an oil-operator, would have found it hard to resist. A half-mile west, at the Brick Church, J. A. Irons punched a hole and started a hardware-store that hatched out Irons City. St. Joe, where two-hundred lots were sold in thirty days and a beer-jerker’s tent was the first business-stand, was the outcome of good wells on the Now, Meade, Boyd, Neff and Graham farms, four miles south. Three miles farther dry-holes blasted the budding hopes of Jeffersonville. Three miles south-west of Millerstown, on an elevated site, Buena Vista bade fair to knock the persimmons. The territory exhausted too speedily for comfort, other points lured the floaters, hotels and stores stood empty and a fire sent three-fourths of the neat little town up in smoke. Two miles west the Hope Oil-Company’s Troutman well, reported on March twenty-second, 1873, “the biggest strike since ’sixty-five,” flowed twelve-hundred barrels. The tools hung in the hole seven months, by which time the well had produced ninety-six-thousand barrels. The gusher was on the Troutman farm, a patch of rocks and stunted trees tenanted by a Frenchman. I. E. Dean, Lecky & Reineman, Captain Grace, Captain Boyer, the Reno Oil-Company and others jostled neck and neck in the race to drain the Ralston, Harper, Starr, Jenkins and Troutman lands. The result was a series of spouters that aggregated nine-thousand barrels a day. Phillips Brothers paid eighty-thousand dollars for the Starr farm and trebled their money in a year. William K. Vandergrift’s Blackhawk was a five-hundred barreler and dozens more swelled the production and the excitement. The day before Husselton & Thompson’s seven-hundred barreler, on the Gruber farm, struck the sand the boiler exploded. Two men were standing on a tank discussing politics. They saw a ton of iron heading directly towards them, concluded to postpone the argument and leaped from the tank as the flying mass tore off half the roof. The Ralston farm evoluted the embryo town of Batesville, named for the late Joseph Bates, of Oil City, and Modoc planted its wigwams on the Starr and Sutton.
Modoc stood at the top of the class for mud. The man who found a gold-dollar in a can of tomatoes and denounced the grocer for selling adulterated goods would have had no reason to grumble at the mud around Modoc. It was pure, unmixed and unstinted. The voyager who, in the spring or fall of 1873, accomplished the trip from Troutman to the frontier wells without exhausting his stock of profanity earned a free-pass to the happy hunting-grounds. Twenty balloon-structures were erected by May first and a red-headed dispenser of stimulants answered to the title of “Captain Jack.” Modoc was not a Tammany offshoot, but the government had an Indian war on hand and red-skinned epithets prevailed. The town soon boasted three stores, four hotels, liveries and five-hundred people. By and by the spouters wilted badly, degenerating into pumpers. On a cold, rainy night in the autumn of 1874 fire started in Max Elasser’s clothing-store and one-half the town was absent at dawn next morning. Biting wind and drenching showers added to the sadness of the dismal scene. Women and children, weeping and homeless, crouched in the fields until daylight and shelter arrived. That was the last chapter in the history of Modoc. The American Hotel and a few houses escaped the flames, but the destroyed buildings were not replaced. It would puzzle a tourist now to find an atom of Modoc or the wells that vegetated about the Troutman whale.
Two miles south of Modoc the McClelland farm made a bold effort to outshine the Troutman. Phillips Brothers owned the biggest wells, luscious fellows that salt-water killed off prematurely. They paid forty-five-thousand dollars for the Stahl & Benedict No. 1 well. The farmer leased the tract to George Nesbit and John Preston. Nesbit placed timbers for a rig on the ground and entrenched a force of men behind a fence. Preston’s troops scaled the fence, dislodged the enemy, carried the timbers off the premises, built a rig and drilled a well. Such disputes were liable to occur from the ignorance or knavery of the natives, some of whom leased the same land to several parties. In one of these struggles for possession Obadiah Haymaker was shot dead at Murraysville, near Pittsburg. Milton Weston, a Chicago millionaire, who hired and armed the attacking party, was sent to the penitentiary for manslaughter. Haymaker was pleasant, sociable and worthy of a better fate.
David Morrison leased ten acres of the Jamison farm, three miles below Modoc and seven south of Petrolia, at one-fiftieth royalty. The property was situated on Connoquinessing Creek, a tributary of Beaver River, in the bosom of a rugged country. On August twenty-fourth, 1872, the tools pricked the sand, gas burst forth and oil flowed furiously. The gas sought the boiler-fire and the entire concern was speedily in a blaze. Unlike many others in the oil-region, the Morrison well suffered no injury from the fire. It flowed three-hundred barrels a day for a month and in October was sold to Taylor & Satterfield for thirty-eight-thousand dollars. They cleaned out the hole, which mud had clogged, restoring the yield to two-hundred barrels. S. D. Karns completed the Dogleg well, the second in the field, on Christmas day, and the third early in January, the two wells flowing seven-hundred barrels. John Preston’s No. 1, a half-mile northward, flowed two-hundred barrels on January twelfth. Preston was a strong-limbed, black-haired, courageous operator, who cut his eye-teeth in the upper fields. He augmented his pile at Parker, Millerstown and Greece City, landing at last in Washington county. He was not averse to a hand at cards or a gamble in production. His word was never broken and he vied with John McKeown and John Galey in untiring energy. A truer, livelier, braver lot of men than the Butler oil-operators never stepped on God’s green carpet. A mean tyrant might as well try to climb into heaven on a greased pole as to keep them at the bottom of the heap.
The first new building on the Jamison farm, a frame drug-store, was erected on September tenth. Eight-hundred people inhabited Greece City by the end of December. Drinking dens drove a thriving trade and three hotels could not stow away the crowds. J. H. Collins fed five-hundred a day. Theodore Huselton established a bank and Rev. Mr. Thorne a newspaper. A post-office was opened at New-Year. Two pipe-lines conveyed oil to Butler and Brady, two telegraph-offices rushed messages, a church blossomed in the spring and a branch of the West Penn Railroad was proposed. Greece City combined the muddiness and activity of Shaffer and Funkville with the ambition of Reno. Fifty wells were drilling in February and the surrounding farms were not permitted to “linger longer, Lucy,” than was necessary to haul machinery and set the walking-beam sawing the atmosphere. Joseph Post—a jolly Rousevillean, who weighed two-hundred pounds, operated at Bradford and retired to a farm in Ohio—tested the Whitmire farm, two miles south. An extensive water-well was the best the farm had to offer and Boydstown, built in expectation of the oil that never came, scampered off. The third sand was only twelve to fifteen feet thick and the wells declined with unprecedented suddenness. The bottom seemed to drop out of the territory in a twinkling. The town wilted like a paper-collar in the dog-days. Houses were torn down or deserted and rigs carted to Millerstown. In December fire licked up three-fourths of what removals had spared, summarily ending Greece City at the fragile age of thirteen months. “The isles of Greece, were burning Sappho loved and sung,” may have been pretty slick, but the oil of Greece City would have burned out Sappho in one round.
“The meanest man I ever saw,” a Butler judge remarked to a company of friends at Collins’s Hotel, “has never appeared in my court as a defendant and it is lucky for him. As a matter of course he was a newspaper man—a rascal of a reporter for the Greece City Review, printed right in this town, and there he stands! One day he was playing seven-up with a young lady and guess what he did? He told her that whenever she had the jack of trumps it was a sure sign her lover was thinking of her. Then he watched her and whenever she blushed and looked pleased he would lead a high card and catch her jack. A man who would do that would steal a hot stove or write a libellous joke about me.” The judge was a rare joker and the young man whom he apostrophised for fun didn’t know a jack from a load of hay.
Parker, Martinsburg, Argyle, Petrolia, the “Cross Belt,” Karns City, Angelica, Millerstown, St. Joe, Buena Vista, Modoc and Greece City had passed in review. The “belt” extended fifteen miles and the Butler field acknowledged no rival. The great Bradford district was about to distance all competitors and leave the southern region hopelessly behind, yet operators did not desist from their efforts to discover an outlet below Greece City and St. Joe. Two miles west of the county-seat Phillips Brothers stumbled upon the Baldridge pool, which produced largely. The old town of Butler, settled at the beginning of the century and not remarkable for enterprise until the oilmen shoved it forward, was dry territory. Eastward pools of minor note were revealed. William K. Vandergrift, whose three-hundred-barrel well on the Pontius farm ushered in Buena Vista’s short-lived reign, drilled at Saxonburg. Along the West-Penn Railroad fair wells encouraged the quest. David Kirk entered Great Belt City in the race and the country was punctured like a bicycle-tire tripping over a road strewn with tacks pointing skyward and loaded for mischief. South of St. Joe gas blew off and Spang & Chalfant laid a line from above Freeport to pipe the stuff into their rolling-mills at Pittsburg. The search proceeded without big surprises, Bradford monopolizing public interest and Butler jogging on quietly at the rear. But the old field had plenty of ginger and was merely recovering some of the breath expended in producing forty-million barrels of crude. “I smell a rat,” felicitously observed Sir Boyle Roche, “and see him floating in the air.” The free play of the drill could hardly fail to ferret out something with the smell of petroleum in the soap-mine county, beyond the cut-off at Greece City and Baldridge. Bradford was sliding down the mountain it had ascended and Butler furnished the answer to the conundrum of where to look for the next fertile spot.